Search Markers

Town of Hunter, NY

In 1885 New York set aside its wild Adirondack and Catskill lands as a Forest Preserve, and in 1894 wrote a remarkable promise into the state constitution: these woods would be kept "forever wild." This tablet, placed in 1985 amid the Catskill peaks of Greene County, marks a full century of that pledge. It was one of the boldest conservation experiments in the nation—an era when Americans were only beginning to wonder whether the forests they were rapidly cutting might not be endless after all.

Hungerford, TX

In 1880, lured by Texas's offer of free land to railroad builders, investors chartered the New York, Texas & Mexican Railroad to run 91 miles between Rosenberg and Victoria. Silver-mine millionaire John W. Mackay bankrolled it and his brother-in-law, Count Joseph Telfener of Italy, oversaw construction using Italian laborers whose pasta rations earned the line its nickname, the "Macaroni Line." The promoters named six stations for family members, including Hungerford, honoring their father-in-law and the railroad's vice-president. The venture faltered and was sold to Southern Pacific in 1885, but the little farming and ranching community it seeded endured.

Houston, TX

New Zion Temple began in 1933 as 'The Little Church on Ruthven Street,' a storefront Church of God in Christ congregation that Bishop Hayward W. Falls built from donated supplies in Houston's Freedmen's Town. Falls later led it out of the denomination to become nondenominational and made it the headquarters of the Worldwide Fellowship, from which affiliated churches spread across several states and abroad.

Newark, NJ

In 1919, Newark opened a college dedicated to training engineers, part of a national surge in technical education as American industry mechanized and cities expanded. Over the following century the school grew into a cornerstone of engineering and applied science in New Jersey, anchoring what became a major public technological university. This monument and its accompanying time capsule, sealed in 2019 and meant to be opened in 2119, mark that hundred-year milestone as a gift from one generation of engineers to the next.

Weatherford, TX

Robert S. Porter, who became newly organized Parker County's first county judge, settled this fertile ground in 1855 among a cluster of pioneer families. A Cumberland Presbyterian congregation took root in members' homes in 1871, and after Jim D. Newberry donated land in 1874 for a church and cemetery, the community itself came to bear the Newberry name. A church, a school, and a tabernacle followed, and the cemetery — its earliest grave a teenager drowned in the Brazos in 1879 — still chronicles the families who built the place.

Comanche vicinity, TX

Pioneers reached this stretch of Comanche County in the mid-1850s and named their settlement for the nearby South Leon River. In 1872 P.W. Brewer set aside land for a cemetery and church, and the oldest documented grave, that of Rosie E. McCurdy, dates to 1875. Renamed Newburg in the 1880s, the graveyard holds local pioneers and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Mexican War.

Jacksonville, TX

The Rev. John Madison Newburn, who came to pastor Jacksonville's First Baptist Church in 1896, built this Victorian home with classical revival touches in 1903. Closely tied to Jacksonville College, the house served as a dormitory when campus housing ran short, and after a 1928 fire destroyed a small local hospital, Lula Newburn opened her home as a temporary hospital until a new one could be built. Owned by Newburn heirs, later a Rawlinson family home and a day care, it returned to Jacksonville College in 1994.

Newlin, TX

Newlin is a tiny farming community on the rolling plains of Hall County, in the Texas Panhandle country that opened to Anglo settlement only after the buffalo and the Comanche were gone. Its cemetery, laid out in 1904, gathered the pioneer families who broke this cotton-and-cattle land in the early twentieth century. In 2009 the State of Texas recognized it as a Historic Texas Cemetery, protecting it as a record of the people who settled here.

Boston, MA

In the early 1950s, Boston's Back Bay was home to a remarkable pair of young students: a Georgia-born theology doctoral candidate at Boston University and an Alabama-raised singer training at the New England Conservatory. Their 1952 introduction and the courtship that followed — carried on between rooming houses along Massachusetts Avenue — would join two lives that reshaped a nation. The League of Women for Community Service, where Coretta boarded, was itself a pillar of Black Boston, a reminder that this romance unfolded within a close, striving community.

Sylvester vicinity, TX

Rancher Jim Newman, one of Fisher County's earliest settlers, established a spread here around 1879, and the community that grew nearby took his name when the county's first post office opened in 1881. By the early 1900s Newman had schools, churches, and a store, and its cemetery—set aside in 1906—holds sixteen veterans, including Civil War soldier R. L. Creswell. As population steadily declined, the churches and school closed one by one, leaving the still-active cemetery as the town's last trace.

Walker County, TX

Newport was founded in 1846 by Joseph Werner, a German emigrant who staked his hopes on the traffic of the Trinity River. Like many antebellum Texas river towns, its fortunes rose and fell with the water: when steamboat navigation on the Trinity declined, the town was left behind and abandoned.

Newport, KY

At the mouth of the Licking River where it empties into the Ohio, the U.S. Army built Newport Barracks in the early 1800s to anchor its presence on the young nation's western river frontier. For most of the nineteenth century the post served as a recruiting depot, supply base, and mustering ground, sending soldiers downriver through the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War. Chronic flooding at the low riverside site eventually drove the Army to abandon it in the 1890s for higher ground at nearby Fort Thomas.

Newport, PA · est. 2015

In July 1841, three enslaved men from Maryland—Alick, Tom, and Ben—fled north and were tracked to Newport by bounty hunters. Ben drowned trying to cross the Juniata River, and the other two were seized, but several Newport residents helped them get away. Six of those citizens were convicted in federal court in 1842 for aiding the escape.

Newport, KY

Newport was a mustering point in the War of 1812, where Kentucky volunteers crossed the Ohio in August 1812 to march to the relief of General Hull at Detroit. Their campaign turned tragic at Frenchtown on the River Raisin, where all but thirty were killed or captured days after taking the town. A second wave gathered here in 1813 and, led by Governor Isaac Shelby, helped defeat the British and their Native allies at the Battle of the Thames, ending the fighting in the Old Northwest.

Chevy Chase, MD

In 1774, on the eve of the Revolution, Thomas Johns—soon to serve as a colonel in the Continental cause—joined Georgetown merchant Thomas Richardson to raise flour mills along the reliable current of Rock Creek. Grinding grain into flour for the growing capital region, mills operated on this site for roughly a century, outlasting the men who built them and falling silent only in the 1870s. In an age before steam, a dependable creek was industrial infrastructure, and Rock Creek's waters turned the stones that fed Georgetown's wharves and tables.

Gainesville, TX

When growing Gainesville needed a high school but lacked the money, W.H. and Ella Dougherty donated their mansion—once the home of U.S. Senator Joseph W. Bailey—along with surrounding land in 1920. They asked only that the school bear the name of their son Isaac Newsome Dougherty, dead at 26 in the great influenza pandemic that began in 1918. The school opened in 1922 and, from 1924, also housed the college that became North Central Texas College.

Asheville, NC

Newton Academy grew from Union Hill Academy, established before 1793 and named for the Reverend George Newton, making it one of the earliest schools in western North Carolina. The present Newton Academy School is the fourth building to occupy the site, marking more than two centuries of continuous education.

Newton, TX

Newton Cemetery has served this Newton County seat since it was formally set aside in 1903, though its first burial came in 1864 when landowner G.W. Robinson laid his young son to rest. After Robinson's death the land passed to another resident who donated it as a public burial ground. Its graves hold veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, and since 1943 a citizens' association has cared for the site.

Midlothian, TX

This family plot holds the Newtons, Peters Colony pioneers who reached the Ovilla area in the 1840s. Patriarch Larkin Newton, born in South Carolina in 1794, was a War of 1812 veteran who fought at the Battle of New Orleans and served as a county commissioner in three states before settling in Ellis County, where he built a schoolhouse for his family. The oldest grave is his own, from 1858, joined over time by his wife, children, and grandchildren.

Newton, TX

Newton County was carved from Jasper County and organized in 1846, just as Texas joined the United States, and named for Sergeant John Newton, a hero of the American Revolution. Its county seat bounced between Newton and Burkeville before settling permanently at Newton in 1853. The naming honored a Revolutionary legacy even as a new American county took shape on the Louisiana border.

Newton, TX

Newton County's present courthouse, raised in 1902-03 from brick fired on nearby Caney Creek, followed earlier courthouses at Burkeville in 1848 and on this square in 1853. Contractors Martin & Moody of Comanche gave it a Second Empire design with a mansard roof, corner quoins, and an unusual truncated clock tower. The interior was altered in 1910 and 1925, a jail was added in 1936, and the building was restored in the early 1970s.

Newton, TX

By 1941, with mechanized armies overrunning Europe, the U.S. Army confronted its own unreadiness and staged the massive Louisiana Maneuvers, sprawling across 3,400 square miles of Texas and involving nearly half a million troops in 19 divisions. Newton County residents opened their land to the exercises, where troops, tanks, vehicles, and aircraft flying 'flour' bombing raids rehearsed modern combat. The maneuvers of 1941–1944 phased out the horse cavalry and taught the Army how to fight — and win — a mechanized war.

Newton, TX

During the Civil War, remote Newton County became a vital Confederate supply corridor, guarding against Federal attempts to push up the Sabine River and into Texas. Confederates threw up breastworks and kept an arsenal at Burkeville, while "The Old Beef Trail" drove thousands of Texas cattle eastward as far as Mobile—its ferries fitted with pens and ox-led swimming herds. Towns like Farrsville tanned leather, ground corn, and made boots for the army, and the county, which had voted 178 to 3 for secession, sent some 400 men to fight.

Crockett, TX

Charles and Elizabeth Newton built this ornate house in 1899 but lived in it only five years. Acquired by Willis and Alice Norris in 1909, it later became—under the terms of Alice's will—a residence for retired Methodist ministers, a role it filled until 1970. Its projecting gable with cutaway corners, wraparound porch, turned posts, and jigsaw trim make it a fine example of turn-of-the-century Texas domestic architecture.

Town of Elmira, NY

In the late summer of 1779, the Sullivan Expedition swept through the heart of Iroquois country in what is now western New York. The village referenced here, christened "Newtown" by General John Sullivan's troops, was a Loyalist and Native settlement that lay in the army's path. After the nearby Battle of Newtown on August 29, 1779 — the campaign's only major engagement — Sullivan's forces razed villages and crops as part of a scorched-earth strategy ordered by George Washington to break the power of the British-allied Iroquois nations.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2009

Founded in Philadelphia in 1965, NFL Films transformed how Americans watched football, trading dry game footage for slow-motion drama, tight close-ups, orchestral scores, and booming narration. Its cinematic style won a shelf full of Emmys and gave fans an intimate new view of the sport. In doing so it helped lift professional football to the center of American popular culture.

San Jose, CA

The Ng Shing Gung temple stood at the heart of San Jose's Chinatown, a place of worship blending Taoist devotion with gilded Buddhist symbols, folklore, and ornamentation imported from China. For the Chinese immigrants who faced exclusion and hostility in 19th-century California, the temple was a spiritual anchor and a community gathering place. Its inscription invokes good fortune and virtue sheltering the faithful far and wide.

Nacogdoches, TX

Born in Germany and arriving in New Orleans in 1817, Adolphus Sterne was a Jewish emigrant who settled in Nacogdoches in 1826 and threw himself into the turbulent birth of Texas. A merchant and early Scottish Rite Mason, he backed the Fredonian Rebellion and the Texas Revolution with money and influence, then served in public office and the state legislature. His home became a gathering place in a raw frontier town on the edge of a new republic.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2000

Nicholas Biddle lived here as one of the most powerful men in Jacksonian America. As president of the Second Bank of the United States from 1823 to 1836, he steered the nation's central bank until Andrew Jackson's famous "Bank War" destroyed it. A scholar and tastemaker as well, Biddle championed Greek Revival architecture, whose columned facades still define courthouses and banks across the country, and he edited the first published account of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Banquete, TX

Born in 1835 in Alsace, Nicholas Bluntzer came to Texas at nine with the Alsatian families led by empresario Henri Castro. He rode as a scout on Robert E. Lee's 1856–57 expedition against the Comanche, fought for the Confederacy at Palmito Ranch—the war's last battle—in 1865, and afterward became an influential South Texas rancher and cotton grower, lending his name to the settlement of Bluntzer.

Galveston, TX

Born in Canada in 1802, Nicholas Descomps Labadie trained first for the priesthood, then for medicine, before coming to Texas in 1831 to serve as a post surgeon. During the Texas Revolution he served as surgeon and infantryman, and at the decisive battle of San Jacinto he interpreted Santa Anna's surrender to Sam Houston. He settled in Galveston, where he became a leading physician, businessman, and supporter of the city's Catholic church and charity hospital.

Smithfield Township, PA · est. 1947

Nicholas Depuy came to this stretch of the Delaware around 1727, among the very first Europeans known to settle the region. When the French and Indian War brought raiding to the frontier after 1755, his stockaded and garrisoned home was pressed into service as Fort Depuy, one of the fortified farmsteads that dotted the wartime backcountry. Such homes-turned-forts show how thin the line was between domestic life and frontier warfare.

Smithfield Township, PA · est. 1930

In 1727 Nicholas Dupuy became the first European settler at Shawnee on the Delaware, buying some 3,000 acres — including river islands — from the Minsi (Munsee) band of the Lenape. He descended from Huguenot refugees who had fled religious persecution in France and reached New Amsterdam in 1662. By mid-century the growing community had land set aside, through proprietor William Allen, for a Dutch Reformed congregation that endures today as a Presbyterian church.

Tivoli, TX

Nicholas Fagan came to Texas in 1829, settling in Power's colony along the Gulf Coast, and served as a private in Fraser's Refugio company during the Texas Revolution. Captured after the Battle of Coleto in 1836, he escaped the fate of the Goliad Massacre when Mexican friends intervened to spare his life. The state honored him with this marker in 1956.

Dallas, TX

Nicholas Henry Darnell arrived in Texas in 1838 and was almost immediately swept into public life, winning election to the Republic of Texas Congress and serving as Speaker of the House. He was a delegate to the 1845 convention that brought Texas into the Union and later served again as Speaker in the state legislature. In 1863 he resigned to lead the 18th Texas Cavalry, and after the Civil War he returned to office and helped draft the state's 1875 constitution.

Galveston, TX

Born in Ireland and raised by his widowed mother in Ohio, Nicholas Joseph Clayton served in the Union navy during the Civil War before finding his life's calling in Galveston. Sent there in 1872 to oversee two building projects, he stayed to become the city's defining architect during its golden era, designing churches, homes, and commercial landmarks across Texas and the South. His surviving works include the Bishop's Palace, "Old Red" at the medical college, and St. Mary's Cathedral in Austin.

Cahokia, IL

The Jarrot Mansion rose in the French colonial village of Cahokia around 1807–1810, built for Nicholas Jarrot, a young Frenchman who fled the Revolution and remade himself as one of the Illinois Country's richest merchants and landowners. Its Federal-style brick walls made it the finest house for miles in a raw territorial settlement, and it is widely regarded as the oldest brick building in Illinois. Jarrot outfitted militia, sold land to newcomers, and once hosted the explorers who passed through this Mississippi River crossroads on the eve of American westward expansion.

New Orleans, LA

On January 10, 1812, the steamboat New Orleans, commanded by Nicholas Roosevelt, completed the first successful steam-powered voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and tied up at this spot. The passage proved that boats could travel upstream against the current, transforming inland commerce. New Orleans would grow into one of the world's great ports on the strength of the steamboat trade.

Rockne, TX

Born in 1804, Nicholas W. Eastland came to Texas in 1834 and, in the spring of 1836, joined Captain Horton's company under Colonel James Fannin during the Texas Revolution. When Fannin's command was captured and largely massacred after the Battle of Coleto, Eastland was among the fortunate few who escaped. He lived on until 1891, and the State of Texas raised this memorial to him in 1957.

Winona, TX

Nicholas Wren came to Texas in 1833 and joined its army in 1836, later commissioned a lieutenant of Rangers by President Sam Houston. He fought during the Vasquez and Woll incursions of the Republic era and reportedly had a horse shot from under him at the Battle of the Hondo. Settling in Smith County by its organization in 1846, he died in the Mount Carmel community in 1859, his grave later marked by his grandsons.

Kerrville, TX

Rowland Nichols, a Kerr County commissioner born around 1805, was killed by Indians and buried in 1859 beneath a live oak on his own farm, just as he had wished. His grave became a gathering ground for the dead of a scattered frontier community, including J. C. W. Ingram, namesake of the nearby town of Ingram. For more than a century this shaded plot has held the region's pioneers.

Houston, TX

This Greek Revival home was built in 1850 in early Houston by General Ebenezer Nichols and soon passed to William Marsh Rice, the merchant-philanthropist whose fortune would later endow Rice University. Decades later Mrs. E. R. Cherry bought it with a $25 bid on the front door and moved it to save it, and it was ultimately relocated and restored by the Harris County Heritage Society.

Collingsworth County, TX

Opened in 1915 and named for county judge Arthur Clyde Nicholson, this school anchored a thriving farming community in Collingsworth County, peaking at 150 students in 1929. Rural consolidation ended its run in 1937, and today only a concrete cellar marks the spot.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2017

Trained in Italy and drawn to the growing American republic, Nicola Monachesi brought the old-world art of fresco painting to Philadelphia in the 1830s, among the first to practice it on this side of the Atlantic. His brushwork adorned grand homes, Catholic churches, and civic landmarks such as the Merchants' Exchange, blending European craft with a young nation's aspirations. The rare surviving ceiling frescoes at St. Augustine Roman Catholic Church still testify to his skill.

Uvalde, TX

Built in 1938, the Nicolas Street School is the last surviving school telling the story of African American education in Uvalde. Its creation owed much to teacher Susie Harris, who — after the school board reneged on promised new facilities for Black students — wrote directly to Uvalde resident and U.S. Vice President John Nance Garner for help, and won a new campus. In an era of "separate but seldom equal" schooling, two teachers taught eight grades here, and the school served the community until 1965, a full decade after the district voted to integrate.

Boerne, TX

In 1844, Bavarian-born civil engineer Nicolaus Zink was chosen to lead German immigrants to a Texas land grant under Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels and the Mainzer Adelsverein. Finding the granted land deep in Comanche country, Zink persuaded the prince to settle instead at the site that became New Braunfels, and his steady leadership carried the colonists through unrest, disease, and starvation. He later built homes across the Hill Country and helped engineer the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad bed to Kerrville.

Lubbock, TX

In 1888 the managers of the great IOA Ranch built the Nicolett Hotel on an open prairie, an imposing two-and-a-half-story landmark visible for miles and named for a hotel in Minneapolis. The original settlement of Lubbock gathered around it as cowboys, salesmen, and land promoters came to eat, meet, and scheme. When a new townsite was platted in 1891, the founders literally moved the hotel five miles south to the courthouse square, and the town moved with it.

Apple Springs, TX

After emancipation, African Americans in northeastern Trinity County founded the freedom colony of Nigton, where families worked as laborers, sharecroppers, and increasingly as landowners. By the 1880s the community thrived with well-kept farms, fine livestock, churches, lodges, and shops, and it prized education, winning a Rosenwald grant for a school and drawing dedicated teachers who taught for decades. Barred from white celebrations, residents built their own, including Juneteenth barbecues each June.

Commerce Charter Township, MI

During the tense early decades of the Cold War, the U.S. Army ringed major cities with Nike surface-to-air missile batteries meant to shoot down Soviet bombers before they could reach their targets. Site D-87 was part of the defensive ring guarding the Detroit metropolitan area, one of dozens of such installations that stood ready across suburban America in the 1950s and 1960s before advances in missile technology made them obsolete.

Anchorage, AK

Perched atop Mount Gordon Lyon above Anchorage, Site Summit was a U.S. Army Nike Hercules surface-to-air missile installation active during the Cold War, part of a ring of batteries meant to defend the city and its bases from Soviet bombers flying the polar route. Decommissioned in the late 1970s, it survives as one of the best-preserved Nike sites in the country.

San Jose, CA

A single stark date—February 19, 1942—marks this Nikkei (Japanese American) lantern in San Jose's historic Japantown. On that day President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal and incarceration of some 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, into remote wartime camps. The lantern stands as a quiet 'Day of Remembrance' for a community torn from its homes and businesses.

New York, NY

This plaque marks the room in Manhattan's Hotel New Yorker where Nikola Tesla, the visionary Serbian-American inventor, spent his final years and died alone in January 1943. Decades earlier Tesla had helped win the 'War of the Currents,' championing the alternating-current systems that made it practical to transmit electricity across long distances and light entire cities. By the time he died in near-poverty, the AC power grids he pioneered had become the invisible backbone of modern life. The marker turns an ordinary hotel address into the last chapter of one of history's great inventive minds.

City of Niagara Falls, NY

This monument at Niagara Falls honors Nikola Tesla, the visionary electrical engineer whose alternating-current (AC) system powered the world's first large-scale hydroelectric plant here in the 1890s. Born in 1856 in the village of Smiljan (in present-day Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hempire and later associated with Yugoslavia) and a naturalized American, Tesla's polyphase AC designs won the famous "War of the Currents" against Thomas Edison's direct current. The Niagara Falls power project, drawing on Tesla's patents, demonstrated that electricity could be generated in bulk and transmitted over long distances to cities and factories.

New York, NY · est. 1977

On January 7, 1943, the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla died in New York City at the age of eighty-six. A pioneer of alternating-current electricity, Tesla's discoveries in the field of AC power helped carry the United States and the world into the modern industrial age. This marker was placed in 1977 by the Yugoslav-American Bicentennial Committee.

Yeadon, PA · est. 2021

In 1959, after three Black families were turned away from a local swim club in the Philadelphia suburb of Yeadon, they refused to accept exclusion and pooled community resources to buy land and build their own. The result, the Nile Swim Club, became the first private swim club in the nation owned and operated by African Americans. In an era when public and private pools were flashpoints of segregation, the Nile offered families a place to swim, gather, and build community on their own terms.

Fort Worth, TX

Incorporated in 1911, tiny Niles City packed so much industry into its square-and-a-half miles that boosters dubbed it the "Richest Little Town in the World." Its townsite held the Fort Worth Stockyards, major meatpacking plants of Swift and Armour, grain elevators, and an oil refinery, pushing taxable property to $30 million by the early 1920s. Named for Boston businessman Louville Veranus Niles, whose reorganization of the local packing company drew the big meatpackers, the city was annexed by Fort Worth in 1923.

Sabine Pass, TX

A New Yorker who came to Texas with Robertson's colony in 1834, Niles F. Smith fought in the Texas Revolution and then helped build the young Republic, serving as its first banking commissioner along with posts as customs collector and land agent. Settling at Sabine Pass in 1841, he erected Jefferson County's first steam sawmill and its first church, and backed annexation to the United States in 1845. He rests here beside his wife Abigail and their two sons.

Hale Center, TX

Swedish-born Nils Akeson came to the thinly settled Texas Panhandle from Iowa in the late 1880s and helped found the town of Hale Center as an officer of its townsite company. He rode for the legendary XIT Ranch, served as postmaster, opened the town's first store, and helped bring the Santa Fe Railroad through in 1909. As mayor, land developer, and school trustee, he shaped nearly every institution of the young town.

Fredericksburg, TX

Charles Henry Nimitz bought this property in 1855 and by 1860 was running a hotel that fed and housed frontier travelers while sheltering his own large family. An 1870s expansion gave it a whimsical steamboat-shaped facade, and it became a hub of community life. In 1964 the building became a museum honoring the founder's grandson, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and those who served with him in the Pacific during World War II.

Tryon, NC

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon in 1933, the woman the world came to know as Nina Simone was a classically trained pianist who fused gospel, jazz, blues, and classical traditions into a sound unlike anyone else's. As her fame grew through the mid-twentieth century, she poured that artistry into the civil rights struggle, becoming one of its most fearless musical voices. This bronze monument, sculpted by Zenos Frudakis and cast at Laran Bronze Studios in 2010, stands in the small Blue Ridge foothills town where her story began, its inscription carrying her own conviction that an artist has a duty to reflect the times.