Search Markers

Center, TX

Brothers James Allen and John M. Mull brought their families from Alabama to Shelby County in 1894, only to lose John's wife Mary to smallpox two years later. Fear of contagion barred her from the city cemetery, so a neighbor offered a burial spot on his land along the San Augustine road, and in 1901 John Mull bought the ground and organized what became Mull Cemetery. The family and at least ten relatives lie here, a small graveyard the city of Center has maintained since 1956.

Spokane County, WA

This monument marks where the Mullan Military Road crossed, the pioneering wagon route built by Captain John Mullan between 1859 and 1862 to connect Fort Benton, Montana, with Fort Walla Walla, Washington. Stretching more than 600 miles, it was the first engineered road across the northern Rockies, opening a corridor for troops, settlers, and freight. The original trail lies about 1,100 feet west of the marker.

Mullin, TX

Charles Mullins, the town's namesake, arrived with cattle in 1857, and tradition holds that a Methodist circuit rider preached in his home. The congregation worshiped in the Mullin schoolhouse for years before J. E. Martin and his wife donated this site in 1893 and a building rose in 1896 under the Rev. Marion Mills. After a 1919 cyclone wrecked that structure, the present native-stone church was raised in 1920 using much of the original material.

San Angelo, TX

This cemetery honors Isaac Mullins, a Virginia-born pioneer who came to the Republic of Texas in 1837 and helped organize Tom Green County, serving on its first commission and in the state legislature. His "IC" cattle brand became one of the most famous in Texas as he trailed herds to markets as far as California, and in the 1860s he captained a company of Texas Rangers. He gave land for a school and deeded this site as a cemetery in 1881, where he lies among Civil War veterans and pioneers of the old Mullins community.

Thrifty, TX

In 1894 Brown County commissioners cut a public road from Bangs to Cross Cut, and its chief crossing of Jim Ned Creek fell at Mullins Ranch, prompting the county to buy eleven acres here. The Mullins brothers had settled the area in 1857, helping found the nearby towns of Mullin and Thrifty, and their ranch became a regular stop for Methodist circuit preachers, a favored spot for camp meetings, and an open watering hole for cattlemen and neighbors. Many of those gathering traditions continue at the site today.

Portland, OR

This marker recalls Multnomah, established in 1908 as a freight and passenger station on the newly completed Oregon Electric Railway linking Portland and Salem. Interurban electric lines like this one briefly knit the Willamette Valley together, spurring small commercial hubs around their depots. The station stood a block away, at the corner of 35th and Multnomah Boulevard, seeding the neighborhood that grew up around it.

Plano, TX

McBain Jameson and Jeremiah Muncey settled this vicinity in the early 1840s, when North Texas was still a dangerous frontier of scattered cabins. Late in 1844, hunters came upon the slain bodies of Jameson, the Muncey family, and a small child, along with signs of an Indian raid; a nearby settler's son named Rice was killed as well, and two Muncey boys vanished forever. Remembered as the last such raid in Collin County, the marker was moved to this site in 1998, about a mile from the actual home and graves.

Muncy, PA · est. 1952

The town of Muncy was laid out in 1799 by Benjamin McCarty in the fertile West Branch Susquehanna country. Its name honors the Munsee, a division of the Delaware (Lenape) who lived here before white settlement. The site was a natural crossroads long before the town existed, where four great Indian paths — the Shamokin, Wyalusing, Wyoming, and Towanda — came together.

Muncy Creek Township, PA · est. 1952

Laid out in 1799 by Benjamin McCarty, Muncy took its name from the Munsee, a band of the Delaware (Lenape) who inhabited the West Branch Susquehanna valley before European settlement. The place had long been a hub of movement: four important Indian paths — the Shamokin, Wyalusing, Wyoming, and Towanda — met near here. The new town simply formalized a junction that Native travelers had used for generations.

Muncy Creek Township, PA · est. 1947

Around 1772 John Alward raised this valley's first gristmill, a cornerstone of any frontier settlement where neighbors brought grain to be ground into flour and meal. Burned by Native raiders in 1779 amid the Revolution's border warfare, it was rebuilt again and again—new mills rising in 1783 and 1800—and the last of them ground on until 1872, a full century of milling on one spot.

Victoria, TX

Built in 1871 as the Continental Hotel, this Victoria building served travelers for more than two decades before Professor O. E. H. Mundt bought it and turned it into the classroom home of the school he founded in 1893. The school ran until 1904, and in 1946 the Mundt family sold the old building to a Veterans of Foreign Wars post, giving it a third civic life.

Dallas, TX

Galilee Baptist Church was organized in 1894 near the railroad tracks on Central Avenue, where members famously hung heavy rags in the windows to muffle the din of nearby taverns — earning it the nickname "Rag Doll Church." After relocating to Munger Avenue in 1911 and taking that name under Rev. Abraham Lincoln King, the congregation built its first permanent structure and grew steadily through the pastorates that followed. A new sanctuary was completed in 1940–41, and the church became a center for worship, education, and civic life in the community.

Coolidge, TX

In 1876 Henry Martin Munger began buying and fencing an 1,800-acre Limestone County survey for a great cotton farm, and his sons carried the enterprise far beyond it. Robert Munger patented cotton-processing machinery and built the Continental Gin Company into the nation's largest maker of such equipment, while Stephen became a Dallas banker and SMU trustee. The Munger community around the farm grew into a full village with a school, churches, gin, depot, and railroad before cotton's decline emptied it by the late 1940s.

Lebanon, MO

The Munger Moss Motel is a beloved survivor of Route 66, the fabled "Mother Road" that carried millions of travelers across America from Chicago to the Pacific. Opened in the mid-20th century in Lebanon, Missouri, it belongs to the golden age of motor courts, neon signs, and cross-country road trips that defined postwar American travel. As Interstate highways bypassed the old route, motels like this became cherished relics of a vanishing roadside culture.

Dallas, TX

Organized in 1914, Munger Place Methodist Church has long served the Munger Place and East Dallas neighborhoods with a range of community programs. Its landmark sanctuary was built in 1925, during the pastorate of Rev. George M. Gibson, and designed in the English Gothic style by prominent Dallas architect C. D. Hill. Symmetrical side gables, a corner square-plan tower, and unusual window tracery mark it as a distinctive work of ecclesiastical architecture, recognized as a Recorded Texas Historical Landmark in 1990.

Yoakum, TX

During the Depression, the small railroad town of Yoakum decided in 1930 — at a packed commission meeting of some 300 residents — to build and own its own electricity rather than buy from an outside utility. The plant that engineers raised in 1932 lit the town until 1938, then served as an auxiliary station and later a city machine shop before local library boosters lovingly converted the sturdy industrial building into a public library in the late 1980s.

San Angelo, TX

When a devastating flood swept down the South Concho River in September 1936, it destroyed much of San Angelo's parks and its public pool. Voters twice went to the polls before a bond—paired with federal Works Progress Administration funds and labor—cleared the way, and work began in 1938. The Pueblo Revival complex designed by John G. Becker opened in 1939, drawing 795 swimmers in its first two days, its exposed vigas and hexagonal stone tower a signature of Depression-era public building.

Scranton, PA · est. 1916

After 1743 a band of Munsee, a division of the Delaware people, settled here under Chief Capoose, in the valley that would one day become Scranton. Their council ground lay beneath a great apple tree that settlers later adopted as a landmark, calling it the town sign-post of Providence; it stood until a storm felled the thirteen-foot giant in 1885. The village is a reminder that Native communities lived and governed across this region well into the era of European settlement.

Bailey's Prairie, TX

In 1850 Mordello Stephen Munson — son of Henry William Munson, a member of Stephen F. Austin's colony — set aside this tract at his family's Ridgely Plantation on Bailey's Prairie as a burying ground for kin and friends. The little cemetery ties one of the founding colonial families of Anglo Texas to the coastal prairie they helped settle. It has stood as their resting place for well over a century.

Hallettsville, TX

Considered the oldest organized group in Lavaca County, this Masonic lodge was chartered in 1851 and named for early Texas colonist and Masonic leader John Murchison. Around 1855 it built a three-story hall that did triple duty as a church and a school known as the "Masonic College." A lodge member, Friench Simpson, later served as grand treasurer of the Grand Lodge of Texas in 1900.

Neches, TX

Born in North Carolina to Scottish immigrants in 1810, Murdoch McDonald came to the Mound Prairie area of Anderson County in 1839 and farmed alongside the family of Dr. George Lester, whose daughter he married. In 1871 he donated three hundred acres to the International Railroad on the condition that a town and station be built, and when the rails arrived in 1872 he raised a hotel that became the community's social center. Remembered as the founder of Neches, he remained a local leader until his death in 1889.

Murfreesboro, NC

The Murfree House was home to William Hardy Murfree, a North Carolina legislator who went on to serve in the U.S. Congress from 1813 to 1817 and cast a ballot as a presidential elector in 1812. He belonged to the founding generation of leaders who steered the young republic through its early decades. The nearby town of Murfreesboro bears his family's name.

Murfreesboro, NC

This monument in Murfreesboro, a small Chowan River town in northeastern North Carolina, honors the local men and women who served in the wars of the twentieth century. From the trenches of World War I through World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, communities like this one sent generations of their sons and daughters into conflicts fought across Europe, the Pacific, and Asia. Rather than singling out one war, the memorial gathers a full century of service and sacrifice into a single civic tribute.

Tyler, TX

North Carolina native Archibald Michael Murphey opened a jewelry and watchmaking business in Tyler in 1868, drawing on a trade he had begun as a young apprentice. His sons carried it on, and by the early twentieth century a younger son had taken over, moving the store to this site in 1919. Passed down within one family, it long offered watches, diamonds, silver, and even pianos and organs.

Jefferson, TX

Brothers John C. and James M. Murphy came from Tennessee to the booming riverport of Jefferson in 1850 and built this sturdy structure in the busy warehouse district to serve their wholesale cotton business. As steamboat commerce faded, the building found new life—county offices and courts in 1884, then city hall in 1915, sheltering everything from a volunteer fire company to a dance club. A Diebold safe installed in 1877 still stands inside, a working relic of the town's mercantile heyday.

Murphy, TX

Settled in the early 1840s by pioneers from a dozen states drawn to the fertile Blackland Prairie, this community farmed and ranched the tall-grass, black-soil country for well over a century. It took the name Murphy in 1888 when William Murphy granted right-of-way to the St. Louis Southwestern Railroad, though the city itself wasn't formally established until 1958. Founding Maxwell, McMillen, and Murphy families built the stores and schools of an agrarian town that faded by 1970—only to revive in the 1980s as a Dallas suburb.

Murphy, TX

In 1872, on the death of his sister Susan Emberton, William A. Murphy set aside a corner of his North Texas land as a private family burial ground, laying it out with sons' families to the north and daughters' to the south. As the Murphys drifted west in the late 1800s, the plot opened to the wider Murphy community, taking its last burial in 1988. Today it rests among cedars first planted by William and Dorothy Murphy's daughters.

Nursery, TX

Built in 1897, the Murphy Home blends the Southern plantation form with the New England saltbox, an unusual pairing that spoke to the tastes of prominent Nursery citizens. It passed through several notable local families before becoming best known as the longtime home of W. M. Murphy, Sr.

Mathis, TX

In 1875, San Patricio chief justice Patrick Frances Murphy and his wife Elizabeth — daughter of the empresario James McGloin — bought "The Point at Echo" and built this modest Greek Revival house on the east bank of the Nueces, using cypress hauled by oxen from Indianola. The property later passed to Margaret Mary Healy-Murphy, widow of Patrick's brother, who devoted her fortune to founding a church campus in San Antonio with a convent and a free school for Black children, established what the marker calls the first order of nuns in Texas, and used this ranch house for retreats before selling it to sustain her mission.

Murphy, TX

Murphy started as 'Old Decatur,' renamed in 1888 after William Murphy donated land for a rail depot and post office. The Works Progress Administration built Murphy School here in 1939, though consolidation shuttered it as a school by 1950. The city later repurposed the sturdy Depression-era building as its city hall, police station, and firehouse.

Rockdale, TX

First known as Pleasant Grove Cemetery, this Milam County burial ground shared its site with the community's school and church, its earliest marked grave dating to 1856. It took its lasting name from Madison Murray, a Civil War veteran who moved from Mississippi in the late 1860s, became a community leader, and ran the old schoolhouse as a private academy. As settlements rose and faded, the cemetery went on serving the Pleasant Grove, Bushdale, and Bethlehem communities, cared for by an association organized in 2004.

Graham, TX

When pioneer Thomas Price bought land in the Fish Creek community in 1874, he and his neighbors repaired an abandoned log cabin and set it aside as a shared meeting house where settlers of every denomination worshiped together. The Fish Creek Methodist Society organized in 1886, served by a circuit-riding minister, and moved through cabin and schoolhouse before the W. L. Chandler family donated land in 1907. Renamed Murray Methodist Church, it has remained a vital part of the community.

Gatesville, TX

Settled largely by families from Sardis, Mississippi, this Coryell County community got its first schooling when Lemuel Murrell built a log schoolhouse in the late 1870s, with Alabama native Robert Earl Timmons as its first teacher. By the century's end nearly a hundred children were enrolled, and a new frame schoolhouse rose in 1909-10, its term often starting in mid-October so students could first help harvest the cotton. The school consolidated with Jonesboro in 1948, leaving the building as one of Coryell County's few surviving rural schools.

Ore City, TX

On the antebellum frontier, formal education was scarce, which makes the Murry Institute remarkable: founded in 1853 by two Tennesseans, it was the first school in Upshur County. Far from a mere grammar school, it taught engineering, higher mathematics, Greek, and Latin alongside common subjects, earning a reputation for excellence in a raw new country. The Civil War forced its doors shut in 1861.

Murrysville, PA · est. 1960

Drilled in 1878, the Murrysville gas well became one of the most productive in the world and a wonder of the early natural-gas age. When it caught fire in 1881 it burned for years, its roaring, brilliant flame drawing sightseers before engineers finally brought it under control and piped the gas to Pittsburgh's hungry mills and homes. The site helped prove that natural gas could be captured and moved as an industrial fuel.

Slocum, TX

Muse Cemetery holds burials reaching back to 1859, when six-month-old Mary E. Gilmore was laid to rest, though a 1969 survey found some 261 unmarked graves hidden beneath the sand of its oldest section. It took its name from the pioneer Muse family who arrived after the Civil War, even though none of them appear to be buried here. To the east lies a separate plot for the community's Black citizens, its earliest marked grave that of Jackson Roach in 1882.

Gail, TX

Rising to 2,862 feet on the West Texas plains, Mushaway Peak has carried many spellings and long served as a landmark of Native American origin. Around 1872 a village near here was a trading point where Apaches and Comanches dealt with Comancheros tied to New Mexico's markets. As U.S. Army expeditions swept the region in the mid-1870s to force the last free bands onto reservations, the peak guided soldiers, buffalo hunters, and surveyors alike — before cattlemen claimed the valley in the 1880s.

Duncanville, TX

When a proposed new school stirred tax fears at an 1887 Duncanville town meeting, six citizens simply paid to build it themselves. The next year Robert N. Daniel funded a separate little music room, outfitted with a piano for instruction. Left standing when the school was later demolished, the modest building was moved and restored in 1975 to serve as a community museum.

Port Aransas, TX

Mustang Island, one of seven Texas barrier islands, took its name from the wild horses descended from shipwrecks and Spanish expeditions, and was long frequented by the nomadic Karankawas. Robert Ainsworth Mercer settled here in 1855 with his family, founding the El Mar Rancho, but the small community scattered during the Civil War when the USS Arthur blockaded Aransas Pass and shelled the island after settlers fired on Federal sailors in 1862. Ranchers returned after the war, and by the 1920s tourism had become the island's economic mainstay.

Marlin, TX

Though the land fell within Sterling Robertson's 1834 colony, Mustang Prairie drew few settlers until Reconstruction and the railroad's 1870 arrival at nearby Bremond brought merchants and families—many of them from Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi. The community anchored itself with the New Hope Baptist Church, established by 1872, and a schoolhouse that first shared the church building before a three-room frame school rose in 1877. Storms, tornadoes, and dwindling enrollment eventually closed both, and by 1940 the schoolchildren were bused to Kosse and Bremond.

Tarzan, TX

This West Texas watering place was already known in 1849, when U.S. Army Captain Randolph B. Marcy paused here while leading emigrants from Fort Smith, Arkansas, toward El Paso. Noted in 1859 as "Mustang Pond" just north of the Emigrant's Road, it was the first reliable water west of Big Spring—a vital marker on the long, dry route west.

Delavan, WI

Across from Delavan's train depot stands a bur oak more than two centuries old, the same sturdy tree where Civil War volunteers assembled as they were mustered in for the journey to camp. The depot and the oak together marked the threshold between hometown life and the war beyond.

Houston, TX

The Myer-Hall House rose in 1910 from the drafting tables of Sanguinet and Staats, a firm that helped define the streetscapes of early-twentieth-century Texas. Built for attorney and civic leader Sterling Myer, the half-timbered Tudor Revival house later became the decades-long home of engineer and businessman James Donald Hall and his family. Its gables, sunroom, and porte-cochere capture the aspirations of Houston's growing professional elite.

Alvarado, TX

Samuel Houston Myers brought his wife Patsy and six children to Texas in 1851, establishing a family farm; over the following years he outlived three wives and buried several kin on the land. The cemetery's first recorded burial came in 1873 with his granddaughter Mary, and early graves include Myers himself, a traveler who drowned in Quil Miller Creek, and a formerly enslaved woman remembered as "Aunt Rachel." A darker chapter unfolded in 1880, when young Sam Houston Myers, Jr. was hanged for a murder his brother-in-law later confessed to.

Houston, TX

Houston's warehouse district grew up east of Main Street along Buffalo Bayou, where waterways and five converging railroads made the city a shipping powerhouse by the Civil War. On this site an 1880s cotton warehouse was converted into a mattery factory and, after 1904, became the Houston branch of the Myers-Spalti mattress and furniture company. Over the following decades the firm added warehouse after warehouse, its buildings—ranging from brick and heavy timber to poured concrete—charting the evolution of Houston's industrial architecture.

San Antonio, TX

Born in Gonzales and raised in San Antonio, Myra Hemmings became one of 22 founders of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority at Howard University in 1913, and days later marched in the women's suffrage procession in Washington. Returning home, she taught English and drama in San Antonio's Black high schools for more than fifty years while founding the city's Delta Sigma Theta chapter and, with her husband, a dramatic guild. She also acted in stage productions and several feature films, shaping the cultural life of Black San Antonio.

Ennis, TX

When W.H. Parsons deeded ten acres for a cemetery in 1875, it took the name "Myrtle" from a child already buried on the tract. The grounds became a resting place for figures across generations of Texas history — Frederick Ranklin of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" and a veteran of the Texas Revolution, author Katie Daffan, and Marine Lieutenant Jack Lummus, killed at Iwo Jima in 1945 and awarded the Medal of Honor.

Quitman, TX

Myrtle Springs Baptist Church began in the fall of 1861, when William Setzler deeded land and a congregation gathered under a Rev. Coker, first meeting in a log schoolhouse before building a wooden church. Early members financed later buildings with gifts of cattle and eggs, and baptized converts in nearby ponds and springs until a baptistery was added in 1964. It grew into a Baptist Missionary Association congregation serving Wood County.

New Summerfield, TX

Begun in the 1860s on land deeded by pioneer Thomas Garrison, this burial ground served the vanished town of Lone Star and scattered East Texas homesteads, its earliest marked grave that of young Martha Wallace in 1866. At least fifteen Civil War veterans rest here, some beneath hand-cut sandstone markers now worn to bare initials. Though Lone Star became a ghost town, the cemetery endured, tended by a community association chartered for perpetual care in the 1960s.

Lexington, KY

Myrtle Weldon spent three decades, beginning in 1924, building Kentucky's Home Economics Extension program from a modest corps of 23 agents into a statewide network of 110. Trained in home economics, she led the effort that founded the Kentucky Federation of Homemakers in 1932. Her work grew from a movement that began in 1914, when the first county agents taught rural families the practical arts of canning, food safety, and preservation.

Stonington, CT

This monument honors the young men of Mystic who marched off to the Civil War — the "war of the rebellion" — between 1861 and 1865 and did not return. Like hundreds of New England mill and shipbuilding towns, Mystic sent a generation of its sons into the Union ranks, and the community raised this memorial to mark their sacrifice. The dates alone carry the weight of four years of national bloodletting.

Stonington, CT

In 1929, three New England men with a shared passion for America's vanishing seafaring past founded the Marine Historical Association on the banks of the Mystic River, on the site of a onetime shipyard. What began with this first building grew into Mystic Seaport, the nation's largest maritime museum—a living village of tall ships, a working shipyard, and preserved vessels that keep the age of sail within reach. This tablet marks where that ambitious act of preservation started.

Palestine, TX

Established in 1912, Banks Elementary was the first school for African-American children living south of the I&GN tracks in Palestine's South End. It honored Nathaniel A. Banks, the Lincoln High principal who ran a summer 'normal school' that trained Black teachers from ten surrounding counties for state certification. Several of its teachers stayed more than 35 years each, and after desegregation closed the school in 1965 the building served five more years as a federal Head Start center.

Montgomery, TX

Judge N. H. Davis built this cottage in 1851 using timber from an 1831 log house he had received as a legal fee, and the home grew with a kitchen wing in 1880 and a south addition in 1895. From 1881 to 1891 it also served the community as the site of Texanna Snow's school, and the house has remained in the Davis family ever since.

Waxahachie, TX

One of the earliest privately endowed libraries in Texas, the N. P. Sims Library and Lyceum grew from a bequest by Virginia-born farmer and investor Nicholas P. Sims, who died in 1902. Rising in Getzendaner Park—land donated by Confederate veteran and railroad president Captain W. H. Getzendaner—the Neo-Classical building of Carrara marble opened in 1905, with reading rooms below and an auditorium and athenaeum above. Later benefactors, including inventor J. Harry Phillips, added wings that carried the institution through the twentieth century.

Raleigh, NC

From 1879 to 1930 the North Carolina Industrial Association ran the Colored State Fair to serve the state's Black citizens, who were excluded from full participation elsewhere. Held on grounds just north of here between 1891 and 1925, it showcased Black farming, industry, and achievement in the segregated New South. It was a rare public stage of Black pride and enterprise in the Jim Crow era.

Rockingham, NC

On October 4, 1887, delegates gathered in Rockingham to organize the North Carolina Farmers' Alliance, choosing Leonidas L. Polk as its first secretary. The Alliance channeled the grievances of hard-pressed farmers in the Gilded Age, agitating for fairer credit, railroad regulation, and cooperative marketing, and it became a seedbed of the Populist movement.

Charlotte, NC

Founded in 1908 amid the Progressive Era's push for efficient, honest government, the North Carolina League of Municipalities gathered city officials to share ideas for sound civic management. Its first meeting, held here, drew delegates from across the state. The organization became a lasting voice for the state's towns and cities.

Raleigh, NC

North Carolina's official memory-keeping began in 1903 with the creation of the state Historical Commission, led by its first secretary, R. D. W. Connor. Over the decades it grew into the Office of Archives and History, gathering and guarding the state's public records. It moved to this building in 1968.

Hillsborough, NC

On October 23, 1783, officers of North Carolina's Continental Line gathered in Hillsborough to form the state branch of the Society of the Cincinnati, a fraternal order of Revolutionary War veterans. General Jethro Sumner served as its first president.