Search Markers

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2016

Established in 1804, the McClurg Iron Foundry was Pittsburgh's first air foundry, casting metal in a young industrial city perched at the gateway to the West. During the War of 1812 it forged cannons and ammunition, much of it destined for the American fleet that would contest control of Lake Erie. In 1835 the site achieved another milestone, producing the first locomotive steam engine built west of the Allegheny Mountains.

Flower Mound, TX

This small community burial ground dates to the 1850s, before Denton was even chosen as county seat. Here lie pioneers who came from Tennessee in 1855—the Boyd, McCombs, Nowlin, Sigler, and Rivers families—including Nehemiah Boyd, who died of pneumonia after being caught by a blue norther while raising a log cabin for his family. Archaeological evidence suggests as many as 100 people were buried here between the 1850s and 1890s, their graves once marked by native sandstone.

Red Willow County, NE

On the high plains of southwestern Nebraska, McCook Army Airfield trained bomber crews during World War II, one of hundreds of hastily built airbases that turned the rural interior into a vast flight-training ground. Crews learned to fly heavy bombers here before shipping overseas. Today the abandoned runways and scattered structures mark where the war effort reached deep into the American heartland.

McCook, TX

McCook was settled in the 1920s by descendants of the Polish colonists who founded Panna Maria in 1854—the oldest Polish settlement in the United States. Urban Kotzur, his son Leon, and neighbor Frank Prukop bought land here in 1925, and the Kotzurs arrived in 1926 to clear the South Texas brush for farming. A post office, a school, and Immaculate Conception Catholic Church soon followed, extending a Polish-American community deep into the Rio Grande Valley.

Dayton, OH

In the years around World War I, the U.S. Army turned a stretch of Dayton floodplain into one of the nation's first centers for aviation research, fittingly located in the hometown of the Wright brothers. Through the late 1910s and 1920s, engineers here pushed the young science of flight forward, testing new aircraft, engines, and equipment and chasing altitude and speed records at a time when airplanes were still a novelty. As the work outgrew the cramped, flood-prone site, it moved to a larger field nearby that would eventually become Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Lewistown, PA · est. 1967

This Lewistown home was the birthplace of Frank R. McCoy, a West Point graduate whose long career carried him from the Spanish-American War through both World Wars. A soldier-diplomat as much as a general, he served on international commissions and led the Foreign Policy Association, helping shape how Americans understood their growing role in the world. His life spanned the era in which the United States rose to global power.

Paducah, KY

The first courthouse on this site was completed in 1861, just as the Civil War began, and was quickly occupied by the Union Army and pressed into service as a military hospital. Paducah's county government had moved here from Wilmington decades earlier, and the present courthouse was built with Works Progress Administration help between 1940 and 1943. The story of the site traces McCracken County's growth from a log courthouse to a New Deal–era public building.

Comanche, TX

James Madison McCrary came to Comanche around 1870 and, with his father and brother, ran a mercantile on the town square and launched the county's first cotton gin. In 1876 he began this limestone house of central-hall plan, its stone quarried near Austin and its facade marked by segmental arches and gable-end chimneys. A noted horticulturist, McCrary later farmed east of town before retiring here, and his descendants held the home until 1987.

Honey Grove, TX

Settlers farming the blackland prairie gathered in Ezekiel Phillips Warren's home in 1859 to organize a Methodist congregation, and in 1877 William Bain McCraw and others donated land for a church and cemetery. The grounds hosted ten-day summer camp meetings and even a school taught in the church building, becoming an anchor for the community. Though the congregation disbanded in 1966 and the building was razed in 1983, an annual homecoming still draws people back each May.

McCreary County, KY · est. 1969

Established in 1912 from parts of Pulaski, Wayne, and Whitley counties, McCreary County was the last of Kentucky's 120 counties. It took its name from James B. McCreary—a Confederate cavalry colonel who became a lawyer, twice governor of Kentucky, and a long-serving congressman between the 1860s and the early twentieth century.

Dallas, TX

Mahulda Bonner McCree granted the first land for this cemetery in 1866, though burials had already taken place here during the Civil War years. Over time it grew to more than three acres, gathering the graves of Peters colonists, war veterans, and many families tied to the area's early Methodist and Baptist churches. It remains a well-documented record of early Dallas County settlement.

Brazoria, TX

Tanner John McCroskey came to Texas among Stephen F. Austin's 'Old 300' colonists and built this home to satisfy his 1824 Mexican land grant. Its later owners read like a roll call of early Texas: Oliver Jones, who chaired the commission that designed the Republic's flag and seal; district judge and legislator Robert J. Townes; and Asa Stratton, under whom the land became a sugar and cotton plantation. Nannie Stringfellow preserved the dwelling after 1945.

Bogata, TX

When the three McCrury brothers and their two sisters came down from Missouri in 1835, they were joining the thin scatter of Anglo settlers pushing into what was still Mexican Texas. The private burying ground on John McCrury's land opened with his own death in 1864 and slowly grew into the community graveyard for the surrounding McCrury area, gathering the pioneer families of Red River County. Formally recorded as a cemetery in 1953, it is still tended by a local association.

Paris, TX

Built in 1858 and remodeled in 1907, this home became the residence of Dr. L. P. McCuistion, a physician for 57 years who founded the Sanitarium of Paris in 1914. His work helped turn Paris into a regional hospital center. The house's story spans from antebellum Texas to the early-twentieth-century rise of organized medicine.

San Antonio, TX

This burial ground traces to Samuel McCulloch, Jr., wounded at Goliad in October 1835 in the opening weeks of the Texas Revolution and long remembered as among its first casualties. He received this land as a bounty for that service, and the earliest marked grave belongs to his father, who died in 1855. After McCulloch deeded acreage to a Baptist congregation in 1861, the site grew into a community cemetery holding area pioneers, Civil War veterans, and noted potter Louis Meyer.

Brady, TX

Created in 1856 from the vast Bexar territory, McCulloch County honors Ben McCulloch, a Texas hero who fought in the Revolution and in the Indian, Mexican, and Civil Wars. Frontier and Indian dangers slowed settlement so severely that two decades passed before the buffalo were hunted off and ranches took hold, and the county finally organized in 1876 with Brady as its seat. It holds the geographic center of Texas and the site of the 1831 Calf Creek fight, where James Bowie battled a much larger Indian force.

Brady, TX

McCulloch County was organized in 1876 as settlement pushed into the Texas Hill Country, with Brady chosen as its seat and a first courthouse raised in 1879. The present building, completed in 1900 by contractors Martin and Moodie, was a "turn-key" job that leaned on local hands and native sandstone quarried nearby. Its Modified Roman lines, arched vaulting, Victorian cupola, and pine woodwork made it the dignified heart of county government.

Brady, TX

Built in 1909–1910 by the Southern Structural Steel Co. of San Antonio, this red-brick Romanesque Revival building was the second to serve as the McCulloch County Jail. Sheriff T. L. Sansom was its first resident, living in the first-floor jailer's quarters while prisoners were held in cells on the upper two floors. When a new jail opened in 1974, the old building found new life as home to the Heart of Texas Historical Museum.

Morristown, NJ

Built in the 1810s, this stately Georgian mansion was the home of George Perot McCulloch, the visionary often called the "father of the Morris Canal." McCulloch championed the canal that would carry anthracite coal and iron across northern New Jersey and help power the region's industry. He and his wife Louisa were pillars of early Morristown, helping to establish local institutions including a nearby Episcopal church.

Laneville, TX

McCune Cemetery grew out of the Chinquapin community in the pine country of Rusk County, its roots reaching back to pioneer James L. McCune, who came to Texas in David G. Burnet's colony and took a land grant in 1835. His son married a local Cherokee woman, Delila Storm, in 1836, and their third child's 1852 burial opened the family graveyard. More than 200 graves now rest beneath hickories, oaks, and chinquapins on land still held by McCune heirs.

Lewisville, TX

The McCurley family came from Illinois to settle Denton County in 1852, and George Collins McCurley set aside land here for a burial ground, church, and school. His brother Abraham, who died in 1871, was the first family member laid to rest, and by 1877 neighbors were burying their dead here too. When Lewisville Lake was created in 1951, all 106 graves had to be relocated to this spot beside Old Hall Cemetery, where George McCurley himself is buried.

McDade, TX

Laid out in 1871 and named for Brenham lawyer James McDade, this Bastrop County town grew into a busy freight center and stagecoach stop, its school-church raised the following year. But prosperity came with lawlessness: a vigilante group organized in 1883 hanged three men on Christmas Eve, and the next day's reckoning erupted in a gunfight at the Rock Saloon, a building that survives today as a museum.

McDade, TX

Organized on July 18, 1880, under the Rev. J. D. Wright, this Baptist congregation first worshiped in a shared union church building in the small railroad town of McDade. The Baptists bought that building outright in 1900 and used it until 1948, when they moved an army chapel purchased from nearby Camp Swift onto this site, tying the church's story to the World War II installation next door.

Hubbard, TX

Hubbard sprang up in 1881 when the Cotton Belt railroad pushed its line from Tyler toward Waco, and one of the town's first fine homes rose the next year. Local merchant and banker Joe B. McDaniel built this late-Victorian house of walnut and pine for his widowed mother, Elizabeth Bonner McDaniel, adorning it with ornate banisters, decorative columns and gables, and tinted glass.

Humboldt County, NV

In the mid-1860s, Paiutes returning from Oregon's reservation joined others from Pyramid Lake—the "cui-ui eaters"—driven together by mistreatment and the dishonest dealings of federal Indian agents. They settled around Fort McDermitt, where some aided the military against groups resisting the settlers overtaking their lands. In the generations since, nearby mercury mines, local industry, and a tradition of pottery made from the canyon's red and green clays have shaped the community's adaptation to a changing world.

New Summerfield, TX

This community cemetery grew up on the 1850s homestead of William and Clarissa Johnson, with its earliest documented burials — two young daughters of a local doctor — dating to 1856. After Clarissa remarried in 1858, the land became the McDonald Farm, and by 1870 the small graveyard was serving the whole community as McDonald Cemetery. Today it holds more than 550 documented graves, plus many unmarked, spanning well over a century of Cherokee County life.

Fort Davis, TX

McDonald Observatory grew from the bequest of William Johnson McDonald, a frugal Paris, Texas banker who loved reading science and gazing through a small telescope, and who left the University of Texas $800,000 to build an observatory. Erected in the 1930s atop a nearly 6,800-foot peak chosen for its clear, dark skies, it long held one of the world's largest telescopes. Astronomers there made discoveries ranging from interstellar polarization to new planetary satellites.

McDonald, PA · est. 2012

When oil was struck here in 1890, the McDonald field roared to life, and by 1891 and 1892 it was pumping more oil than anywhere else on earth. It stood second only to the famed Bradford field in Pennsylvania's history, and helped drive the state to its all-time record output of more than 31 million barrels in 1891. Nearby gushers like the Mevey No. 1 and Mathews No. 1 set the state's highest daily production rates.

San Diego, CA

The McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet entered U.S. Navy and Marine service in the early 1980s as a versatile strike fighter, equally capable of dogfighting and ground attack. Flown from carriers and shore bases, it became a workhorse of American air power in the decades that followed. This example, displayed on San Diego's carrier-museum waterfront, represents the modern era of naval aviation.

Klein, TX

In 1838 George McDougle brought his family to 100 acres carved from the John House survey, building a home and raising cattle on land his descendants would hold for a full century. This small burying ground reflects the 19th-century Texas custom of interring kin near the homestead; among its graves lie a Texas Ranger, a Civil War veteran who served as a Harris County commissioner, and several generations of the family.

Buda, TX

On a bluff above Onion Creek, the McElroy-Severn complex began in 1875 as a stagecoach house and post office serving travelers on the old San Antonio road. When the railroad drew mail service to the new town of Dupre — soon renamed Buda — in 1880, the station became a private home and ranch headquarters for more than a century. Its limestone post office, with carved stone lintels, and the much-remodeled center-passage house together recall Buda's scattered homestead beginnings.

McFaddin, TX

When a railroad line pushed through the McFaddin Ranch around 1900, a ranch settlement — briefly renamed Marianna by the railroad — sprang up with a depot, post office, church, and school. This board-and-batten mercantile, built in 1910, became the community's gathering place and for a time housed the post office. Its simple, sturdy design typifies the small-town general stores that anchored rural Texas commerce.

McFaddin, TX

The McFaddin ranch settlement was rechristened Marianna in 1906 by the railroad that reached it, and a post office opened the next year inside a general store, migrating between buildings before settling into this board-and-batten structure in 1913. At rancher A. M. McFaddin's request, the town reclaimed its original name in 1923. For decades the mail arrived and departed by train, a rhythm that continued until 1962.

Beaumont, TX

This classical revival mansion rose in 1906 on the homestead of William McFaddin, who had received land from the Republic of Texas for his service at the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto and went on to build a sprawling ranching empire. Architect Henry Conrad Mauer designed the house for McFaddin's daughter, and it passed down through the family for generations. It stands amid the wealth generated by Southeast Texas ranching and the oil that gushed from nearby Spindletop.

Bleakwood, TX

Family tradition holds that Colonel Thomas S. McFarland set aside this ground as a family burial place around 1840, when he and his father William were figures of standing in the young Republic of Texas. The land later passed to the Wilson family, whose members began to be laid here in the 1890s. Descendants still tend the graves, keeping alive the memory of two pioneer East Texas families.

Cochranton, PA · est. 2023

Long before European settlers reached northwestern Pennsylvania, Native peoples built successive palisaded villages along the French Creek Valley, occupying this ground from roughly 1100 to 1500 AD. Excavations here uncovered evidence of a life balanced across the seasons—hunting, gathering, and small-scale farming—along with a distinctive shell-tempered pottery style archaeologists named McFate Incised. That signature pottery has since helped researchers trace the movements and trade connections of the region's Indigenous communities.

Crane, TX

Crane County's oldest house was built in 1909 by pioneer rancher R. D. McGee, on land he had homesteaded more than two decades before the county was even organized. Its classic 'dog-trot' plan—two rooms flanking an open central passage—was a practical answer to the West Texas heat. Hauling the lumber from Odessa took wagons three full days across the open range.

San Marcos, TX

This spot marks where the Camino Real—the King's Highway from Nacogdoches to the Rio Grande—forded the San Marcos River. The French explorer St. Denis traveled it in 1714 to open trade with the Spanish, and the Austins likely crossed near here during their 1820–21 colonization efforts. Thomas McGehee settled on the east bank around 1846, and the family's long association gave the crossing its name.

Alice, TX

Sons of a Mississippi family, the McGill brothers built one of South Texas's notable ranching operations, purchasing the Santa Rosa Ranch in 1916 and rising to lead the Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. In 1941 Frank McGill erected this office building for the family's ranching enterprise, reportedly patterning it after San Antonio's Alamo, which had impressed him on a visit. With its corbelled stone parapet and Greek touches, it later passed to a museum corporation as a South Texas landmark.

Tarkington, TX

Established in 1861, McGinnis Cemetery began at the very outset of the Civil War, when the farming families of rural Liberty County were being drawn into the conflict that would reshape Texas. Frontier cemeteries of this era often gathered pioneer settlers and the war generation side by side. It carries a Historic Texas Cemetery designation.

Milam, TX

McGown Cemetery opened with the 1842 burial of pioneer Anne Kyle, just five years after Sabine County was organized. Its namesake, George Washington McGown, served as a justice of the peace during the Republic of Texas era and became the first of his family laid to rest here in 1859. Civil War veterans followed, among them his son Andrew, a four-term county sheriff, and members of the prominent Browning family.

Saint Jo, TX

Allen R. McGrady and his wife Elizabeth Cox McGrady moved to this area along Clear Creek in 1859, settling on 160 acres. The cemetery began in the 1860s after a McGrady employee was killed by Indians and buried on the family farm, and an acre was set aside as a graveyard for family and neighbors. Allen and Elizabeth, who both died in September 1899, are buried here among the pioneers of Montague County.

McGregor, TX

McGregor was born of the railroad. In 1882 the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe and the Texas and St. Louis lines drew statewide crowds to a public auction of town lots, and settlers from nearby hamlets like Banks and Eagle Springs moved in. Named for pioneer physician Dr. Gregor Carmichael McGregor, the town grew as an agricultural shipping hub and boomed again during World War II with a new ordnance plant.

Nelsonville, TX

In the early 1850s a close-knit band of Scottish immigrants—McGregors, Carmichaels, McLeans and more, many from the isle of Lismore in Argyllshire—settled western Austin County by way of North Carolina. They founded Galatia Presbyterian Church and, in 1868, opened this graveyard with the burial of Mary McGregor. When the last interment came in 1900, the cemetery remained as the community's final trace.

McGregor, TX

Founded in 1904 by T.E. Streight, the McGregor Mirror soon drew a young typesetter named Chas Hall, who with his wife bought the paper in 1918 and launched a family dynasty that has now run it for three generations. The Mirror still operates in the same building where it began, which houses one of the earliest Model 14 Linotype machines in Texas, bought at the State Fair in 1925 and used into the 1990s. For over a century the paper has chronicled the life of its community.

Charlotte, NC

In the autumn of 1780, Lord Cornwallis and his British army occupied Charlotte, but the surrounding Mecklenburg County countryside was fiercely hostile — so much so that Cornwallis reportedly called it a "hornet's nest" of rebellion. On October 3, a small band of local Patriot militia ambushed a much larger British foraging party at the McIntyre farm north of town, harassing the redcoats with well-aimed fire from behind fences and trees and driving them back toward Charlotte. The skirmish was one of many stinging local resistances that made the British occupation of the region untenable.

Wills Point, TX

Thomas J. McKain came to Texas from Florida in 1870 and, four years later, built this house for his bride Mattie Cornelia Bagby — the first couple married in the young town of Wills Point. The lumber traveled by ox-wagon all the way from Longview. A merchant who promoted immigration to Texas, McKain served repeatedly as mayor along with stints as alderman and school trustee, helping shape the community in its formative decades.

Richardson, TX

Long before European or American settlers reached North Texas, Native peoples camped around the natural spring now called McKamy Spring, one of the few above-ground springs still surviving in the area. Early settlers of Breckenridge—the community that preceded Richardson—used it as Bowser Spring until the railroad drew the town elsewhere. Richardson's first mayor, Thomas McKamy, later drew on the spring to supply water for wells and even the construction of the Central Expressway, bought the surrounding land, and placed a marker there honoring the Native Americans who had used it before him.

Smethport, PA · est. 1981

Formed in 1804 from Lycoming County and named for Pennsylvania governor Thomas McKean, this northern county long drew its living from oil, gas, and timber. In 1861 the county seat of Smethport became a mustering ground when the celebrated "Bucktails" gathered here, a hard-fighting Civil War regiment known for the deer tails pinned to their caps. The name marked a rugged frontier people answering the Union's call.

McKees Rocks, PA

Rising sixteen feet high and eighty-five feet wide, the McKees Rocks Mound is the largest Native American burial mound in Western Pennsylvania. It was raised by hand by the Adena people between about 200 BC and 100 AD, and later peoples—the Hopewell and the Monongahela—continued to use the site. Nineteenth-century excavations recovered thirty-three burials along with artifacts of copper and shell.

McKees Rocks, PA

This monument in the old mill and railroad town of McKees Rocks, on the Ohio River just below Pittsburgh, honors the local men and women who left home to serve in the nation's armed forces. Communities across industrial western Pennsylvania sent generations of sons and daughters into uniform, and memorials like this one gather that collective sacrifice into a single civic place of remembrance.

Forney, TX

Merchant and landowner John Alexander McKellar built this Forney house in 1873, and around 1902 his son B. Yancy McKellar remodeled it into the Colonial Revival form seen today. Its two-story Ionic columns, stained glass, and wraparound porch reflect the prosperity of a leading local family. The home stayed in McKellar hands until 1977.

Groesbeck, TX

This burial ground lies in what was once McKenzie Prairie, named for Joseph S. McKenzie and his family, who settled here in 1853. Its oldest grave belongs to Elizabeth Etemon and her infant daughter, who died passing through in 1865; the McKenzies gave land for the burial and marked it with a sandstone stone that Elizabeth's grieving husband carved before continuing his journey. From that single act of kindness the one-acre plot grew into a community cemetery for the McKenzies, their neighbors, and their descendants.

Clarksville, TX

Founded in 1841 by the Reverend John W. P. McKenzie — a Methodist circuit rider and former missionary to the Choctaws — McKenzie College grew from a single log cabin into four large buildings spread across 900 acres. Chartered in 1854, it enrolled some 300 boarding students a year and ranked among the finest schools in the Southwest before the Civil War, closing in 1869.

Honey Grove, TX

This congregation reaches back to Methodist services held in Honey Grove's shared Union Church in the 1840s, one of the first footholds of the faith in North Texas. Members put up their own building in 1881 and named it for J.W.P. McKenzie, a pioneering Methodist preacher and educator in the region. The graceful Gothic structure standing today was raised in 1912, its builders folding native stone salvaged from the 1881 church into new walls topped with conical towers and arched, stained-glass windows.

McKinney, TX

McKinney was founded in 1845 and named for Collin McKinney, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence—the same man who gave his name to the surrounding county. During the Civil War, future Texas governor J. W. Throckmorton raised Company K of the 6th Texas Cavalry here, a well-regarded Confederate unit. The town grew into a center of manufacturing, trade, and medicine for the region.

Waxahachie, TX

Henry McKinney rode a year with Company C of the Texas Rangers' Frontier Battalion before settling near Waxahachie, where he and his wife Viola bought a 71-acre tract in the fertile Blackland Prairie in 1903. In 1913 he hired local builder Jack Harris to raise this 2,000-square-foot Prairie-Style farmhouse, its wrap-around porch, dormers, and cedar-shake roof completed that August. With its original barn, corrals, and chicken house still standing, it remains one of rural Ellis County's few intact early-20th-century family farmsteads.

Hillsboro, TX

This Victorian house was built in 1896 by A. P. McKinnon, a Georgia-born lawyer who came to Hillsboro in 1873 and earned a wide reputation for his exacting ethics and busy practice. In 1903 it passed to banker Samuel Houston Anderson, who lived here 35 years, and since 1966 it has been lovingly preserved as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Cushing, TX

McKnight Cemetery began in the 1850s as the family burying ground of William Newton and Rebecca McKnight and opened to neighboring communities by the Civil War. It served hamlets like Glenfawn, Linn Flat, and Toliver—the last of which faded into a ghost town after the Texas and New Orleans Railroad bypassed it, drawing residents to rail-served Cushing. Among those interred are Confederate soldiers and World War II R.A.F. Wing Commander Lance C. Wade, a celebrated fighter ace.

Currituck County, NC

Thomas McKnight, a colonial merchant and legislator, operated a large shipyard that stood near this Currituck County marker in the years before the Revolution. When war came he remained loyal to the Crown, one of many Loyalists whose fortunes and communities were torn apart by the conflict. His shipyard reflects the maritime commerce that made the Albemarle region a colonial trading crossroads.