Search Markers

Stowe Township, PA

This plaque marks the home of Michael A. Musmanno, a Pittsburgh-area jurist whose career stretched from the coal-country courtrooms of the 1920s to the world stage. He served in both World Wars, sat in the state legislature, and in 1947–48 presided over one of the Nuremberg trials that held Nazi leaders to account for their crimes. He capped his life with sixteen years on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and authorship of sixteen books, and was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery.

Austin, TX

Michael Butler left Limerick, Ireland, in 1866, learned bricklaying in New York, and by 1873 had settled in Austin, where his riverside brickyards would operate until 1958. Using mule-powered machines to press Colorado River clay into molds, Butler's plant supplied most of Austin's brick buildings between 1873 and 1900—and some three million bricks that support the interior of the Texas Capitol. His family later deeded 91 acres of the old brickyards to the city, land now honored as Butler Park.

Lincolnton, NC

Michael Hoke (1874-1944) was a pioneering orthopedic surgeon who founded hospitals for children with disabilities and served as chief surgeon of the Warm Springs Foundation in Georgia, the polio treatment center associated with Franklin Roosevelt. His birthplace stood eighty yards east.

Anderson, TX

Born in Tennessee, Michael Moore Kennard brought his family to Texas in 1830 as part of Robertson's Colony, likely pausing along the way to raise a crop. He received a large land grant in what is now Grimes County and earned still more land for his service in the Texas Revolution. His trading firm, Fanthorp, Womack & Kennard, was the county's first mercantile business.

Bozeman, MT

This mall in Bozeman honors Michael P. Malone (1940–1999), a celebrated teacher and leading historian of the American West who rose from a small Washington town to serve as the tenth president of Montana State University. His scholarship shaped how a generation understood the West's mining, politics, and settlement. He led the university until his death in 1999.

Bellville, TX

Born in Grantham, England, in 1820, Michael Robert Pilley joined the Mier Expedition of 1842 — the ill-fated raid in which Republic of Texas forces crossed into Mexico and were captured, an episode remembered for the deadly "black bean" lottery imposed on the prisoners. This marker, placed in 1936, commemorates his part in that chapter of the young Republic's turbulent border struggles.

Chelsea, MA

This memorial honors Michael T. Fitzpatrick, remembered here as killed in action during the Vietnam War. Between the mid-1950s and 1975, the United States sent millions of service members to Southeast Asia, and communities like Chelsea bore the loss of those who did not return. Markers like this keep an individual name attached to a national sacrifice.

Palestine, TX

Little is documented of Micham Main before his 1820 marriage to Elizabeth Van Winkle in Illinois, but in 1833 the lure of favorable Mexican colonization laws drew the family to the Nacogdoches District of what became Texas. He received a land grant in David G. Burnet's colony in 1835, farmed as required, and briefly served in the Republic of Texas army in 1836. When Anderson County was created in 1846, Main was one of three Illinois-Palestine men appointed to choose and name the county seat—Palestine—though later accounts credit fellow settler John Parker with the naming.

Galveston, TX

A French-Canadian trader, Michel B. Menard reached Texas in 1829 and settled on Galveston Island in 1833, then signed the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836. As a founder of the Galveston City Company he steered the island's early development into a major port, and later served the Republic in its Congress. Menard County was named in his honor in 1858.

Marble Falls, TX

Ernst Gustav Michel, a German immigrant, and his wife Lillie Agnes opened a drugstore on this site in 1891. After fire destroyed the first store in 1905, Michel raised a three-story building with the drugstore and soda fountain below, a 300-seat opera house on the second floor, and the family's quarters above — only for it to burn again in the great block fire of 1927. All four of the Michel children who reached adulthood became pharmacists, and the family has kept a drugstore here since 1891.

Dexter, MI

This depot was built as a station on the Michigan Central Railroad, part of the network that carried people and freight across nineteenth-century Michigan and helped towns like Dexter grow. Long after the last passenger trains, the surviving building found new life as home to the Ann Arbor Model Railroad Club. Its preservation keeps a piece of the railroad age standing in the community it once served.

Houghton, MI

In 1885 the state of Michigan founded a mining school in Houghton, at the heart of the Keweenaw copper country that was then America's first great metal-mining region. As the Michigan College of Mines, the institution earned worldwide renown for its teaching and research in mining, metallurgy, and geology, training engineers who fanned out across the globe. It grew directly from the copper boom that made the Upper Peninsula an industrial frontier.

Rogers City, MI

Rogers City was founded in 1871 on the Lake Huron shore, and this Michigan Sesquicentennial marker honors more than 150 years of continuous municipal life. Settled during the post-Civil War push into Michigan's northern timber and limestone country, the town grew from a frontier lumbering venture into an enduring community. The marker records that long unbroken thread of local history.

Houghton, MI

This wall at Michigan Technological University remembers the men and women who served the nation in war and in peace and later died from the effects of that service. Unlike a memorial to a single conflict, it honors sacrifice across generations of veterans drawn from the university's community. The dedication emphasizes remembrance and gratitude rather than any one battlefield.

Watertown Charter Township, MI

When Michigan organized as a state in 1835, Detroit remained its capital, just as it had been through the territorial years. After a drawn-out debate over where a permanent seat of government belonged, lawmakers in 1847 chose a more central, still-forested site that would grow into Lansing. The move helped pull settlement and commerce inland from the older Detroit riverfront.

Ann Arbor, MI

This official Michigan Historic Site marker records the location of the first Jewish cemetery in Michigan, established in 1848–49 as the young state's Jewish community took root. In 1900 the remains buried here were reinterred in Ann Arbor's Forest Hill Cemetery, a common practice as growing cities reorganized their early burial grounds. The site marks one of the earliest institutional footholds of Jewish life in the region.

Navasota, TX

Eliza Johnson raised this limestone-rubble building in 1874 after a fire swept the block, complying with a new city ordinance that demanded fireproof construction. Local investor August Horst bought it in 1877 and soon passed it to his wife's brothers, the Mickelboroughs, whose families held it until 1929. Over the decades its rooms hosted a saloon, a grocery, a confectionary, an ice cream parlor, and the offices of attorneys and dentists.

Southampton Township, PA · est. 1950

Middle Spring Church was founded in 1738 by Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, part of the wave of immigrants who streamed into the Cumberland Valley frontier in the early 18th century. Its first congregation gathered near the old cemetery a short distance northwest of here, worshiping there until 1781. The present church building went up in 1847, with a parsonage added in 1855.

Bridgewater Township, NJ

During the American Revolution, the Continental Army made seasonal and winter camp at Middlebrook, in the hills near Bound Brook, New Jersey. Washington's troops encamped here in 1777 and again through the hard winter of 1778–79, using the rugged terrain to watch British movements while the army rested, drilled, and regrouped. The 'Washington Camp Ground' preserves the memory of these encampments.

Palo Alto, CA

Long before bridges spanned San Francisquito Creek, travelers between San Francisco and San Jose forded it here on the old route the Spanish called "El Camino de en Media." After 1852 traffic shifted to a bridge at the El Camino Real crossing, and later the Middlefield bridge carried the road as the growing region demanded reliable ways across the water. The site traces the evolution of an ancient travel corridor down the Peninsula.

Middlesboro, KY

Middlesborough was no ordinary mountain town—it was a planned English colony, conceived in 1886 by promoter Alexander Arthur and bankrolled by British investors betting on the coal, iron, and timber locked in these hills. Their company bought nearly 100,000 acres across the Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee borders, named the place for Middlesbrough in England, and drove a railroad to Knoxville and a tunnel through Cumberland Gap. For a moment, a piece of industrial Britain rose in Appalachia.

Billerica, MA

Chartered in 1793 and carrying its first boats a decade later, the Middlesex Canal was one of early America's most ambitious public works, floating timber, farm goods, and passengers 27 miles between the Merrimack River and Boston Harbor. For half a century mule-drawn barges glided across this crossing at a walking pace, knitting inland New Hampshire mill towns to the sea. The railroads that arrived in the 1830s and '40s eventually outran it, and the canal closed in 1853.

Arlington, TX

Born in South Carolina in 1810, Middleton Tate Johnson became such a foundational figure in North Texas settlement that he is remembered as 'the Father of Tarrant County.' He served in the Congress of the Republic of Texas and left a wide mark on the region's early development. He died at Austin in 1866, and neighboring Johnson County was named in his honor.

Lower Swatara Township, PA · est. 1952

Laid out in 1755 by the Quaker George Fisher, Middletown is the oldest town in Dauphin County, its name marking its spot midway between Lancaster and Carlisle. In the 19th century it grew into a busy river port at the junction of the Pennsylvania and Union Canals, where boats gathered before heading downriver. Early flour, lumber, and iron industries clustered around that traffic, giving the town its livelihood.

Midfield, TX

Midfield rose at a crossroads equidistant from four coastal-plain towns, gaining a post office in 1904 and a railroad stop a decade later. When young Iva Nell Hale died of appendicitis in 1913, her grieving father pressed banker W.B. Gaumer to set aside a community graveyard, which Gaumer formally deeded in 1916. As the town dwindled late in the century, residents formed an association to keep the ground and its records.

Midfield, TX

Area Methodists worshiping at Hawley Methodist Church became charter members of a new Midfield congregation in 1907, first gathering at the Keller Hotel before building a sanctuary and parsonage on Junetta Street. As the surrounding population thinned, the congregation merged with Markham Methodist in 1970. In 1981 the members bought back their old building and reopened it as the Midfield Community Church.

Midkiff, TX

Tucked where four West Texas county lines nearly meet, Midkiff began in the 1880s when railroads sold cheap land to lure settlers onto the ranching plains. Rancher John Rufus Midkiff opened a general store in 1902 and strung the area's only telephone line thirty miles to Midland along a barbed-wire fence. The sleepy ranch country roared to life after oil was struck in 1950, spawning an oil-camp town before the revived name of Midkiff took hold.

Midland, TX

Built by rancher David Fasken to move cattle, supplies, and passengers, this 66-mile standard-gauge line ran from Midland out to the ranch towns of Fasken, Florey, and Seminole from 1916 to 1920. It was a rough-and-ready operation: trains stopped so crews could open pasture gates and shoot coyotes and rattlesnakes, and stranded passengers were sheltered at the ranch during breakdowns. Abandoned in 1920 after just four years, the railroad left a roadbed still visible across the West Texas prairie.

Andrews, TX

Chartered in 1916 by David Fasken's Midland Farms Company, the Midland and Northwestern ran sixty-five miles of standard-gauge track from Midland toward Seminole to ship cattle and lure settlers to the plains. It was a shoestring operation—an engine borrowed from the Texas and Pacific, aging equipment, and crews said to shoot coyotes from the cab to break the monotony. Flash floods that washed away its crossties helped finish it off, and the line was abandoned in 1923 as unprofitable and poorly located.

Midland, TX

For a brief decade beginning in 1910, the raw new railroad town of Midland supported its own two-year coeducational college, headed by first president H. R. Garrett. Students rode a horse-drawn bus to the three-story gray brick building, edited a yearbook wryly named 'The Sandstorm,' and numbered some 250 by 1917. Financial strain forced the doors shut in 1921, and the building was eventually torn down.

Midland, TX

Midland sits where old cattle trails once crossed and where, tradition holds, the last Comanche raid into Texas passed. The Texas and Pacific Railroad reached the spot in 1881, and its position halfway between El Paso and Fort Worth gave the town its name. Sheep and Hereford cattle came first, then farmers drawn by windmill-pumped water—until the 1928 Permian Basin oil discovery made Midland the headquarters of a booming petroleum empire.

Midland, TX

Midland County was created and organized in 1885, its name drawn from its position roughly halfway between Fort Worth and El Paso on the Texas and Pacific Railway — it was first called Midway. The railroad brought the settlers and commerce that gave the county life on the arid plains of West Texas. Midland would grow into a hub of the region.

Midland, TX

Sitting midway between El Paso and Fort Worth on the Texas and Pacific Railroad, the townsite took the name Midland in 1881, and Midland County was created in 1885. The area had been a crossroads of trails and the site of one of the last Comanche raids into Texas before cattlemen, sheepmen, and windmill-watered farmers moved in. The 1928 Permian Basin discovery made Midland an oil headquarters, and in 1954 the ancient "Midland Man" remains were found nearby.

Midland, TX

Oil found in the Permian Basin in the 1920s carried the region through the Great Depression and drew company headquarters to Midland, yet the county itself saw no producing wells until the 1940s. Geologist H. L. Beckman and the Rowan Drilling Company staked Humble Oil's No. 1 Mrs. O. P. Buchanan well here, spudding it in September 1944 and completing it in November 1945 at a depth of more than 12,500 feet. It became Midland County's first producer before being plugged in 1947.

Midland, TX

In 1953 pipeline welder Keith Glasscock spotted fossilized human bones weathering out of a ranch near here — a skull, rib, and hand fragments of a woman who may have lived as early as 9,000–9,500 B.C. Found alongside the bones of extinct horse, camel, mammoth, and sloth, plus tools and ancient hearths, the discovery drew a team of leading archaeologists, geologists, and anthropologists. "Midland Man" ranks among the oldest human remains yet found in the Americas.

Midland, TX

Chartered in Odessa in 1902 as the Odessa National Bank with just $25,000 in capital, this institution moved to Midland within a year and reinvented itself alongside the West Texas economy. It rode the cattle trade until a devastating drought forced a 1923 reorganization, then hitched itself to the oil boom that reshaped the Permian Basin from 1927 onward. Through decades of "boom and bust," mergers, and ever-taller downtown towers, the bank remained a fixture of Midland's commercial life.

Midland, TX

Built of concrete blocks in 1908 in the Western Ranch style, this was the first house in the young town of Midland, then a rough cattle settlement on the West Texas plains. It was home to Raymond and Edith Lawrence and stands as a tangible link to the community's earliest days.

Midlothian, TX

Midlothian grew out of the Peters Colony, an ambitious 1840s effort to draw settlers onto the north-central Texas prairie. The Hawkins family arrived in 1848 and set aside land for a church and, beside it, a cemetery whose earliest marked grave belongs to Mary Elizabeth Hawkins in 1873. As the town incorporated in 1888 and prospered, the burial ground grew alongside it, gathering mayors, pioneers, ranchers, farmers, and the anonymous poor into one shared record of the community's life.

Midlothian, TX

In the decades after the Civil War, American Presbyterianism was split between a northern branch (PCUSA) and a southern one (PCUS), and small Texas towns often supported a congregation of each. Midlothian brought its two together in 1911, and the united congregation raised a sanctuary just before the First World War. Generations of members have anchored the town through cooperative charities like Manna House and through national and global mission work.

Midlothian, TX

Education in the Midlothian area began in an 1850 log cabin that served as both school and church in the Hawkins settlement. After the town's founding, railroad president George B. Sealy donated a block for schooling, and by 1906 the Midlothian Independent School District had formed, opening a two-story brick schoolhouse in 1907. Black students, taught at a separate campus later named for Booker T. Washington before integration, were part of a system that grew through grammar schools, an elementary school, and beloved traditions like the May Fete.

Livingston, TX

Andrew and Mary McKee came to Texas in 1845 and bought this land in 1854; when Mary died in childbirth in 1857 she became the first person laid to rest here, at a spot she is said to have marked herself. By the close of the Civil War the burial ground served the whole Midway community. Its graves hold pioneer settlers and their descendants, former slaves, and veterans of American wars from the Civil War to Vietnam.

Midway, TX

Though its exact founding is lost to sparse records, the Midway Church of Christ is thought to have organized around 1854, with traveling preachers serving it until Joseph Addison Clark became its first settled minister in 1855. Many of its early members helped build up Midway and Madison County. The congregation has worshiped on this same site ever since, enlarging its meeting house over the years while its roots reach back before the Civil War.

Gig Harbor, WA

This plaque records the 1987 listing of the Midway School on the National Register of Historic Places. One- and two-room schoolhouses like Midway once anchored rural communities across the Puget Sound country, serving at once as classroom, meeting hall, and social center for scattered farm families.

Midway, UT

This Utah Historic Site marks the Midway Social Hall, a community gathering place in a mountain valley town settled largely by Swiss and other pioneer families. Social halls like this were the heart of civic life in 19th-century Utah settlements, hosting dances, meetings, and celebrations. Its designation recognizes its role in the town's pioneer heritage.

Wichita Falls, TX

Beginning in 1948, African American graduates of Booker T. Washington High School repeatedly sought admission to Hardin Junior College, part of Midwestern University in Wichita Falls, only to be turned away — even honor students accepted by mail were rejected in person. With NAACP encouragement, Willie Faye Battle and fellow applicants pressed the issue into federal court in Battle, et al. v. Wichita Falls Junior College District. Following the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the first Black students enrolled that summer.

De Berry, TX

Deep in the piney woods of East Texas, these mineral springs drew settlers before 1850 and blossomed in the 1880s into a bustling farm town and health resort called Breckenridge Springs. After Spencer Midyett's store landed a post office in 1887, the renamed community swelled with a cotton gin, sawmill, stores, a school, and a hotel and boarding house catering to visitors who believed the mineral waters could cure what ailed them. Like so many East Texas timber towns, Midyett faded once the forests were logged out after World War I, its post office closing in 1920 and its school folding into Carthage's by the 1940s.

Lewistown, PA · est. 1981

Established in 1789 from Cumberland and Northumberland counties, Mifflin County took its name from Thomas Mifflin, an early governor of the commonwealth. Its seat, Lewistown, was laid out the following year as settlers pushed into the Juniata Valley. In the decades that followed the county became important to Pennsylvania's canal era and its early iron industry, twin engines of the state's rise.

Lubbock, TX

From the 1880s onward, Hispanic workers shaped Lubbock County—first as ranch hands, then as the rail crews recruited out of El Paso to build the lines that opened the South Plains. Railroad row houses and cotton-picking camps hardened into ethnic enclaves, and in the city a barrio known as "Mexican Town" or the "Chihuahua District" took root amid poverty, segregation, and overcrowding. The Great Depression and a devastating 1970 tornado both fell hardest on these residents, yet the community grew into a third of the city and built dozens of civic and civil-rights organizations.

Brownsville, TX

Brothers Miguel Fernandez and José Fernandez-Toral immigrated from Asturias, Spain, and built an import-export business in Brownsville. After their partnership dissolved, Miguel opened one of the city's first hide yards here in 1890, during a drought that forced ranchers to slaughter herds; the yard rendered tallow, bleached bones and horns, and baled hides for distant markets while stocking ranch supplies. The distinctive Border Brick-style building, expanded around 1900, stayed in the family until 1984 and was listed on the National Register in 1990.

Frelsburg, TX

Tennessee-born Mike Muckleroy came to Texas in 1840 and, just two years later, joined the campaign that drove the Mexican general Adrian Woll's thousand troops out of San Antonio and back across the border. Settling in Colorado County on a Republic of Texas land grant, he farmed and built a two-story log house topped with a watchtower to guard against Indian raids. Beloved as "Uncle Mike," he served terms as county commissioner before his death in 1896 at nearly eighty-eight.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1957

Founded in 1740, this is one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in the United States and the resting place of some of colonial and Revolutionary America's most notable Jewish families. Among those buried here are Nathan Levy, whose ship carried the Liberty Bell across the Atlantic; Haym Salomon, the broker whose financing helped sustain the American Revolution; and the prominent Gratz and Levy families. Their graves testify to a Jewish community woven into Philadelphia life from its earliest colonial days.

Milam, TX

First described by Stephen F. Austin as he camped along El Camino Real de los Tejas in 1821, Milam is among the oldest towns in Texas, originally known as Red Mound and prized by settlers for its fertile land. Sitting close to the great road, it saw a steady stream of explorers, veterans, and pioneers before losing its county seat in 1858 and slowly fading.

Milam, TX

Founded in 1828 as Red Mound and renamed in 1835 for Texas Revolution hero Benjamin Rush Milam, this town served as an early seat of justice and a hub of the Republic of Texas, complete with an internal revenue post. During the Civil War it housed the Confederate quartermaster's department for Sabine County. It was the first Texas home of John S. Roberts, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and of John C. Hale, who died at the Battle of San Jacinto.

Milam, TX

Milam served as the first county seat of Sabine County, on land where Spanish explorers passed as early as 1539 and where Stephen F. Austin marveled at the rich red soil in 1821. Set on a high hill above the old settlement of Red Mound, the cemetery holds military veterans dating back to the Creek War and prominent pioneer families, and may be the oldest organized burial ground in the county.

Cameron, TX

Carved from Robertson's colony and the Mexican municipality of Viesca, this land was renamed Milam County in December 1835 to honor Benjamin Rush Milam, killed leading Texian forces at San Antonio. Once a sprawling district, it was whittled down as Burleson, Robertson, Williamson, Bell, McLennan, and Falls counties were cut from it. Cameron has served as the county seat since 1846.

Cameron, TX

The fourth building to serve as Milam County's seat of justice, this courthouse rose in 1891 with its cornerstone laid by the local Masonic lodge on Independence Day. Designed by Austin architect A.O. Watson, it once wore a fashionable Second Empire roof and a four-faced clock cupola, both lost when the Works Progress Administration remodeled the building in 1938. For more than a century it has stood at the center of county government in Cameron.

Cameron, TX

When Milam County's 1875 jail grew overcrowded in the 1890s, the commissioners hired the Pauly Jail Building and Manufacturing Company of St. Louis to build a larger prison, completed in 1895 of St. Louis pressed brick. Designed in the Romanesque Revival style, it rose three stories with a "hanging tower" and trap door—never actually used, since most executions took place outdoors. The ground floor housed the sheriff's family, the upper floors held cell blocks, and after a new jail opened in 1975 the old building was renovated into a museum.

Nacogdoches, TX

Chartered in 1837, this is the oldest Masonic lodge in Texas still meeting in its original town, founded when the republic was barely a year old. Named for revolutionary hero Ben Milam, it counted among its early members signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence and statesmen like Thomas J. Rusk, and it joined two sister lodges to form the Grand Lodge of Texas. True to Masonic tradition, it helped found Nacogdoches University in 1845 and long championed education and charity.

Brenham, TX

A native Texan and grandson of a pioneer Nueces County sheriff, Milas Roberson "Burney" Parker rose through local government, serving fourteen years as Washington County's road superintendent before winning election as county treasurer in 1908. In 1914 he resigned to become sheriff, holding that office through the turbulent years of World War I and Prohibition. He later moved his family to Houston, where he died in 1932.

Lindale, TX

As Anglo settlers filled the Gum Springs area of Smith County in the 1850s, the growing community took the name Starrville and became a stop on the Dallas–Shreveport freight route, with a post office, school, Masonic lodge, and Baptist church. The Rev. Williamson Milburn, the church's pastor, built this house in 1855 of hand-picked, knot-free lumber over a peg-set foundation with solid oak walls. Later owned by the Gary family, who moved it in 1900 for better water, it was relocated once more in 1995 to preserve it.