Search Markers

Danville, PA · est. 1982

Carved from Columbia County in 1850, Montour County took its name from Madame Montour, the influential Native interpreter and diplomat who moved between Indigenous nations and colonial officials. In the industrial age its seat, Danville, became a cradle of American iron, where the first iron T-rails for the nation's booming railroads were manufactured. The county also claims Christopher Sholes, born here, whose later work produced the typewriter that transformed the modern office.

Sterling City, TX

Montvale sprang up in 1884 when settlers relocated the earlier community of St. Elmo to a spot along the Shafter Military Trail, an old road running from Fort Concho. Within a few years it had a school, a platted townsite, a Methodist church, a hotel, a post office, and a cluster of stores and shops. But the creation of Sterling City as county seat in 1891 drained the town's fortunes, and today only a community cemetery marks where it stood.

La Grange, TX

In 1848 the remains of Texans killed in the 1842 Dawson Massacre and the 1843 "Black Bean Death Lottery" were gathered and reburied in a sandstone vault on this bluff above the Colorado River. Cared for over the years by the Kreische family and later the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the grave was finally crowned during the 1936 Texas Centennial by a 48-foot shellstone shaft with an Art Deco mural. Local citizens later donated the surrounding acreage to the state as parkland.

City of Ithaca, NY

In the heart of Ithaca, New York, this monument honors Ezra Cornell (1807–1874), the self-made businessman who rose from carpenter and millwright to a key figure in the telegraph industry, helping build the lines that knitted the young nation together. Having amassed a fortune through Western Union, Cornell devoted his wealth to public good, most famously by founding a university in 1865 on the hills above Cayuga Lake. His vision was a radically open institution where, in his own words, "any person can find instruction in any study."

Perrysburg, OH

After the Civil War, communities across the North raised monuments to the local men who had marched off to preserve the Union. This tribute remembers the soldiers and sailors of Perrysburg Township, a northwest Ohio community on the Maumee River that sent its sons into federal service. Like thousands of such memorials, it turned a village common into a permanent place of mourning and civic memory.

Philadelphia, PA

This monument enshrines the memory of the six million Jewish men, women, and children murdered in the Holocaust — in the ghettos, concentration camps, and gas chambers of Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War. Dedicated in Philadelphia, it was among the earliest public memorials in North America to the victims of the Holocaust. It stands as a permanent act of collective remembrance.

New Orleans, LA

Standing on the New Orleans riverfront, the Monument to the Immigrant honors the generations who arrived by ship at this Mississippi port — one of the nation's great gateways — seeking freedom and opportunity in a new land. New Orleans drew Irish, German, Italian, and many other newcomers whose labor and cultures reshaped the American South.

Moody, TX

When the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad bypassed the older settlement of Perry in 1881, a new town was platted on settler William Naler's land two miles south. It took its name from Col. W. L. Moody of Galveston, who oversaw the track-laying and honored his own family. Incorporated in 1901, Moody grew into a full community of schools, churches, businesses, and fraternal orders.

Moody, TX

Soon after Moody was founded in 1881, settlers sought a burial ground nearer than the old cemetery at Perry, and bought this tract from J. Parker Naylor. It was first used in 1889 for the grave of seven-year-old Flora Welch, and hackberry trees were transplanted here from the Leon River in 1890. A women's federation, later the Moody Cemetery Association, cared for the grounds — Miss Rob McCauley presiding for thirty-five years — and many of the town's early pioneers rest here.

Galveston, TX

This building carries a century of caring for Galveston's children. St. Mary's Orphanage, run by the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word from 1867, first stood on the beach until the catastrophic 1900 hurricane destroyed it; the congregation rebuilt inland, raising this brick structure in 1950. When the era of orphanages gave way to foster care and the home closed in 1967, Galveston College acquired it with a Moody Foundation grant and renamed it Moody Hall.

Canadian, TX

By 1910 Canadian was a thriving railroad and marketing hub, prosperous enough that English-born rancher, banker, and academy trustee Robert Moody set out to build a hotel worthy of the town. Rising on the site of the former McIntosh Hotel, his three-story brick building opened late that year with 40 guest rooms and a handsome oak stairway. The Moody Hotel became a beloved landmark and popular waystation until shifting travel habits eventually closed its doors.

Moody, TX

This Methodist congregation traces its roots to an 1855 union church in the pioneer settlement of Perry, a few miles northeast. When the Santa Fe Railroad crossed central Texas in 1881, the new town of Moody sprang up along the tracks and drew Perry's residents to it — a common pattern as railroads redrew the map of Texas settlement. The first sanctuary rose in 1884, and the congregation has worshiped on its current site since 1956.

Moody vicinity, TX

Founded in 1877 by German Methodist settlers, this congregation grew out of the efforts of immigrant brothers who first worshiped in homes and a country schoolhouse. A frame church rose here in 1908, and services were preached in German until 1939 — a marker of how long immigrant communities carried their mother tongue into the Texas countryside. Fire took the original building in 1969, and the present structure replaced it.

Newton, NJ

During the Revolution, Newton sat in contested country raided by the notorious Loyalist partisan James Moody, whose daring strikes harried Patriot supply lines across northern New Jersey. The town also served as a supply depot under a Continental assistant quartermaster, and in October 1779 troops passed through in connection with the campaign against the Iroquois. This crossroads saw the war's shadow fall well behind the main battle lines.

Salem, OR

This Douglas-fir grew from a seed that orbited the Moon aboard Apollo 14 in 1971, carried by astronaut Stuart Roosa, a former smokejumper. Hundreds of these "Moon Tree" seeds were later germinated and planted across the country, and this one was set here by Oregon's governor on Arbor Day in 1976. It links a living tree to one of humanity's great journeys.

Carnegie, PA · est. 2004

In 1943, with the nation's factories running full-tilt for the war, the federal government threw up planned housing like Mooncrest to shelter the workers who kept the arsenal fed. Its residents crossed the river to the Dravo Corporation, turning out armor plate, munitions, and ships for the fight overseas. After the war the Air Force ran the community briefly before the little homes passed into private hands in the 1950s.

Humble, TX

After decades of reported gas seeps near the San Jacinto River, the Higgins Oil Company brought in a major gas well in 1904 and the first oil well followed in 1905, opening the great Humble oil field. A boom town called Moonshine Hill exploded to some 10,000 people almost overnight, its tents mixed with a church, school, stores, and saloons. Among its operators was the Moonshine Oil Company of Walter Sharp, Ed Prather, and Howard R. Hughes; despite later booms, the settlement faded away.

Moore, TX

Moore Catholic Cemetery began before its land was even formally donated, with the earliest known grave that of Christine Tehas, who died in 1894. Ben Duncan deeded the ground to the parish in 1902, and the headstones—mostly Spanish, but also English and German—reflect the mingled peoples who settled this South Texas frontier. Among those buried here are pioneer settlers, veterans of Indian conflicts and both World Wars, and a Virginia-born formerly enslaved man.

Waco, TX

Missouri native Louis Moore came to Texas about 1834 and received title in 1835 to land on the east bank of the Brazos above the old Waco village. When his son John died in 1858 and his wife and infant daughter soon after, Moore buried them atop the highest hill on his estate, beginning what grew from a family plot into a community burial ground. Formalized by an association in 1921 and now spanning more than eleven acres, the cemetery holds veterans from the Texas Revolution to the present.

Trinity County, TX

South Carolina natives John W. Moore and his wife Rosella Meredith brought their family to East Texas in the 1850s and donated nearly six acres of their Mossy Creek land grant for a community cemetery, with the earliest recorded burial in 1860. Among the first laid to rest were sons Preston and William Moore, believed by family tradition to have been hanged for refusing to fight for the Confederacy in a county fiercely loyal to the Southern cause. Alongside many infant graves from disease epidemics lie veterans of the Civil War and every major American war through Vietnam.

Moore, TX

Established on land deeded by Moses Veith in 1896, Moore Cemetery was the community's first public burial ground, replacing the scattered private plots and church graveyards of earlier years. Among those interred are pioneers and men who fought in frontier Indian conflicts and both World Wars. The town itself was named for R. B. "Mustang" Moore, an early Texan killed by Comanches in 1861, and was first known as Moore Hollow.

Dumas, TX

Carved from the Bexar Land District in 1876 and formally organized in 1892, Moore County took its name from Edwin W. Moore, commodore of the Republic of Texas navy. In its early days stagecoaches and freight wagons crossed a thinly settled Panhandle where ranching was nearly the only livelihood. That changed sharply after oil and gas were struck in 1926, and the county's economy grew into petrochemicals, helium, cattle feeding, and grain.

Dumas, TX

Louis Dumas donated this square and laid out the townsite in 1891, and Moore County organized its government the following year, raising its first courthouse in 1893. The original was replaced by the present brick building, erected by C. S. Lambie and Company for $155,000 and occupied by county officials in August 1931. Both courthouses have safeguarded county records and served as the civic heart of Dumas and the surrounding Panhandle.

Alton, TX

Financed by the neighboring cities of Edinburg, McAllen, and Mission, Moore Field opened in 1941 as a U.S. aviation training base, named for Lt. Frank M. Moore, a pilot killed in World War I. It trained airmen throughout World War II before closing in 1945, was reactivated during the Korean War, and since 1960 has housed research offices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Its runways trace the long shadow of three American conflicts across a single Rio Grande Valley site.

Richmond, TX

John M. Moore built this Richmond house in 1883 for his bride Lottie, and as a prosperous rancher he went on to serve in the state legislature and in the U.S. Congress from 1905 to 1913. That same year he remodeled the home from its original Victorian design into the fashionable Neo-classical style. Richmond's First Baptist Church was founded within its walls, and cattlemen and politicians were frequent guests.

Rockport, TX

Built in 1906 for business owner J. Ed Moore and his wife Josephine Kennedy Moore, this story-and-a-half Craftsman bungalow reflects the comfortable domestic style of an early Rockport leader. Moore served several terms as mayor between the 1920s and 1940s and championed civic works—a yacht basin, a public beach park, and a modern sewer system—still felt in the coastal town today. The house's low overhanging roof, wrapped porch, squared columns, and dormer with tripartite windows mark it as a fine example of the period.

Seguin, TX

John Moore, an Irish-born newspaperman and civic leader, settled in Seguin and, through family ties, counted Theodore Roosevelt among his friends. In 1895 he built a modest three-room house here, then in 1900 commissioned a fine Queen Anne residence that wrapped the earlier structure inside it. His descendants carried on, including a son who served as Seguin's mayor for twenty-two years.

Ennis, TX

Built in 1905 for Malinda and Hardin T. Moore, this Neoclassical Revival house — with fluted Ionic and Doric columns, balustrades, and urns — announced the wealth of a family formed by two remarriages. Malinda had inherited substantial land and businesses from a first husband and managed them herself with notable diligence, while Hardin, a Civil War veteran and cattle merchant, brought his own holdings. She lived here until her death in 1930.

Houston, TX

In 1931–32 Edith L. Moore and her husband built this house from pine logs cut on their own land, laying up a fireplace from sandstone curbstones salvaged off Houston's downtown streets. They made their living by dairy farming and logging along Rummel Creek. Determined to keep her homesite wild, Edith Moore willed the house and 17.5 acres to the Houston Audubon Society in 1975 as a nature sanctuary.

Big Spring, TX

In 1906 pioneers moved onto the frontier north of Big Spring to buy farmland from rancher Sid Moore, and a one-room school rose the same year, its first term serving fifteen students. School and community both took Moore's name, and the building became the hub of local life—even hosting a double wedding on its front steps. Hard years followed, including 1917's loss of young men to World War I and a devastating influenza epidemic, and a 1945 fire finally closed the school for good.

Austin, TX

Contractor Charles Funk built this house in 1887 for John M. Moore—a former legislator and district attorney then serving as secretary of state under Governor Sul Ross—at a cost of $2,000. In 1901 it was bought by Laura A. E. Flack, a prominent Austin businesswoman who owned several buildings on Congress Avenue and who in the 1920s added a two-story neoclassical porch to the original Victorian design. Flack lived here until her death in 1933, and the house stayed in her family for another forty years.

Austin, TX

Around 1850 the Irish-born merchant Martin Moore and his wife Elizabeth left their Austin business for a 521-acre farm north of town, raising five children in the log structures they built here. After Martin's death, Elizabeth sold the homestead in 1866 to Judge John Hancock, and it is believed his formerly enslaved man Orange and family lived on the land in the late 1860s. The sensitively restored cabins survive as a rare example of local pioneer farmstead architecture.

Crawford, TX

This state marker honors John Creed Moore, a Confederate brigadier general in the Army of Tennessee. Commended for gallantry at Shiloh, he led his brigade at Corinth and through the siege of Vicksburg, and later fought at Chattanooga and in the defense of Mobile. Texas erected the star-and-wreath marker in 1963.

Bonham, TX

Alexander Moore and his wife Mary Jane brought their family from Missouri to this part of Fannin County in 1857, and in the mid-1870s donated two acres to a growing community for a cemetery, with neighbor Martha Cashion the first recorded burial in 1876. A Baptist sanctuary rose just to the north on land the Moores also gave, and church, school, and graveyard together became the community center known as Moore's Chapel. A grim cluster of infant graves from the 1880s and 1890s records a typhoid outbreak, while veterans from the Civil War through World War II rest among the pioneer families still tended by a cemetery association.

Austin, TX

These iron spans began life in 1884 as part of a six-span bridge carrying Congress Avenue across the Colorado River in Austin, engineered by the King Iron Bridge and Manufacturing Co. of Cleveland. Dismantled in 1910 and stored, three spans were re-erected here in 1915 only to be swept away by a flood that same year. The surviving spans were finally rebuilt into the present bridge in 1922.

Paris, TX

Levin Vinson Moore brought his family from Tennessee to this area in 1836 and settled a farmstead beside a natural spring, soon joined by eleven other families from the southern states. The graveyard that began on the Moore farm holds burials dating back to 1873, including many of the Moores and their neighbors. In 1895 the family formally deeded a one-acre tract for burial purposes, cementing the cemetery in the county record.

Eustace, TX

This burial ground began on the farmland of Andrew and Nancy Moorehead, South Carolinians who reached Texas by the 1850s, and served their extended family before the surrounding land passed to the Melton family in 1884. In 1920 the Meltons formally set aside land for a community cemetery, though graves here predate nearby Eustace by decades, the earliest marked burial dating to 1870. Pioneer settlers and veterans reaching back to the Civil War rest here, and a family association still holds an annual memorial gathering.

Texarkana, TX

Built in 1895 for Rachel Perry Godbold Moores, widow of a member of Texarkana's pioneer Moores family, this Neo-Classical residence was designed by architect Henry Koerner with fish-scale shingling and elegant parquet floors. It passed to Robert Emmett Burke in 1904 and later housed the Ragland family for nearly half a century. The house stands as a showpiece of a booming late-19th-century railroad town on the Texas-Arkansas line.

Mooreville, TX

Irish immigrant Robert Moore built a hilltop general store above Cow Bayou in the 1850s, and by 1859 enough families had gathered that the settlement took his name. After Confederate veteran Edward McCullough acquired the land in 1865, this community burial ground took shape, its earliest marked graves dating to 1866 and bearing the surnames of the area's founding families. Since 1973 a cemetery association of their descendants has tended the grounds.

Kermit, TX

This wooden cable-tool rig was the last of its kind in the United States to retire from daily use, its bull wheels and rig irons of a type not manufactured since the 1920s. It drilled the Moorhead No. 1 well in Loving County, powered first by steam, then by a gasoline engine that ran its 'Yo-Yo' wheels and walking beam, before the well went electric in 1966. That year R. O. Moorhead gave it to Kermit as a Permian Basin oil-history exhibit, moved 35 miles fully intact.

White Township, PA · est. 1951

Around 1781, in the final years of the Revolution, pioneer Fergus Morehead built a fortified refuge here to shelter his family and neighbors amid the violence of the western frontier. Fortified homesteads like this were the frontline of settlement in the Pennsylvania backcountry, where isolated families faced raids and had no army to protect them. Moorhead's Fort anchored what became the first permanent settlement in this part of Indiana County.

Dallas, TX

When Dallas's YMCA expanded in the late 1920s, African American citizens of North Dallas raised $75,000—overshooting their goal—and, with a matching gift from the Rosenwald Fund, opened the Moorland YMCA in 1930. Named for YMCA leader Dr. Jesse Edward Moorland, the Italian Renaissance Revival building became a rare public gathering place for the Black community: a gym, a youth and education center, lodging for travelers turned away from segregated hotels, and a meeting ground for the local civil rights movement. It closed in 1970, and the building later became home to the Dallas Black Dance Theatre.

San Antonio, TX

In 1850 the German immigrant John Moos and his bride Rosina built this house near the headwaters of Leon Creek, laying it up of field stone mortared with caliche in the style typical of pioneer Texas Germans. Its location made it useful as a relay station for the stagecoaches running the long road from San Antonio toward El Paso and California. The homestead thus served both as a family dwelling and as a link in the overland travel network of antebellum Texas.

Junction, TX

Meliton Morales was born in Mexico in 1837, kidnapped by Indians as a youth and held captive for nine years before making his way to Texas in 1855. In 1874 he drove 200 Spanish goats and 2,000 sheep into Kimble County and, in 1881, built the small rock house that still stands, raising nine children and serving on the county's first jury. His remarkable life crossed borders, cultures, and the violent frontier to plant a ranching family whose descendants still hold the land.

Moran, TX

Settlers reached this rugged West Texas country in the 1860s and, during the Civil War, built the temporary fortress settlement of Mugginsville on Deep Creek for protection. A branch of the western cattle trail once passed nearby, but the town truly took shape after the Texas Central Railroad arrived in 1881; Swope Hull opened a store and the 'Hulltown' post office in 1883, and the community was renamed Moran in 1892 for a railroad president. Incorporated in 1919, it boomed as a supply point during the oil and gas rush of 1910–30.

Moran, TX

After Hulltown—later Moran—was founded in 1883, the community elected trustees who in 1896 bought two-and-a-third acres for a public burial ground, the oldest marked grave being that of Lucy Brazell Snider. Over the following decades the cemetery grew to hold more than 1,800 people, including town pioneers and many military veterans, and a native-stone boundary fence was built in 1933 with Depression relief funds. A cemetery association formed in 1926 still maintains the grounds.

Hallettsville, TX

Czech immigrants Ignac Jalufka and Jakob Hollub brought their families to northern Lavaca County in 1874, and the community they founded in 1881 was named Moravia after their homeland. In 1889 Jalufka raised a two-story frame building here—groceries and a saloon below, a dance hall above—that became the community's social hub for masquerades and celebrations, while he also ran the post office. Passing through several owners and surviving prohibition, the trimmed-down general store stayed in business over a century, closing in 1990 before reopening in 1996.

Bryan, TX

This small burial ground was set aside in 1889 by Josef Stasta for the Moravian Brothers, with a deed requiring it be used only as a Moravian cemetery. Most of its handful of headstones are inscribed in Czech, a quiet record of the Central European families who settled the Brazos County countryside. Though only fifteen graves are marked and the last burial came in 1906, as many as forty-one people may rest here.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 1953

First organized in 1757, the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem safeguards the records of one of America's oldest Protestant communities. Its shelves hold manuscripts, books, music, and images tracing Moravian life in North America from 1740 to the present — including the meticulous diaries the church kept of its congregations and frontier missions. It is a rare, continuous documentary window onto colonial faith, culture, and daily life.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 1953

Consecrated by Count von Zinzendorf, this burial ground served Moravian Bethlehem from 1742 to 1910. In keeping with the community's belief that all are equal in death, only flat gravestones were permitted, laid in orderly rows without grand monuments. Here rest people of many nationalities and races — European settlers alongside Native American and African converts — a quiet testament to the Moravians' unusually inclusive spiritual vision.

Corpus Christi, TX

In the early 20th century, Czech-speaking settlers—most of Moravian descent—streamed into southwestern Nueces County, drawn by Stanislav Kostohryz's advertised "Bohemian Colony Lands" and the promise of affordable farmland. The community that grew up around them, Kostoryz, needed a gathering place, and in 1923 residents formed what became the Moravian Club of Nueces County. Across three successive halls—one displaced when the Navy bought land for Cabaniss Air Field—the club anchored dances, church socials, Czech-language music, and even semi-pro baseball.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 1953

On June 25, 1742, the Moravians formally organized their community at Bethlehem, planting one of colonial America's most distinctive religious settlements along the Lehigh. Their oldest buildings still stand on West Church Street — among them the Gemeinhaus, Sisters' House, Bell House, Brothers' House, and Old Chapel — a remarkable cluster of colonial architecture built by a devout, communal society. Together they map the daily rhythm of a town organized around faith, work, and shared living.

Lititz, PA · est. 1953

In 1746 the Moravians—a close-knit German Protestant community—built a Gemeinhaus at Lititz that served at once as church, parsonage, and school. Standing on the rise above Carter's Run, it was the heart of a planned religious settlement where faith, work, and daily life were tightly woven together. The Moravians were among the most disciplined and musically gifted of Pennsylvania's colonial communities.

Frankfort, KY

Built in 1810 by land-office registrar Mark Hardin, this Frankfort house sheltered a remarkable run of prominent Kentuckians across the 19th century, including bank president John Harvie and Governor Charles S. Morehead, who lived here in the years before the Civil War. After 1874 it passed to merchant and railroad builder Lawrence Tobin, whose family kept it for nearly nine decades. Its walls trace the rise of Kentucky's political and commercial elite.

Los Angeles, CA

This sprawling Moreton Bay fig, planted around 1875, is a living relic of California's Gilded Age, when settlers imported the fast-growing Australian trees to shade streets and estates. Its massive buttressed roots and broad canopy earned it official recognition as Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #19. More than a century on, it remains a landmark rooted in the city's early growth.

East Huntingdon Township, PA · est. 2000

In the spring of 1891, the coke fields of southwestern Pennsylvania erupted as some 16,000 workers walked off the job demanding higher wages. On April 2, sheriff's deputies opened fire on strikers at the H.C. Frick Coke Company's Morewood Mines, killing seven that day and two more later; thousands filled the roads to mourn the men buried together in Scottdale. By late May the strike had broken, dealing a hard setback to the fledgling effort to organize the region's coke workers.

Midway, KY

On July 15, 1862, John Hunt Morgan's raiders swept into Midway during their first Kentucky raid, having seized hundreds of Union horses and mules at Versailles. Learning of an approaching troop train from Frankfort, Morgan tore up the tracks and set his howitzers—but the warned train reversed course, and a second decoy at Lexington also failed. His men reached Georgetown that evening, having sown confusion across the Bluegrass by rail and telegraph.

Ben Wheeler, TX

Born near Ben Wheeler, Morgan Gurley Sanders published newspapers and clerked for the state senate before building a long career in Texas and national politics. A Democrat, he served in the state legislature, as county and district attorney, and for nearly two decades in the U.S. Congress, where Speaker John Nance Garner placed him on the powerful Ways and Means Committee in 1931. Defeated in 1938, he remained an active figure in Van Zandt County until his death.

Grapevine, TX

This small, long-abandoned burial ground holds a single visible grave marked by the remains of a sandstone cairn, a common way of marking graves in the region between the 1850s and 1870s. With no written records surviving, its dead may have been members of the Peters Colony, pioneers who first entered the Grapevine area in 1844. Nearly erased by time, the site is one of the last traces of Tarrant County's founding generation.

Childress, TX

When Childress was still a young Panhandle railroad town, its residents depended on a handful of pioneering physicians for care. Built in 1916, this double-galleried Colonial Revival building first housed the clinic of Drs. J.D. Michie and H.D. Barnes before Dr. T.M. Morgan bought it in 1925 and ran it as the Morgan Hospital until he died in 1941. It stands as a memory of the small-town doctors who delivered medicine on the early Texas frontier.