Search Markers

Paris, TX

After emancipation, freedpeople in Paris gathered in informal prayer meetings, drawn to Baptist worship for its message of equal redemption. Rev. Sam McCarley formally organized Mt. Canaan Baptist Church in 1886 in the "TP" neighborhood beside the Texas & Pacific Railroad, where the booming cotton industry employed many Black workers. The congregation built its lasting church in 1900 and has served the same community — mill workers, ginners, and teachers at the segregated Bankhead school — ever since.

New Iberia, LA

Founded in 1872 by the Sisters of Mt. Carmel, this New Iberia academy offered formal education to girls at a time when such opportunities were scarce. The teaching order itself traced its origins to Tours, France, in 1825, and the oldest building on the grounds — nearest Bayou Teche — was raised by Henry F. Duperier in 1826. The school reflects the strong French Catholic educational tradition that took root along the Teche.

Wolfe City, TX

This burial ground began in 1852 as a family plot when "Uncle Billy" Williams set aside a few acres for his two-year-old niece; the oldest stones mark his parents, born in the 1780s. First called Williams Cemetery, it took the name Mt. Carmel from a nearby Methodist church built in 1883, and a chapel from 1920 still stands on the grounds. From that single child's grave it has grown to nearly forty acres and some ten thousand burials.

Houston, TX

Organized in 1915 in Houston's Fourth Ward, Mt. Carmel Missionary Baptist Church has always stood in the historic Freedmen's Town District founded by formerly enslaved people after emancipation. Known first as Nelson's Chapel and then Zion Rock, it took the name Mt. Carmel in 1921 in response to a sermon, and under the Rev. Robert T. Bingham built a new sanctuary in 1940 — much of its lumber drawn from the pastor's own East Texas lumberyard. Through food pantries, counseling, and meeting space, it became a hub of the community's social and civic life.

Annin Township, PA · est. 1949

In 1805 Thomas McKean—a signer of the Declaration of Independence and then governor of Pennsylvania—purchased a 299-acre tract here, and the county was later named in his honor. The estate's name, Mt. Equity, reflected a bare-knuckle land struggle: Pennsylvania sought to strengthen its claim to lands that settlers from Connecticut also claimed, part of the long Pennamite dispute over the Susquehanna country. Buying in gave Pennsylvania greater "equity of power" in the contested region.

Dripping Springs, TX

Pioneer rancher Joseph "Grandpa" Gainer settled here in 1858, and the high point on his land gave its name to the farming and ranching community that grew along the south fork of Onion Creek. By the early twentieth century Mt. Gainer had general stores, mills, churches, a school, and a farmers' union that anchored its social life. After the school consolidated with Dripping Springs in 1944, the village faded, leaving only rock fences and a few buildings behind.

Hays County, TX

Mt. Gainer was once a thriving rural Texas settlement, complete with its own school, that slowly emptied as the twentieth century wore on. By 1998 only fragments remained — a school cistern and steps, a teacherage, native rock fences, and a scattering of buildings on private land — the quiet skeleton of a community that had faded away. It stands among the many small crossroads settlements that rose and vanished across the Texas Hill Country.

Copperas Cove, TX

Chartered in 1884, Mt. Hiram Lodge No. 595 gathered the Masons of frontier-era Copperas Cove, first meeting in a two-story building it shared with the town's public school. In those early years its members joined a local company of Minutemen and worked to build up the area's economy. The lodge moved to quarters above a Main Street mercantile in 1894 and to its present home in 1970.

Milano, TX

Originally the Watson family burial ground, this site passed to the trustees of Mt. Homer Baptist Church in 1866, its church building doubling as a schoolhouse. Its earliest marked grave, dated 1863, belongs to Zachary Williams, mortally wounded at the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia, and family diaries record that local African American residents were buried in the southeastern section. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2004, it preserves the intertwined histories of white and Black Milam County families.

Hood River, OR

The Mt. Hood Hotel Annex, dating to 1911, went up during Hood River's early-twentieth-century boom, when the railroad and the valley's famous apple orchards brought travelers and new money into the growing town. Its place on the National Register of Historic Places, along with Oregon's special-assessment program, marks it as a survivor of that formative commercial era.

Hood River, OR

Built in 1911, the Mt. Hood Railroad Depot anchored a line that climbed south from the Columbia River into the orchards and timberland of the Hood River Valley, carrying lumber, fruit, and passengers. Its listing on the National Register of Historic Places recognizes it as a surviving landmark of the railroad era that opened the valley to wider commerce.

Wells, TX

Joseph and Mary Bowman brought their family through Missouri and Mississippi to Texas as part of Stephen F. Austin's colony, and their sons Joseph, John, and James fought for Texas independence from Mexico. In 1875 James H. Bowman offered a hundred acres to draw the Rev. W. D. Lewis to establish a Methodist church at Mt. Hope, giving adjacent land for this cemetery. The first burial came that November; when the railroad passed through Wells in 1886, the church moved to town and Bowman himself was laid to rest here.

Wells, TX

Mt. Hope Cemetery began in 1875 when James H. Bowman, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence, offered land to the Rev. W. D. Lewis to establish a Methodist church and burial ground in the Mt. Hope community. Margaret "Ruby" Hicks was the first interred that November, and though the congregation later followed the railroad to nearby Wells, the cemetery remained a fixture of local life. More than eighteen hundred people rest here, including over two hundred military veterans and eight Confederate soldiers.

Blanco, TX

Peyton Roberts was born into slavery in Virginia and gained his freedom in Texas as the Civil War ended, then moved west to farm this land in the Hill Country. The Black settlement that grew around him became known as Peyton Colony, and in 1874 its residents, led by the Rev. Jack Burch, founded Mt. Horeb Baptist Church. Their first sanctuary was a log building that doubled as a schoolhouse, a common pairing in freedmen's communities where faith and literacy advanced together.

Palestine, TX

This historically African-American congregation grew from prayer meetings held in the 1870s under a brush arbor on the land of Jimmy and Moriah Nixon, and the church built in the early 1880s took Moriah's name. A tornado destroyed the original building in 1946, but the congregation rebuilt on the same ground. A school beside the church taught grades one through eight, and members helped establish a nearby high school for African-American students in 1938.

Commerce, TX

Founded in 1896 out of the Cypress District Association, Mt. Moriah Temple Baptist Church became the spiritual and social heart of Commerce's Norris community, where most of the city's African American residents lived. Members provided food, shelter, clothing, and medicine, and built youth and college ministries. Through the turbulent mid-20th century the church was a beacon in a neighborhood then known as a dangerous place, and in the 1960s it organized voter drives, hosted candidates, and linked with the local NAACP. Streets in Norris still bear the names of influential members.

Cedar Creek, TX

Freed from slavery only a decade earlier, African American citizens of Bastrop organized Mt. Olive Baptist Church in 1874, first gathering under a brush arbor before building a sanctuary with a split cedar-log pew. The congregation doubled as a school: Elm Grove School shared the frame building from 1897, enrolling nearly ninety pupils. In 1909 the church bought three acres for a new sanctuary and cemetery, adding a dedicated classroom in 1912, and classes continued there until consolidation with Bastrop in 1957.

Van Zandt County, TX

Farming families from Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia settled the Mt. Pisgah area in the 1860s and 70s, and their first shared institution was Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church, organized about 1870. In 1877 Wade H. Walters deeded land for a church building and a school, and a cemetery grew up beside the church to serve the neighborhood for generations. Like so many rural communities, Mt. Pisgah thinned out when residents left for wartime employment during World War II.

Mineola, TX

One of the oldest fellowships in Wood County, this church began in 1853 as the Holly Springs Baptist Church of Christ, meeting first in the home of pastor J. D. J. Davis with a tiny circle of charter members. Early worship moved from a log building to a chapel at Liberty Hill, now Pine Mills, and a new sanctuary went up here by 1860. The congregation, renamed Mt. Pisgah in 1865, counted many of the county's early leaders among its members.

Oakwood, TX

Though records don't fix its beginning, the Mt. Pisgah Cemetery's earliest marked grave belongs to a child who died in 1854, and local tradition holds that older unmarked burials lie among the pioneers here. Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church was organized in 1855 beside it in a hewn-log building called the Board Shanty, and the graveyard holds veterans of the Texas Revolution, the Civil War, and both World Wars, along with victims of an early influenza epidemic.

Kilgore, TX

As the Civil War ended and slavery collapsed, newly freed African Americans in this corner of East Texas gathered under a brush arbor to worship, forming a Methodist Episcopal congregation that formally organized in 1871. As families put down roots, the church bought two acres in 1891 for a burial ground beside its sanctuary, with graves that trace back even earlier. Generations of pioneers, veterans, Freemasons and community leaders now rest here, still tended by a committee tied to the church that founded it.

Lamar County, TX

Deeded to the Mt. Pleasant Church trustees for a single dollar in 1895, this two-acre burial ground already held graves — the earliest marked stone belongs to four-year-old Sammie Bryan, who died in 1874. Its 449 markers read like a ledger of the farming community of Deport: victims of a 1908 tornado, the dead of the 1918 influenza pandemic, veterans of the nation's wars, and generations of local families.

Montgomery, TX

Pioneers who settled this Montgomery County area as early as the 1850s rest in this community cemetery, the oldest marked graves belonging to Clara and William Fridge, who died in 1870 and 1872. Trustees of the nearby Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church acquired the deed in 1894, and among the unmarked graves lie seven victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic. A cemetery association reorganized in 1928 to keep the grounds.

Wichita Falls, TX

Founded in 1891 by the Rev. Mr. Thurston and twelve charter members, this was the first congregation organized on the east side of Wichita Falls, meeting in members' homes until it could raise a building. Two of its early structures were destroyed by dynamite, yet the community held together, relocating and rebuilding through the early 20th century. Under long pastorates it grew into a pillar of the city's African American community, producing pastors and sustaining Christian education and missionary work.

Athens, TX

Mt. Providence Baptist Church took shape in 1888, its earliest congregants worshipping in borrowed churches, homes, and brush arbors before trustees bought land in 1890. Its classrooms did double duty for pupils of the Blackshear School, and baptisms were held in a pool near the old Harbison-Walker brickyard. After World War II the congregation bought a surplus military barracks from Camp Fannin and hauled it in as their new sanctuary, later bricking it over and adding an indoor baptismal pool. The church remains a hub of community aid in Athens.

Port Lavaca, TX

Organized at the port of Indianola in 1870, this is one of the oldest Black congregations in Calhoun County, first led by the Rev. Joseph Whitlock. Two devastating hurricanes—in 1875 and 1886—drove the members from ruined Indianola to Port Lavaca, where they carried their church with them. Known first as Second Baptist, it took the name Mt. Sinai in 1905 during the long pastorate of the Rev. A. K. Black.

Hemphill, TX

Mt. Sinai Cemetery has served the families of southeastern Sabine County since its first burial in 1894, on land the Lutcher & Moore Lumber Company deeded in 1955. Some graves here are older still, relocated from the Morris, Anthony, and Robertson cemeteries after the Toledo Bend Reservoir flooded their original ground by 1968. Maintained today by a local association, it remains a tangible record of the county's timber-country past.

Whitesboro, TX

Alabama natives Burrel and Harriett Scarbrough settled north of Whitesboro before the Civil War, and in 1878 Burrel deeded 8.5 acres atop a hill for a community cemetery, named Mt. Tabor for the biblical mount of the Transfiguration. The earliest dated grave belongs to I. E. Lindsey in 1868, and Burrel himself was buried there months after the deeding. Cared for by the Scarbrough family and the Sandusky community for over 140 years, its curbed plots and ornate fencing shelter veterans of four twentieth-century wars.

Holyoke, MA

Late on the night of July 9, 1946, a B-17 Flying Fortress carrying twenty-five servicemen home crashed into the slopes of Mount Tom in poor weather, killing everyone aboard. The men had come through the Second World War only to die on a domestic flight bound for discharge and home. It remains one of the worst air disasters in the region's history, and this memorial marks the mountainside where they were lost.

Woodford County, KY

On June 6, 1822, a small band of Baptists in Woodford County entered into a covenant to organize this church, with James Fishback serving as its first pastor. The congregation built a meeting house that served until 1903, when it was razed and replaced by a new sanctuary dedicated in 1905 and still in use today. In 1872 the church helped establish nearby Midway Baptist Church.

Houston County, TX

In the years after the Civil War, East Texans built their communities around church and cemetery, and Mt. Vernon began when Henry Warren Payne and W. M. Conner donated land for both. A church house doubling as a school rose in 1871, and after fire destroyed it, Payne rode door to door to fund its 1884 replacement. The Baptist congregation formally organized in 1888, and the fenced family plots of its cemetery—begun with a child's grave in 1872—still trace the community's roots.

Coleman, TX

Established in 1891 on land donated at the base of Robinson's Peak, this rural Coleman County cemetery grew up alongside the Mount View School to serve the families who settled the area. The oldest marked grave dates to that first year, and more than a hundred of those buried here were born before 1900. A cemetery association formed in 2005 to protect and formally preserve the grounds.

Frydek, TX

Organized in 1866 as the Bethlehem Baptist Church by Joe and Abe Osborne and Louis Thompson, this congregation took root in the first year of freedom after the Civil War. Reorganized as Mt. Zion Baptist in the 1880s, its members worshipped in homes and then a log sanctuary, rebuilding faithfully after both a fire and a major storm leveled their church. More than a century and a half on, it still serves as a spiritual anchor for the Frydek community.

Burton, TX

Organized in 1852 on land donated by a pioneer settler, Mt. Zion Baptist Church drew early ministers from the nearby Baptist stronghold of Independence, home to Old Baylor College. When the town of Burton rose along the railroad in 1882, the congregation dismantled its building and rebuilt it in the new town, taking the name Burton Baptist Church. The sanctuary weathered the catastrophic 1900 storm and was eventually returned to its original site in 1983.

Fort Worth, TX

On Christmas Day 1894, evangelist the Rev. Frank Tribune gathered five founding members—four of them women—to organize Mt. Zion Baptist Church, aided by the prominent Black Baptist leader the Rev. Dr. A. R. Griggs. The congregation worshipped in a 1907 frame building, then a tabernacle, before raising this brick sanctuary beginning in 1919 and adding an education building in the mid-20th century.

Ben Wheeler vicinity, TX

In 1874, families from four small communities gathered on Ephraim and Malinda Curtis's farm to organize Mt. Zion Church, offering spiritual and material support through the hard, uncertain years of Reconstruction after the Civil War. The Curtises deeded land for a sanctuary in 1877, and as the congregation outgrew each building it moved and expanded, reaching a third sanctuary in 1990. A Colored Methodist Episcopal congregation, it sent a number of its members into the ministry.

Carthage, TX

This burial ground began on land owned by pioneer settlers Richard and Polly Golden, whose daughter and son-in-law buried a child here in the 1840s before deeding the tract to the Mt. Zion Methodist Church and Cemetery in 1850. More land came from the local farmers' Grange when it disbanded, and the cemetery—still in use—holds many of Panola County's early leaders and veterans of American military service. The site is a layered record of frontier settlement, faith, and civic organization in East Texas.

Burton, TX

This five-acre burial ground lies on land granted in 1831 to Robert Clokey, a colonist in one of Stephen F. Austin's colonies. Its first grave, an infant's, dates to 1852, and some unmarked graves may hold victims of the yellow fever epidemic that swept the area in 1867. Named for the Mt. Zion Baptist Church that stood here from 1857 to 1882, the cemetery holds 132 marked graves representing 55 pioneer families.

Monroe Township, OH

In the years after the Civil War, small farming communities across southern Ohio anchored their social life around a handful of shared institutions—a meetinghouse, a burying ground, and a schoolhouse. This marker gathers three of them on one hilltop outside Clermontville: the Mount Zion Chapel, raised in 1872 by a congregation of the Christian Church, the cemetery beside it where those members were laid to rest, and the nearby Lafayette School. The Christian Church grew out of the American Restoration Movement, a homegrown 19th-century effort to unite believers on a simple, non-sectarian basis, and its plain frame chapels dotted the rural Midwest.

Cumby, TX

Faith came early to this corner of northeast Texas: the Mt. Zion Methodist Episcopal congregation organized here in 1846, even before Hopkins County existed, and in 1849 the Rev. Anthony Travelstead gathered thirteen members into a Cumberland Presbyterian church. After years of worship in oak groves, brush arbors, and homes, the two congregations jointly built a church in 1861 on land given by local settlers. The Methodists moved away in 1914, but the Presbyterian congregation—and the cemetery—endure.

Fairfield, TX

Early settlers raised the first Mt. Zion church—a simple log building—in 1854 near Doddy Hollow, with the Reverends G. W. Walker and Timothy Green among its founders. Over the following decades the congregation moved twice as families donated fresh tracts, at one point sharing a structure with a school and a Grange hall. Its cemetery, given by J. C. James and A. P. Vaughn, became the resting place of many Confederate veterans.

Houston, TX

Organized in 1866 — the year after the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished in Texas — Mt. Zion was one of Houston's first three African American churches, its congregation meeting at first in a tent on Commerce Street. That same fall the Freedmen's Bureau opened a school on the church's property, one of the earliest in the city for formerly enslaved children and adults, and the congregation kept teaching there into the 1880s. Through fires, a devastating norther, and the great hurricane of 1900, the church rebuilt again and again, helping to found many other congregations along the way.

Robstown, TX

Shortly after Riley and Ella Mays brought their twelve children to Robstown in 1917, they and the Ira Collier family gathered neighbors to found Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church, holding its first service in a schoolhouse in 1918. Regional Baptist leaders supplied early pastors before the congregation called the Rev. C. B. Baycoat, and the church raised its first sanctuary in 1930 and a full-time ministry by 1950. Later decades brought new buildings and the purchase of the Phyllis Wheatley School as a community activity center.

Brenham, TX

After emancipation in 1865, African American families settled the west side of Brenham in a community called Watersville, where Reverend J.R. Smith held brush-arbor services in 1877 that grew into Mt. Zion. The congregation bought this site and built its church in 1878, rebuilding after damaging winds in 1926 and dedicating a new fellowship hall in 1984. Standing on what is now called Heritage Corner, the church entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1990.

Bangs, TX

This hilltop graveyard has served the Thrifty and Fry communities of Brown County for well over a century, its oldest legible burial dating to 1864 and a weathered rock slab hinting at use as early as 1862. Among those laid to rest are pioneer settler Charles Mullins, who brought his family west in 1858, people killed in frontier Indian attacks, and workers caught up in the oil boom of 1926–27. The stones read like a timeline of the West Texas frontier, from first settlement through the derricks of the petroleum age.

Belton, TX

German immigrant Fred Muehlhause reached Texas in 1885, married Louise Albrecht in 1892, and worked as a craftsman shoemaker before opening the Belton Shoe Shop downtown in 1906. A respected civic leader, he was elected city alderman in 1907 and had builder James M. Scott construct this Queen Anne residence in 1908 to his own written specifications, complete with a spring-fed limestone cistern. The house and its carriage, wash, and smoke houses stayed in the family until 1992.

Fredericksburg, TX

The oldest part of this Fredericksburg house was built about 1848-1850 by Willis Wallace on land granted by the German Immigration Company, using traditional fachwerk timber-frame construction. German farmer Heinrich Mueller, Jr. later acquired it, and his daughter and son-in-law A.W. Petmecky — a justice of the peace for forty-two years — added a limestone wing in 1895.

Muenster, TX

In 1889 the Flusche brothers contracted to sell 22,000 acres along the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, and Jot Gunter donated land for a school, church, cemetery, and park. The first Mass on December 8, 1889, marked the founding of this German Catholic town, whose settlers persevered through drought, typhoid, and tornadoes that twice destroyed their church. Cooperative ventures in insurance and bulk marketing, along with a 1926 oil boom, carried the farming and dairy community into prosperity.

West Brunswick Township, PA · est. 2023

In 1972 the heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali went looking for solitude and found it on remote Sculps Hill, where he built a rustic training camp he christened 'Fighter's Heaven.' From these Schuylkill County woods he prepared for the defining bouts of his career, sharpening himself for the 'Rumble in the Jungle' against George Foreman and the brutal 'Thrilla in Manila' against Joe Frazier. Ali trained at Deer Lake through 1980, making the hillside a shrine for fans and fighters alike.

Louisville, KY

Louisville's own Cassius Clay rose from the city's West End to become Muhammad Ali — three-time heavyweight champion and one of the most recognized figures of the 20th century. Beyond the ring he was a lightning rod: he embraced Islam, refused induction during the Vietnam War at the cost of his title, and became a global symbol of conviction. He was laid to rest in his hometown in 2016, his headstone carrying his own words on service to others.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2016

This building was Pennsylvania's first Nation of Islam house of worship and the heart of Philadelphia's African American Muslim community through the 1950s and 60s. Under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, it drew notable teachers and administrators—including Malcolm X and Wallace D. Muhammad—during a pivotal period in Black religious and political life. The temple served as a gathering place for faith, education, and community organizing.

Greenville, KY

Muhlenberg County, formed in 1798, takes its name from Peter Muhlenberg, the Pennsylvania clergyman who famously declared there was "a time to preach and a time to fight"—and shed his pastor's robes to raise the 8th Virginia Regiment. He served from 1776 through the victory at Yorktown, then entered Congress and the Senate. Many veterans of his regiment became pioneers in this corner of Kentucky.

Trappe, PA · est. 1960

This Trappe house was the home of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, the German-born pastor often called the organizer of the Lutheran church in America, who lived here from 1776 until his death in 1787. His son Peter Muhlenberg — famous for reportedly shedding his clerical robes to reveal a Continental uniform — went on to become a general in the Revolution and later lived in the same house. Under one roof the family joined the story of American religion to the story of American independence.

Merkel, TX

Human activity in Mulberry Canyon reaches back to prehistoric times, when Native American peoples hunted buffalo, deer, and bear across the land. The canyon saw the 1849 forty-niner mail route and, from 1858 to 1861, the Butterfield Overland Mail's stagecoaches before cattle ranchers arrived in the 1870s and the last buffalo herds passed through in 1878. Pioneer families then planted maize, corn, and cotton and raised more than half a dozen small communities, served by ten churches and ten schools, whose descendants still occupied the canyon in the 1990s.

Ravenna, TX

Two miles from the Red River, the farming community of Mulberry took root in the early 1880s, its land anchored by Civil War veteran Captain Thomas Lightfoot, who donated ground for both a cemetery and a one-room school in 1883. The burial ground grew to hold pioneer families, a shaded "Mexican section" begun after the Portillo family arrived in 1902, and the victims of the floods, cyclones, and tornadoes that repeatedly struck Mulberry Bottom. A cross now stands over the unmarked graves between the old cemetery and the vanished schoolhouse.

Houston, TX

In 1909, banker William Mulcahy and his wife Mattie bought this newly built home in the developing Houston Heights, where Mulcahy was climbing from bank teller to bank president. Its Dutch Colonial Revival design is distinctive: a T-shaped cross-gambrel roof, native cypress siding, and an inset front porch on square paneled posts. The family held the house for ninety years, a rare span of continuous ownership.

Muldoon, TX

First settled in the 1830s on land from an 1831 Spanish grant through Stephen F. Austin, the Muldoon community took its name from Father Miguel Muldoon, an Irish-born, Spanish-educated priest who ministered to Austin's colonists and received leagues of land in return. The town boomed after the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad arrived in 1887, gaining stores, churches, a hotel, a cotton gin, and its distinctive 1890 precinct courthouse. Muldoon blue sandstone from the local quarry went into courthouses, churches, and even Galveston's coastal jetties before the community faded with the railroad's decline.

Tennyson vicinity, TX

Set on the rolling frontier of Coke County, Mule Creek grew up around a small settlement whose very name is the stuff of tall tales—recalled either as an early horse-and-mule ranch or a stagecoach mule that died at the nearby creek. The Abilene-to-Fort Concho stage once rolled through, and for years a combination school-and-church served as the community's heart. As West Texans drifted toward town life in the twentieth century, the settlement thinned, leaving its cemetery—blanketed each spring with bluebonnets—to tell the story.

Jasper County, GA

In the cotton country of middle Georgia, a farm mule named John earned something almost no working animal ever did: a grave and an epitaph. The boast that he "made 200 bales of cotton" measures a lifetime of turning plows and hauling loads across the red-clay fields of Jasper County, where mule power drove the crop that ruled the Southern economy after the Civil War. Long before tractors arrived, a good mule was a farm's most valuable partner, and this small stone marks the genuine affection and respect one such animal could command.

Muleshoe vicinity, TX

Established in 1935 as a wintering ground for migratory waterfowl, Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge sits along the Central Flyway, one link in a chain of sanctuaries stretching from Mexico to Canada. Each fall its playas fill with the largest wintering concentration of sandhill cranes in North America, alongside countless other birds. Spanning more than 5,000 acres, it is among the oldest of Texas's federal refuges.