Search Markers

Oakville, TX

Named for the live oaks around it, Oakville served as the seat of Live Oak County from the county's creation in 1856 until 1919. For over sixty years it was the hub of government and commerce for this stretch of South Texas ranch country. When the county seat moved to railroad-served George West, Oakville faded into a quiet crossroads.

Oakville, TX

When Thomas Wilson donated this ground in 1857, the land had already passed through the hands of empire — it was originally part of the 1831 McMullen-McGloin colony granted under Mexico. As the young community of Oakville took shape, its cemetery became the resting place of the county's founding generation, including town founder J.T. James and the organizers of Live Oak County. The graves here read like a roll call of the pioneers who settled this stretch of South Texas.

Oakville, TX

Oakville grew up on land granted to Irish immigrants under the McMullen-McGloin Mexican colony, at a spot along the Nueces watershed once simply called "on the sulphur." When Live Oak County organized in 1856, Oakville became county seat, and its post office opened in 1857 with mail arriving by stagecoach on the San Antonio–Corpus Christi–Brownsville run. The town thrived until the railroad bypassed it in 1913 and the county seat moved away, though the post office still serves the community today.

Raleigh, NC

Oakwood Cemetery, a few blocks east, holds some of North Carolina's most consequential dead, including governors Aycock, Bragg, Fowle, Holden, Swain, and Worth, alongside Confederate soldiers and other notables. Established in the Civil War era, it became a resting place for the state's political and military figures. Its grounds read like a roll call of North Carolina history.

Cisco, TX

Oakwood Cemetery in Cisco began by accident in 1883, when a family traveling to Fort Worth for lumber buried a stillborn son beneath an oak in their pasture. A cemetery association organized in 1899 fenced and beautified the grounds, and during the Depression the Works Progress Administration raised a 2,517-foot rock wall and a signature stone archway. Today more than 7,000 graves rest here, including over 600 veterans spanning the Civil War through Vietnam.

Austin, TX

Oakwood Cemetery took shape in 1839, the same moment Austin was being chosen as capital of the Republic of Texas, when the first burials were made on this hill. The land became city property in 1856, and over the decades the name shifted from City Cemetery to Austin City Cemetery to, in 1912, Oakwood. Beneath its oaks lie governors, cabinet members, mayors, and ordinary citizens, with two Jewish sections cared for by Temple Beth Israel since 1876.

Denton, TX

Oakwood Cemetery took shape soon after Denton was chosen as the county seat in 1857, on land donated by pioneer settler Hiram Cisco, who had also given ground for the townsite. Its earliest grave belongs to a Mrs. Wilson, who died in childbirth crossing the area by covered wagon. Among those resting here are town founder Jesse M. Blount and other early leaders—along with two men hanged for murder in 1879 whose stones simply read "Executed."

Jacksboro, TX

Oakwood Cemetery has served Jacksboro for well over a century, with graves dating to 1859 on land donated by old settlers between 1883 and 1904. In 1899 townspeople organized the Oakwood Cemetery Association—with Miss Alice Rogers as its first president—and secured a charter in 1908 to care for the grounds. An endowment begun in 1947 helped ensure the burial ground endured as a lasting record of the frontier community's founders.

Tyler, TX

Tyler's Oakwood Cemetery began in the 1840s as Lollar's Cemetery on land first used for burials before Texas was a decade into statehood. It holds a raised section of Confederate dead from the Civil War, a separate Jewish Beth-el Cemetery, and the graves of many leading citizens, including a Texas Supreme Court justice and Governor Richard B. Hubbard, who later served as U.S. Ambassador to Japan. WPA crews expanded and improved the grounds in the 1930s.

Huntsville, TX

Burials began here as early as 1846, and in 1847 Huntsville's founder Pleasant Gray deeded a plot that neighbors' donations steadily enlarged. Many stones bear the date 1867, when a yellow-fever epidemic swept Walker County. Among those who rest here are General Sam Houston, the towering figure of the Texas Revolution and Republic, and Henderson King Yoakum, author of the first comprehensive history of Texas.

Coldspring, TX

Set on land from the old Robert Rankin league, Oakwood Cemetery grew alongside the earliest days of San Jacinto County, with its first documented burial dating to 1853 and older, unmarked graves likely predating even that. Beneath its oaks lie the pioneers, children, officeholders, and veterans who built a corner of East Texas in the decades after statehood. A cemetery association chartered in 1979 keeps the ground and its stories.

Honey Grove, TX

Begun in 1846 as the Walcott Graveyard around the grave of Kentucky-born pioneer James G. Gilmer, this ground became a public cemetery when the Walcott family deeded it to the Honey Grove community. Beneath its oaks lie the town's founding families and more than 275 veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars, some memorialized because their bodies never came home. Members of the area's pre-Civil War enslaved community and later freed Black citizens are buried here as well.

Waco, TX

Before it became a cemetery in 1878, this Waco tract held a fairgrounds and a racetrack; afterward it grew into a 157-acre resting place that received reburials from the city's older graveyards. Uniquely, its association has long been governed by a board of directors made up entirely of women, as its founding by-laws required. Among those interred are three Texas governors, the pioneer for whom McLennan County is named, and a crusading editor shot dead in 1898 over his caustic pen.

Comanche, TX

When Texas redrew Comanche County in 1858 and moved its seat, land developer Captain John Duncan donated 200 acres in 1859 for a new townsite, setting aside ground for a graveyard, churches, and schools. Named Oakwood for its stand of oaks, the cemetery's earliest marked grave is a one-year-old boy who died in 1861, and it has since gathered pioneers, civic leaders, and veterans of every conflict from the Republic of Texas onward — including both Union and Confederate dead of the Civil War. The city has owned it as a community burying ground ever since.

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth pioneer John Peter Smith — later a mayor, civic leader, and philanthropist — founded this cemetery in 1879 with a gift of 20 acres, since grown to 100. Bringing together the Oakwood, Calvary, and Trinity grounds, it holds many of the city's and county's notable dead, with plots held by lodges, unions, and churches, and separate tracts for Union and Confederate soldiers. Its chapel dates to 1914.

Joaquin, TX

This Shelby County burial ground was established in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, in the piney woods of deep East Texas. It was recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2012.

Dallas, TX

On November 22, 1963, hours after President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One at Love Field. His longtime friend, U.S. District Judge Sarah T. Hughes, administered it at 2:38 p.m., with Lady Bird Johnson at his side and a grieving Jacqueline Kennedy beside them. Johnson became the first Texan to hold the presidency.

Maricopa County, AZ

This memorial remembers the Oatman family, emigrants killed in March 1851 while crossing the Arizona desert on the trail west. The attack left young Olive Oatman a captive for years before her return—one of the most widely told frontier stories of its era.

Bertram, TX

This burial ground holds some of the earliest settlers of the Oatmeal community, with its oldest documented graves — a mother and her infant daughter — dating to 1854. Land was formally deeded for the cemetery in 1871, and it grew over the following century as an association took up its care. Among those laid to rest here are veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.

Fallon, NV

Designed in 1914 by Frederick J. DeLongchamps, Nevada's preeminent architect of the era, the Oats Park School is among his earliest—and perhaps his very first—public school designs, later expanded with matching wings he added in 1921. Its contrasting brick colors and careful interior detailing earned it a place on the State and National Registers of Historic Places in 1990. In 1995 the Churchill Arts Council began renovating it, reopening the building as the Oats Park Art Center in 2003.

Mission, TX

In 1916 the young city of Mission, deep in the Rio Grande Valley, secured a long-term lease to turn land into a public park, naming it for the Missionary Oblate Fathers—the Catholic society whose earlier land sale had made the townsite possible. For decades the grounds hummed with band concerts, Memorial Day observances, and Fourth of July celebrations. As the heart of an early residential addition, the park became the social anchor of a fast-growing border town.

Orange County, NC

Around 1680 to 1710, a village of the Occaneechi people stood a half mile east of here, astride the Great Trading Path that carried commerce deep into the Carolina interior. In 1701 the explorer John Lawson passed through and recorded his impressions of the community. The Occaneechi were influential traders whose position on the path made them a hub of exchange between Native nations and colonists.

Beach, ND

The Occidental Elevators were the first grain elevators built in Beach, North Dakota, a railroad town on the state's western edge founded in the early twentieth-century homestead boom. Towering elevators like these were the economic heart of prairie towns, gathering wheat from surrounding homesteads for shipment east by rail. Being the first, they mark the moment Beach became a shipping point on the Northern Plains.

San Luis Obispo County, CA

In the small farming and dune town of Oceano on California's Central Coast, this memorial honors the local young men who died in World War II. Like thousands of rural American communities, Oceano sent a generation of its sons overseas between 1941 and 1945, and marked their loss with a permanent tribute at home.

Perryton, TX

When Jim McLarty and J. V. Stump fenced ninety acres for a cemetery in the town of Ochiltree in 1902, McLarty himself became its first occupant, killed at twenty-one in a fall from his horse. The county took the deed in 1927 and an association formed in 1930, and during the Depression the Works Progress Administration built its entry gate. Its graves hold veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Perryton, TX

Ochiltree County, in the Texas Panhandle, was carved from Young and Bexar territories, created in 1876 and formally organized in 1889. It honors William Beck Ochiltree (1811–1867), a Texas Supreme Court justice, treasury secretary, and the last attorney general of the Republic of Texas who later served in the legislature, backed secession in 1861, and became a Confederate colonel. The county seat moved from Ochiltree to Perryton in 1920.

Perryton, TX

Ochiltree County was created in 1876 and named for Texas jurist William Beck Ochiltree, but settlers only began digging dugouts near Wolf Creek in 1886, organizing the county in 1889 with their village as county seat. A two-story courthouse of Dodge City lumber rose in 1891 and doubled as church, school, and social hall; by 1903 the town of Ochiltree had 600 people, a bank, flour mill, and newspaper. When the Santa Fe Railway founded Perryton 8 miles north in 1919, the railroad lured residents with free lots and whole buildings were hauled to the new site.

Temple, TX

Czech immigrant families of the Unity of the Brethren faith settled the farming community of Ocker in eastern Bell County in the late 1870s, worshipping in their homes until traveling Czech preachers helped them organize in 1892. They raised their first church the next year, and the congregation grew steadily as Czech gradually gave way to English by the 1940s.

Orlando, FL · est. 2019

On Election Day 1920, Black residents of Ocoee who owned land and businesses sought to vote and were turned away; after Mose Norman persisted, white mobs unleashed days of terror. They surrounded and burned July Perry's home, and the next morning a lynch mob took the wounded Perry from the Orange County Jail and hanged him within sight of Judge Cheney's home. Mobs burned some two dozen Black homes, two churches, and a lodge, and within a year Ocoee's entire Black community was driven out.

Oconee County, SC

Oconee Station stands on what was once the far frontier of the South Carolina backcountry. In the years after the Revolution, a stone blockhouse was built here as a military outpost guarding the fringe of settlement, and it later served as a trading post exchanging goods with the Cherokee. The site marks a meeting point of frontier defense, commerce, and the shifting boundary between settler and Native lands.

Hyde County, NC

Erected in 1823 to guide vessels through the busy trade route at Ocracoke Inlet, this 75-foot whitewashed tower is the oldest lighthouse still in service in North Carolina. For two centuries its beacon has marked one of the most treacherous stretches of the Atlantic coast.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Octavius V. Catto was a rising leader of Black Philadelphia in the Civil War and Reconstruction years—an early graduate of the Institute for Colored Youth who became an educator, a military officer, and a tireless organizer for equal rights. On election day in 1871, as he urged Black citizens to exercise their newly won right to vote, he was assassinated by rioters. His death was mourned across the city as the loss of a brilliant champion of equality.

Corsicana, TX

In 1885 the Grand Lodge of Texas, Independent Order of Odd Fellows, founded this home as one of the state's first fraternal orphanages, on 200 acres given by the Corsicana lodge and local citizens. It grew into a self-contained community with its own school district, farm and dairy, power plant, and even a gym and swimming pool, peaking near 400 residents in the 1920s. It also sheltered the aged until 1928, closed its school in 1943, and, renamed in 1948, has cared for more than 5,500 people over its life.

Gonzales, TX

Established in 1870, this burial ground was founded under the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, one of the great fraternal orders that provided mutual aid, burial insurance, and social bonds to nineteenth-century Americans. Cemeteries like it were often a community's most enduring institution, tying together the families of Gonzales across generations. It is recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery.

Sherman, TX

Built in 1875, this Odd Fellows Hall was the third home of a Sherman lodge organized in 1854, and it doubled as the town's civic heart — opening a 74-student school a decade before Sherman had a public one. Its Civil War story is striking: at a June 1862 meeting, every member but one aging brother left to join the Confederate army, and the lodge kept that meeting formally 'open' until the war ended. From its ranks came three Grand Masters of Texas and a Sovereign Grand Master of the World.

Goldsboro, NC

Opened in 1892, the Odd Fellows Home in Goldsboro served as an orphanage and school run by the fraternal order, caring for and educating children until it closed in 1971. Over its lifetime it provided for some 960 young people. The original 20-acre tract has since become a city park.

Kosse, TX

The Odds community took root around 1854 when the David Barron family and other settlers established a scattered farming settlement first known as Buffalo Mott. When a post office opened in 1899, the postal department required a new name, and the still-debated "Odds" stuck. A cotton gin, the Locust Grove school, and Methodist and Baptist congregations anchored the community until declining population thinned it to a scatter of homes.

Franklin, NH

This ornamental arch has marked the entrance to Odell Park in Franklin, New Hampshire since 1909, in the era when American towns embraced the public-parks movement and set aside green space for recreation and civic pride. Franklin was a bustling New England mill town on the Winnipesaukee and Pemigewasset rivers, and a landscaped park with a formal gateway was exactly the kind of turn-of-the-century civic improvement that growing industrial communities took on. The arch has since welcomed generations of residents to concerts, ballgames, and quiet afternoons under the trees.

Sinton, TX

Sinton rose in the 1890s as a planned railroad town, and merchant David Odem was among the founders who bet on its future. In 1909 the Sinton State Bank—of which Odem was a principal stockholder—raised this handsome Beaux Arts building, with a corner entry, terra cotta ornament, and round-arched windows that announced the young town's ambitions. The bank failed during the Depression in 1934, but its sturdy walls outlasted the storms and fires that leveled Sinton's early wooden storefronts.

Odem, TX

On April 28, 1912, the Baptists of Odem organized their own congregation with the help of a traveling missionary, meeting at first once a month in the Methodist church before land was donated for a frame sanctuary. Through donated labor, a Depression-era building, and a World War II that cost the church a member and made materials scarce, the congregation kept building—raising a brick sanctuary in 1951 and education wings in the decades after. Traditions like its harvest-day fundraiser have carried across a full century.

Littlefield Township, MI

This memorial honors the men and women of Oden, a small community in Michigan's Emmet County, who served in the nation's armed forces. Like countless small-town veterans' memorials, it gathers the community's service across generations of wars into a single place of remembrance. It speaks to how rural America has long borne its share of military service.

Odessa, TX

After the Texas and Pacific Railway reached the area in 1881, an Ohio townsite company promoted Odessa to settlers, and excursion trains carried families like the Whites of Indiana out to the West Texas prairie. The town gained a post office in 1885, was platted in 1886, and became county seat when Ector County organized in 1891. A farming and ranching community until oil was struck nearby in 1926, Odessa boomed into a major petrochemical center after World War II.

Odessa, TX

In 1886 the Texas & Pacific Railroad handed 640 acres of its land grant to John Hoge of Zanesville, Ohio, who formed the Odessa Land & Townsite Company to sell off town lots — prime house lots for $150, business lots for $200. He flooded the eastern states with literature touting rich soil, pure water, and a healthful climate, and the railroad ran excursion trains with free sleeping cars to lure buyers. A small frame land office stood on this site until 1911, later serving as school and church.

Odessa, TX

Roughly 20,000 years ago a shower of nickel-iron meteorites slammed into the West Texas plains, the largest gouging a funnel-shaped crater some 550 feet across and 100 feet deep. Over the millennia wind and water filled the depressions until they nearly vanished, and smaller buried craters went undetected until University of Texas excavations exposed them in the early 1940s. Today the main crater survives only as a shallow, rock-rimmed dimple in the earth.

Odessa, TX

In 1946 four West Texas oilmen founded the Odessa Natural Gasoline Company to capture the natural gas being flared away as waste in the oil fields. That gas proved ideal for making butadiene and styrene—the building blocks of synthetic rubber—and through the 1950s the Odessa Chamber of Commerce helped attract a cluster of plants that grew into what was then the largest petrochemical complex in the world. Firms like Shell, Rexene, and El Paso Products anchored an industry that reshaped the town.

Odessa, TX

Odessa's telephone exchange opened around 1897 in the early years of rural Texas telephony, when connecting far-flung ranches meant improvising with whatever ran across the land. Under pioneer rancher A. Quincy Cooper, service reached the countryside by stringing calls along barbed-wire fence lines. In a remarkable coincidence, Cooper's repair work on one such line in 1915 briefly broke into the first transcontinental telephone call between Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, and the exchange was folded into Southwestern Bell in 1928.

Safety Harbor, FL

Odet Philippe, born in Lyon, France, in 1787, settled on the shores of Tampa Bay and became one of the earliest non-Native pioneers of what is now Pinellas County, dying at this site in 1869. He is widely remembered for introducing citrus—especially grapefruit—cultivation to the region, helping seed an industry that would define Florida. His homestead at Safety Harbor sat amid ancient Native American shell mounds along the bay. His grave marks the resting place of a genuine frontier settler whose influence outlived him by generations.

Valley Mills, TX

Tennessee-born pioneer John Odle brought his family to this Bosque County country in 1856 and about 1860 raised a cabin of oak logs, living in it until he could build a sturdier rock house for his thirteen children. During the Civil War he rode with a frontier ranger company charged with guarding the settlements, fighting at the Battle of Dove Creek against the Kickapoo in January 1865. The surviving cabin is a rare relic of frontier homebuilding.

Austin, TX

Swiss immigrant Fridolin "Fritz" Oertli came to Travis County in 1904 and by about 1923 was running a dairy, his wife Margaretha making Swiss cheese while Fritz yodeled for guests. Three of their children carried on the business, adapting through the end of home milk delivery in 1950 and shifting locations as Austin's growth swallowed their pastureland. When it closed in 2001 after 78 years, the Oertli Dairy was the last dairy farm in Travis County, its land becoming a city park.

Texarkana, TX

Built about 1879 for the First National Bank, the Offenhauser Building was the first brick structure in the young railroad town of Texarkana. On its second floor was an insurance agency where, in 1883, pioneer businessman F. W. Offenhauser wrote his first policy before becoming a leading agent across Texas and Arkansas. The building stands as an early landmark of the town's commercial beginnings.

Orange, TX

Orange's position at a bend in the Sabine River beside vast pine forests made it a natural shipbuilding town, but by 1930 the timber was exhausted, the sawmills closed, and the Depression bore down. In 1940 Texas lawmakers secured a federal appropriation to build landing craft and destroyers there, establishing the Navy's Office of Supervisor of Shipbuilding and a sprawling yard operated largely by Consolidated Steel. Beginning in 1941 the yard launched the first warships built on the Gulf Coast for the U.S. government, ultimately producing 39 destroyers and 100 destroyer escorts during World War II.

Dallas, TX

On November 22, 1963, less than an hour after President Kennedy was assassinated at Dealey Plaza, Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit stopped a man walking through his Oak Cliff patrol area and was shot dead at this intersection by Lee Harvey Oswald. A citizen used Tippit's own radio to call for help, and the manhunt that followed led witnesses to trail Oswald into the nearby Texas Theatre, where he was arrested. Tippit, who left a wife and three children, was posthumously honored for valor and is remembered for the events his death set in motion.

Brackettville, TX

These interlocking-log quarters went up in 1854-55, just after the U.S. Army planted Fort Clark on the edge of the Texas frontier to guard the road west. Around the parade ground stood barracks, a storehouse, magazine, and hospital, and the officers who cycled through included future Civil War commanders like John Bell Hood, J.E.B. Stuart, Fitzhugh Lee, and James Longstreet. Notched horizontal logs, vertical posts, and limestone chimneys survived beneath later siding until the fort's 1944 closure.

Jacksboro, TX

Built in 1867 from cottonwood cut in nearby river bottoms, this is one of five original officers' quarters at the Jacksboro army post and reputedly one of the last such structures standing in the country. Its style was typical of 19th-century western army posts. Among the officers quartered here was General Ranald S. MacKenzie, who led the campaigns that forced Native peoples onto reservations between 1871 and 1874.

Fort Clark Springs, TX

Fort Clark began in 1852 as a U.S. Army garrison of crude log and palisade huts, gradually rebuilt in quarried stone from 1857 onward. Built in 1873–74 as duplexes for two officers' families each, these eight stone residences—with three large rooms per floor, twin fireplaces, and fifty-five-foot porches—reflect frontier military design adapted to local stone and climate. The post was deactivated in 1946 and later became the private community of Fort Clark Springs, where the old quarters were eventually sold to residents.

San Miguel County, NM

Villanueva State Park sits in a red-sandstone canyon of the Pecos River beside the old Spanish colonial village of Villanueva, one of the small farming settlements founded along the river as Hispano families pushed into the fertile bottomlands of northern New Mexico. The valley's terraced fields and adobe traditions reflect centuries of Spanish colonial and later Mexican and American settlement in the Pecos country.

Bernalillo County, NM

This official New Mexico historic marker commemorates Doña Elena Gallegos, daughter of early Hispanic colonists Antonio Gallegos and Catalina Baca, born around 1680. Her family fled New Mexico with their newborn daughter during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when Indigenous peoples drove Spanish colonists from the region for more than a decade. Returning after the reconquest, Elena Gallegos became a landholder whose name endures in the large land grant later associated with the Albuquerque area.

Magdalena, NM

This roadside marker interprets the Magdalena Fault and the rugged geology surrounding the old mining town of Magdalena, where the Magdalena Mountains rise to South Baldy and Magdalena Peak above the La Jencia plain. The region's fractured rock and mineral wealth made it a center of mining in central New Mexico. The dramatic faulted landscape tells the deep-time story that shaped where towns, mines, and roads would later stand.

Magdalena, NM

The mining camp of Kelly sprang up after lead and silver strikes in New Mexico's Magdalena Mountains, tracing its beginnings to discoveries around 1866. Its greatest boom came in the early 1900s, when zinc carbonate once thrown aside as waste turned valuable to the paint industry. At its height Kelly's streets held stores, banks, saloons, schools, and churches before the ore gave out and the town faded.

Sandoval County, NM

This marker honors the Kewa (Santo Domingo Pueblo) jewelry tradition and the women's cooperative that carries it forward. By oral and recorded account, Santo Domingo people have always made and traded jewelry, and since prehistoric times they have crafted heishi—drilled and ground shell beads strung into necklaces. Generation after generation, Kewa artisans have kept this craft central to their economy and identity.