Search Markers

Bay City, TX

Chartered in 1940, this Bay City VFW post first met under a World War I veteran, Col. Wyatt O. Selkirk, and gathered in courthouses, halls, and USO buildings before finding a home in 1948. It took the name of Army Air Forces Capt. Philip Hackley Parker, killed in action in 1945 while piloting his P-51D Mustang over China. Through fire and rebuilding, the post and its ladies auxiliary have aided needy veterans, sponsored student contests, and helped identify the graves of more than 3,000 Matagorda County veterans.

Berkeley, CA

Science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick lived in Berkeley during the 1950s, amid the intellectual ferment of a Bay Area that shaped his restless imagination. His novels and stories probed the nature of reality and perception, and later inspired films including Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report.

North York, PA · est. 1949

Philip Livingston, a wealthy New York merchant, put his name to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and continued to serve in the Continental Congress until his death in June 1778, while Congress was meeting in York. He was buried here, hundreds of miles from home, a casualty of the demands of wartime public service. His grave lies about 300 feet west of this spot.

Rome, PA · est. 1947

Before he became one of the most beloved gospel songwriters of the 19th century, Philip P. Bliss taught school in Bradford County. He went on to write and lead singing at revival meetings across the country, penning hymns still sung today, until his life was cut short in 1876. So great was his following that Sunday school students in both England and the United States contributed the gifts that raised his cemetery monument.

Huston Township, PA · est. 1947

Philip P. Bliss was born in a log house near this spot in 1838 and grew up working the family farm and the region's lumber camps until he was sixteen. He went on to become one of the most beloved gospel songwriters and singing evangelists of the nineteenth century, his hymns carried into churches and revival meetings across the country. His life traced the arc from a rough Pennsylvania frontier boyhood to national renown.

Lampasas, TX

Philip Smith, who had served as a teamster during Texas's war for independence from Mexico, built this rugged home in 1856 on the central Texas frontier. Its two-foot-thick walls of native rock and cedar framework were made to endure, and endure they have—the house earned recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2003

Master silversmith Philip Syng, Jr. crafted the elegant silver inkstand that sat on the table at Independence Hall, used to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. A close collaborator of Benjamin Franklin, he joined in Franklin's famous experiments with electricity and helped found civic institutions including the American Philosophical Society. His artistry and curiosity placed him at the heart of Philadelphia's revolutionary and scientific circles.

Austin, TX

Philip Walker was one of the soldiers who reached San Jacinto in April 1836, the decisive battle that secured Texas independence. Born in South Carolina in 1815, he lived out his life in Texas and died in Johnson County in 1897.

Fredericksburg, TX

Philipp Hartmann and Elisabeth Crenwelge married in Bruchweiler, Prussia, in 1853 and sailed for Texas in 1855, settling to farm and butcher near Fredericksburg. They opened this family graveyard in 1859, and its stones tell a hard story: of thirteen children between Philipp's two marriages, several died in infancy. Well kept for well over a century, it remains a fine example of a German immigrant family cemetery.

Philipsburg, PA

In 1797, the year the young United States was still finding its footing, twelve families pushed into the dense central Pennsylvania forest at the invitation of Henry Philips, who offered them free land. They settled along the Moshannon Creek among towering old-growth timber, carving out a foothold in country still shared with the Seneca followers of the Iroquois leader Cornplanter. The little settlement they raised, first called Moshannon Town, grew into the borough of Philipsburg.

DeKalb vicinity, TX

The Dalby homestead has stayed in one family since 1841, built on land the Republic of Texas granted to Phillip A. Dalby. Its oldest room is hand-hewn oak logs pegged together, the floorboards worked by hand; by 1856 Dalby was raising eight children under its enlarged roof. The house rang with singings, quiltings, and logrollings, boarded the local teachers, and gave passing freighters a yard to camp in, passing down through son, grandson, and beyond.

Fayetteville, TX

North Carolina native Phillip J. Shaver settled in the Fayette County community of Rutersville around 1840 and, two years later, joined the Texas Army to defend area settlers, earning a 320-acre grant from the young Republic. After marrying in 1847, he bought 525 acres, surveyed a townsite he named for a former home, laid out its streets, and donated lots for a school, church, Masonic lodge, and cemetery. He supported the community he founded, Fayetteville, until his death in 1875, and his descendants remain in the area.

Ennis, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1813, Phillip R. Pierce came to Texas and took up arms in the war for independence as a member of the Madisonville Cavalry, Texas Volunteers. He lived out his days in Ellis County, dying in 1891. The state erected this marker to his service in 1962.

Lampasas, TX

After an August 1884 fire gutted much of downtown Lampasas, developer John B. Higdon sold a lot to legislator David W. Phillips, who raised the eastern half of this adjoining pair of buildings; grocers J. M. and A. L. Trosper built the other half about the same time. With their limestone construction, four-bay facades, and round-arched transoms, the buildings became a fixture of the town square. Over the years they housed cafes, saloons, a newspaper, a bootmaker's shop, a bowling alley, and much else.

Travis, TX

Ezekial Thomas Phillips, a Civil War veteran, moved his family to Falls County in 1869. When his son Robert died in a shooting accident in 1883 shortly before his wedding, he was buried on the very tract meant to be his wedding gift. So many neighbors asked to bury their dead there that Phillips deeded the land as a public cemetery in 1903, and it now holds some 350 graves.

Dripping Springs, TX

In 1880 settlers John and Nancy Phillips deeded this land to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, where a small sanctuary was dedicated that March. Following frontier custom, the community buried its dead beside the church, and the graves came to include sixteen Civil War veterans and many of Dripping Springs' earliest families. When a new church rose on the San Marcos road in 1901, the old site endured as a cemetery, tended by families and, by 1962, a formal association.

West Columbia vicinity, TX

Zeno Phillips was one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred," the first legal Anglo-American colonists in Texas, and he and his brothers took up land here and served in the Republic of Texas Army. The cemetery began in 1835 with the burials of Zeno and his brother John. Later generations of the family were laid to rest at Waverly Place before the land passed out of Phillips hands in 1887.

Victoria, TX

Alexander Hamilton Phillips, a New Yorker who came to Texas in 1837 and served in both the Republic's Congress and the state Legislature, built this Victoria house in 1851 from bricks made by enslaved workers at a nearby Guadalupe River brickyard. It became a social hub: during his 1857 run for governor, Sam Houston spoke from its front porch. A 1890s remodel by architect Jules Leffland stuccoed the brick in the Colonial Revival taste, and the family of World War I veteran Dr. Walter Wynne Sale has held it since 1932.

Liberty Township, PA · est. 1966

In July 1780, as the Revolution's violence spilled across the Pennsylvania frontier, Captain William Phillips and eleven men of his militia company were captured near this spot by a Native war party. Ten were killed and later buried by a search party, while Phillips and his son Elijah were taken prisoner and not freed until the British released them at war's end.

Phillipston, MA

This monument honors a living American Liberty Elm planted in tribute to Boston's original Liberty Tree. On August 14, 1765, colonists in Boston hung effigies of a stamp officer and a British official from a great elm near the Common, launching a wave of protest against Parliament's Stamp Act. That tree became the rallying point for the Sons of Liberty, and elms and poles like it sprang up across the colonies as living emblems of resistance to taxation without representation.

San Francisco, CA

This monument honors Philo T. Farnsworth, the farm-boy genius who conceived electronic television as a teenager and, in a San Francisco laboratory in 1927, transmitted the first all-electronic TV image. Working far from the corporate research giants, he pieced together the technology that would remake communication, culture, and daily life around the world. San Francisco was where his boldest breakthroughs took shape.

Springfield Township, PA · est. 2006

On this site in the late 1930s, Philo T. Farnsworth ran experimental station W3XPF, conducting some of the earliest live local television broadcasts. Farnsworth had pioneered the all-electronic television system, and his relentless work in electronics earned him a long list of patents. He was later inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Austin, TX

Swedish-born court clerk Sven Axel Philquist hired a fellow Swedish immigrant to build this Austin family home in 1912. Grocer Sam Wood bought it in 1943, and it stayed in his family for over 50 years, keeping original detailing that blends Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, and Craftsman styles.

Gorham, ME

Phinney Park in Gorham gathers memorial tablets honoring figures tied to the town's history, among them Capt. John Phinney, an early settler of this colonial-era Maine community, and a dedication to the Gorham Library Association. It is a small civic space layering generations of local remembrance in one spot.

Phoenixville, PA · est. 2005

For more than two centuries the ironworks at Phoenixville turned Schuylkill Valley ore and skill into the hard goods of a growing nation — nails and rail in the early years, then cannons and armor as the country went to war. The Griffen Gun of 1861 and the patented Phoenix Column of 1862 made the works a byword for American iron engineering, and its structural steel later helped raise buildings and bridges nationwide. The plant ran from the era of the young republic until it finally closed in 1987.

New Braunfels, TX

Built in 1871 and operating under various names before becoming the Phoenix Saloon in 1895, this New Braunfels landmark paired a lively barroom with a back-room café. There proprietor William Gebhardt served a stew seasoned with his own blend of herbs and dried chilies — 'tampico dust,' often credited as the first chili powder — before moving to San Antonio in 1896 to manufacture his Eagle Brand. The saloon, unusually welcoming to ladies, closed under Prohibition in 1918 and reopened as a saloon a century later.

Washington, DC

In the spring of 1880, Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter were experimenting in Washington with the "photophone," a device that transmitted sound on a beam of light rather than a wire. On June 3, 1880, they sent an intelligible voice message between two Washington rooftops, a feat Bell himself considered his greatest invention. This marker stands at the building from which that wireless transmission was launched toward 1325 L Street.

Plum, PA

This site in Plum, Pennsylvania once held a battery of a dozen Nike Ajax missile launchers, part of the ring of air-defense installations that guarded Pittsburgh's steel-making region during the early Cold War. Operational from 1955 to 1960, it belonged to a nationwide network built to shoot down Soviet bombers before they could reach America's industrial heartland. The launchers are long gone, but the ground where they stood recalls a tense chapter of homeland defense.

Manor, PA

At this location in Manor, Pennsylvania stood a Cold War Nike missile battery, its launchers later upgraded from the Ajax to the longer-range, nuclear-capable Hercules. Active from 1955 into 1968, it was one link in the chain of anti-aircraft sites encircling the Pittsburgh industrial area against the threat of Soviet air attack. Its long service life traces the evolution of American air defense across the height of the Cold War.

Millhousen, IN

This monument honors Corporal Lester Louis Picker of a bombardment squadron, born in 1919 and killed in action on November 12, 1942, in the first full year of American combat in World War II. Across small towns like Millhousen, families sent their sons into a global war, and communities raised markers to those who did not return. Picker was one of the many young Americans lost in the war's early, costly campaigns.

Marietta, OH

This stone marks the southern corner of the palisaded, or "picketed," defensive point where Marietta's early settlers sheltered during the Indian War of 1791–1795 — the frontier fighting that followed the founding of Ohio's first permanent American settlement. Behind such stockades families lived under threat during years of conflict between the new settlers and the Native nations of the Ohio country. The Woman's Centennial Association placed the marker in 1903, and its reverse recalls the Marquis de Lafayette's landing at Marietta.

Breckenridge, TX

One of Stephens County's first Anglo settlements, Picketville rose on Gunsolus Creek just before the Civil War, its name likely drawn from the picket-style cabins of upright, mud-chinked timbers. Left without military protection during the war, families "forted up" here for safety against Indian raids. It served as county seat until Breckenridge was founded in 1876, after which it faded away, leaving only a cemetery that Boy Scouts later restored and fenced.

Leander, TX

Master carpenter Andrew Porter Pickle built this house for his family in 1871, and it stayed in the Pickle family until 1913 before passing to the Mason-Davis line. Its distinctive form — two structures joined under a single roof, with shiplap siding at the rear and a milled, five-bay front — reflects the evolving craftsmanship of a settling Williamson County. It endures as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Graford, TX

Capt. William Carroll McAdams left Tennessee for Texas in the 1840s, rangered on the frontier, and fought in the Mexican War before he and his wife Ann settled this land in 1854 to raise cattle. The burial ground that grew up here served the Pickwick community, later drowned beneath Possum Kingdom Lake, and in 1940 gathered in graves relocated from Carter Bend Cemetery ahead of the reservoir.

Picture Rocks, PA

In the small Loyalsock Creek village of Picture Rocks, tucked into the wooded ridges of Lycoming County, this memorial gathers the community's remembrance of the men and women who served in the nation's armed forces. Towns like this across rural Pennsylvania raised such monuments so that neighbors who left the valley for distant wars—and those who did not return—would keep a permanent place at the heart of local life. The simple pledge "Never Forgotten" speaks to that enduring bond between a small place and its service members.

Pidcoke, TX

Founded in 1884 as Harmony Baptist Church with just four members, this Coryell County congregation first met in the local schoolhouse. A 1907 sanctuary burned within two years, a new one rose by 1911, and in 1916 the church took the name of its community, Pidcoke. Its traditions ran to camp meetings and baptisms in Cow House Creek, and it helped restore the Pidcoke Cemetery.

Gatesville vicinity, TX

Serving the ranching communities of Pidcoke and Harman, this cemetery dates to at least 1885, when six-year-old Mattie Jeter was buried here after a fatal fall from a wagon. Local landowners deeded the ground formally in 1896, and generations of the founding families lie here, their stock-raising economy sustaining the area until the 1942 creation of Camp Hood forced many families to relocate. Among the graves are veterans of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

Greensboro, NC

Built between 1862 and 1864 to serve the Confederacy, the Piedmont Railroad closed a crucial gap between Greensboro and Danville, Virginia. In the war's final years the line became a vital supply artery for Confederate armies—and in 1865 the route taken by Jefferson Davis's fleeing government as the Confederacy collapsed. Its terminus stood nearby.

Galveston, TX

This stretch of Galveston waterfront has carried nearly every current of Gulf history — Jean Lafitte's pirate ships, the Republic of Texas Navy, Confederate marine assaults that broke Federal occupation in 1863, and, so the story goes, Prohibition-era rum runners. In calmer years it became the berth of the Mosquito Fleet, small fishing boats named for their insect-like profiles. Their crews blended Asian and European fishing customs into a distinctly American trade, still honored in the yearly blessing of the fleet.

Lampasas, TX

In 1902 twenty civic-minded women chartered the Pierian Club of Lampasas, naming it for the mythical spring of the Muses and joining the state and national federations of women's clubs that same year. Focused on literature, art and philanthropy, the club helped launch a book collection in 1903 that became the Lampasas Public Library.

Maple Grove, MN

Pierre Bottineau (1817–1895) was a Métis fur trader, guide, and townsite promoter whose knowledge of the northern plains made him one of frontier Minnesota's most sought-after pathfinders. Fluent in numerous languages, he helped guide expeditions and lay out settlements as the region shifted from fur-trade country to farms and towns. His preserved house recalls the mixed Native and European world that shaped Minnesota's founding generation.

Dallas, TX

Born in Carcassonne, France, in 1800, Pierre Dusseau brought a passion for horticulture to Texas in 1855 as the gardener for La Réunion, Victor Considérant's utopian socialist colony near present-day Dallas. He arrived with his daughters and son-in-law and tended the colony's gardens for two years until the idealistic venture collapsed. In failing health, he spent his final years in Dallas with his daughter's family.

Arkansas County, AR

This monument commemorates Pierre Laclède Liguest (1729–1778), the French fur trader and merchant who founded St. Louis in 1764 near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Laclède died in 1778 near Arkansas Post, the early French and Spanish colonial outpost on the lower Mississippi where this marker stands. His trading venture helped plant one of the great gateway cities of the American interior.

Wibaux, MT

This statue honors Pierre Wibaux, a French-born cattleman who arrived in the Montana badlands in the 1880s and built one of the great open-range ranching operations of the northern plains. He survived the devastating winter of 1886–87 that ruined many ranchers and rebuilt his herds into the tens of thousands. The town that grew up around his enterprise took his name, and the statue keeps his memory at its heart.

Ipswich, MA

This monument remembers Francis R. Appleton Jr. (1885–1974), the ninth generation of his family to run Appleton Farms in Ipswich — one of the oldest continuously worked farms in the country, with fields traced back to the 17th century. His life bridged the era of the gentleman-farmer estate and the modern age. The memorial stands on Pigeon Hill, high ground above the farm.

Milford, PA · est. 1981

Split from Wayne County in 1814 and named for the explorer Zebulon Pike, this scenic northeastern county sent its bluestone and lumber to market by way of the Delaware & Hudson Canal and the Erie Railroad. Those materials helped build a growing nation even as the county became famed for its natural beauty. Near the seat of Milford stands Gray Towers, home of conservationist governor Gifford Pinchot.

Dallas, TX

Bought by the City of Dallas around 1912 as a neighborhood green, this park grew into the heart of "Little Mexico," the city's Mexican-American community, by the 1920s. Renamed in 1927 for park board member Edgar L. Pike, it became a gathering ground for Mexican-American servicemen during World War II and remains the stage for Cinco de Mayo and Diez y Seis de Septiembre celebrations. Its bilingual marker reflects generations of cultural, recreational, and political life.

Piketon, OH

Piketon, the seat of Pike County in south-central Ohio, carries the name of Zebulon Montgomery Pike, the army officer and explorer best remembered for the 1806 expedition that gave Pike's Peak its name. By the War of 1812 Pike had risen to brigadier general, and on April 27, 1813, he was leading American troops in the assault on York (present-day Toronto) in Upper Canada when a retreating British garrison detonated its powder magazine. The blast mortally wounded Pike, and he died soon after — reportedly with a captured enemy flag beneath his head. Ohioans laying out this county and town in the war's aftermath honored the fallen general by attaching his name to the land.

Panna Maria, TX

Built in 1875 in Panna Maria — the oldest Polish settlement in the United States — this was the community's second-oldest store, its stone walls mortared with lime fired in home kilns. Victor Pilarczyk bought the store in 1913 and installed its first gas pump in 1919. Its original rafters and floors still survive.

Bethel Township, PA · est. 1950

In 1742, Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf, the Moravian leader traveling among the Native peoples of Pennsylvania, paused at this spring along the Tulpehocken Path and named it "Pilgrim's Rest." The path was an ancient Indian route linking European settlements to the Native towns of Shamokin and Wyoming, and Zinzendorf's journey was part of the Moravians' extensive missionary work among the region's Indigenous nations.

Houston, TX

Founded in 1904 in Houston's Freedmen's Town, Pilgrim Congregational was the city's first African American Congregational church, begun in the Rev. G.B.M. Turner's home. Its members left a lasting civic mark—helping establish the Colored Carnegie Library in 1909 and the local NAACP chapter in 1918—and city schools were later named for early leaders including educator E.O. Smith. Renamed after a 1957 denominational merger, the congregation moved to Blodgett Street in 1974 and still honors its ties to the 1839 Amistad captives and their Congregationalist defenders.

Palestine, TX

Organized in 1880 with help from the Reverend Richard Henry Boyd, Pilgrim Hill Baptist gathered a congregation of former slaves on land loaned by Henry Butler, himself formerly enslaved. Boyd went on to found the National Baptist Publishing Board, for over a century a major publisher of Christian educational material. The church moved several times — from Butler's land to Cartmell family land and finally, in 1958, to its present home — sustaining more than 130 years of worship and community service.

Elkhart, TX

Elder Daniel Parker organized this Predestinarian Baptist congregation in Crawford County, Illinois, in 1833, then carried it whole into Mexican Texas — a clever way around the colony's restrictions on organizing new churches. Its first Texas meeting was held in Stephen F. Austin's Colony on January 20, 1834, and a log meetinghouse followed in 1839. It is remembered as the first Baptist church in Texas.

Elkhart, TX

Organized in Illinois in 1833 by Elder Daniel Parker, this Predestinarian Baptist congregation moved with its members to Mexican Texas, holding its first meeting in Stephen F. Austin's Colony on January 20, 1834. A log church went up in December 1839, and the congregation claims continuous worship since 1834 — with the present building the fourth to stand on the site. Parker served as its pastor until 1844.

Gonzales, TX

The Gonzales County community of Pilgrim took its name from Thomas J. Pilgrim, an educator granted land here by the Republic of Texas in 1838. Decades later, in 1883, members of a nondenominational Union church — representing Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and Quaker families — organized this Cumberland Presbyterian congregation, building a sanctuary in 1886 on land donated by Crawford Burnett. Neighbors helped raise and furnish the building, which became a gathering place for camp meetings and summer revivals.

Palestine, TX

After the Civil War, African Americans settled the South End of Palestine to work as laborers in the town's shops and railyards, but the thriving neighborhood had no church of its own. With help from the Rev. Richard H. Boyd, a noted organizer of Anderson County congregations, residents founded Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church in 1892, worshiping in borrowed rooms and a summer tent before building their own sanctuary. Fire destroyed the church in 1941 and the members rebuilt, sustaining a congregation that has anchored the community for well over a century.

Markham, TX

In 1903 a handful of Markham laborers—workers from the canals, cattle ranches, rail lines, and rice fields of a rough settlement known as 'Tent City' or 'Red Town'—organized Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church. Their first sanctuary rose in 1909 only to be leveled by a hurricane that year, and later buildings met the same fate, including one lost to Hurricane Carla in 1961. Each time the congregation rebuilt or relocated, most recently by moving in a church from the Ashby community.

Athens, TX

This congregation was first constituted in Alabama in 1850, then carried west by a caravan of covered wagons led by Samuel Tine Owen. Camped on Baptist Branch in January 1851, the roughly 150 travelers were so taken with the beauty of the country that they abandoned their planned trek to the California gold fields and settled here, building a log cabin church. The mother congregation gave rise to several other area churches before disbanding after an 1892 move.

Bellville, TX

Established in 1861 as the Civil War began, Pilgrims Rest Cemetery serves a rural community in Austin County. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2006, it holds the graves of families who settled the surrounding farmland. Its founding year places its earliest burials against the backdrop of a nation torn by war.

Collegeport, TX

This Collegeport-area ranch carries more than a century of Texas history in its soil. Its earliest owners were the Yeamans brothers, veterans of the Texas War for Independence—two of whom died in the 1836 Goliad massacre. In 1880 the legendary cattleman Abel 'Shanghai' Pierce and his brother Jonathan bought the land, establishing a headquarters overlooking a slough named for a pioneer physician, and generations of tenant families raised cattle and rice here.