Search Markers

Belton, TX

By 1860 much of Bell County had been carved into farms along its creeks and rivers, and among them was Three Forks Farm, established by Franklin Allen after he and his brother came to Texas in 1866. Franklin's 1885 burial began the cemetery, and in 1900 his widow Mary Allen Oliver and her second husband formally established it for the Three Forks community. Its more than 80 graves, from sandstone to granite, include a World War I veteran and headstones carved with patriotic and personal emblems.

Crockett, TX

In 1886 the Presbyterian Church's Board of Missions for Freedmen chose Crockett—for its large Black population and an existing parochial school—as the home of a new school for Black girls, named for Mary Allen, wife of the effort's leader. Growing into Mary Allen College under its first Black president, Dr. Byrd R. Smith, it became a coeducational, four-year liberal arts institution before legal and financial troubles forced its closing in 1972. For generations its twelve-building campus stood as a center of quality education in East Texas.

Kerrville, TX

Born in Missouri in 1827, Mary Ann Kent came to Gonzales as a small child; her father, Andrew Kent, died at the Alamo, and the family fled in the Runaway Scrape during the Texas Revolution. Widowed young after her first husband returned from Confederate service, she raised a large family through malaria and typhoid epidemics that claimed four of her children, marrying twice more as she settled the Hill Country's Byas Branch and Guadalupe River country. Blind and nearly deaf in old age, she held court in her log cabin, recounting frontier Texas to visitors until her death in 1917.

Covington, KY

Born a storekeeper's daughter in 1868, Mary Greene left the land when she married riverboat captain Gordon C. Greene and became one of the very few women licensed as a boat master and river pilot. She steered through a cyclone, survived a nitroglycerine explosion, and after her husband's death in 1927 ran the Greeneline Steamers fleet of 28 paddlewheelers — including the famous Delta Queen.

Canadian, TX

Born in Massachusetts in 1854, Mary B. Isaacs came to Texas in 1888 as Hemphill County's first public school teacher, sometimes glancing up to find curious Indians peering through the schoolroom windows. After marrying Will C. Isaacs in 1892, she founded and led the Canadian Woman's Christian Temperance Union for 44 years, and the W.C.T.U. building she guided into being served as a community center and now houses the city library. Her legacy was honored in the naming of the Mary B. Isaacs Elementary School.

Harborcreek Township, PA

In 1948, Mary Behrend gave her family's Glenhill Farm estate to Penn State so the university could put down permanent roots in northwestern Pennsylvania — the seed of what grew into Penn State Behrend. This monument, designed by students, honors that act of generosity.

Campbell County, KY

A younger sister of Daniel Boone, Mary Boone Bryan was born in Pennsylvania in 1736 and married William Bryan in North Carolina in 1755. In the fall of 1779 she and her husband led their ten children through the Cumberland Gap to help settle Bryan Station in Kentucky—only to lose her husband and three sons that first hard winter. She endured, returning to the frontier after the Revolution and living out her life in Campbell County.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2004

Born near here in 1844, Mary Cassatt left Pittsburgh to study art in Europe and settled in Paris, where the Impressionist master Edgar Degas became her friend and mentor. A gifted painter, printmaker, and etcher, she became renowned for her tender, unsentimental depictions of women and children. She stands as one of the few Americans — and fewer women — at the heart of the Impressionist movement.

Fort Worth, TX

A Fort Worth native, Mary Daggett Lake (1880-1955) was a botanist, musician, author, and civic leader who left a deep mark on her hometown in the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s she chronicled the lives of pioneer Fort Worth families in a series of newspaper articles for the Star-Telegram. Through the garden clubs and the city park board she championed landscape conservation and beautification, work that earned national recognition.

Boston, MA

Mary Dyer was a Quaker who defied the Puritan authorities of the Massachusetts Bay Colony at a time when dissent from the established church could be a capital crime. Banished on pain of death for her beliefs, she returned to Boston to stand with her fellow Quakers and was hanged on Boston Common in 1660. Her calm insistence that liberty of conscience mattered more than her own life turned her execution into a moral indictment of religious persecution in colonial New England.

Canyon, TX

Built in 1909 and later moved to Canyon after West Texas State University was established in 1910, this house served as a home for faculty and students. Educator Mary E. Hudspeth rented and then owned rooms here for 33 years while chairing the Modern Languages Department. Her long tenure links the house to the early growth of higher education on the Texas plains.

Milwaukee, WI

This 1932 memorial honors Mary E. Spence, a past national president of the American War Mothers, dedicated by Milwaukee's chapters. The American War Mothers formed after World War I to unite the mothers of servicemen in remembrance and mutual support, and its leaders were prominent public figures in the interwar patriotic movement. Spence's national role placed her at the head of one of the era's most influential women's organizations.

Salado, TX

Born in Salado, Liz Carpenter rose from University of Texas student leader to Washington journalist, serving as president of the Women's National Press Club in 1954. In 1961 she became the first woman to serve as Executive Assistant to the Vice President of the United States, and she went on to be staff director and press secretary to First Lady Lady Bird Johnson. The marker was placed in 1967 as part of an Outstanding Women of Texas series.

San Francisco, CA

Mary Ellen Pleasant arrived in Gold Rush San Francisco a free Black woman of extraordinary drive, building wealth as an entrepreneur while quietly financing the fight against slavery. Through the 1850s and into the Civil War she helped make the city a western refuge for people escaping bondage, and later challenged segregation in California's courts. The six trees she planted on this spot still mark where this remarkable pioneer once lived.

Whitesboro, TX

Mary Florence Cowell came to Texas from Missouri in 1900 and brought with her a commitment to the P.E.O. Sisterhood, a philanthropic society founded in 1869 to open educational doors for women. In 1902, with organizer Dora Hallock, she gathered the state's very first P.E.O. chapter in her Whitesboro home and served as its president. She went on to help found the Texas State Chapter in 1928 and became its first president, earning the title "the mother of P.E.O. in Texas."

Riverside, CA

Established in 1913, the Mary Frances booster station was part of the water and irrigation infrastructure that made citrus agriculture possible in the Riverside area during Southern California's early-20th-century boom. Booster stations like this one pumped water uphill to reach groves and growing towns, quietly powering the region's transformation from arid land to productive farmland.

Homestead, PA · est. 2003

By 1919 Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was already a legend of the American labor movement, a fearless organizer who called herself the miners' angel. Arrested and jailed in Homestead that year for addressing striking steelworkers, she met a judge's demand for her speaking permit with defiance, invoking Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams as the only authority she needed. Her wit turned a courtroom rebuke into a ringing claim that the right to speak was as old as the Republic itself.

Coaldale, PA

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was among the most fearless labor organizers of her age, and in October 1900 she led a march of some 2,000 women from McAdoo to Coaldale to bolster a strike the United Mine Workers had called that September for higher wages, union recognition, and a grievance process. Many mineworkers joined the walkout and the union. The pressure helped set the stage for the great anthracite coal strike of 1902.

Des Moines, IA

Mary J. Coggeshall (1836–1911) was the driving force of the women's suffrage movement in Iowa — a writer, orator, and organizer who spent decades pressing for a woman's right to vote, including lobbying at the state capitol in Des Moines. She helped build the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association and mentored a generation of activists. Though she died before ratification, her work laid the groundwork for the vote Iowa women would win.

Strawn, TX

Born in Boston in 1912, Mary Jane Gentry became an educator, author, and historian whose 1946 University of Texas thesis on the coal town of Thurber—written under Walter Prescott Webb—became a classic of Texas social history. She co-authored The Story of Texas, a seventh-grade textbook used statewide, and taught in schools and colleges from Thurber to Odessa. She died in Dallas in 1996.

Greenville, TX

Born in Georgia in 1876 and settled in Greenville by 1899, Mary Jim Morris earned her teaching certificate at a county institute for Black teachers just as African American children were first gaining access to schools in Hunt County. She taught for 45 years at Greenville's segregated schools, earned her college degree from Prairie View A&M in 1934, and in 1930 became principal of Fred Douglass Elementary. A devoted missionary at New Hope Baptist Church, she pushed her students to outdo every other school in Texas.

Palestine, TX

Born near Palestine in 1866, Mary Kate Hunter trained as a classical pianist in the United States and Germany and taught generations of local children, but her lasting work was preserving her region's past. A charter clubwoman and delegate to the first Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, she organized local history societies and conducted dozens of oral-history interviews with early settlers. A committed suffragist, she founded and led the Palestine Equal Suffrage Association and held statewide office, and at her death in 1945 she left her vast records to the public library.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1996

A child prodigy who grew up on Pittsburgh's streets and attended its Lincoln School in the early 1920s, Mary Lou Williams became one of jazz's great composers and pianists. She played for Andy Kirk's band in the 1930s and went on to arrange for Duke Ellington and other giants of the era, shaping the sound of American music across decades. Her ambitious works, from the "Zodiac Suite" to her sacred "Mary Lou's Mass," carried jazz into the concert hall and the cathedral alike.

Washington, DC

Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) was born to formerly enslaved parents in Mayesville, South Carolina, and rose to become one of America's most consequential educators and civil-rights leaders. With little more than resolve, she founded a school for Black girls in Daytona Beach, Florida, that grew into Bethune-Cookman University, organized the National Council of Negro Women, and advised President Franklin Roosevelt as part of the informal 'Black Cabinet.' Sculpted by Robert Berks and unveiled in Lincoln Park on July 10, 1974, the bronze shows Bethune passing a scroll of her legacy to two children, echoing the inscription's charge, 'Let her works praise her.'

Oxford, NC

In 1889, G. C. Shaw founded a school in Oxford to educate African Americans in an age when public schooling for Black children was scarce and underfunded. Named for a Presbyterian benefactor, Mary Potter, the academy trained generations of students before eventually becoming a public school. It was a lifeline of learning in the segregated South.

Millhousen, IN

This Latin cornerstone — "To Blessed Mary ever Virgin, conceived without original sin, in the Year of the Lord 1858" — marks the founding of a Catholic church in the German immigrant settlement of Millhousen. Its date comes just four years after Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, a devotion the inscription directly invokes. Communities of German Catholics who settled the Indiana countryside in the mid-19th century built such churches as the spiritual anchors of their new homes.

Austin, TX

During the building boom of the 1890s, developer Nichols Dawson raised a row of small stone houses in south Austin, cut from limestone quarried nearby and distinguished by their hexagonal front bays. His partner in the venture was his sister Mary "Molly" Dawson, one of the area's most respected educators, who served as principal of Fullmore School before opening a private school of her own. This surviving residence is a remnant of that family enterprise in brick, stone, and learning.

New Ulm, TX

German immigrants Conrad and Mary Theresa Juergens reached Texas in 1833 and built a cabin near this site. When the Texas Revolution sent settlers fleeing in the 1836 Runaway Scrape, the family stayed — and was raided by Karankawa people. Conrad was wounded and the pregnant Mary was carried off with two stepsons; she bore a daughter, Jane Margret, in captivity before mother and child were ransomed at a Red River trading post. Mary later remarried and died in Ohio in 1891.

Bomarton, TX

When the Wichita Valley Railroad pushed from Seymour to Abilene in 1906, it gave rise to Bomarton and drew settlers to the surrounding Baylor County plains. Trustees organized Mary's Creek School in 1908, one of thirty-eight rural schools in the county, starting with a single room and adding a second by the mid-1920s. Attendance peaked at sixty-nine pupils in 1930 before waves of consolidation eventually folded the district into Seymour.

New York, NY

On August 27, 1776, in the Battle of Brooklyn (also called the Battle of Long Island), the first major engagement after the Declaration of Independence, a small regiment of Maryland soldiers made a series of desperate charges against a far larger British force near the Old Stone House. Their stand held the enemy back long enough for George Washington to pull the battered Continental Army out of a trap and across the East River to fight another day. Roughly 250 of these men fell, and tradition holds that Washington, watching from a distance, lamented the brave fellows he was losing. This monument in what is now Prospect Park honors that sacrifice.

Spotsylvania County, VA

On May 8, 1864, the fighting at Spotsylvania Court House opened as Union troops of the V Corps tried to break through Confederate positions guarding this vital Virginia crossroads. This monument marks the ground reached by the Maryland Brigade of the 2nd Division during that first assault, its inscription preserving the urgent cry to press forward past cannon and rifle fire. The clash was part of Ulysses S. Grant's relentless Overland Campaign, in which the Union army, rather than retreating after brutal losses, kept driving south toward Richmond in a grinding war of attrition against Robert E. Lee's forces.

Frederick County, MD

On July 9, 1864, the fields along the Monocacy River south of Frederick became the stage for a desperate delaying action in the Civil War's final year. Confederate General Jubal Early, driving north through Maryland toward a lightly defended Washington, D.C., collided with a badly outnumbered Union force under General Lew Wallace. Wallace lost the battle but won the day that mattered: the hours his men bought held Early up just long enough for veteran reinforcements to reach the capital's forts before he did.

Towson, MD

This memorial in Towson honors the troopers of the Maryland State Police who gave their lives in the line of duty. Maryland organized a statewide police force in the early 1920s, part of a nationwide move to professionalize law enforcement for the automobile age. Rather than marking a single loss, the monument holds the collective memory of generations of officers who did not return home.

College Park, MD · est. 2006

In 1914 the University of Maryland donated this College Park land for Maryland's first state tree nursery, where state forester Fred W. Besley — a student of forestry pioneer Gifford Pinchot — and head nurseryman Silas Sines Sr. pioneered large-scale tree propagation. Thousands of seedlings grown here reforested Maryland's woodlands and roadsides, healing land ravaged by decades of heavy logging and farming.

Burleson, TX

Families settled along spring-fed Quil Miller Creek in the 1850s, and by 1869 Thomas W. Hollingsworth's mill and store gave rise to a town named Marysville—later Marystown—for his wife Mary, the community's first schoolteacher. The cemetery, set aside about 1860, holds pioneer settlers, county founders, Civil War veterans, and some fifteen diphtheria victims from a passing 1870s wagon train. Only the Baptist church and cemetery survive of the once-active settlement.

Maysville, KY

Established by Virginia's legislature in 1788 out of Bourbon County, Mason County once sprawled across the area of some sixteen present-day counties. It was named for George Mason, author of the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights—a foundation for the U.S. Bill of Rights—and a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

Mason vicinity, TX

Created and organized in 1858, Mason County took its name from Fort Mason, the frontier post garrisoned on and off from 1851 to 1869. The fort honored Lt. G. T. Mason of the U.S. 2nd Dragoons, killed near Brownsville in 1846. It was one link in a chain of Army posts spaced a day's ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande, built to shield settlers from Apache and Comanche raids.

Mason, TX

Completed in 1909, this was the third courthouse to serve Mason County, following a first built in 1872 and a red sandstone successor that replaced it after an 1877 fire. Designed by E. C. Hosford in the Beaux Arts style with a central dome, clock tower, and rusticated stonework, it anchored the county seat until it too was gutted by fire in 2021.

Mason, TX

Mason County's third jail was built in 1894 from brown sandstone quarried in the nearby hills, in a modified Romanesque Revival style marked by a massive entry arch, segmental window arches, and a central tower. Its ground floor held living quarters for the sheriff, while the cells sat on the second story.

Maysville, KY

In 1792 the frontiersman Simon Kenton proposed to General Charles Scott that a company of trained "spies," or scouts, be raised to guard Kentucky's exposed pioneer settlements. The volunteers served short-term duty—most from May to December 1792—ranging ahead of the settlements and earning a reputation for daring against Native raiders during the violent border warfare of the early republic. The marker names the company's members, from Mercer Beason and Archibald Bennett to Cornelius Washburn.

Mason, TX

Built in 1869–70 by S. F. "Lace" Bridges, the Mason House served as a hotel and stagecoach stop on the San Antonio to El Paso Road. It offered weary travelers rest and local residents hearty meals, and was marred by a tragic 1900 fire that killed 23-year-old Annie Medlock. Later converted to apartments, it still keeps historic features such as its original kitchen cistern and stone fences.

Post, TX

Dedicated to Garza County pioneers Marshall and Gladys Mason, this building was donated by their children for use as a community museum and recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1967. It honors the settler families who helped establish this corner of the West Texas plains in the early 20th century. The gift turned a family memorial into a public keeper of local history.

Mason, TX

Founded in 1904 by pioneer settlers as the German American National Bank of Mason, this institution anchored the finances of a heavily German Hill Country community. Anti-German feeling during World War I pushed the board to rename it Mason National Bank in 1918, even as it led local Liberty Bond drives. It weathered the Great Depression through a 1932 merger and early FDIC certification.

Ingham Township, MI

Built in 1926 and energized in February 1927, the Mason–Dansville electric line carried the current of a new age into rural Ingham County. In the early twentieth century, electric interurban and power lines spread across the Michigan countryside, linking farms and small towns to the grid and to one another and transforming daily life with light, power, and faster travel.

Manheim Township, PA

The Mason-Dixon Line began as the peaceful settlement of a long and bitter boundary quarrel between the Penn family of Pennsylvania and the Calverts of Maryland. Between 1763 and 1767 the English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon ran the line westward with remarkable precision, setting stone markers as they went; at every fifth mile they planted an ornate "crownstone" carved with the coats of arms of the two proprietary families. A crown marker like this one, re-dedicated in 1984, honors that painstaking survey and the famous boundary it fixed across the York County countryside.

Carroll County, MD · est. 1970

Between 1763 and 1767, English astronomers Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon surveyed the disputed boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, using precise celestial observations to settle a long-running colonial quarrel. This particular stretch was run in late July and early August of 1765. Their meticulous line became one of the most famous borders in America.

Harford County, MD · est. 1970

From 1763 to 1767, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon carried their astronomical survey across the countryside to fix the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland and end the provinces' border disputes. This section of the line was surveyed on June 26, 1765. The exacting work stands as a landmark of eighteenth-century science applied to the shaping of colonial America.

Kent County, MD

This is a crownstone — one of the ornate boundary markers set along the Mason-Dixon Line, the border that surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon painstakingly ran between 1763 and 1767 to settle a bitter, decades-long dispute between two proprietary families. The heraldic crests carved into its faces name those families: the Penns of Pennsylvania looking east, the Calverts of Maryland looking west. Unlike the plainer mileposts, crownstones like this one were imported from England and placed every five miles, each a small monument to a border drawn with astronomical precision through colonial wilderness.

New Castle County, DE

Between 1763 and 1767, the English astronomers Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon carried out one of the most precise surveys of the colonial era, settling a long and bitter boundary dispute between the Penn and Calvert families. This point served as a base reference from which their famous line was run westward. Guided by the stars and painstaking measurement, they drew the border that would forever bear their names.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2013

In 1763, English astronomers Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon set their instruments near Philadelphia's southernmost point to settle one of colonial America's most stubborn quarrels — a boundary dispute between the Penn and Calvert families that had simmered for generations. Their painstaking measurements of a degree of latitude set a new standard for professional surveying, though Indian conflicts and harsh weather to the west delayed the line's completion until 1768. The border they traced would one day take on a meaning far beyond property: the symbolic divide between North and South.

Del Rio, TX

New York transplant James H. Mason built a modest four-room frame house on this Del Rio site soon after buying it in 1887, later developing a spring on the property for mineral baths and a medicinal drink. In 1905 attorney and civic leader John J. Foster bought the place and greatly enlarged it, and his wife Mary added artwork to its interior detailing. The home stayed in the Foster family until 1962.

Mason, MI

This marker identifies the site of the first school in Mason, Michigan, the seat of Ingham County. As settlers moved into central Michigan in the early-to-mid 19th century, one of their first communal acts was establishing a school, often a modest one-room building. Marking the town's first schoolhouse preserves the memory of how frontier communities prioritized education from their earliest days.

Kerrville, TX

Built of locally quarried limestone, this late Italianate building went up after Charles Schreiner formed the Kerrville Masonic Company in 1890, its façade dressed with arched openings, stone quoins, and a pressed-metal cornice. Kerrville Lodge No. 697 met on the second floor until 1927, when it moved out and leased the space to the Odd Fellows. The ground floor served the town in turn as post office, C.C. Butt Grocery, and Texas Power and Light, and the property stayed in the Schreiner family until 1959.

Big Spring, TX

After the Staked Plains Lodge was chartered in 1884, its members saw a need for a Masonic burial ground in Big Spring, and lodge member George Bauer donated this land in 1885. The earliest documented grave is that of William Howerton, who died in 1886, and adjoining gifts grew the site into the sixteen-acre Mount Olive Cemetery. Among those laid to rest here are Masons and community leaders, Texas and Pacific Railway employees, and veterans of World War I, World War II, and Vietnam.

Eagle Lake, TX

The Eagle Lake Masonic Lodge purchased this burial ground in 1880, though the earliest known interment here dates to 1867. Its graves gather a remarkable cross-section of local life, from a mayor and U.S. representative to a World War II Women Airforce Service Pilot and the namesake of Oldham County. Curbing, obelisks, and Masonic gravestones still mark the historic grounds, tended today by a cemetery organization.

Gonzales, TX

The Gonzales Masonic Lodge No. 30 bought eleven acres here in 1849 for a cemetery, though two graves already predated the lodge's ownership. Buried among the grounds are veterans of the Texas Revolution—men like Andrew Ponton and Amasa Turner—along with three Texas Masonic grand masters and prominent local citizens. The lodge expanded the site in 1903.

Hondo, TX

In 1859 Freemasons and neighbors in the New Fountain Settlement built a two-story stone church-and-lodge hall here, and Hondo Valley Lodge No. 252 was chartered the next year. The adjoining cemetery opened in 1864 when Junior Warden Rubin Smith was killed by Indians, and twenty-two graves of Masons and their families lie within it—two headstones oddly bearing the Masonic emblem upside down. Though the lodge itself dissolved in 1883, it had already given rise to two daughter lodges nearby.

Lufkin, TX

Completed in 1900 by self-taught Black architect Will Engram—who arrived in Lufkin with a third-grade education and went on to build some hundred homes—this wood-frame hall became the meeting place for North Lufkin's Black fraternal orders, from the Free Masons to the Eastern Stars and Heroines of Jericho. Slated for demolition in the 1970s, it was saved through the efforts of Engram's daughter and now houses a Black History room. It stands among the last turn-of-the-century buildings in the community.

Fort Worth, TX

Springing from the Texas Masons' founding commitment to charity and education, the Grand Lodge planned a home for Masonic widows and orphans in the 1880s and accepted Fort Worth's offer of 200 acres and $5,000 to build it. Construction began in 1898, and a special excursion train carried Masons to the cornerstone ceremony in 1899. Over the decades the institution grew into the Masonic Home and School of Texas, caring for and educating hundreds of children on a campus designed by noted architects and now listed on the National Register.

Halifax County, NC

Chartered in 1767, this Halifax Masonic lodge erected its building in 1769, making it one of the oldest in North Carolina. Buried there is Joseph Montfort, appointed "Grand Master of America" — a title of unusual reach across the colonies. The lodge stood at the center of colonial Halifax's civic life on the eve of the Revolution.