Search Markers

Athens, TX

Hester and Armstead Barker were formerly enslaved people who struggled to buy the very land they had once worked for others. When Hester died in 1893, Armstead set aside four acres as a cemetery for the Gum Creek community and its descendants. Through hard times—including a forced Depression-era sale that concerned neighbors reversed by forming an association in 1933—the burial ground endured, growing to more than 300 graves and remaining in use today.

Edenton, NC

The Barker House was home to Thomas Barker, North Carolina's colonial agent to England, and his wife Penelope, remembered as the reputed leader of the Edenton 'Tea Party' of 1774. That October, some fifty women signed a public resolution to boycott British tea and cloth, one of the earliest recorded political actions by American women. The house stands three blocks south, overlooking Edenton Bay.

Round Rock, TX

E. B. and Mary Harvey Barker bought this house of locally quarried limestone in 1873. Though the family farmed at Rice's Crossing some twenty miles east, they wintered here so their eight children could attend school in Round Rock. Their son Dudley grew up to become a noted Texas Ranger, returning in 1940 to etch his birth date into an interior wall. The dwelling survives as an intact example of a vernacular center-passage house.

Barker (Houston), TX

Barker grew up along the Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad in the late 1890s, and in 1898 a storekeeper opened a post office in a corner of his shop, which doubled as a saloon. Battered by the 1900 storm, it was moved and rebuilt, and over the decades it shifted locations and climbed through the postal ranks. When the service considered closing it in 1978, residents rallied to keep it open.

Sutherland Springs, TX

Alabama natives Emory Barker and Leah Humphreys came to the Cibolo Valley as children in the 1850s; Emory rode with Terry's Texas Rangers in the Civil War before the couple married in 1866. Their 1871 home, built of sawn red sandstone, was one of the valley's few rock houses and a popular stagecoach and wagon stop thanks to its spring-fed well. After several owners, the Huebinger family bought it in 1916 and held it into the 21st century.

Beeville, TX

Barnard Elliott Bee, Sr. was a South Carolina lawyer and colonel who cast his lot with the young Republic of Texas after moving west in 1836. He rose quickly through its government, serving as the Republic's first Secretary of the Treasury, then Secretary of War, and finally as its diplomat to Mexico and the United States—where he helped secure formal U.S. recognition of Texas in 1843. Both Bee County and Beeville carry his name, given at his son's urging.

Glen Rose, TX

Charles Barnard built this grist mill in 1860 like a fort — walls three feet thick at the base, pierced with gun ports — to withstand Indian attacks on the Texas frontier. Charles and his brother George, who had earlier run successful trading houses at Waco and elsewhere, operated the mill until 1874. Over the decades it gained a cotton gin, hosted social gatherings on its third floor, and even served as a hospital from 1943 to 1971.

Glen Rose, TX

In 1843 the Torrey brothers and their friend George Barnard—with Sam Houston as a silent partner—won a contract to build trading posts along the Brazos frontier. Barnard's fair dealing earned Native trust, and after ransoming a young captive, Juana Cavasos, from the Comanches, the family settled her with his brother Charles at a post near Comanche Peak. When the government removed the region's Native peoples to Oklahoma in 1859, the trade faded, and Charles built a gristmill whose town became Glen Rose.

McKinney, TX

Built about 1910 for Joe and Florence Barnes on land from her father, prominent McKinney merchant W. B. Largent, this house later became the home of Dr. Ben Largent and stayed in the family until 1945. Its foursquare form, touched by Prairie School and bungalow influences, reflects the popular residential architecture of early 20th-century North Texas. The home marks a leading local family's place in a growing county seat.

Eden, NC

James Barnett dug this canal near the Dan River in 1813 to harness the current's power. Over the following century that waterpower drove a growing cluster of textile mills—eventually the largest continuously operating textile complex in the northern Piedmont. The canal helped turn this stretch of riverbank into an engine of Southern industry.

Kerrville, TX

Barnett Chapel is the oldest African American church in Kerr County, tracing to 1896 when Jim and Josephine Barnett helped organize Kerrville's first religious services for Black residents. Named in the couple's honor, the congregation secured its lasting home in 1898 and was served by circuit-riding ministers from surrounding towns until the Rev. W.M. Mosby became its first full-time pastor in 1902. Through worship, outreach, youth work, and Juneteenth celebrations it has remained a pillar of the community.

San Saba, TX

Between 1855 and 1895, John W. Barnett and his family — joined by sons-in-law Burrell and Tom Hamrick — settled a large tract here and founded the community of Simpson Creek. They were among the first in the area to both farm and irrigate their crops, and they helped organize the county, host its first camp meeting, and open one of its earliest schools.

Lower Paxton Township, PA · est. 1947

During the bloody frontier years of the French and Indian War, Joseph Barnett's fortified log house near the head of Beaver Creek became a refuge for settlers fleeing raids between 1756 and 1763. The war struck this family directly: Barnett's young son William was carried off in a 1756 raid and not returned until 1763, freed in the settlement that followed Colonel Henry Bouquet's campaigns. Such private strongholds were the thin line of defense along a violent borderland.

Brookeland, TX

Barney C. Lowe joined the 1835 capture of San Antonio, one of the opening victories of the Texas struggle for independence. Born in Kentucky in 1817, he lived out his years on the East Texas frontier, and in 1936 — the centennial of Texas independence — the state marked his and his wife Philiann's resting place. The stone ties an ordinary settler's grave to the extraordinary events of the revolution.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2005

Barney Dreyfuss took control of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1900 and spent three decades as one of baseball's shrewdest and most influential owners. In 1903 he helped arrange the first modern World Series, pitting his National League champions against the upstart American League — a match that fused the two rival leagues into a single national spectacle. He later built Forbes Field in 1909, one of the first great steel-and-concrete ballparks, and guided the Pirates to numerous pennants and two championships.

Barnhart, TX

Founded in 1910 and named for a Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railroad agent, Barnhart boomed in the 1920s and 1930s as a major freighting center and what many called the largest inland livestock shipping point in the region. The Ozona-Barnhart Trap Co. built cattle-holding pens along the trails into town. At its peak Barnhart supported a school, newspaper, hotels, cafes, and a bank — but the town faded as rail traffic declined.

Barnhart, TX

In 1914 residents of several faiths met outdoors to organize a shared Union church for the ranching community of Barnhart. Cowboys from the surrounding spreads built the sanctuary themselves under the direction of W. H. Parker and his brother-in-law, finishing it in 1917. Fittingly nicknamed the Cowboy Church, it has hosted worshippers of many denominations together ever since.

New Bern, NC

A citizen of Bern, Switzerland, Baron Christoph von Graffenried led a party of Swiss and German Palatine immigrants to the North Carolina coast, founding New Bern in 1710. The new settlement, named for his home city, was one of the earliest planned immigrant colonies in the region. It soon faced hardship, including the outbreak of the Tuscarora War.

Bastrop, TX

This monument honors Felipe Enrique Neri, the Baron de Bastrop (1770–1829), a colonizer whose intervention proved decisive for Anglo-American Texas. As a land commissioner and Red River empresario, he helped Moses Austin win the first Spanish contract to colonize Texas in 1821 and later served in the Congress of Coahuila and Texas. In 1837 the town and county — once called Mina — were renamed Bastrop in his memory.

Manheim, PA · est. 1947

In the mid-1700s, German immigrant Henry William Stiegel — known in his heyday as "Baron" Stiegel — turned a Lancaster County iron furnace into one of colonial America's most ambitious industrial ventures, laying out the town of Manheim in 1762 and opening a celebrated glassworks two years later. His fine flint glass rivaled European imports and made his name, even as his lavish living later ruined him. His famous gift of church land carried a nominal rent of one red rose a year, a token still paid to his heirs.

Austin, TX

In 1898, cotton merchant William Braxton Barr commissioned Austin architect Charles Page to design this ornate Eastlake-styled home in the community he named for his grandfather, Captain Erasmus Sprinkle. Together the two men had built a cotton gin and general store, and the town of Sprinkle thrived on the white gold of the fields around it. When cotton prices collapsed in 1920 the town began its long decline, but the mansion endured in Barr hands until 1980.

Brownsville, TX

Built in 1928–29 for Celestino Pardo Barreda, a Spanish immigrant who arrived in Texas in 1872, this two-story Spanish Colonial Revival house showcases twisted cast-stone columns, iron balconies, and a Mission parapet by architect Ben Clark. Barreda built a mercantile business into influence across banking and agriculture in the lower Rio Grande Valley. The home stayed in his family for more than six decades.

Glasgow, KY

Formed in 1798 from Green and Warren counties, Barren County took its name from the open 'barrens,' or prairies, that drew early explorers and settlers. During the Civil War the area saw hard use: the first two of Morgan's Raids passed through in 1862, the same year General Braxton Bragg's Confederate army entered Kentucky here.

Glasgow, KY

In 1862 the Confederate government authorized a Medal of Honour, awarded not by generals but by vote of the soldiers themselves after every signal victory—each company choosing its most worthy man. More Confederate soldiers from Barren County received this honor than from any other Kentucky county. The medalists listed here earned it in the bloody fighting at Stone's River and Chickamauga in 1862 and 1863.

Edgewood, TX

A post office opened at the crossroads of Barren Ridge in 1850 with James Bundy as its first postmaster. Because a Canton post office already existed in neighboring Smith County, residents of the Van Zandt County seat — also called Canton — had to ride eight miles here for their mail, and the spot doubled as a stop on the Dallas–Shreveport stage road. When the post office closed in 1857 the settlement quickly faded, leaving only the Blair/Bundy Cemetery behind.

Richfield, NC

In 1825 Mathias Barringer struck gold in the quartz veins of what became Stanly County, moving beyond the placer panning that had defined North Carolina's early gold fever. His discovery is credited with launching the state's underground, or lode, gold-mining industry. For decades afterward, shafts and stamp mills spread across the Piedmont in America's first true gold rush.

Roswell, GA

Barrington Hall was the Greek Revival home of Barrington King, who with his father Roswell King founded the town of Roswell. Completed in 1842 after two years of seasoning virgin timber and three of construction by Connecticut carpenter Willis Ball, the house crowned a community the Kings had planned with wide streets, a park, and church and school sites. The Kings also organized the Roswell Manufacturing Company, incorporated in 1839, which made the town a textile center.

Chappell Hill, TX

In 1844 Anson Jones, the last president of the Republic of Texas, bought this land and named it "Barrington" for his Massachusetts birthplace, making it in effect the "White House of Texas" during his 1844–46 presidency. After leading Texas into annexation with the United States, Jones retired here as a gentleman farmer; the surviving house was later moved to Washington-on-the-Brazos State Park.

Collinsville, TX

John Barron, a Virginia-born Civil War veteran, bought a farm in this Grayson County community in 1870 and about 1875 gave land for a church-school and this cemetery. He and his large family lie among some six dozen interments, the earliest belonging to fellow Confederate veteran William Jenkins. Closed around 1920, the grounds are still tended by descendants who organized a cemetery association in 1971.

Everman, TX

Built in November 1917 as Taliaferro Field No. 2, this was one of three World War I flight-training fields around Fort Worth, first used by Canadian cadets before American units arrived in 1918. Renamed Barron Field for a cadet killed in a flying accident, the 600-acre camp trained hundreds of airmen and sent six air squadrons to France before the Armistice. It closed in 1921, leaving only its munitions building.

Van Alstyne, TX

Built in 1905 for merchant and banker Walter Barron and his family, this home blends the low, broad lines of the Prairie School with classical touches like a wraparound porch, fluted Corinthian columns, and a Sullivanesque frieze. Sold in 1920 to hardware merchant R. Lee Veazey, it remained in that family until 1965.

Realitos, TX

The Barronena Ranch preserves the deep roots of South Texas ranching, on land granted by the Republic of Mexico to Diego Hinojosa and patented under Texas in 1856. Later owners included James O. Luby, an English-born Confederate veteran who became Duval County's first judge, before J. M. Bennett bought the ranch in 1905 and kept it in his family. Its adobe core reportedly served as a stage stop between Goliad and Laredo, and after World War II the King Ranch introduced its famous Santa Gertrudis cattle here.

Barry, TX

Barry grew up where the rails met the cotton fields. Named for Corsicana businessman Bryan T. Barry, the town got its post office in 1886, the same year the St. Louis, Arkansas & Texas Railroad arrived, and clustered around Owen Taylor's general store. Settlers drawn by rich farmland cleared the land for cotton—Barry's first gin opened in 1899—and by 1920 the community supported banks, churches, and a school that served the area until 1958.

Barry, TX

Founded in September 1891 with seven charter members as the Elam Baptist Church, this congregation called its first pastor the next summer and quickly joined the Navarro County Baptist Association. A Sunday School began by 1895, and in 1916–17 the members built their second church building at this site, where worship has continued ever since. For more than a century the church has anchored the little farming community of Barry.

Fort Davis, TX

This 6,300-foot peak overlooking Fort Davis served from the 1850s to the 1880s as a campground and lookout for soldiers, mail coaches, freighters, and emigrants crossing the Trans-Pecos, and it saw the area's last Indian raid in 1881. In 1964 Governor John Connally named it for Barry Scobee, a writer and historian whose efforts helped preserve old Fort Davis.

Columbus, TX

This ornate Victorian cottage rose in the 1880s in Columbus, Texas, one of the state's oldest German-influenced river towns. Anton Bartels, an immigrant from northern Germany who arrived in 1869, built the home about 1886 and served the town as an alderman. Its gable star tracery, carpenter's lace, and stained-glass entrance doors show the decorative confidence of a settled Gilded Age community.

Halifax County, NC

Bartholomew F. Moore was one of antebellum North Carolina's most respected lawyers, serving as state attorney general from 1848 to 1851 and compiling the state's Revised Code in 1854. A staunch Unionist, he opposed secession as the sectional crisis deepened. He was born about three-quarters of a mile to the west.

Falmouth, MA

According to local tradition, the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold came ashore near this Falmouth spot with a boatload of men in 1602 — part of the early English voyages probing the New England coast years before the Pilgrims arrived. Gosnold is credited with naming Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard on that expedition. The town of Falmouth raised this monument to the reputed landing in 1930.

Bartlett, TX

Though the town of Bartlett had electricity by 1905, the farms around it stayed dark for another thirty years—an everyday hardship across rural America. That changed with Franklin Roosevelt's 1935 executive order creating the Rural Electrification Administration, which lent the local light-and-power company $33,000 to string a 59-mile line to some 110 farm homes. Energized in 1936, it was the first REA project in Texas and the first in the nation to come alive under an REA loan.

Bartlett, TX

By the early 1900s Bartlett had grown into the railroad hub of a prosperous cotton-growing district, and in 1903 it created its own school district. When a five-room schoolhouse quickly proved too small, the town passed a bond and in 1908-09 built a multi-wing brick building designed by noted Austin architect A.O. Watson. After a separate high school opened in 1917 the building became a grammar school, serving until it closed in 1988.

Buda, TX

This ground was once part of a Mexican land grant awarded to empresario Ben Milam in 1826. James U. Barton brought his family from Alabama in the 1850s and established a farm here, and the cemetery's first burial is believed to be his infant granddaughter, who died in 1873. Barton formally deeded 3.25 acres for the graveyard in 1881, and it still serves the Mountain City community today.

Wilson, NC

Founded in 1902 by the Christian Church of North Carolina as Atlantic Christian College, this Wilson institution grew from the era's wave of church-affiliated colleges that brought higher education to the rural South. In 1990 it was renamed Barton College to honor Barton W. Stone, a founding figure of the denomination. The campus remains a center of learning in eastern North Carolina today.

Calvert, TX

After fire destroyed her home north of Calvert, Minnie Walker Burnitt Barton — widow of plantation owner Francis Davis Barton — resolved in 1909 to build something that could survive nearly any disaster. The result was a Classical Revival brick house with a slate roof, 18-inch exterior walls, and 12-foot ceilings, wrapped by colonnaded porches and balconies on three sides. Here the three Barton daughters hosted the large house parties that made the home a center of local social life.

Austin, TX

Fed by the Balcones Fault and gushing millions of gallons daily, Barton Springs drew people long before Austin existed — Native peoples, then Spanish friars who placed three missions here in 1730–31, then settler William "Uncle Billy" Barton, who patented the land around 1837 and named springs for his daughters. His tame buffalo calves lured sightseers even amid the danger of frontier raids, and over the decades bathhouses, mills, a merry-go-round, and excursion boats turned the spot into a playground. A.J. Zilker eventually deeded the land to Austin as the beloved public park it remains.

Dallas, TX

Kentucky-born Barton Warren Stone reached Dallas from Tennessee in 1851 and prospered at farming and law. He helped lead the 1852 settlers' rebellion against Peters Colony land agent H. O. Hedgecoxe, and though he first opposed secession, he raised and commanded two Confederate cavalry regiments during the Civil War. After a spell in Missouri he returned to Dallas in 1879 to practice law once more.

Bartonville, TX

Bartonville grew from post-Texas Revolution settlement along Denton Creek, where fertile sandy soil drew subsistence farmers raising peanuts, cotton, and grain. In 1881 brothers Bentley and James Barton bought ten acres at a busy crossroads; Bentley's store and gristmill prospered, and the settlement soon shed the name "Barton's Mill" for Bartonville. The store remained the town's hub through incorporation, disincorporation, and reincorporation over 130 years, closing only in 2013.

Cartersville, GA

Carved out of Cherokee lands in 1832, this northwest Georgia county was first called Cass before the Civil War swept away its old name. In December 1861, with the Confederacy newly formed, Georgia rechristened it for Francis S. Bartow, a Savannah lawyer and politician who had marched off to Virginia at the head of his brigade. Bartow was killed that July at the First Battle of Manassas, one of the earliest prominent Confederate officers to die in the war, and his reported last words—urging his men never to give up—made him a martyr to the Southern cause.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2016

Baruch Blumberg, who lived here, was a physician-scientist whose curiosity ranged from human blood to the possibility of life beyond Earth. His identification of the hepatitis B virus led to a diagnostic test and a vaccine—work that earned a Nobel Prize and has since prevented untold cases of liver disease worldwide. He chose to share the vaccine widely to speed its use, and later helped lead scientific institutions from Fox Chase Cancer Center to NASA's Astrobiology Institute.

Provincetown, MA

Before the Pilgrims ever reached Plymouth, their ship the Mayflower first dropped anchor in the sheltered curl of Provincetown Harbor in November 1620. There, still aboard ship, forty-one men signed a brief compact agreeing to govern themselves by "just and equal laws" — one of the earliest self-governing agreements in what became the United States. This bronze relief fixes that moment in metal, on the very shore where it happened.

Tyler, TX

The community of Bascom was settled in the mid-1840s and named by early settler Lazariah Smith for a Tennessee Methodist bishop. Burials began just north of this spot, and in 1857 acreage on both sides of the Tyler-to-Henderson road was set aside as a cemetery, with graves from the earlier site reinterred here. Among its more than 2,000 burials lie the region's first settlers, their descendants, and at least one veteran of the War of 1812.

West Buechel, KY

Built in 1874 to a design by architect Henry Whitestone for J. B. Wilder, this estate took its name from a Maryland ancestral home. In 1887 George J. Long transformed the farm into a nationally renowned thoroughbred stable whose peacock-blue and yellow silks became famous on Kentucky's racetracks. Three Kentucky Derby winners — Azra, Manuel, and Sir Huon — were foaled here before the horses were sold in 1922 and the buildings fell to demolition decades later.

Hanover, NH

In 1964, Dartmouth mathematicians John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz set out to make computing something ordinary students could do, not just specialists. Their language, BASIC — Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code — used plain, English-like commands and ran on Dartmouth's pioneering time-sharing system, letting many users share one computer at once. As inexpensive personal computers spread in the 1970s and 1980s, BASIC became the language millions of people first learned to program in.

Bernards Township, NJ

Basking Ridge is one of New Jersey's old Presbyterian village centers, with roots reaching back to early-1700s settlement in the Somerset hills. The Historical Center preserves the community's long memory — colonial farmsteads, the ancient white oak that stood for centuries beside the village church, and the Revolutionary era, when the war moved through this part of the Watchung country. It serves as a keeper of local history for the township.

Whitney, TX

In the 1950s a severe statewide drought pushed Texas to build reservoirs, and those new lakes—paired with postwar urbanization—turned bass fishing into a beloved pastime for city families seeking recreation. The Waco Tribune-Herald organized a pioneering tournament on Lake Whitney in 1955 that grew into the Texas State Bass Tournament, while improved tackle, federal fish-restoration funds, and the later introduction of Florida largemouth bass boosted the sport further. Catch-and-release limits in the 1980s helped make bass fishing one of Texas's most popular sports and a sizable industry.

Tremont, ME

Bass Harbor Head Light has guided mariners along the rocky Maine coast since 1858, perched on granite ledges at the southwestern edge of Mount Desert Island. Built in the antebellum era of expanding American maritime trade, it warned fishing boats and coasters away from a treacherous shore. Its listing on the National Register recognizes both its engineering and its enduring place in New England's seafaring identity.

Brenham, TX

Brothers Benjamin and Thomas Bassett opened their bank and law office in this Italianate building soon after it was completed in 1873, using bricks from Brenham's own Wild & Co. Brickyard. The bank operated here until it closed in 1884, and a third story was added in the early 1900s. Its round arches and stucco hood moldings made it a distinctive landmark on the Brenham streetscape.

Kosse, TX

Henry Caleb Bassett, a Connecticut-born tradesman turned banker, moved to Texas in 1869 and by 1871 was buying land near the Little Brazos River northwest of Kosse. Ahead of his first child's birth in 1875, he and his wife Hattie built a two-story brick house — a rarity among Texas farmhouses of the era — likely from local Kosse brick. The surrounding Bassett Farms grew to nearly 2,500 acres of livestock, corn, cotton, and peaches and stayed in the family for over a century.

Bastrop, TX

Founded before 1857, this congregation first gathered in the county courthouse, then in a rock church raised on this site in 1867. The New England Victorian building standing today was erected in 1895 and still rings the old rock church's bell — a bell that once called passengers aboard a Colorado River steamboat. Its history threads together frontier worship and the river commerce that once moved through Bastrop.

Bastrop, TX

This land was part of Stephen F. Austin's original 1821 colonial grant, becoming the municipality of Mina in 1834 and then a county of the Republic of Texas in 1836. In December 1837 it was renamed Bastrop to honor Felipe Enrique Neri, the Baron de Bastrop, land commissioner for Austin's Colony and a member of the Coahuila-and-Texas congress. The town of Bastrop serves as the county seat.

Bastrop, TX

Bastrop, one of Texas's oldest towns, anchored a county seat whose courthouse dates to 1883, in the confident Gilded Age decades when Texas counties raised substantial public buildings to signal permanence and civic pride. A courthouse of this era stood at the center of local government, commerce, and community life.