Search Markers

Temple vicinity, TX

Founded in 1857 by New York physician Dr. Chauncy W. Moffet and his wife Amelia, the town took its name from a misspelling of theirs. A Union loyalist in a Confederate state, Dr. Moffet was pressed into Confederate service, later aided the Union, and vanished mysteriously after returning home in 1868. The town was platted that year and grew to hold three churches, a school, a post office, stores, and small industries.

Temple, TX

Moffat Cemetery began as a family and Masonic burial ground, its oldest marked grave that of Mary Marshall, who died in 1861. Land set aside from a farm sale in 1869 grew through gifts to the Leon Masonic Lodge and, from 1921, to a dedicated cemetery association. Among those resting here is pioneer Isaac Thomas Bean, who came to Texas with his family in 1823, and the grounds hold both upright stones and distinctive stone cairns.

Gainesville, TX

Ned Moffett, Sr. (1842–1924), a Missouri native whose family was recorded in early census records as Mulatto, owned 90 acres along Elm Creek that he opened for celebrations by Gainesville's African American community. In 1943 the city bought the land from his heirs to create Moffett Park, and the following year it hosted a major Juneteenth celebration. Though use declined after nearby Leonard Park was integrated in the mid-1960s, the park endures as a monument to the city's African American community life.

Goldthwaite, TX

Ambrose Bull bought part of the Moses Hughes tract in 1859 and became one of the first settlers of the Bulls Springs community, where a cemetery took root in the 1870s—its earliest burial believed to be War of 1812 veteran George Washington Joy. Placed in trust in 1899, the grounds hold 83 surveyed graves, many unknown, amid concrete curbing, brick crypts, iron fencing, and stone markers. Many of the tombstones bear poems written by grieving family members.

Walton County, GA

This marker stands at the Walton County birthplace of Moina Michael, the Georgia teacher known to history as "The Poppy Lady." Moved by John McCrae's wartime poem "In Flanders Fields," she seized on the red poppy as an enduring emblem of remembrance for those who died in World War I, and she campaigned tirelessly to have it adopted as a national symbol of tribute. Her idea took root on both sides of the Atlantic, growing into the memorial poppies still worn each year around Armistice and Veterans Day.

Kern County, CA · est. 1958

From 1884 to 1889 this spot near Mojave was the Southern Pacific railroad terminus for the legendary twenty-mule-team borax wagons, which hauled ore 165 miles across mountain and desert from the Harmony Borax Works in Death Valley. Designed by company superintendent J.W.S. Perry and built in Mojave, each wagon train carried a twenty-four-ton payload on a round trip that took twenty grueling days. New borax discoveries near Barstow ended the Mojave route in 1889.

Warwick Township, PA · est. 2006

In the tense summer of 1777, General Washington gathered some 11,000 Continental soldiers at the Neshaminy encampment and made this house his headquarters for two weeks in August. It was here that a young Marquis de Lafayette first served in the field as a major general, and where the Polish exile Casimir Pulaski met Washington for the first time. Pulaski would soon organize American mounted forces and earn lasting fame as the "Father of the American Cavalry."

Lometa, TX

The Moline community took root along Lampasas County's northern edge in the 1880s, and by 1916 its growing families needed their own school after neighboring ones overflowed. Kenneth and Olive Patterson donated five acres, and citizens raised a three-room building on a prominent hill. Over the next three decades Moline expanded into the largest rural school in the county before closing in 1949; the community around it faded into a ghost town.

Houston, TX

Mollie Arline Kirkland married into a circus family in 1858 and toured the South with the Bailey Family Troupe until the Civil War, when she followed her husband's regiment as a nurse and entertained the troops of Hood's Texas Brigade. After the war the Baileys bought a small circus and settled in Texas, billing it as "A Texas Show for Texas People." Widowed in 1896, Mollie ran the beloved traveling show herself until 1917, earning the title "Circus Queen of the Southwest."

Proctor, TX

During the Civil War, Mollie E. Moore wrote poems that Texans memorized, clipped from newspapers, and mailed to their soldiers — verses honoring fallen heroes, home units, and Confederate victories — while also nursing and doing social work at Camp Ford near Tyler. A spirited young woman who rode horseback with a pistol at her side, she went on to national fame as a poet, novelist, and columnist, married a newspaper editor, and led New Orleans society for two decades. Near this spot, at Old Mooresville (now Proctor), she often visited her brother's family.

Langhorne, PA · est. 2010

In an era when children with intellectual disabilities were too often hidden away or written off, Mollie Woods Hare devoted her life to teaching them. In 1913 she founded the Woods Schools, which grew into a nationally recognized center blending research, education, and rehabilitation for people with special needs. Her pioneering methods drew wide acclaim and helped advance the very theory of how such children could be taught.

Jim Thorpe, PA · est. 2006

On June 21, 1877, four men accused of belonging to the "Molly Maguires," an alleged secret society of Irish miners, were hanged here in what came to be called the Day of the Rope. Their convictions rested largely on the undercover testimony of Pinkerton detective James McParlan, hired by coal interests. More than a century later, historians still debate the truth of the labor, class, and ethnic conflicts that drove the case, and even whether the organization truly existed.

Pottsville, PA · est. 2006

On June 21, 1877—a day remembered in the anthracite region as 'Black Thursday'—six Irish immigrant mineworkers accused of belonging to the secret society known as the Molly Maguires were hanged here, with four more executed the same day at Mauch Chunk. The convictions rested largely on the testimony of Pinkerton detective James McParlan, who had infiltrated the coalfields on behalf of powerful mining and railroad interests. To this day historians debate the guilt of the accused, the fairness of the trials, and even whether the organization truly existed.

New Orleans, LA

Molly Marine was dedicated on November 10, 1943 — the Marine Corps birthday — in the heart of New Orleans, honoring the women who joined the Marine Corps Women's Reserve during World War II under the recruiting call "Free a Marine to Fight." Believed to be among the first monuments to a woman in U.S. military uniform, she stands trim in her service dress as thousands of women stepped into stateside duties so male Marines could deploy.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1949

Mary Hays McCauley, remembered in legend as "Molly Pitcher," became one of the Revolution's most enduring heroines for her courage at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778, where women carried water to overheated soldiers and, by tradition, she took a place at the cannon. She is buried in the Old Graveyard just east of here, among many of Carlisle's distinguished early citizens.

Manalapan Township, NJ

In the sweltering heat of June 28, 1778, Continental and British armies clashed across the fields of Monmouth, New Jersey, in one of the largest battles of the Revolutionary War. Legend holds that when a soldier fell at his cannon, a woman who had been carrying water to the parched troops—remembered as Molly Pitcher—stepped forward and took his place at the gun. The name came to honor the many women who followed the army, hauling water to cool both throats and overheated cannon barrels during that brutal day.

Nocona, TX

When the Rev. Abraham Molsbee brought his family from Tennessee to Texas in 1888, he helped plant Church of the Brethren congregations across the northwest of the state and into Indian Territory. The graveyard beside his chapel began that same year with the burial of his 20-year-old son Orville, and over generations it grew from a family plot into a community burial ground formally deeded in 1942. Its rows chronicle frontier hardship and the service of veterans from the Confederacy through World War I, World War II, and Vietnam.

Monohans, TX

The shifting dunes near Monahans hold traces of an astonishingly deep human past—flint points, grinding stones, and the bones of mammoths and giant bison from a wetter, grassier age. Spanish explorers Cabeza de Vaca and Antonio de Espejo met the Jumano people here in the 1500s, and for more than a century Apache and Comanche fought over its scarce water and shinnery-oak acorns along the Comanche War Trail. Later the California gold rush sent emigrant wagons through the sand, first mapped by Army engineers in 1849 and 1854; the state set aside 3,000 acres as a park in 1957.

Monaville, TX

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, one-room schools like Monaville, Aurora, and Bracy Island sprang up across rural Waller County to serve scattered farm families. The schools organized into districts in the 1890s, and in 1904 local landowners deeded an acre here to the Monaville school. State efforts to build larger high school units led to a 1930 consolidation into the Monaville Independent School District, but as the rural population thinned after the Depression the district's schools closed by 1953, with students absorbed into neighboring towns.

Owensboro, KY

Born in Owensboro in 1926, Moneta J. Sleet, Jr. became one of the defining photojournalists of the twentieth century, working four decades for Jet and Ebony. His lens captured both the African independence movements and the American civil rights struggle, walking alongside figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. from Selma to the Nobel ceremony in Oslo. In 1969 his tender photograph of a grieving Coretta Scott King at Dr. King's funeral earned him the Pulitzer Prize — the first African American to win it in photography.

Town of North Hempstead, NY

This burial ground holds the graves of some of the families who put down the earliest European roots on western Long Island, with interments spanning more than 150 years from 1737 to 1892. Names like Onderdonk, Rapelje, and Schenck echo the Dutch heritage of the region, whose settlers farmed the fields and shorelines of what became North Hempstead long before it was part of Nassau County. A small country cemetery like this one is a quiet ledger of a colonial-era community, recording generations of the same households through independence, nationhood, and the growth of the young republic.

Mabank, TX

Formed in 1895 when the tiny Elm Grove and Harper districts merged, Mono School—its name meaning "One"—served the farming families of Roddy and Elm Grove in Van Zandt County. At its height it employed four teachers and taught children through the tenth grade. When wartime factory jobs pulled families toward the cities after World War II, enrollment dwindled and the school closed its doors in 1950.

Hutto, TX

When the land here was held by a handful of families in 1870 — among them that of Edward Mandell House, later a nationally known political advisor — the growing settlement of Stringtown gained a school on an acre House donated in 1893. Settlers named it for House's daughter; a clerk's slip turned “Monadale” into the enduring “Monodale.” Its Swedish and Czech immigrant cotton farmers were served by the school district until it consolidated with Hutto in 1949.

Forward Township, PA · est. 2012

Begun in 1838, the Monongahela River's system of locks and dams became one of the nation's earliest and most successful efforts to tame a river for year-round travel and trade between Pittsburgh and Fairmont, West Virginia. Millions of tons of coal moved through its locks to feed Pennsylvania's mighty coke, iron, and steel industries. After the federal government acquired the system in 1897, the Army Corps of Engineers expanded and modernized it for generations to come.

Monongahela, PA · est. 1947

Monongahela is remembered as the oldest settlement in its valley, a river town whose life turned on the water from the very start. Devore's Ferry, chartered in 1775, made it a crossing and transportation hub long before the town was laid out in 1796 as Williamsport, and it became a city in 1873. From its banks countless pioneers pushed off to begin the river journey westward.

Monongahela, PA · est. 1947

Monongahela is remembered as the oldest settlement in its valley, a river town whose life turned on the water from the very start. Devore's Ferry, chartered in 1775, made it a crossing and transportation hub long before the town was laid out in 1796 as Williamsport, and it became a city in 1873. From its banks countless pioneers pushed off to begin the river journey westward.

Monongahela, PA · est. 1947

Monongahela is remembered as the oldest settlement in its valley, a river town whose life turned on the water from the very start. Devore's Ferry, chartered in 1775, made it a crossing and transportation hub long before the town was laid out in 1796 as Williamsport, and it became a city in 1873. From its banks countless pioneers pushed off to begin the river journey westward.

Jefferson, PA · est. 1960

In the years just after the Civil War, the Ten Mile Baptist Association set out to plant higher learning in the hills of southwestern Pennsylvania, founding what became the first Baptist college west of the Alleghenies in the state. Chartered by the legislature in 1871, Monongahela College opened its doors to students in a rural corner of Greene County, but like many small denominational schools of the era it struggled to stay solvent, closing, reopening, and finally shutting for good in 1894. Its brick 1871 college building still stands nearby as a reminder of that ambition.

Morgantown, WV

Standing in Morgantown, the seat of Monongalia County, this memorial gathers three generations of the county's soldiers under a single tribute. It remembers the Union men who marched off during the Civil War of the 1860s, the volunteers of the brief 1898 Spanish-American War that pushed the United States onto the world stage, and the doughboys who shipped to France during World War One. Communities across West Virginia raised such monuments in the early twentieth century, turning a courthouse lawn or town square into a permanent roll of local service.

Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1983

Monroe County was formed in 1836 from Northampton and Pike counties and named for President James Monroe. The land had earlier been a frontier battleground, marked by Indian raids between 1755 and 1782 and crossed by part of General Sullivan's 1779 march against the Iroquois. In later generations its Pocono Mountains blossomed into one of the Northeast's most famous resort regions.

Richmond, VA

Laid out in 1851 as one of Richmond's first public squares, Monroe Park has served the city in nearly every capacity. It hosted early state fairs, became a Confederate instructional camp and then a military hospital during the Civil War, saw some of Richmond's first baseball games in 1866, and matured into a fashionable park graced by a four-tiered cast-iron fountain.

Richmond, VA

In 1851, as Richmond expanded westward, the city laid out a network of public squares to bring greenery and breathing room to its growing neighborhoods. One of these, originally called Western Square, was renamed Monroe Park in honor of President James Monroe. Over the following decades the grounds served varied purposes—from a Civil War-era encampment and hospital site to a Confederate fairground—before settling into its long life as one of the city's oldest public parks.

Crockett, TX

The Monroe-Crook House was built in 1854 by A. T. Monroe, a prominent merchant and grandnephew of President James Monroe, in a refined Greek Revival style with insulating brick set between its inner and outer walls. Attorney George W. Crook bought the home in 1911, and it has since been preserved by his family. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1969.

Mount Pleasant, NC

Founded on the eve of the Civil War, Mont Amoena Seminary gave young women in the Carolina Piedmont a formal education at a time when few schools would. Run by the Lutheran church, it took a Latinized version of its hometown's name — "Pleasant Mountain" — and educated girls for nearly seventy years, closing in the 1920s. It stood as the counterpart to the men's colleges just up the street in Mount Pleasant.

Montague, TX

In the early 1880s, families from the mountain provinces of northern Italy—Raimondi, Fenoglio, Perona, Corado—began settling in Montague, and by the early 1900s as many as fifty Italian families lived there. Most were Catholic, and in 1901 they founded St. John Catholic Church; the year before, the bishop of Dallas had bought three acres for this cemetery, where Giroloma Vitali was the first buried in 1901. Its stones record Italian, German, Polish, and Hispanic families among more than 250 marked and unmarked graves.

Montague, TX

The first settlers reached Montague County in 1849, and after the county formed in 1857 the town of Montague rose as its seat. Pioneer James M. Gibbons is remembered as donating the cemetery's first plot when his wife Elizabeth died in 1862. Among the graves — about sixty bearing legible nineteenth-century dates — rest Confederate veterans, early Texas Rangers, and numerous founding families of the area.

Bowie, TX

Montague County was carved out of the North Texas frontier in 1857 and organized the next year, taking its name from Daniel Montague, a pioneer surveyor who mapped the region and fought as a militia commander in the Mexican War. Surveyors like Montague were the advance guard of Anglo settlement, translating raw land into the grid of counties and farms. The town of Montague became its seat.

Montague, TX

Montague County, created in 1857 on the North Texas frontier, cycled through log, frame, and stone courthouses—several lost to fire and one wrecked by a 1912 storm—before commissioners hired Waco architect George Burnett to design the present Classical Revival building. Completed in 1913 by contractor A. H. Rodgers, the three-story brick and stone "temple of justice" features four staircased entrances, porticos, and dentils. It has anchored county government for more than a century.

Montague, TX

In 1888 Montague County established a poor farm east of town, renting land to an operator who housed and fed the needy in exchange for their labor; its first year listed sixteen paupers. Moved to a larger tract in 1899, it grew a "big house" for residents and, by the 1930s, hosted a WPA garment project and a Texas A&M horticultural research station. The county closed the institution in December 1939 after more than fifty years of caring for its poor.

Brackettville, TX

Around 1887 Yldefonso Montalvo, also known as Obed Woods, built this house from cedar pickets and caliche plaster gathered close at hand. The educated son of an English mother and a Mexican father, he worked as a rancher and for nearby Fort Clark and a local store, raising nine children here with his wife Guadalupe. The dwelling reflects the resourceful vernacular building of the Texas borderlands.

Town of East Hampton, NY

Authorized by President George Washington in 1795 and completed in 1797, the Montauk Point Lighthouse was among the first public works of the young United States, built to guide ships safely around the eastern tip of Long Island. Its sturdy sandstone tower, 28 feet across at the base, originally stood some three hundred feet back from the cliff's edge — a distance the relentless Atlantic has been eating away ever since. It remains the oldest lighthouse in New York State.

Town of East Hampton, NY

This plaque marks the Montauk Point Lighthouse as a National Historic Landmark, the highest federal recognition of a place's importance to the story of the United States. Standing watch over Long Island's easternmost point since 1797, the lighthouse earned the designation as one of the oldest surviving public works of the early republic and a working sentinel of American maritime history. The honor places it among a select group of nationally significant sites.

Rusk County, TX

Built by Julien Sidney Devereux (1805–1856)—a justice of the peace, county commissioner, and legislator—Monte Verdi was a frontier interpretation of southern Greek Revival architecture, set so high on his roughly 10,000-acre plantation that much of Rusk, Cherokee, and Nacogdoches counties could be seen from its upstairs porch. It was one of the most significant antebellum plantations in Texas, worked by scores of enslaved people whose labor made its scale possible. The house was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Cushing, TX

Monte Verdi was the 10,700-acre plantation of Julien Sidney Devereux, and this marker names the enslaved men, women, and children whose labor sustained it—people like Scott and Tabby, born in the 1780s and 1790s, carried from Georgia to Alabama to Texas, and the many families documented in 1846 and in the 1856 probate that listed 80 enslaved people. Freed in 1865, they built new lives on the plantation's former lands, and their descendants—rarely taking the Devereux name—carried surnames like Anderson, Booker, Henry, and Lewis into the surrounding communities. One couple, Green and Phoebe, founded the Anadarko Christian church and school in 1868.

San Antonio, TX

Monte Vista rose between 1890 and 1930 as one of San Antonio's fashionable suburbs, where brewery presidents, oilmen, cattle barons, and civic leaders built showcase homes. Its streets hold an eclectic mix of Georgian, Renaissance Revival, Mediterranean, Victorian, and Art Deco designs, some by noted architects such as courthouse designer J. Riely Gordon and Atlee B. Ayres. The district survives as a colorful record of the city's turn-of-the-century growth.

Uvalde, TX

A Methodist mission took hold in the small community of Montell in 1889, its early members gathering wherever they could—including a summer brush arbor—before a Union Sunday School formed by 1895. A permanent sanctuary was dedicated in 1908, hosting monthly services that paused only briefly during World War II. Descendants of those pioneer families still worship here on alternating Sundays.

Monterey, CA

Raised in stages between 1827 and 1841, this Custom House collected duties on foreign shipping when Monterey served as the capital of Mexican Alta California. Those customs receipts were the province's chief source of revenue, making the building the commercial heart of a distant frontier of the Mexican republic. Its adobe walls witnessed the busy trade in hides, tallow, and manufactured goods that tied California to the wider Pacific world.

Lubbock, TX

Monterey High School opened in 1955, taking its name from one of the two original townsites platted for Lubbock. That earlier Monterey was founded in present-day northwest Lubbock by W. E. Rayner in 1890, but in a notable 1891 compromise Rayner joined forces with the rival townsite's promoters to establish Lubbock in its current location. The school thus carries forward the name of a would-be town that merged into the city instead.

Montgomery, TX

Baptists in Montgomery organized a fellowship in 1850 and bought this site the same year, calling their first full-time pastor, the Rev. Thomas Chilton, in 1853. The present vernacular Gothic Revival sanctuary went up in 1902 under Pastor O. P. Stark, who is said to have designed the building himself. A 1918 storm toppled the upper steeple, an education wing followed in the 1940s, and the congregation worshiped here until 1979.

Bellville, TX

Established in 1850, Montgomery Cemetery is among the oldest burial grounds of Austin County, dating to the first years of Texas statehood. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2007, it preserves the resting place of pioneer families who settled this stretch of the Brazos country. Graves from so early a date are a rare surviving record of antebellum frontier life.

Conroe, TX

Montgomery County was carved from Washington County on December 14, 1837, during the days of the Republic of Texas, and organized that same year. It was named for Richard Montgomery, the Continental Army brigadier general killed in the 1775 assault on Quebec. The county seat began at Montgomery in 1837 before shifting to Conroe in 1888.

Christiansburg, VA

This marker was dedicated in 1976 to celebrate Montgomery County's bicentennial, marking two hundred years since the county was carved out of Virginia's frontier in 1776 — the same year the colonies declared independence. The commemorative stone was taken from a bridge abutment of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad, built between 1848 and 1855 to thread rail traffic through the rugged terrain of southwest Virginia. By preserving a piece of that early railroad masonry, the county tied its founding-era story to the transportation boom that later opened the region to commerce.

Conroe, TX

Montgomery County was the third county created by the Republic of Texas, established by act of Congress on December 14, 1837, in response to a settlers' petition, and its sprawling original boundaries later gave rise to several neighboring counties. The town of Montgomery served as the first seat, where log cabins and a wood building housed county government until 1889, when an election moved the seat to Conroe. A brick courthouse rose here in 1891, and the present Art Deco building was completed in 1936 amid the prosperity of the Conroe oil boom, later expanded as the county grew.

Montgomery, TX

A prosperous farming area in 1861, Montgomery County threw its wealth and men into the Confederate war effort, sending two companies into the famed Hood's Texas Brigade. Young boys, old men, and the partially disabled filled home guard and state units, while the courthouse hosted a sewing room where families clothed their own soldiers. By 1864 the sacrifice was so total that not a single store remained open in the town of Montgomery.

Danville, PA · est. 1952

Built in 1792, this house was the residence of General William Montgomery, a pioneer settler on the Susquehanna frontier and father of the man who founded Danville. Solid and dignified, it stood as one of the early anchors of a community pushing into the Pennsylvania interior in the years after the Revolution. Today it shelters the Montour County Historical Society, which keeps the region's past alive within its walls.

San Diego, CA

This San Diego memorial honors John J. Montgomery, an aviation pioneer who conducted controlled glider flights in Southern California decades before the Wright brothers' powered flight. The poetic inscription — "He opened for all mankind the great highway of the sky" — captures his place among the earliest experimenters in heavier-than-air flight. Montgomery's work made the hills above San Diego an early proving ground for American aeronautics.

Louisville, KY

Built in 1853 in a classic Renaissance Revival style, the Montgomery Street School served Louisville's Portland neighborhood as a place of learning for 155 years. During the Civil War it likely sheltered soldiers wounded at the Battle of Perryville. Renamed in 1929 for biologist and children's health advocate Emma Dolfinger, it later became Portland Christian School before closing in 2008, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

Plainview, TX

Built in 1929 on the eve of the Great Depression, this Plainview store housed Montgomery Ward for nearly four decades. Its glazed terra cotta and multicolored tile — a signature look the mail-order giant repeated across its Texas stores — brought big-city retail style to the High Plains. The building endures as a landmark of the town's early commercial growth.

Garwood, TX

This family burial ground served pioneer planters James S. Montgomery, a veteran of the War of 1812, and George W. Thatcher, whose households fled the advancing Mexican army in the panicked 1836 flight known as the "Runaway Scrape." Returning after the Texas Revolution, both men prospered as planters, and Montgomery went on to represent the county in the Congress of the Republic of Texas. The earliest grave here is likely that of Montgomery's young son, who died in 1836.

Mount Pleasant, TX

The community of Monticello, named for Thomas Jefferson's Virginia home, took shape in the 1850s and won a post office in 1857, growing into a small hub of mills, gins, a brick factory and a school. Its Baptist congregation appears in association records by 1878 and in 1919 moved to this site, where members donated pine trees, hauled the logs by mule wagon to a local mill, and raised a cross-gabled frame sanctuary in just three months. The church long served as the community's spiritual and social heart, and by the 21st century, as lignite mining and recreational lakes reshaped the land, it stood as one of Monticello's last historic landmarks.