Search Markers

Eagle Pass, TX

Carved from Kinney County in 1856 and organized in 1871, Maverick County took its name from Samuel A. Maverick, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Its county seat, Eagle Pass, sits where the storied El Camino Real crossed the Rio Grande — the same road that carried Spanish missionaries, the explorer Louis St. Denis, Moses Austin, and generations of troops and settlers into Texas. The land holds Spanish mission ruins and old military posts, including Fort Duncan, which sheltered both U.S. and Confederate soldiers.

Eagle Pass, TX

Built in 1884–85 on land chosen by a citizens' committee, the Maverick County Courthouse rose as a fortress-like Victorian landmark on the Texas–Mexico border, its crenelated tower still keeping time with its original E. Howard works. Within its walls unfolded the sensational 1889 trial of Dick Duncan, convicted of murder on evidence gathered by Texas Rangers and hanged in 1891 in the county's only capital execution. The courthouse remains a striking monument to law and civic ambition on the frontier.

San Antonio, TX

Built in 1893 for real-estate developer William Harvey Maverick—son of Texas Declaration of Independence signer Samuel Maverick—this three-story limestone mansion rose on the banks of the San Antonio River and was designed by the prominent architect Alfred Giles. In 1914 it passed to attorney H.C. Carter, whose wife Aline added a rooftop observatory and a chapel and served as Texas poet laureate from 1947 to 1949. A noted astronomer and artist, she taught the stars to local children and hosted Christmas parties for San Antonio orphans here.

Del Rio, TX

Around the turn of the 20th century, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe fanned out across small-town America, often starting as peddlers before opening dry-goods and department stores that anchored growing Main Streets. Max Stool, who had fled an area of Russia once part of Poland, stumbled into Del Rio in 1904 on a westbound train and never left, building 'The Guarantee' department store with his wife Anna. Together they bought land, put up commercial buildings, and coaxed national chains into the young downtown.

Dickinson, TX

This 1962 home, designed for NASA engineer Maxime 'Max' Faget (1921–2004) from his own conceptual sketches, sits beside Dickinson Bayou. Faget began with NASA's forerunner in 1946 and went on to help design the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft—and in his garage workshop in 1969 he developed the concept for a reusable Space Shuttle, testing balsa-wood models on his own property. He retired in 1981 as one of the essential engineers who carried the United States into space.

Killeen, TX

After repeated flooding cut the Maxdale community off from Killeen, Bell County commissioners approved a bridge here in 1913—only to see it swept away by a flood before completion. They contracted again with Hess & Skinner Engineers, agents for the Missouri Valley Bridge Company, and the replacement opened in 1914 using a Parker truss for maximum strength at mid-span. It has carried traffic across the crossing ever since.

Killeen vicinity, TX

One of the oldest cemeteries in Bell County, this burial ground began in the 1860s serving the rural community of Pleasant Grove. When Frank N. McBryde, Sr. — who donated the land — secured a post office in 1883, the settlement took the name Maxdale. Its earliest documented grave is that of a young woman who died in 1867, and among those laid to rest here are pioneer settlers and veterans reaching from the Civil War through Korea.

Briarcliff, TX

James Edward Maxey brought his family from Arkansas to Texas in the 1850s, eventually settling in western Travis County where the Pedernales meets the Colorado. The cemetery began in grief: his three-year-old grandson Alfred died of a snakebite in 1873 and was laid to rest on a shaded knoll, the first of the family burials. Maxey later served as the first postmaster of the nearby 'Mud' post office, and the little community he helped anchor faded as its school and post office closed in the early twentieth century.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2015

Maxfield Parrish, trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and under illustrator Howard Pyle at Drexel, became one of the most popular American artists of the early 20th century. His luminous fantasy scenes and the deep 'Parrish blue' made him a pioneer in blending fine art with commercial illustration and advertising. In 1915 he collaborated with Tiffany Studios on the shimmering Dream Garden glass mosaic located here.

Salisbury, NC

Built around 1820, the Maxwell Chambers House is a fine surviving example of the larger, more refined homes that prosperous families raised in Salisbury during the early republic. Its scale and craftsmanship reflect the town's growing wealth in the decades after independence. The house, a half-block south of this marker, now serves as a home for the Rowan Museum.

Fort Worth, TX

This late Queen Anne residence was built in 1904 in Fort Worth by contractor and carpenter Charles W. Maxwell, who lived here only briefly before selling to James Liston in 1907. The Liston family kept the home until 1941. Its corner turret, wraparound porch and wreath-and-scroll gable work show off the exuberant craftsmanship of the era's building trades.

Village of East Hampton, NY

May Groot Manson (1859–1917) made her East Hampton home a center of the fight for the vote on eastern Long Island. She led the Woman Suffrage League of East Hampton and the Women's Political Union of Suffolk County during the long campaign that would culminate in the Nineteenth Amendment. She is buried in nearby Cedar Lawn Cemetery.

Cambridge, MA

May Sarton lived and wrote in Cambridge, Massachusetts, part of a literary community that made the city one of America's great crucibles of letters in the twentieth century. Belgian-born and brought to New England as a child fleeing the upheavals of the First World War, she spent a long career moving between poetry, fiction, and the intimate art of the journal — work that found beauty in solitude, aging, and the interior lives of women. Her chosen epitaph, "maker of bridges between two worlds," captures a writer who linked Old World and New, private feeling and public page.

May, TX

Methodism reached this corner of Brown County with circuit-riding preachers in the 1860s, holding services in private homes before Mt. Zion Methodist Church was organized in 1882. The May Methodist Church formally took shape in 1886, gathering in a schoolhouse until members built their own one-room church in 1894 and later a brick sanctuary with stained glass. Fire destroyed that building in 2000, but the congregation's century-plus of service through depression, drought, and war endured.

Yoakum, TX

This sturdy dogtrot house of hewn logs and stone chimneys went up in the 1840s, the frontier years when Texas was passing from republic to statehood. Built for the family of John Joseph May and later home to the Hickeys, its open central passage was a hallmark of early Texas building, designed to catch the breeze in a hot climate.

Killeen, TX

This small graveyard dates to the late nineteenth century, though only one headstone — that of James Moses Cowan, who died in 1888 — remains legible among an estimated dozen to twenty burials. Other graves are marked with plain fieldstones or nothing at all, and local tradition places members of the pioneer O.M. Hood family here. The land was folded into Fort Hood in 1942, and the site took the name Mayberry Park Cemetery only in the mid-twentieth century.

Maydelle, TX

In 1906 the state-owned Texas State Railroad pushed into this area hunting timber to fuel the iron works at the Rusk penitentiary, and a branch prison called Camp Wright rose at the railhead. When Rusk native Thomas Campbell became governor, he had the line extended to Palestine, opening the region to settlers who platted the town of Maydelle in 1910—named for the governor's daughter, who sang at its dedication. Cotton, timber, and tomatoes fueled its early years before the slow rural decline of the later twentieth century.

Burton, TX

The Mayer Cemetery marks the German community of Winedale, settled from 1836 in a district first opened by Stephen F. Austin's Old 300 colonists, some of them wine makers who gave the area its name. Brothers Henry and Martin Mayer arrived from Germany in 1846 and by 1864 had built the area's first cotton gin and a mill. The burial ground, set aside in 1876, holds Mayer and Menn family members along with blacksmiths, farmers, and ministers, and veterans from the Civil War through the Korean War.

Denison, TX

Architect Donald Mayes designed and lived in this low, horizontal mid-century home, one of several he built in Denison's Edgewood addition. Over his career he shaped much of the town's built environment—banks, schools, First Presbyterian Church, the county sub-courthouse, and dozens of houses—and chaired Denison's planning and zoning commission. The house's Colorado red ledgestone, hand-split cedar shakes, and ribbon windows show the modern style he favored.

Manassas, VA

In the early months of the Civil War, Confederate forces fortifying the strategic rail junction at Manassas threw up earthen defenses to guard the approaches to the vital Orange & Alexandria and Manassas Gap railroad lines. The Mayfield earthworks were part of this network of hand-dug forts ringing the town, built from the very soil soldiers stood upon. Manassas Junction sat at the heart of the war's opening campaigns, drawing two major battles to its fields in 1861 and 1862.

Palo Alto, CA

On this site once stood the home of Sarah Armstrong Wallis (1825–1905), a leading California pioneer of the women's suffrage movement. Her Mayfield home became a gathering place for the cause, drawing national figures said to include Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Wallis helped organize early suffrage efforts on the Pacific Coast decades before the vote was won.

Palo Alto, CA

From 1906 to 1925 this bell rang out to call the volunteer firemen of Mayfield, an independent town along El Camino Real that later merged into Palo Alto. First hung near College Avenue and moved to the town hall in 1921, it was the community's alarm in an age before sirens and telephones reached every home. Its survival preserves the memory of a small California town's civic life.

Winston-Salem, NC

Opened in 1919, Maynard Field was North Carolina's first commercial airfield, operating on the edge of Winston-Salem until the mid-1930s. It was named for Lt. Belvin W. Maynard, a North Carolina native and celebrated early aviator. The field belongs to the barnstorming dawn of American aviation, when former military flyers turned open ground into the country's first airports.

Portland, ME

Governor Percival Proctor Baxter donated this Portland woodland in memory of his father, James Phinney Baxter (1831–1921), a noted historian and philanthropist who served six terms as the city's mayor. Held in trust as a public park, the woods honor a family whose civic leadership shaped Portland across generations.

Maypearl, TX

Maypearl sprang up on the International & Great Northern line in 1903, and when landowner William P. Wilemon died in 1907 and was buried on his farm, townsfolk resolved to make a proper cemetery. His widow Minnie sold four acres, including his grave, to trustees for the purpose, and the grounds came to hold the doctors, teachers, farmers, and fraternal members who built the town. Tombstones mark veterans of wars from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Henderson, TX

This pioneer burial ground served the New Salem community, a 1850s settlement with a stagecoach stop, post office, and academy nestled between Quinn Mountain and the Angelina River. Tradition holds that two enslaved people were the first laid to rest here, and its oldest marked grave belongs to a two-year-old child who died in 1856. Veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War lie beneath marble and granite stones amid historic jonquils and crepe myrtles.

Maysfield, TX

Area Methodists were meeting as early as 1847, but this congregation was not formally organized until 1854, served by itinerant circuit-riding preachers who first gathered worshippers in a schoolhouse. A separate Maysfield circuit came in 1885, and a sanctuary was built in 1897 that stood until fire destroyed it in 1933. The congregation worshipped in the local Presbyterian church until 1952, when its present building was donated and moved in from Ben Arnold.

Maysville, KY

Chartered in 1829, the Maysville and Washington Turnpike laid down the first macadamized road in Kentucky—and reputedly the first anywhere west of the Alleghenies—when its opening four-mile stretch was completed in 1830. By 1835 the improved road ran all the way from Maysville to Lexington, threaded with thirteen tollhouses and six covered bridges. It carried the Bluegrass region's goods and travelers over a smooth, engineered surface that muddy frontier tracks could never match.

Mayville, WI

Dedicated on Memorial Day 1928 by the Woman's Relief Corps of Mayville, this monument honors the Union soldiers and sailors who left rural Dodge County, Wisconsin, for the Civil War. The Woman's Relief Corps, the women's auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic, spent the postwar decades tending veterans and raising just such memorials across the North. Erecting it more than sixty years after Appomattox, they worked to keep the war's memory alive as its veterans passed away.

Storey County, NV

In 1862 Ivy Mead, John McCone, and a partner opened a foundry in Gold Canyon, moving it to this granite building two years later to serve the booming Comstock mines. McCone took sole ownership in 1866 and, after an 1872 fire, absorbed the Fulton Foundry to build what may have been the largest foundry in Nevada, employing 110 men. Its shops cast the early machinery of the Virginia and Truckee Railway and, in 1880, the largest casting ever poured on the Pacific Coast.

Rockport, TX

Tucked among hackberry, mesquite, and live oak on Texas's Coastal Bend, this family burying ground dates to the turn of the twentieth century, when Charles H. McLester—an engineer on the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad—and his wife Eliza inherited the land in 1903. The McLesters were among the vegetable farmers of the nearby Sparks Colony, and the first grave, dug in 1909, held their thirteen-year-old son Bennie. Generations of educators, city officials, and veterans followed, and descendants still tend the plot.

Walker County, TX

John McAdams, a veteran of the Texas Revolution, brought his family to what became Walker County around 1840 and built a life as a rancher, planter, and mill owner; the community that grew around his land took his name. The cemetery began in 1849 with the burial of his first wife, Hester, and grew over generations to hold family, neighbors, and a separate section McAdams set aside for the people he enslaved. Maintained since 1937 by a cemetery association, it now spans nearly thirteen acres.

Walker County, TX

John McAdams III, a veteran of the Texas Revolution and the Republic of Texas Army, moved from the Sabine District to present Walker County and, with his first wife Hester White, built this home in the 1840s. A land speculator, planter, and rancher, he also ran a cotton gin and sawmill, and the surrounding area became the McAdams community, with a post office from 1888 to 1917. The house was moved here in 1968 from its original site a mile east.

Jackson Township, PA · est. 2018

In 1778, as the Revolution reached the Pennsylvania frontier, Col. William McAlevy — a pioneer settler and Revolutionary War officer — raised a blockhouse near this spot to shelter early settlers from raids. Decades later, in the 1840s, the entrepreneur Robert McBurney founded a village here and spent the following years developing it. Nearby 19th-century ironworks and mills fueled the community's growth, layering an industrial chapter atop its frontier origins.

McAllen, TX

Methodism reached the lower Rio Grande Valley by 1849, when circuit-riding preachers covered the long river country from Brownsville to Roma on horseback. When McAllen took root, the Rev. C. W. Godwyn arrived in 1909 to gather local Methodists, and a modest frame sanctuary went up that same year. Growth came quickly in the booming Valley town, prompting a larger building in 1913 and the present church in 1928.

McAllen, TX

Chartered in December 1915 by Master Mason R. M. Bounds and some thirty fellow Masons, this lodge first met in early downtown McAllen commercial buildings before erecting its own temple here in 1927. Its membership drew from many Masonic jurisdictions and included two men who rose to serve as Grand Masters. The lodge has remained an active force in the civic life of McAllen for more than a century.

McAllen, TX

When the federal government built this Spanish colonial revival post office in 1935 and dedicated it in January 1936, McAllen was a fast-growing town on the Texas–Mexico border that had already outgrown five earlier postal quarters since 1907. The building's baroque frontispiece, corbelled cornice, and red tile roof reflect the regional revival style that shaped much South Texas public architecture of the era. After serving the mail until 1957, it was repurposed for federal and city offices and named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1986.

Linn, TX

The McAllen Ranch reaches back to Spanish colonial Texas, when José de Escandón's Nuevo Santander opened the lower Rio Grande and José Manuel Gómez received the vast 95,000-acre Santa Anita grant in 1790. Through marriages and shrewd purchases, the grant passed to María Salomé Ballí, who with Irish immigrant John McAllen reunited and expanded the holdings to more than 160,000 acres, supplying beef and hides—and refuge—to both sides during the Civil War. Run under the SM brand by her descendants, it became one of the oldest Texas ranches in continuous family operation.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2022

In 1796, in a young republic still importing most of its fine goods, John McAllister Sr. opened what is remembered as America's first optical shop near this Philadelphia site. His shop grew into a multigenerational dynasty of innovators: a son who became a pioneering hospital optician, a grandson who first taught the science of refraction to eye physicians, and a great-grandson who helped found a national professional body in 1898. For over a century the McAllisters helped turn eye care from craft into profession.

Hanover, PA · est. 1954

Along the old Monocacy Road, Richard McAllister raised a two-story log building and opened a store and tavern that helped seed the settlement that became Hanover. In 1755 Benjamin Franklin, then organizing supply and communication for the frontier during the French and Indian War era, stopped as a guest. The original building stood until it was razed in 1950.

Cumberland Township, PA · est. 2012

On the eve of the Civil War era, the McAllister family's grist mill on Rock Creek in Adams County became a haven for people escaping slavery. James McAllister and his family sheltered hundreds of freedom seekers as part of one of the earliest Underground Railroad networks carrying them north. On July 4, 1836, the site hosted a gathering of abolitionists that gave birth to the influential Adams County Anti-Slavery Society.

White Hall, TX

Around 1851 North Carolina native Dugald McAlpine settled the pioneer community of Wallace's Prairie and bought a large tract that included several early burial sites. His relative Malcomb was interred here in 1866, and McAlpine fenced the grounds as a family graveyard before his own death in 1876; descendants deeded three acres for cemetery use in 1886. Those buried here span former slaves, McAlpine kin, civic leaders, and veterans of wars from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Lometa vicinity, TX

Robert D. McAnelly arrived in this country in the early 1830s and worked as a surveyor mapping large tracts of the surrounding land, his homestead marking a threshold for the settlement of Lampasas and San Saba counties. McAnelly's Bend on the river took his name in 1858, and his son Cornelius was recorded as the first white child born in Lampasas County. The marker commemorates the family's role in opening this stretch of central Texas frontier.

Lincoln, CA

This park is named for Peter McGill McBean, co-founder of Gladding, McBean & Co., and his descendants, whose family long guided the clay-products company that anchored Lincoln, California. The dedication links a community park to the industrial dynasty whose terra-cotta and pipe works drove the town's growth.

Camden County, NC

McBride Church traces its roots to an Anglican congregation founded around 1733 and became Methodist in 1792 as that faith swept the American backcountry. It was visited by Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke, the pioneering bishops who organized American Methodism after the Revolution. The present building was erected in 1837 and remodeled in 1882, standing about two and a half miles east.

Amarillo, TX

In 1903 pioneer settler David Nichols McBride quarried Alibates dolomite from the canyon rim and burned his own lime on site to raise this Panhandle ranch house, framing it with timbers salvaged from an old railroad bridge over the Canadian River. Having claimed his homestead in the heart of the vast, London-owned LX Ranch, McBride proved up his land under the patient terms of state settlement law. The house survived him and eventually passed to the National Park Service within the Lake Meredith recreation area.

Killeen vicinity, TX

When Mancel T. McBryde brought his family from Georgia to Bell County in the early 1860s, the Texas frontier was still a place where families made their own institutions—including where to lay their dead. Upon his wife Jane's death in 1885, he chose a rise south of the family home for her grave, beginning a burial ground that gathered McBryde and Hoover descendants, their graves facing east and the oldest ringed in stone. Kin still tend it today.

McCamey, TX

McCamey sprang up almost overnight in 1926 when a wildcat well came in, and within a year some ten thousand people had rushed to the new oil town. Named for driller George B. McCamey, whose discovery well opened dozens of fields across Upton County, it settled into a durable life of ranching—horses, sheep, and goats—once the boom cooled. Its parks and the Mendoza Trail Museum keep the memory of that frenzied birth alive.

McCamey, TX

When the 1920s oil boom conjured McCamey out of the desert, the town had no school at all—just twenty pupils in a tin shack in 1925. A year later 550 children crowded into dance halls, skating rinks, and churches, using apple and orange crates for desks. This 1927 building finally gave them a proper home, and it doubled as the community's civic center, hosting everything from weddings to Draft Board meetings until it closed as a high school in 1961.

Corpus Christi, TX

In 1908 the widowed Mary Alice Ward McCampbell bought beachfront land in Corpus Christi's old Irishtown and commissioned a home for herself and her three sons overlooking the bay. When the catastrophic 1919 hurricane drove floodwaters into the first floor, the family watched from the second-story porch as the house held. Long a family home, it was later moved to Heritage Park in 1984 to be preserved.

Crockett, TX

John McCarter was born in Pennsylvania in 1813 and came to Texas in 1832, four years before the Republic itself was born, settling with his wife Jane and their nine children on a farmstead in Houston County. Like many pioneer families, they set aside a corner of their land as a burial ground, and John became its first occupant when he died in 1895. In 1907 Jane formally deeded the plot to the surrounding community, tying the graveyard to the schoolhouse settlement that grew up nearby. Descendants still gather each year to tend the graves.

Angelina County, TX

In 1860 Orange McCarty and his wife Mary Arrington bought a large tract in Angelina County, but their planned move from Mississippi stalled when the Civil War erupted and two of their sons died fighting for the Confederacy. The surviving family, joined by the Arringtons and McCalls, finally settled here in 1866 and built a log cabin above Jack Creek, setting aside this acre for burials that were in use by 1873. It endures as the resting place of a founding Angelina County pioneer family.

Beeville, TX

Erected about 1867 near Poesta Creek on the courthouse square, this is Beeville's oldest business building—a pioneer-western structure with southern porches that housed a general store, lodging house, and post office. It was built by G. W. McClanahan, the town's first merchant, who also served as schoolteacher, postmaster, county clerk, innkeeper, and Sunday school superintendent.

Coldspring, TX

Built in the 1880s, this Coldspring home was bought in 1913 by merchant Robert Hugh McClanahan, Jr., who served as county tax collector and as postmaster from 1914 until his death in 1940. After a 1915 fire destroyed the courthouse and the town square was relocated, McClanahan had his house turned to face the new town. Long a haven for travelers, it later passed to his son-in-law, Marshall Douglas Trapp.

York, PA · est. 1949

For roughly nine months in 1777–1778, York stood in for Philadelphia as the capital of the United States after the British seized the larger city. Archibald McClean, who surveyed lands for the Penn family and served as a county officer, was a committed patriot whose home is remembered as a place where the fledgling nation's treasury was kept during that anxious interlude.

Sacramento County, CA

As tensions rose across the Pacific in 1936, Congress authorized the Sacramento Air Depot, the installation that would become McClellan Air Force Base. Built to supply and stage air operations on the West Coast, it grew into a major logistics hub during the wartime years that soon followed.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997

The house at 912 Walnut Street sheltered two remarkable George McClellans. The father, a physician, founded Jefferson Medical College and lived here until his death in 1847. The son, raised here as a boy, grew up to command the Army of the Potomac in the Civil War's early years and to run for president against Abraham Lincoln in 1864.

Bonham, TX

District Judge Eugene David McClellan and his wife Alice, a piano teacher at Carlton College, built this two-story Queen Anne home in Bonham in 1879. When their daughter Cornelia married attorney Henry Allen Cunningham in 1907, the couple moved in, and the house stayed in the family into the 1960s. Its projecting bay, full-gallery verandas, fish-scale shingles, and sunburst gable details make it a showpiece of late-Victorian craftsmanship.

Austin, TX

Architect Charles H. Page designed this house in 1906 for Judge James Wooten McClendon and his wife Annie, on land her father gave as a wedding gift. McClendon served 26 years as Chief Justice of the Court of Civil Appeals, and fellow judges rented the home before the family sold it in 1944. In 1960 it passed to University of Texas head football coach and administrator Ed Price, whose family lived in the 2½-story American Foursquare, its buff-brick walls blending Prairie, Craftsman, and Eclectic styles.

Palestine, TX

Judge Alexander E. McClure, a Tennessee lawyer who came to Texas in 1840, built this Palestine home in 1849 and served as Anderson County's first district clerk. In 1884 it passed to Confederate veteran Z. A. McReynolds, who had survived the sieges of Vicksburg and Atlanta and went on to hold nearly every county office. It later sheltered his daughter and her husband, Colonel Godfrey Fowler, a soldier of the Spanish-American War, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and World War I.