Search Markers

Plano, TX

This graveyard lies on a Peters Colony land grant held by Joseph Klepper, an Illinois immigrant who reached Collin County around 1845. It holds the graves of five Peters colonists and their families alongside other early settlers, and over time became the community's only burial ground for its Black residents. The cemetery has long been tied to the First Methodist Church, which once stood on adjacent land Klepper deeded.

Plano, TX

Education on this Plano site began with the private Plano Institute in 1882, before the city took over operations in 1891 and built a succession of public schools here. A 1924 building became the core of the present structure, and in 1938 the Works Progress Administration added the gymnasium. The eclectic complex mixes Mission and Classical styles, with stepped parapets, cartouches, and a cross motif in red brick.

Plano, TX

Among the earliest graveyards in Collin County, this cemetery began in 1852 when Dr. Lillie was buried on land owned by his uncle William Forman, a Kentuckian who had bought 640 acres the year before. His death prompted settlers to organize a burial ground, and by the 1870s the Forman family plot merged with tracts owned by the Masonic and Odd Fellows lodges. A Ladies Mutual Cemetery Association formed in the 1890s beautified and doubled the grounds before today's association took over in 1928.

Plano, TX

After fire destroyed the building they shared in 1895, the Plano National Bank and the Odd Fellows (I.O.O.F.) Lodge rebuilt together in 1896, joining commerce and fraternal life under one roof. In 1936 architect Abe Cain gave the structure a striking art deco makeover—complete with Czechoslovakian black Carrara glass—a look a 1980s restoration later reclaimed. The building charts a small Texas town's evolution from Gilded Age main street to modern era.

Hempsted, TX

Edwin Waller lived on this Hempstead-area property, acquired during the Republic, from 1846 for many years. His public life bracketed the era's great turning points: a member of the 1835 Consultation and a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, he went on to serve as the first mayor of Austin. In 1861 he sat as a member of the Secession Convention, tying his long career to Texas's entry into the Civil War.

Jefferson, TX

Built in 1854 in the thriving riverport of Jefferson, this antebellum residence blends European design with practical local building, pairing a brick ground floor with framed upper stories and distinctive double iron stairways. Jefferson was then one of Texas's busiest inland ports, and homes like this one signaled the wealth flowing through the cotton economy of the era. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Jefferson, TX

In 1852, during Jefferson's boom years as a bustling inland riverport, this building served as the warehouse of a mercantile firm with branches in St. Louis and New Orleans. Steamboats reaching Jefferson through Big Cypress Bayou made the town one of the busiest commercial hubs in antebellum Texas. The surviving structure recalls an era when river trade, not rail, ruled the region's economy.

Harlingen, TX

This Harlingen corner began humbly as the site of pioneer Mack Crenshaw's barber shop before the land was deeded to the Planters State Bank in 1917. The bank building rose here, its upper floors leased as offices, and after Planters closed it housed the Valley State Bank from 1924 to 1927. From then until 1965 the Cameron County Irrigation District ran its operations from the building — a fitting tenant in a region whose prosperity depended on watering the Rio Grande Valley.

Plantersville, TX

Plantersville Baptist Church was organized in May 1861 under the Rev. N. T. Byars, worshipping in a schoolhouse until this sanctuary was dedicated in 1872 at a cost of more than $2,700, paid in gold. Its bell was hauled by oxcart from San Antonio, and the building — including its hand-hewn pews — survives in its original state. Over the years the congregation guided two mission churches, at Todd and Smith's Store.

Plantersville, TX

Organized in May 1861 by pioneer elders in the piney woods of Grimes County, this Baptist congregation counts among its founders the Rev. George W. Baines—great-grandfather of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the nation's 36th president. The church took root just as Texas joined the Confederacy, part of the dense fabric of rural congregations knitting frontier communities together. Its founding roll carries a thread that would reach the White House a century later.

Plantersville, TX

Settlers from the southern states began arriving here in the 1830s, and a post office opened in 1856 as Plantersville, named to honor the local planters. Burials date to at least 1864, and in 1866 landowner and postmaster Peter Walton donated the ground for a community cemetery. Among those interred is Mary Benigna Durst Blake, daughter of a Texas Revolution figure, making the grounds a resting place for pioneers, veterans, and notable Texas families.

Village of Upper Brookville, NY

Planting Fields is one of the great surviving estates of Long Island's fabled "Gold Coast," the belt of palatial country places built by America's wealthiest families in the early decades of the twentieth century. Its rolling lawns, formal gardens, and greenhouses were laid out on a grand scale during the era when industrial and financial fortunes reshaped the north shore of Nassau County into a landscape of Tudor halls and manicured parkland. The National Register listing in 1979 recognized both the mansion and its designed grounds as a rare intact example of this vanished world of estate life. Today the property endures as a public arboretum, its horticultural collections open to visitors long after the private era that created it.

Platte City, MO

On Veterans Day 1994, VFW Post 4055 dedicated a 155mm howitzer on the courthouse grounds of Platte City to honor the men and women of Platte County who served in the armed forces. Displaying a retired field gun as a community war memorial is a long American tradition, turning a weapon of war into a place of gratitude and remembrance.

New York, NY

On a commanding ridge in Upper Manhattan, Fort Tryon Park overlooks the Hudson from land that industrialist-philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. assembled and gave to New York City, with the park opening in the mid-1930s. This plaque records a further gift in 1941, when Rockefeller set aside ground to enlarge the park with a children's playground. It reflects an era when private benefactors shaped great American public spaces — the same Rockefeller generosity that also brought the Cloisters museum to the park's northern end.

Lower Southampton Township, PA · est. 1925

In the earliest years of Penn's colony, an Unami Lenape community known as Playwicky stood in the vale by the run and springs south of here. Their leader was Tammany, a chief of the Turtle clan who became famous for his dealings with William Penn and, later, as a folk symbol of American liberty. In 1683 he and his people sold Penn the land between the Neshaminy and Pennypack Creeks.

Gonzales, TX

When Gonzales was laid out as a four-league town tract, its inner city held 49 squares, seven of them reserved for public use. This particular square was meant for a municipal building but instead became a public plaza. Today it bears the name Texas Heroes Square, honoring the men of Gonzales who took up arms in the Texas Revolution.

Liberty, TX

When J. Francisco Madero platted the town of Liberty in 1831 under Mexican authority, he set aside five of the inner city's squares for public use, and this one has always held municipal buildings. That May, residents elected an ayuntamiento and their first alcalde, Hugh B. Johnston, only to have the young government dissolved the same year by Anahuac garrison commander Juan Davis Bradburn. City halls rose here in 1939 and 1959, continuing the square's civic role.

San Antonio, TX

First explored by Spaniards in 1691, this plaza became the site of the Presidio of Bexar and for years was ringed on three sides by adobe fortifications. It witnessed executions of captured rebels during the Mexican independence struggle of 1813 and, in quieter times, teemed as a raucous market of oxcarts, vendors, guitarists, and the famed "Chili Queens" serving Mexican food at open-air stands. Though City Hall rose here in 1892 and its military and market roles faded, the ancient plaza remains the municipal heart of San Antonio.

Liberty, TX

First mapped in 1831 under the laws of Coahuila and Texas, then the northernmost state of Mexico, this square was set aside as the site of a jail and houses of correction where prison sentences would be served through labor. By 1885 the town had grown around it, folding the old plaza into the mercantile district while jail functions moved elsewhere. The site preserves a trace of Mexican civic planning in what would become an American town.

Liberty, TX

When the Mexican government mapped the town of Liberty in 1831, it laid out five public plazas, and this was one of them. Unlike the others, this square was sold early to private owners and never became a true public commons — yet it remained, as its name suggests, at the heart of the town's mercantile district throughout its history.

Liberty, TX

When Liberty was laid out in 1831, the Mexican commissioner J. Francisco Madero set aside this block of the inner town for Catholic use, part of the formal town-planning of Mexican Coahuila-Texas. History proved less orderly than the plat: in 1846 Methodists petitioned for and built a log church on the square's northeast corner, moving to Main Street in 1853, the same year the Catholic Church received the southeast corner and raised the first of four churches here.

Martinez, CA

This downtown plaza carries the name of Ignacio Martínez, the Californio ranchero and former Presidio commander for whom the city of Martinez is named. In the era of Mexican California, Martínez held a sprawling land grant along the Carquinez Strait, and the community that grew there kept his name long after California passed into American hands.

New York, NY

In the bitter winter of 1944, German forces launched their last great offensive on the Western Front, striking through the snow-covered Ardennes forest and bulging deep into Allied lines — the shape that gave the Battle of the Bulge its name. American soldiers, often outnumbered and surrounded, held key crossroads and eventually turned the assault back, in what became one of the largest and costliest engagements U.S. forces fought in Europe. This Staten Island plaza was dedicated on December 16, 2001 — the anniversary of the day that battle began — naming a piece of the New York cityscape in honor of the men who endured it.

Colleyville, TX

Pleasant Glade Baptist Church was organized in September 1923 by fourteen charter members drawn from the older Pleasant Run Baptist Church, settling into a frame building they moved from Cottonwood to this rural site. As a farming community, its members weathered the Great Depression better than their city neighbors and kept growing, building a parsonage by 1947 and a modern facility by 1963. Renamed First Baptist Church of Pleasant Glade in 1956, it even spun off a mission that became Bellevue Baptist Church.

Longview, TX

After emancipation, freedpeople established the community of Pleasant Green, and in December 1871 pastors Henry Moses and Charles Anderson helped local residents organize a Baptist congregation, with the Rev. Henry Mass as its first pastor. From a small farm the church moved to this site in 1884 on land deeded by Simon and Mealy Claiborn, raising a frame sanctuary and later a larger house of worship. It remains a center of the historic African American community.

Howland, TX

This home was raised in 1857 by James Shelby "Sheb" Williams, a settler newly arrived from Kentucky, and his wife Mary. Its builders dressed the lumber on site and hand-hewed sills and studs from heart oak, pegging the frame together with bois d'arc — a hard native wood — while the porch steps and hearth were cut from stone quarried nearby. It survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark of antebellum frontier craftsmanship.

Houston County, TX

Founded in 1862 by a group that included charter member J.M. Russell, this Baptist congregation hosted regional Baptist association meetings just after the Civil War. Fire twice destroyed its buildings, in 1866 and again in 1907, but the congregation rebuilt each time, raising a church at this location in 1911. It has served the surrounding community continuously, taking its present name in 1945.

Princeton, TX

Pleasant Grove Cemetery took its first burial in 1891 with Malissa Sides, believed to be half Native American and a survivor, with her Cherokee half-sister, of the U.S. government's removal of the tribe. The pair came to Collin County from Indian Territory, and later that year a Methodist family donated the land — including Mrs. Sides' grave — as a public burial ground. Among its thousand-plus graves lie 141 infants, testament to harsh pioneer life, alongside Confederate and other war veterans.

Coryell County, TX

After Fort Gates closed in 1853, soldiers like Irish-born Hugh Sheridan and families such as the Browns and Powells settled the Leon River lowlands and named their community for its groves of post oak. They built a school district, held farmers' union meetings and a Democratic club, and buried their dead in ground Walter Worthington deeded in 1899 "to be used...as a graveyard forever." The graves range from an 1867 burial to veterans of every war from the Civil War through World War II.

Combine, TX

The Mathis family reached the Combine area around 1870, and the 1873 burial of eight-year-old Harriet Mathis became the first in what grew into Pleasant Grove Cemetery. In 1879 the family gave an adjoining acre for a schoolhouse that also hosted early Baptist and Church of Christ congregations, binding graveyard, school, and church into the community's shared ground. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery, it remains the resting place of the area's pioneers and their descendants.

Pleasant Grove, TX

Shaded by live oaks along Simms Creek, Pleasant Grove was settled after the Civil War by veterans of both the Union and Confederate armies, who put their old enmities aside to build a community. The cemetery opened in 1876 with the burial of Tom Berry's young daughter, and alongside it stood a Methodist church and a school; today more than 400 graves, many unmarked, hold the area's early settlers.

Bettie, TX

In the 1850s, families from the Deep South pushed into the piney woods of East Texas and founded the Lafayette community, burying their dead in what became Pleasant Grove Cemetery — the first grave, in 1860, that of a one-year-old child of Georgia immigrants. Land was formally set aside for church and cemetery use in 1870, and in a distinctly local touch, iron ore mined commercially nearby in the 1890s was used to mark the graves of the area's earliest settlers.

Elgin, TX

By 1860 a log building near this site served as both school and church for the farming settlement of Pleasant Grove, and land was formally deeded for a school in 1871 as a cemetery took shape nearby. The community built a two-story Woodmen of the World lodge in 1908, reused its lumber for a later schoolhouse, and saw the school consolidate into Elgin in 1949. The cemetery — its oldest marked grave from 1871 and one gravestone recording an 1799 birth — endures as the settlement's chief remnant.

Dallas, TX

This congregation grew from a rural union church meeting in a cabin as early as 1875. In 1906 its Ladies Aid Society began raising money for a dedicated building, completed in 1908 — the first of several sanctuaries repeatedly struck by fire and rebuilt across the decades. Through it all the church continued to serve descendants of the area's pioneer families.

El Dorado County, CA

During the Pony Express's brief run of 1860–61, roadhouses like the one that stood here served as relay points where riders swapped tired ponies for fresh mounts before galloping on. Set along the western leg of the route in the Sierra foothills, this popular stop linked the trail onward toward Folsom and eastward through the mining country. The roadhouse offered rest and provisions in an era when a horse and rider were the fastest link to the East.

New Salem, TX

Settled in the 1850s by Southern planters and nicknamed "Shake Rag," the Pleasant Grove community held its first Methodist services on the plantation of Judge Stephen Decatur Morris. A sanctuary rose about 1853 and this cemetery was consecrated in 1873 with the burial of the Morrises' young son. Among those laid to rest here are pioneer settlers and a noted surgeon, marking the graveyard as a record of early East Texas settlement.

Maydelle, TX

Organized in 1854, Pleasant Grove is among Cherokee County's oldest Baptist churches, first led by the Rev. G. W. Slover and meeting in a building on land donated by Green B. Hill. After the Civil War the original structure gave way to a frame sanctuary, and generations of members—including several area civic leaders—rest in the nearby Pleasant Grove Cemetery.

Pleasant Grove, TX

One of three Wise County communities named Pleasant Grove, this settlement's cemetery holds marked graves dating to the late 1870s. In 1879 neighbors built a frame schoolhouse on donated land that doubled as a church and community hall; the school consolidated with Boyd in 1929 and the old building gave way to a rock church in 1942, while the cemetery remains in use.

Winnsboro, TX

When Henry and Mary Robinson gave land for a school and burial ground in the 1870s, they seeded a community that would take its name from the schoolhouse itself. A humble one-room log building gave way to larger structures as families settled the Wood County countryside, and in the 1880s teacher D. Speer christened the place Pleasant Grove. The school served until 1956, when it joined the Winnsboro district, but the cemetery—begun in 1879—remains active and tended by a local association.

Corsicana, TX

In the years before the Civil War, Methodist circuit riders carried their preaching to the scattered farms of the Mercer Colony in Navarro County, gathering pioneer families first in a settler's schoolhouse. By 1870 the congregation had land for weeks-long camp meetings held after harvest, and in 1877 it settled here amid a grove of oaks that likely gave the church its name, raising a frame sanctuary later rebuilt in 1905.

Carbon vicinity, TX

Eight charter members organized the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in the old Pleasant Hill Schoolhouse in 1892, joining the regional Cisco Baptist Association the next year and starting a Sunday school in 1894. Fire destroyed the first sanctuary in 1905, but the congregation rebuilt in 1906 and again in 1945, and several of its pastors went on to hold prominent posts at area colleges. The church has stayed active in community and missionary work.

Hallsville, TX

Within months of learning of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865, newly freed families began settling this Harrison County community. Led by Brother Ned Jacobs, they held prayer meetings in one another's homes, and in 1871 formally organized Pleasant Hill Baptist Church under a brush arbor with the Rev. George Pritchett as pastor. With no other public gathering place, the church doubled as a schoolhouse for reading and writing lessons and a hall for economic and political meetings.

Fulshear, TX

In 1910, land from the Mason Briscoe estate passed to the Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church, and by about 1930 the ground behind the sanctuary was serving as a community cemetery. The first marked grave, that of Will Brown, dates to 1933, though unmarked burials may reach back earlier. The site once held a school and church as well, and its many handmade concrete markers and veterans' graves reflect a close-knit rural community.

Nolanville, TX

One of Bell County's oldest cemeteries, Pleasant Hill has received burials since 1855, beginning on the farm of Missouri-born pioneer Fleming Trigg Cox. Cox descendants formally deeded the grounds in 1907, and a cemetery association organized in 1901 has cared for it ever since, gathering each June beneath a tabernacle raised that same year. Its graves hold veterans from the Mexican War through Vietnam alongside the hard-working families who first settled western Bell County.

Nevada, TX

This burial ground, also known as South Church Cemetery, grew up beside Pleasant Hill Baptist Church, formed after a congregation near Lavon and Farmersville split in 1882. The Gooch family sold the land for both church and graveyard, and among those laid to rest are veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War. The church disbanded in 1947, and by 1950 the cemetery had ceased active burials.

Rusk County, TX

Founded on land donated in 1845 by Texas Revolution veteran Captain Robert W. Smith, this cemetery began serving a Cumberland Presbyterian congregation, with its earliest marked grave dating to 1850. It became forever tied to tragedy in March 1937, when 112 of the 293 victims of the New London school explosion—one of the deadliest school disasters in American history—were laid to rest here. An annual homecoming still gathers the community each July.

Mt. Vernon, TX

Around 1850, settlers gathered at a spring below this hill for Methodist camp meetings, and a visitor's offhand remark that it was "a pleasant place" reputedly gave the site its name. Landowner Gideon Edwards deeded five acres for a sanctuary and cemetery in 1854, and by 1874 Governor Richard Coke addressed some 1,100 people who came to dedicate an English-cast bell in the belfry. Though the congregation disbanded around 1950, the cemetery — holding veterans from the Civil War through the Korean Conflict — still serves the community.

Whitney, TX

In the decades after emancipation, freedpeople across Hill County built their own houses of worship—at Towash, Lofer's Bend, and near Aquilla. In 1883 those three congregations united as Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church, laying a new cornerstone in 1894 and buying their lot in 1901. By 1907 the church counted about 100 members.

New Boston vicinity, TX

Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church has served the Black community north of New Boston since it was organized in February 1872 by the Rev. Forrest Hooks and fourteen charter members, gathering first in a log cabin on land owned by Abram Ellis, a former slave of Texas patriot Richard Ellis. The present building was raised in 1912–13 on land bought from Richard Ellis's descendants, and a school opened here as early as 1903, later housed in its own building until it consolidated with the New Boston district. Though its membership peaked in the 1920s, the small congregation still gathers for worship on the fourth Sunday of each month, as it has since its earliest days.

Rusk County, TX

In 1845, Texas Revolution veteran Captain Robert W. Smith donated this land for a Cumberland Presbyterian church, whose first log chapel doubled as a schoolhouse. In 1856 the property passed to a group of Baptists from the nearby community of London, who organized Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church that year and have worshiped here ever since. The church and its adjacent cemetery were formally separated by court decree in 1953.

Linden, TX

Pleasant Hill is one of Texas's oldest African American communities, its Baptist church organized in 1843 beside the Old Monterey Road. In 1925 residents built this school with help from the Julius Rosenwald program, matching their own contributions to erect a Craftsman-detailed schoolhouse to a standard Rosenwald plan, complete with an industrial room and movable partition. It taught roughly 1,200 students through eighth grade until 1964 and, restored around 2009, is the last of the twenty-three Rosenwald schools once built in Cass County.

Brenham, TX

The community once called Krug grew into Pleasant Hill as settlers filled the southern reaches of Washington County and needed schools for their children. The first Pleasant Hill School was a one-room wood building with a small porch, typical of rural Texas; a second site in 1918 got a new building funded through the state's Rural Aid Fund. Students rode horses to class and pitched in on community projects until the school merged with neighbors in 1954. Parents and teachers gave their summers to keep the little schoolhouse standing, determined that their children would have a fuller education.

Silverton, TX

Civil War veteran Pleasant Lafayette Crawford built this Queen Anne home, with its inviting wraparound porch, in 1904 on the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle. He had come from Arkansas in the late 1880s to buy ranch land and open a mercantile store, and his family followed by covered wagon to join him. One of Silverton's founders, Crawford opened the town's first hotel in 1894, and his family kept the house until 1917.

Dallas, TX

This burial ground lies within the 1,640-acre survey of James Jackson Beeman, who came from Illinois in 1840 and, as uncle by marriage to Dallas founder John Neely Bryan, helped cut the first road through the Trinity bottoms, named Turtle Creek, and plat the city of Dallas in 1842. In March 1848 Beeman buried his wife Sarah Crawford Beeman at the northeast corner of his land and later opened the plot to his neighbors. Formally organized under trustees in 1887, it remains a resting place of the region's earliest pioneers.

Dallas, TX

Set where two well-traveled pioneer roads crossed, this cemetery saw its first burials as early as 1869, with the earliest marked grave dating to 1881. That year Newton and Catherine (Beeman) Hustead deeded the land to the Pleasant Mound Methodist Church for use as a cemetery. A cemetery association has cared for the grounds since 1906.

Dallas, TX

This congregation grew from a shared frontier meeting house in the farming hamlet of Scyene, a two-story building that doubled as store, Masonic lodge, and school where several denominations worshiped side by side. The Methodists built a log sanctuary in 1876 and relocated to the Pleasant Mound community in 1878, replacing their buildings repeatedly as membership grew. The tradition of shared worship gave way to separate congregations after 1900, but neighbors still gathered for annual homecomings for decades.

Tyler, TX

Organized as early as 1854 on land deeded to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, this congregation first met in a log cabin that doubled as a school. Known first as Black Fork Church and then as Pleasant Retreat, it counted African Americans among its membership from its earliest days and held popular August camp meetings on donated land. After fire damaged its 1897 frame building, the members raised a brick church in 1928 and the congregation continues today amid Tyler's rose fields.

Lancaster, TX

Madison Moultrie Miller came west from Alabama and rode with 'Bigfoot' Wallace as a Texas Ranger before settling near present Lancaster in 1846. He built up a sprawling frontier enterprise — a home-store stocked with New York silks and hardware, a grist mill, stage stand, hotel, blacksmith and tin shops — and became the first postmaster of Pleasant Run in 1848. He laid out a town and worked to bring river navigation and railroads to Dallas County, but his death at 46 stalled the community's growth.

Colleyville, TX

In the spring of 1877, just as Reconstruction was winding down, a small presbytery gathered the scattered farm families of the Bransford community into a Baptist congregation. They worshiped first in a one-room Grange hall, then a schoolhouse, before landowners deeded an acre for a proper church house in 1904. The steady accretion of Sunday School rooms and a sanctuary traces the growth of a rural North Texas settlement into a rooted community.

Colleyville, TX

A log school reportedly stood near this Colleyville site as early as 1870, and by 1877 it had 45 pupils. After A.J. Colwell deeded two acres for a public school and church in 1884, the campus grew through a wooden schoolhouse — where one teacher, Emma Dixon, taught 93 children — a brick building around 1913, and a WPA structure in 1939. Classes ended in 1962 after consolidation with Grapevine.