Search Markers

Raleigh, NC

The museum's collections trace back to an 1851 state geological survey, and it has operated as a public museum since 1879, making it one of the oldest of its kind in the South. For half a century, from 1895 to 1946, naturalist H. H. Brimley served as its curator, building its reputation for natural history. It reflects a 19th-century faith in science, survey, and public education.

Reno, NV

This Reno depot, built in 1910, served the Nevada-California-Oregon Railway, a line that began in the 1880s as the Nevada-Oregon Railway and grew under the Moran brothers into one of the West's largest narrow-gauge railroads, reaching all the way to Lakeview, Oregon. Architect Frederic DeLongchamps blended several styles into the building — a Mission-style entry porch, Italianate eaves, and Romanesque Revival arches. After the Western Pacific bought and standard-gauged the line in 1917, the depot kept serving travelers until 1937.

Center Point, TX

Pennsylvania-born and a Union veteran of the Civil War, Nelson Orcelus Reynolds enlisted as a Texas Ranger in 1874 and quickly made his name, capturing the Horrell brothers and brokering a peace to end their feud with the Higgins faction—a feat that won him command of the newly formed Company E. He was later charged with jailing and guarding the notorious gunman John Wesley Hardin for trial. After leaving the Rangers in 1879 he served as Lampasas County sheriff and settled in Center Point, where he died in 1922.

Nacogdoches, TX

Long home to the Nacogdoches Indians, this East Texas region saw Spanish settlement begin in 1716, though the presence was repeatedly abandoned and re-established amid French encroachment. The town of Nacogdoches was founded in 1779, and the area became the scene of the Fredonian Rebellion in 1827. Organized as a municipality under Mexico in 1832, it was made a Texas county in 1836.

Nacogdoches, TX

Raised in 1917–1918 to a design from the office of federal architect James A. Wetmore, this brick post office set a note of classical dignity at the center of the Nacogdoches town square. Its Palladian windows and cast-stone trim mark it as a restrained example of the beaux arts style the U.S. Treasury favored for public buildings of the era. It carried the town's mail until 1964, then served in turn as public library and, later, a visitor center.

Nacogdoches, TX

Incorporated by an independent board in February 1845 and opened that September, Nacogdoches University was a pioneering co-educational school granted four leagues of land for its support. Its first president was Marcus A. Montrose, an outstanding early Texas educator. In time the institution was absorbed into the public school system.

Nada, TX

Nada grew on land once part of Stephen F. Austin's colony, settled beginning in the 1880s by German and Czech immigrant families who built stores, schools, and a Catholic parish. The founding of a public school in 1883, a post office in 1894, and the Church of the Nativity in 1896 anchored a farming community that by 1904 boasted a cotton gin, stores, and a dance hall. Its descendants still work the same agricultural land generations later.

Nada, TX

The Nada post office opened in 1894 with William J. Engbrock, Jr. as first postmaster, and for nearly a century it migrated around town with each new postmaster's trade — housed by turns in general stores, a doctor's pharmacy, and a service station and garage. It followed the community's shifting center of gravity, even moving to be near the new State Highway 71 in the 1930s. A permanent facility was finally built in 1987.

Galveston, TX

New Jersey native Nahor Biggs Yard reached the raw new town of Galveston in 1838 and built one of its first residences. A successful businessman, he is best remembered for a sweeping public life—city alderman, county commissioner, school board member, church and Masonic leader, colonel in the first regiment of Texas troops, and president of the philanthropic Howard Association. His career traces the making of a frontier port into an organized city during the Republic era.

Moody, TX

When Joseph Naler brought his family from Georgia to the Central Texas prairie in 1851, the country around present-day Moody was still raw frontier. The first grave dug on his land in 1863 was for his wife Polly, and over the decades the plot grew from a family burying ground into a chartered community cemetery holding many of the district's earliest settlers. That the graveyard predates the town of Moody itself makes it a quiet record of who came first.

Travis County, TX

Nameless, Texas reportedly earned its wry name in the 1880s after residents grew tired of having their proposed post-office names rejected by the government. This little Hill Country farming community once supported its own school and gathering places, but like countless rural Texas settlements it faded as families drifted toward larger towns and better roads. Today a schoolhouse site and the community cemetery are just about all that remain to mark where Nameless stood.

Lexington, NC

In the Piedmont of North Carolina, the town of Lexington took its name from the opening clash of the American Revolution. When word of the April 19, 1775 fighting at Lexington, Massachusetts reached the Carolina backcountry, local patriots honored the moment by attaching the name to their settlement. Lexington later became the seat of Davidson County when it was formed in 1822, and in 1928 residents set down this marker to record how their community came to be named.

Jacksonville, TX

This hospital began in 1919 as the nine-bed Cherokee Sanitarium in a small Jacksonville apartment house. A larger facility followed in 1925, and in 1930 it was renamed to honor Nan Travis, mother of staff physicians J.M. and R.T. Travis. Through decades of expansion it grew to serve patients across East Texas, merging in 1997 into a larger system as the East Texas Medical Center–Jacksonville.

De Soto, TX

Otway Bird Nance moved his family from Kentucky to this Dallas County land in 1851, securing title through the Peters Colony in 1856. The farmhouse begun in the 1850s was later enlarged with Victorian detailing and even rotated to face east in the early 1900s, while its barn, curing shed, and elevated water tank survived alongside it. The family held the place until 1951, and De Soto acquired it in 1975.

Crews, TX

In this cabin lived "Grandma" Parker, a frontier herb doctor who brewed medicinal teas in a great pot over an open fire and walked miles across dangerous country to tend the sick. She made her home here for more than a decade before failing eyesight forced her to sell the cabin in 1888. Her story preserves the memory of the self-taught healers who served isolated settlements before formal medicine arrived.

Cuero, TX

Nancy Shows was among the pioneer settlers of the DeWitt County frontier in the 1850s, where her husband Adam Shows built the nearby Hebron Church around 1855. Mother of eight children, she represents the settler families who put down the first roots — homes, churches, and cemeteries — in this stretch of early Texas.

Beaumont, TX

In 1825 Nancy Nixon Tevis and her husband Noah settled a bluff on the Neches, becoming the first known Anglo-Americans there and later receiving a Republic of Texas land grant covering much of what became Beaumont. Widowed young, Nancy held her ground with eight children through the Runaway Scrape of 1836, ran a profitable ferry, and joined with others in 1837 to found the town — renaming it from Tevis Bluff to Beaumont. Fiercely protective of her rights, she once appealed directly to President Sam Houston over a land dispute.

Nanticoke, PA · est. 1951

The Nanticoke people, originally of Maryland's Eastern Shore, moved north and settled at this spot on the Susquehanna around 1750 as colonial pressure pushed them from their homeland. In 1753 they were formally adopted by the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy and later relocated toward Chenango near Binghamton, New York, to help guard the confederacy's "Southern Door." Their name endures on the town that grew here.

Naples, TX

When the railroad bypassed the prosperous town of Wheatville, a rival community sprang up beside the tracks and inherited its momentum. The post office moved here in 1882 as "Station Belden," then was renamed Naples in 1895. As the surrounding hardwood forests were logged out, the local economy shifted back to cattle and farming.

Naples, TX

The earliest recorded burial here is Elizabeth A. Baker, who died in April 1883, followed by others reinterred from the local school grounds. In 1892 J. H. Mathews sold about an acre to the trustees of Belden Public School for $12.50 to use as a cemetery, and when the town of Belden was renamed Naples in 1895 the graveyard's name changed with it. Among the interred are a Texas state representative and Amanda Sheppard, mother and grandmother of two U.S. congressmen.

Naples, FL

Before jetliners and snowbird traffic, this stretch of Southwest Florida was cattle country: the airfield rose on land that had been the Henry Youngman dairy farm. During World War II the U.S. military transformed it into a training base, part of the vast network of Florida airfields that took advantage of the state's flat terrain and clear skies to prepare aircrews for the war. In the peacetime decades that followed, the field found new life as a commercial gateway, with Naples Airlines—later Provincetown-Boston Airline (PBA)—flying connecting routes out of Naples under owner Mr. Van Arsdale, Sr.

Arlington, TX

Between 1853 and 1900 dozens of narrow gauge railroads threaded through Texas—cheap to build and run, they served as 'taps' to towns off the main line and as logging roads pushing deep into woods and swamps. They hauled passengers, cattle, and crops like sugar cane, and one line whimsically operated as the 'Two Mules and a Car.' The two engines running at Six Flags Over Texas, built in 1887 and 1903, were rebuilt to original specifications.

Burnet, TX

Settlers reached the Naruna area as early as the 1840s, and the town took its name from the riverboat that carried its first postmaster to Texas. In 1877 residents organized Providence Baptist Church under Ira Reese, holding baptisms in Deer Creek and later sharing a sanctuary with local Masons. Renamed Naruna Baptist Church in 1932, it endured even after the railroad bypassed the town and thinned its population.

Grapevine, TX

Established in 1859 by Kentucky migrants Thomas Jefferson Nash and his wife Elizabeth, this 450-acre farm is one of the last surviving nineteenth-century agrarian sites in North Texas. During the Civil War the Nash brothers left to serve with Confederate troops while Elizabeth and the children kept the farm; all returned to expand their holdings. The 1869 I-house, a crib barn, cistern, and family cemetery still stand, and in 1888 the Nashes gave right-of-way to the Cotton Belt Railroad that spurred the region's growth.

Jefferson, TX

Built by Jefferson S. Nash after he arrived in 1846, this was the first iron furnace in Texas, exploiting the region's abundant ore, hardwood for charcoal, and molding clay. Workers poured charcoal and ore down the stack from a ridge behind the furnace, then cast the molten iron into farm tools, cooking pots, and smoothing irons—and, during the Civil War, cannonballs and possibly firearms. Nash struggled constantly for machinery, labor, capital, and transport, yet his works helped launch an East Texas iron industry that grew to at least sixteen operations.

Forreston, TX

In 1873 pioneer Thomas Alexander Williams moved his family to the Garden Valley area and promptly carved a schoolhouse out of his own farmland — a common act of community-building on the post-Civil War Texas frontier. Renamed for the Nash Post Office a decade later, the school taught local children until 1938, when consolidation moved them to neighboring districts. The surviving two-story frame schoolhouse now serves as a community center.

East Columbia, TX

East Columbia began in 1823 as Bell's Landing, a town in Stephen F. Austin's colony founded by Josiah H. Bell. The oldest part of this house was raised about 1847 on cedar pole framing by George Lewis Nash, whose family lived here some forty-five years. Merchant James P. Wright's wife Martha bought and expanded it in 1892, and their descendants preserve it still.

Nashville, TN

Nashville's first firefighting force, a company of volunteers, formed in May 1807, and the city organized its first paid department in 1860 under Chief J.S. Dashiell, equipped with horse-drawn steam engines. A telegraph alarm system arrived in 1875, and the department entered the motor age when Chief A.A. Rozetta used the first automobile in 1910, followed by gasoline-driven engines in 1912. The marker traces a century of the city's evolving fire protection.

Nashville, TN

In Nashville, as in cities across America, the work of firefighters and emergency medical crews grew alongside the dense, fast-growing urban neighborhoods they were sworn to protect. This memorial honors the long line of local first responders who answered calls into burning buildings and to the scenes of accidents and emergencies, some of them never returning home. It gathers the past, present, and future of that service into a single tribute to civic courage.

Round Top, TX

Purchased in 1843 by the German Emigration Society, or Adelsverein, the 4,428-acre Nassau Plantation was named for Duke Adolf of Nassau and became one of the show places of early Texas. Though Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels rejected it as a colonist way station—fearing German settlers might lose their culture near non-German neighbors—it hosted his lavish horse races and feasts, and quieter visits by his successor, John O. Meusebach. Never colonized, the two-story oak plantation grew cotton before the bankrupt society sold it in 1848, and it was later divided among German farming families.

Memphis, TN

Nat D. Williams broke a color barrier in 1948 as the first Black radio announcer in Memphis, taking the microphone at station WDIA. A city schoolteacher by day, he co-founded the Cotton Makers Jubilee, wrote for the Memphis World, and from 1935 ran the legendary Amateur Night on Beale Street at the old Palace Theater. Through the airwaves and the footlights he helped launch a generation of Memphis performers.

Dayton, OH

Natalie Clifford Barney was born in Dayton on October 31, 1876, into a wealthy and prominent family whose earlier generations helped found local institutions such as the Dayton Academy and Cooper Female Seminary. She would go on to become a celebrated writer and the host of one of the most famous literary salons in early twentieth-century Paris, gathering many of the leading authors of her age. This marker recalls a Dayton daughter who became an influential figure in the transatlantic literary world.

Angleton, TX

Born into slavery in Charleston in 1840 and brought to Texas by his enslaver, Nathan H. Haller rose after emancipation to become a farmer, county commissioner, and Republican political leader. Elected to the 23rd and 24th Texas Legislatures in the 1890s, he was Brazoria County's first Black legislator and authored a bill to establish a branch of the University of Texas for Black students. He and his colleague R. L. Smith were the last African Americans elected to the Texas Legislature until 1966, as the disfranchisement of the Jim Crow era closed the door behind them.

New York, NY

In September 1776, with New York City fallen to the British, the young Continental officer Nathan Hale slipped behind enemy lines to gather intelligence and was captured. A Yale graduate barely into his twenties, he was hanged the next morning, reportedly declaring that he regretted having but one life to give for his country.

Pierce County, WA

This plaque honors Army Sergeant First Class Nathan Ross Chapman, a Special Forces soldier from the Pacific Northwest. In the opening weeks of the war in Afghanistan that followed the September 11 attacks, Chapman is widely remembered as the first U.S. soldier killed by enemy fire in that conflict. His community dedicated this tribute—'We now have a Hero'—in 2005.

Charlotte, NC

On December 3, 1780, General Nathanael Greene took command of the battered Southern Continental Army at Charlotte, replacing Horatio Gates after the disaster at Camden. A self-taught Rhode Island Quaker's son, Greene rebuilt the ragged force and waged a brilliant war of maneuver against Cornwallis across the Carolinas. He never won a major battle outright, yet steadily bled the British toward defeat.

Irene, TX

Louisiana-born Nathaniel Addison took up arms as a soldier in the Texas Army in 1836, the year Texas won its independence. He lived on to 1900, dying in Hill County long after the frontier struggles of his youth. This marker also remembers his wife, Margaret Ann, a Missouri native who shared his pioneer life.

West Columbia, TX

Nathaniel C. Hazen arrived in Texas in January 1836, at the height of the revolution against Mexico. Captured with James Fannin's command, he was led out to be executed in the Goliad massacre of March 27, 1836, yet managed to escape that mass killing. He went on to fight at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in Captain William H. Patton's company, only to die in Columbia before the year was out.

City of Rochester, NY

Colonel Nathaniel Rochester was a Revolutionary War veteran and Maryland landholder who, in the early 19th century, purchased a tract of land along the Genesee River and laid out the settlement that would grow into the booming flour-milling city bearing his name. This small park in the South Wedge neighborhood was dedicated in 2008 to honor that founder while celebrating the diverse community that thrives there today. The marker links Rochester's frontier-era origins to the everyday life of one of its historic close-knit neighborhoods.

Town of Huntington, NY

Nathaniel Whitman (1732–1804) served as an officer in the Huntington militia during the American Revolution, one of the citizen-soldiers who defended Long Island's towns in a war fought close to home. After the British victory at the 1776 Battle of Long Island, the region fell under a harsh occupation that made local militia service both perilous and essential. His home and grave mark the life of one of the many ordinary patriots whose service rarely reached the history books.

Atlanta, GA

At Atlanta's Yonge Street School in 1911, Selena Sloan Butler organized a parent-teacher group that grew, through a state body formed in 1921 and a national congress in 1926, into the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers. In an era of rigid segregation, Black parents built their own network to advocate for their children's schools when the existing PTA excluded them. Butler, elected first national president, is honored as its founder.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1999

When George Washington died in December 1799, Philadelphia was still the nation's capital, and Congress set aside December 26 for formal mourning. The national memorial service filled Zion Lutheran Church, which stood on this site from 1766 to 1870, with President John Adams among the mourners. It was here that Congressman Henry Lee delivered the immortal eulogy remembering Washington as 'first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.'

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1994

In 1941, at the Cardwell School of Music, Mary Cardwell Dawson founded the first national Black opera company in the United States. At a time when the great opera houses were closed to Black performers, the company gave classically trained African American singers a stage worthy of their talent, touring from Pittsburgh to Washington and New York. For twenty-one years it drew acclaim for its artistry and opened doors that had long been shut.

Pittsburgh, PA

This Pittsburgh house was the home of the National Negro Opera Company from 1941 to 1962 — the first Black opera company in the United States, founded by musician and educator Mary Cardwell Dawson. From this modest residence in the Homewood neighborhood, singers who were shut out of mainstream stages built a company that toured the country and gave Black artists a place to perform grand opera. The building was recognized as a Pennsylvania historic structure in 1994 and a Pittsburgh Historic Landmark in 2008.

Yarmouth, MA

This bronze plaque marks a property in Yarmouth, one of Cape Cod's oldest towns, settled in 1639 during Massachusetts's colonial era. Its listing on the National Register of Historic Places—the official federal roll of buildings, sites, and districts worth preserving, administered by the Department of the Interior since 1966—signals that the structure behind it holds recognized architectural or historical value. In a village of weathered saltbox houses and sea-captains' homes, such a designation ties one building into the long story of Cape Cod's maritime and settlement past.

Garrett County, MD · est. 1947

The National Road was the nation's first federally funded highway, championed by Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin as a link binding the young country to its western territories. Construction began at Cumberland, Maryland, in 1811 and reached Wheeling on the Ohio by 1818, carrying settlers, freight, and mail deep into the interior. After 1835 the states ran it as a toll road for seventy years, and in the automobile age it was rebuilt as U.S. Route 40.

Redstone Township, PA · est. 1948

The National Road was the country's first federally funded highway, championed by Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin as a way to bind the eastern seaboard to the growing western settlements. Construction began at Cumberland, Maryland, in 1811 and reached Wheeling on the Ohio River by 1818. Later handed to state control as a toll road from 1835 to 1905, its route was eventually rebuilt as U.S. Route 40.

Buffalo Township, PA · est. 1949

Championed by Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, the National Road was the young nation's first federally funded highway, begun at Cumberland, Maryland, in 1811 and reaching Wheeling on the Ohio River by 1818. It opened a reliable overland artery for settlers, freight, and mail streaming toward the western frontier, and was later maintained as a state-run toll road from 1835 to 1905. Rebuilt in the automobile age, its route survives as U.S. Route 40.

South Union Township, PA · est. 1996

Authorized in 1806, the National Road was the nation's first federally funded highway, carrying settlers, freight, and mail west across the Appalachians toward the growing Midwest. For nearly half a century, until railroads eclipsed it in the 1850s, thousands crossed Chestnut Ridge here in southwestern Pennsylvania. The village of Hopwood, founded in 1791, thrived as a busy resting stop for travelers moving in both directions.

Groton, CT

At Groton, Connecticut — the historic home of America's submarine force — this memorial centers on an actual submarine conning tower and honors the 3,617 submariners lost during World War II. Fifty-two engraved granite stones ring the site, one for each U.S. submarine that never returned from patrol. The submarine service suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the U.S. armed forces in the war.

McKeesport, PA · est. 1991

Incorporated in 1869 and in production here at McKeesport by 1872, the National Tube Works grew into the largest pipe manufacturer in the world, its mills feeding the oil fields, waterworks, and factories of an industrializing nation. Absorbed into U.S. Steel in 1901, the plant pioneered advances in pipe inspection before its long run ended when operations ceased in 1987.

Ogden, UT

Sarah E. Anderson was turned away from the ballot box in 1895, yet within a year she was among the first women elected to the Utah state legislature — part of Utah's remarkable early embrace of women's suffrage. Her former home stood on this spot, now marked on the National Votes for Women Trail.

Presidio, TX

Where the Rio Conchos meets the Rio Grande lies La Junta, the finest farmland for hundreds of miles and a natural trading hub that Native peoples occupied for thousands of years. When Cabeza de Vaca passed through in 1536 he met the agricultural Patarabueye and the nomadic, trading Jumanos, who lived in jacal homes and pit-houses. Spanish missions, settlement, and enslavement over the following centuries steadily eroded the region's Indigenous character, though descendants remained.

Cestohowa, TX

The burial ground for the Czestochowa parish was pieced together from acre donations in the 1870s and became a chronicle in stone of Polish immigrant life in Texas. Its markers—many inscribed in Polish until the 1930s—record the parish's founding priests, its authors and pastors, and the toll of the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic, which took Frances Gawlik and three of her children within a single week. Among more than 800 graves lie dozens of military veterans, from Confederate soldiers to men who served through Vietnam.

Cestohowa, TX

This parish grew out of one of the oldest Polish colonies in America, planted in Karnes County by immigrants who had followed the pioneers of nearby Panna Maria. After lightning destroyed the "Mother Colony" church in 1877, the Czestochowa settlers built their own sanctuary—a decision that stirred real controversy among the tight-knit Polish community before ending in reconciliation, sealed by a gift of a painting of Our Lady of Czestochowa, Poland's patroness. Blessed in 1878 and enlarged in the 1930s, the church anchored a community that Americanized even its spelling, from Czestochowa to Cestohowa.

New Braunfels, TX

On March 27, 1960, four St. Mary's University students exploring the hills near New Braunfels broke into a vast, still-growing cavern named for the natural rock bridge at its mouth. Dedicated in 1964 by Governor John Connally, the early-Cretaceous formation proved to hold far older human stories — artifacts dating back some 7,000 years, ancient remains, and Indian campsites. The caverns join deep geologic time with the long presence of Native people on the land.

New York, NY

When Central Park was laid out in the mid-19th century, its designers gave each entrance a name honoring a walk of life — mariners, miners, artists, and here, the naturalists. This gate salutes the countless students who have passed through it to study birds, plants, and geology under the wing of the American Museum of Natural History, just across the park. It marks the meeting point of a great public landscape and a great public institution of science.

Corpus Christi, TX

Commissioned in March 1941 as the nation prepared for war, Naval Air Station Corpus Christi grew into one of the country's great flight schools, graduating some 35,000 aviators and earning the nickname 'the University of the Air.' Its trainees included future president George H. W. Bush and astronaut-senator John Glenn, while hundreds of WAVES served as instructors, controllers, and technicians across its many auxiliary fields.

Quincy, MA

Naval Air Station Squantum, on the Quincy shoreline, was one of the early cradles of American naval aviation, hosting flights and reserve training from the 1910s into the early Cold War. These reinforced bunkers safely stored the station's ordnance until the ammunition depot was abandoned in 1953 as the base wound down. Their thick walls and earthen mounds are among the last physical traces of a once-busy military airfield.

Key West, FL

The United States bought this harbor-front lot in Key West in 1833, and Congress authorized a Naval Depot here in 1852, built under the supervision of Capt. J.M. Scarritt and Lt. J.J. Philbrick. Key West's deep harbor made it a strategic foothold for the young republic's navy, guarding the vital shipping lanes of the Florida Straits. The storehouse later served as U.S. Coast Guard headquarters.