Search Markers

Geneva, TX

John and Margaret Payne came to Texas from Georgia about 1835, and John—a War of 1812 veteran—served Sabine County as a justice of the peace and state legislator. He set aside land for this family cemetery, where his son Epperson Duke Payne, a veteran of the Siege of Bexar and the Battle of San Jacinto, is also buried. Later interments include Civil War veteran Lewis Williams and his kin.

Dare County, NC

This marker recalls the Pea Island Life-Saving Station, the only U.S. Life-Saving Service station ever crewed entirely by Black surfmen. Under keeper Richard Etheridge, appointed in 1880, the station's men patrolled the treacherous Outer Banks and rowed into storms to rescue shipwrecked sailors during an era of deep racial segregation. Etheridge, born enslaved and a Civil War veteran, ran one of the most disciplined and effective crews on the coast, and his surfmen carried out daring rescues that saved countless lives. Their station stood as a rare place where Black Americans held recognized, life-and-death authority.

Huntsville, TX

Built in 1902, this was the first building on its campus devoted entirely to being a library, blending classical and Romanesque revival styling. It rose with help from the Peabody Education Fund, the pioneering philanthropy that Northern banker George Peabody created after the Civil War to support Southern schooling. It served as a library until 1929 and has filled other academic roles ever since.

Hillsboro, TX

In 1885 Hillsboro issued a bond to build a school for African American children in the Black neighborhood known as Freetown, naming it for George Peabody, whose fund famously aided Southern education after the Civil War. A brick building replaced the original frame structure in 1919, and the school moved to this site in 1950. Its last class graduated in 1966 as full integration approached; though the building burned in 2005, Peabody School remains a point of community pride.

Town of Huntington, NY

In the 1600s, when Huntington was a young English settlement on Long Island's north shore, an inn was far more than a place to eat and sleep. Owned by the Chichester family, this seventeenth-century establishment doubled as a civic hub where neighbors gathered and the town's earliest public business was conducted. Colonial taverns and inns often served as the informal town halls of their day, knitting scattered farming communities together.

Hampden Township, PA · est. 1947

In the Cumberland Valley of the 1790s, a Reformed congregation raised this sturdy meetinghouse in 1798, and by 1806 shared it with a Lutheran congregation — a common arrangement among Pennsylvania's German settlers, who often pooled resources for a single "union church." The two flocks worshiped side by side under one roof until 1866. Left in its original form rather than modernized, the building survives as a rare, unaltered window into early frontier faith.

Hampden Township, PA · est. 1948

Raised in 1798 by a German Reformed congregation, this plain limestone meetinghouse soon came to be shared: a Lutheran congregation bought a half-interest in 1806, and the two worshipped together here until 1866. Left unaltered for more than two centuries, it survives as a rare example of an early Pennsylvania union church, still used once a year by St. John's Lutheran. Its very name reflects the neighborly compromise that let two faiths share one roof.

Raleigh, NC

Founded in 1857 by Presbyterian elder William Peace as a school for women, the college's opening was delayed by the Civil War, during which its main building served as a Confederate hospital and later housed the Freedmen's Bureau. Classes finally began in 1872. Its early history reflects the upheaval and reordering of the wartime and Reconstruction South.

Saint Paul, MN

This Peace Officers Memorial in Saint Paul, near the seat of Minnesota government, honors law-enforcement officers who died in the line of duty, inscribed with the Beatitude "Blessed are the peacemakers." Public memorials to fallen officers became common across American state capitals in the twentieth century, offering a civic space for remembrance and annual observances. It marks collective sacrifice in public service rather than any single individual.

Jasper, TX

As the river port of Bevilport faded with the decline of commerce on the Angelina River, some of its residents resettled at Peachtree, where Baptists worshiped alongside Methodists before formally organizing their own congregation in 1910. For decades they held services only twice a month, sharing preachers across a rural circuit, until they built their own sanctuary and called a full-time pastor in 1951. Steady growth after World War II brought new facilities and programs.

Peacock, TX

Like many West Texas towns, Peacock grew up with the coming of the Stamford & Northwestern Railway. Once called Alluvia, it was renamed in 1910 for the three Peacock brothers who moved their mercantile store in from nearby Oriana, and G.A. Gray sold 100 acres for the townsite. Within a few years it boasted groceries, drugstores, a bank, hotel, school, and more — until a catastrophic 1914 tornado leveled nearly every building. Residents rebuilt within a decade, and though the Depression and urban migration thinned its numbers, the community endured, holding homecomings that continue today.

Houston, TX

In 1949, a decade before Motown, Houston nightclub owner Don D. Robey founded Peacock Records out of frustration with how major labels marketed Black musicians under the dismissive "race music" banner. From his converted Bronze Peacock club he built a recording empire, adding Duke and Back Beat records and signing artists such as Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, "Big Mama" Thornton and Johnny Ace before the labels were sold to ABC Dunhill in 1973.

Wimberley, TX

This 1.7-acre cemetery, with its 23 known graves, is nearly all that remains of an early Hays County community. Settlement began with North Carolina native John Bennett Peal, who with his wife Mary bought 1,920 acres in 1872 and helped found Pleasant Valley Baptist Church in 1875; the church also housed the Valley Ford School. Children from the Burchett, Edwards, George, and other pioneer families made the schoolhouse the center of Blanco Valley life, and several of those family names rest in the cemetery today.

Abernathy, TX

When a 1.5-by-15-mile 'Strip' of land opened to homesteaders in the 1890s, settlers like William Houston Pearce built a schoolhouse that doubled as a place of worship, birthing Pearce Chapel Methodist Church. A cemetery followed in 1898, and a small post office, union church, and community grew up around it before nearby Abernathy drew the settlement away. The chapel and school were eventually moved, but the cemetery endures with veterans of the Civil War through World War II among its graves.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Born in 1919, Pearl Bailey spent part of her youth in Philadelphia before rising through the big-band circuit of the 1940s, where her warm, teasing delivery made her a standout vocalist. Her career crested in 1967 when she headlined an acclaimed Broadway production of "Hello, Dolly!", earning national adoration as one of the era's most beloved entertainers. From these city streets emerged a performer who bridged the swing age and the Broadway stage.

Pearl, TX

Organized in 1884 under pioneer missionary the Rev. E. Berry, this congregation began four miles west as the Bee House Missionary Baptist Church, worshiping in a Masonic hall that also served as the community schoolhouse. When it relocated in 1889 to land sold by rancher Charles T. Karnes, it took the name Mt. Olive, and the settlement once called Wayback was later renamed Pearl. A tabernacle built about 1908 on the line between the Baptist and Methodist properties long hosted revivals and summer brush-arbor meetings.

Pearl, TX

In the rolling country of Coryell County, the community first called Wayback—a clerical mangling of "Swayback"—took the softer name Pearl in 1890 for a postmaster's young cousin. Its cemetery grew out of grief and generosity when the Keeton family set aside land after burying fourteen-year-old Lillian in 1896, later deeding acreage for public graves. The ground holds pioneers, victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic including a doctor who died treating the sick, and veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Pearl, TX

Worship in this corner of Coryell County began in the Bee House community around 1878 and moved to the first Pearl schoolhouse on Cowhouse Creek before the Church of Christ was organized in 1895. Members bought land, raised a sanctuary, and in 1904 built a tabernacle for the marathon summer revivals — days-long meetings running from sunrise to late evening — that it still hosts. More than a century on, the church continues to serve its rural membership.

Corpus Christi, TX

This memorial was placed by a chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association to keep alive the memory of December 7, 1941, the morning Japanese forces struck the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. President Franklin Roosevelt called it 'a date which will live in infamy,' and the attack pulled the United States into World War II the next day. The survivors who founded these chapters made it their mission to remember fallen comrades and, in their motto, to 'Keep America Alert.'

New Haven, CT

This crossing over New Haven Harbor honors the American service members killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 — the assault that drew the United States into World War II. Naming a major piece of public infrastructure for that day keeps the memory of the attack woven into everyday life in Connecticut.

Pearl, TX

A handful of Methodists first gathered in a preacher's home in the winter of 1875–76 and worshiped in the Hope schoolhouse before a landowner donated three acres for a church in 1890. For a century Pearl Methodist Church anchored a scattered rural community, its congregation rising and falling as neighbors moved on to found new churches, until it disbanded in 1979 and left its property to the local cemetery association.

Hilltown Township, PA · est. 1995

Pearl S. Buck spent much of her early life in China, the daughter of missionaries, and drew on that world to write novels that gave American readers an intimate, humane portrait of Chinese farm life. Her 1931 novel "The Good Earth" won the Pulitzer Prize and helped earn her the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first American woman so honored. After 1934 she settled at Green Hills Farm here in Bucks County, writing prolifically and championing international understanding and the welfare of children. The farm later became home to the foundation that bears her name.

Pearl, TX

The Pearl School grew from a log cabin with a puncheon floor and split-log benches into a modern campus with a gymnasium over its 1884–1958 life. Beginning as a one- or two-teacher school under trustees J.H. Harrison, V.C. Karnes, and Frank Roberts, it expanded steadily — to three teachers in 1907, four by 1917, and a seven-teacher high school in 1934. After consolidating with the Evant district in 1958, the building found new life as the Pearl Community Center, still visited by former students.

Pearland, TX

Pearland began with a railroad siding called 'Mark Belt,' laid by the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe in 1883. A decade later William Zychlinski platted a townsite here, and developer S.M. Christensen planted pear and fruit trees to lure settlers—giving the town its name. A 1900 depot became the community's hub for mail, supplies, and shipping cotton, hay, and produce, and though the great 1900 storm slowed things, promotion of the area as an agricultural paradise fueled its growth before the depot finally closed in 1972.

Pearsall, TX

Pearsall's Presbyterians organized in 1884 in the home of Mrs. Mary Dorsey, electing elders and trustees and calling the Rev. W. S. Wright as their first pastor. Their church, dedicated in 1885, is the oldest church building in continuous use in Pearsall and still holds its original pulpit, communion table, and pews. In 1970 the congregation became ecumenical.

Austin, TX

This green stretch along Shoal Creek began as part of the early plantation holdings of Elisha Marshall Pease, a Texas governor of the 1850s. In the years after the Civil War it served as a camping ground for federal troops during the military occupation of Texas, and in 1875 Governor Pease and his wife gave the acreage to the city as a public park. Long a favored spot for firemen's outings and community celebrations, it remained largely undeveloped for decades and still keeps its natural beauty.

Margaret, TX

On this ground in December 1860, Texas Rangers under Captain L. S. Ross overtook a Comanche encampment and recaptured Cynthia Ann Parker, who had been taken as a child during a raid in 1836 and raised among the Comanche for twenty-four years. Torn from the family she had made—including her son, the future chief Quanah Parker—her recapture became one of the most famous and tragic episodes of the Texas frontier. The state marked the battlefield in 1936.

Crowell, TX

At the Battle of Pease River in 1860, Texas Rangers under Captain L. S. Ross attacked a Comanche encampment and took a woman they recognized as Cynthia Ann Parker, seized as a nine-year-old in the 1836 raid on Fort Parker. By then she had lived a quarter-century among the Comanche as Naduah, wife of Chief Peta Nocona and mother of the future leader Quanah Parker. Returned to her Anglo relatives with her infant daughter, she never adjusted, tried repeatedly to escape, and died in 1864.

Austin, TX

This Austin schoolhouse rose in 1876 on a block the Republic of Texas had set aside for education back in 1839, making it one of the oldest public-funded school buildings in the state. It honors Governor Elisha M. Pease, whose mid-century legislation helped lay the financial groundwork for Texas public schools. Rebuilt after an 1892 fire and repeatedly enlarged, its walls saw generations of children through their first lessons.

Austin, TX

Dedicated in 1876 on ground the Republic of Texas had set aside for education back in 1839, the Austin Graded School House was one of the first Texas schools built entirely with public funds. The three-story limestone building held twelve rooms and served 200 students until an 1896 fire; rebuilt around its original walls, it was renamed in 1902 for former Governor Elisha M. Pease. Later additions by architects Dennis R. Walsh and Hugo Kuehne expanded the simplified classical building still in use.

Peaster, TX

The village of Peaster grew from land South Carolinian Henry H. Peaster bought in 1870 and the town lots he began selling in the late 1880s. He donated two acres for this still-active cemetery in 1893, and among its early settlers and war veterans rests John Alexander Fox, the artist who created the "Buster Brown" character for a famous shoe-advertising campaign.

Longview, TX

This East Texas congregation traces its roots to a Disciples of Christ church gathered near Camden in 1852, in the antebellum decades when scattered rural families built faith communities of their own. When that early church dissolved in the 1870s, its members regrouped, and the Peatown Christian Church took shape in 1871 with twelve charter members drawn from the settlement of Edwardsville—locally called Peatown—and nearby farms. For over fifty years they worshiped in the old building and baptized new members in a neighboring spring.

Dublin vicinity, TX

Dating to 1880, Pecan Cemetery was the main burial ground for the Purves Community, which grew up around James Purves's blacksmith shop in Erath County. Its oldest marked grave is that of infant Horace F. Adams, and a memorial stands for Civil War casualty Daniel Turney, though he is actually buried in Tyler. When nearby Friendship Baptist Church disbanded, its materials were used to build a tabernacle here where funerals and annual cemetery-working gatherings were held.

Dublin vicinity, TX

In 1884 J. W. McKenzie deeded three and a half acres in the Purves Community for a church and cemetery, though burials had begun there as early as 1880. When the Friendship Baptist Church disbanded in 1915, its lumber was reused in 1922 to build this open-air tabernacle—a well-preserved example of the group meeting shelters that hosted revivals and gatherings across rural Texas.

Gatesville, TX

Organized in 1882 as Coryell Creek Baptist Church of Christ by a handful of founding families, this congregation began with services in local schoolhouses and brush-arbor camp meetings along Coryell Creek. It built a tabernacle in 1903, took the name Pecan Grove Baptist Church in 1929, and raised a sanctuary at this site soon after. Recognized by Baylor University for supporting ministerial students, it has counted as many as six generations of some families among its members.

McKinney, TX

This ground began as a Republic of Texas land grant in 1845, just four years after Dr. William E. Throckmorton led his family from Tennessee to found the first permanent settlement in the area. By the 1850s it held its first burials, and public ownership followed in 1870; a shady stand of trees gave the place its name. Among those honored is Dr. James Webb Throckmorton—Confederate general, Governor of Texas, and long-serving congressman.

Hooks, TX

In March 1836, as Texas declared its independence from Mexico, an unusually large share of the convention's leading delegates came from Pecan Point, a Red River settlement in this corner of far Northeast Texas. Richard Ellis presided over the gathering that produced the young republic's declaration and constitution, while neighbors like Collin McKinney, A. H. Latimer, Samuel Price Carson, and Robert Hamilton helped draft the document and staff the new government. That a single frontier vicinity supplied five prominent founders speaks to how thinly settled but politically ambitious early Anglo-Texas was.

Hamilton, TX

In the 1870s and 1880s, pioneer families settled the country along the Lampasas River near Lookout Mountain, opening a school and, in 1893, beginning burials at what became Pecan Wells Cemetery. Civil War veteran W. M. Kemp and his wife Margaret formally donated the ground in 1904, reportedly on the condition that graves always remain free. As nearby schools consolidated in 1921, the community took the name Pecan Wells, and its cemetery grew to hold more than 200 graves.

Fort Stockton, TX

Carved from Presidio County in 1871 and organized in 1875, Pecos County chose Fort Stockton as its seat and elected its first slate of officials that March. The names on that roll—Frazer, Torres, Rooney, Carrasco, Huffmann—reflect the mingled Anglo and Tejano leadership of the far West Texas frontier. Decades later, the 1926 discovery of oil in the Yates field transformed the county's fortunes.

Del Rio, TX

Where the Pecos River runs its last sixty miles through deep canyons before joining the Rio Grande, engineers have long struggled to bridge it. The Southern Pacific built the first high railroad span here in 1891, and the first highway bridge followed in 1923 — only to be swept away, like its temporary successors, by floodwaters in the 1950s. The current bridge, completed in 1957 and towering 273 feet above the water, is the highest highway bridge in Texas.

Fredericksburg, TX

German immigrant farmers established the Pedernales community in the 1840s, and by 1854 it joined a neighbor to form a school district in the Hill Country. A native-stone schoolhouse built before 1875 hosted a one-teacher, seven-grade school, where final-exam days, plays, and Christmas programs became beloved traditions. Falling enrollment during World War II closed the school in 1945, and the building later became a home.

Dallas, TX

Pediatric orthopedic care in Dallas grew from a 1921 effort by Masons who recruited the city's first orthopedic surgeon, Dr. William B. Carrell, to treat children—especially young polio patients—at the Hella Temple Free Clinic. The Scottish Rite Masons bought the growing hospital in 1926, and over the decades it pioneered work in dyslexia, scoliosis, clubfoot, limb reconstruction, and hand disorders. Renamed Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children, it still treats children free of charge, supported entirely by donations.

Woodville, TX

Abram and Julia Pedigo came to Texas in 1857 and, with their eleven children, established a plantation near this site in the 1880s, running a grist mill, cotton gin, and sugar mill alongside their farming. The family cemetery began in sorrow in 1883, when their daughter Cordelia and one of her newborn twins died and were brought home for burial. Nearly all the Pedigo children came to rest here, and a native-rock chapel raised by the family was dedicated to these pioneers in 1938.

Richmond County, NC

Organized in 1755, the Pee Dee Meeting was an early Quaker community on the Carolina frontier, gathering Friends for worship in a region far from the colony's coastal centers. As families moved westward in search of new land, the meeting dwindled and had faded by the 1840s, leaving its cemetery a mile and a half to the west.

Memphis, TN

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Pee Wee's Saloon on Beale Street was the informal headquarters of Memphis's musicians, a place to swap news and find work. There W.C. Handy leaned on the cigar counter to copy out parts for his band, including a 1909 campaign tune written for mayoral boss E.H. Crump that, with new words, became the celebrated 'Memphis Blues.' The song helped carry a raw local sound into the national songbook.

Peebles, OH

Peebles was platted in 1881 where the historic Zane's Trace met the new Cincinnati & Eastern Railway, a crossing of old road and new rail that gave the village its start. Incorporated in 1886 and named for John G. Peebles, it saw David Nixon raise the first house, later the Nixon Hotel, and drew crowds to nearby Chautauqua gatherings from 1906 to 1917.

Cincinnati, OH

When Cincinnati electrified its cable-car lines in 1898, the streetcars turned outlying neighborhoods like Walnut Hills into thriving commuter districts, and Peebles Corner became one of the city's busiest shopping crossroads outside downtown. Its early-1900s mixed-use blocks—storefronts at street level with apartments overhead—captured the era's dense, walkable urban form, when a trip to the shops meant a ride on the trolley rather than a drive to the mall. That distinctive streetscape earned the area a historic designation in 1985.

Menard, TX

This hourglass-shaped pass where McDougal Creek meets the San Saba River was a favored Native American campground long before it entered written history in 1732 as the site of a Spanish-Apache battle. Over the following generations it saw mustang hunters, Indian fighters, German settlers, and gold-seekers pass through, and it became a stagecoach station named—so the story goes—for a one-legged land commissioner. Its nearby 'Robbers' Roost' gained notoriety for hold-ups, and the crossing later served the Great Western Cattle Trail.

Victoria, TX

Erected in 1884, the Pela House blends a conservatively Greek Revival frame—balanced bays, a center passage, pedimented windows, and columns—with fashionable Victorian touches like geometric railings on its two-tiered porch. It was the home of Silvain Pela, a French immigrant, and his Swiss-born wife Elizabeth Meyer Pela, who raised ten children within its walls. The Pela family and their descendants held the house for more than a century. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1998.

Frost, TX

Pelham Cemetery has served an African American community founded in the years after the Civil War by freedpeople who had recently gained their liberty. Originally called Fork of the Creeks for the three streams that met nearby, the farming settlement buried its earliest known resident, Isaac Franklin, in 1880. Families like the Caruthers, Porters, and Stanfords rest here, and a community association has cared for the grounds since the late 1930s.

Frost, TX

Founded by Black families after 1866 and first called Forks of the Creek, Pelham was one of the freedmen's communities that took root in Texas after emancipation. Its residents organized churches — Wesley Methodist, Brown's Chapel A.M.E., and Union Baptist — the first of which also housed the community's school. Renamed Pelham when it won a post office in 1898, the town peaked at 350 people in 1926; though its stores, gin, and schools are gone, its heritage endures.

Bowie, TX

In the years after the Civil War, Confederate veterans around the young town of Bowie gathered on land bought by Captain John J. Carter to reunite, mourn, and remember. In 1901 the Bowie Pelham Camp of United Confederate Veterans purchased acreage that was to be forever dedicated to veterans past, present, and future, building a pavilion, wells, and a dining shed. As the old soldiers died off, the camp deeded the grounds to the city in 1923, and Pelham Park grew into a community gathering place for celebrations, trading days, and rodeos.

Snohomish County, WA

A Pelton wheel is a rugged water turbine whose cupped buckets convert a high-pressure jet of water into rotating power—a technology that drove mines, mills, and early hydroelectric plants across the American West. This example was cast by the Sumner Iron Works of Everett, Washington, a foundry that equipped the region's booming timber and mining operations. Displayed today as an industrial relic, it recalls the era when moving water was the muscle behind the Northwest's growth.

Pemberville, OH

When oil derricks were sprouting across northwest Ohio's booming fields in the early 1890s, the small town of Pemberville channeled its new prosperity into a single ambitious brick building. Completed in 1892, it packed the machinery of local government—offices, a fire station, even a jail—beneath a 250-seat Opera House that became the community's stage for plays, concerts, and civic gatherings. For generations it was the beating heart of town life, until changing tastes and postwar decline dimmed its lights, before a 1999 restoration brought the hall back to life.

Providence, RI

In 1891, a handful of women began college-level study at Brown University at a time when most American universities still barred them from the classroom. Formally established as the Woman's College in Brown University in 1896, the school grew into a respected institution and was renamed Pembroke College in 1928, honoring an early benefactor's connection to Cambridge's Pembroke traditions. For decades it gave Rhode Island women a rigorous liberal-arts education alongside—yet separate from—the men of Brown, until the two coordinate colleges fully merged in 1971.

Center Point, TX

The Penateka, or "honey eaters," were the southernmost band of the Comanche, ranging across the Edwards Plateau and following the buffalo on which they depended for food, clothing, and shelter. Renowned horsemen, they made settlement west of this area perilous for decades. Pressure from Texas Rangers and the U.S. Army's Second Cavalry, reservation removals, and the Red River War of 1874–75 forced the Comanche onto reservation lands, where the breakup of holdings in 1901 scattered the people — who have since worked to rebuild their shared culture.

Sidney vicinity, TX

William and Emaline Pendergrass left Tennessee for Texas in 1849 and put down permanent roots in frontier Comanche County by 1873. A community builder, William helped found churches and a school, and in 1883 gave a plot of his land to bury a stranger found nearby—the first grave in what became the family cemetery. He deeded the acre to the community in 1888, and generations of descendants now rest among its more than five hundred graves.

Town of Newcomb, NY

In the early 1800s the rugged Adirondack interior around Rich Lake was still raw frontier, its dense forests and cold, thin soils daunting to would-be settlers. Nathaniel Pendleton, a veteran of the Revolution who had gone on to serve as a judge down in Dutchess County, gambled on this wilderness in 1808, buying 5,000 acres and raising water-powered mills along the lake. His mills gave the first farming families a place to grind grain and saw timber, and by selling off lots he seeded the small community that would become Newcomb.

Temple, TX

Known as Pendletonville in the 1880s, this Bell County community was renamed in 1904 for George C. Pendleton (1845–1913), a local resident who rose through Texas politics with rare speed. He served in the state House, became its Speaker, and then as Lieutenant Governor became the first elected official to preside over both legislative chambers before going on to Congress.

Falmouth, KY

Pendleton County, established in 1798 from parts of Bracken and Campbell counties, honors the Virginia patriot-statesman Edmund Pendleton (1721–1803). A longtime member of the House of Burgesses, he served in the First Continental Congress, presided over Virginia's 1776 constitutional convention, and led the 1788 state convention that ratified the Federal Constitution. He capped his career as chief judge of Virginia's Court of Appeals until his death.