Search Markers

Bedford Township, PA · est. 1947

Word of these mineral springs' supposed healing powers spread in the 1790s, and by the early 1800s Bedford Springs had grown into one of the nation's fashionable resorts, drawing politicians and society travelers to "take the waters." Its most famous guest, President James Buchanan, used the resort as a summer White House in the years just before the Civil War. Grand spa hotels like this one were where the antebellum elite mixed leisure with politics.

Bedford Township, PA · est. 1947

Founded around 1750 as Raystown, this frontier settlement guarded the wilderness gateway to the Ohio country. In 1758 the British raised Fort Bedford here and used it as a staging base for the Forbes and Bouquet expeditions that drove the French from the forks of the Ohio during the French and Indian War. A generation later, in 1794, President Washington reviewed his militia army here on the march against the Whiskey Rebellion.

Bedford Township, PA · est. 1947

Founded around 1750 as Raystown, this frontier settlement guarded the wilderness gateway to the Ohio country. In 1758 the British raised Fort Bedford here and used it as a staging base for the Forbes and Bouquet expeditions that drove the French from the forks of the Ohio during the French and Indian War. A generation later, in 1794, President Washington reviewed his militia army here on the march against the Whiskey Rebellion.

Bedford, PA · est. 1947

Founded around 1750 as Raystown, this frontier settlement guarded the wilderness gateway to the Ohio country. In 1758 the British raised Fort Bedford here and used it as a staging base for the Forbes and Bouquet expeditions that drove the French from the forks of the Ohio during the French and Indian War. A generation later, in 1794, President Washington reviewed his militia army here on the march against the Whiskey Rebellion.

Bedias, TX

The Rev. Anderson Buffington, a Baptist missionary who had fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, organized this congregation in 1848 in the early-statehood settlement of Bedias. After meeting in a schoolhouse, members built this structure in 1859, where it doubled as a school into the early 1900s and helped spawn other Baptist churches nearby. Restored in 1974, the building was deeded to the local cemetery association.

Lumpkin, GA

Built in 1836 by Dr. Bryan N. Bedingfield as a family home and stagecoach stop, this inn stood a day's travel from Columbus, Americus, Fort Gaines, and Eufaula, making it a hub of commerce and community life. Known over the years by several family names, it served as a hotel or boarding house into the 1930s before being restored as an 1840s house museum.

Burton, TX

Czech immigrants Joseph and Anna Bednar arrived in Texas in 1876 with their six children, part of the wave of Central European families who settled the farmlands of Austin County. After Joseph's death that same year, Anna and the children worked as tenant farmers until she bought 195 acres in 1883, and much of that land has stayed in the family under continuous cultivation. Over generations the Bednars helped build a thriving Czech community, founding Sacred Heart Catholic Church and cemetery, the County Line School, and the roads and mail routes that knit the area together.

Schulenburg, TX

Built in 1888 by the King Iron Bridge Company of Cleveland with a Kansas subcontractor, this sixty-foot iron span carried the Old Praha Road across Mulberry Creek and opened easy access to the growing town of Schulenburg. A pin-connected, box-chord modified Pratt low truss — the "bedstead" type — it cost just $1,422 to erect and served a major travel route into the early twentieth century. Few bridges of its distinctive style still stand.

Pettus, TX

Carved largely from San Patricio County in 1857 and organized in 1858, Bee County took its name from Barnard E. Bee, who served the Republic of Texas as secretary of war, secretary of state, and minister to the United States. A cattle region since Spanish colonial times, it became an important beef producer after 1865 and gained its first railroad, the San Antonio and Aransas Pass, in 1886. Oil was discovered here in 1929, and the county seat has been at Beeville since 1860.

Beeville, TX

Bee County was carved from five neighboring counties in 1857, its first commissioners meeting on the banks of Medio Creek. This 1912 courthouse—the county's fourth—was designed by local architect W. C. Stephenson in the French Beaux Arts manner, bringing a grandeur the county had never seen. Builder W. C. Whitney died during construction, and Stephenson's partner Fritz Heldenfels finished the Classical Revival landmark, crowned by an unusual lady of justice depicted without a blindfold.

Beech Creek, TX

Georgia native James G. Collier brought his family to the Beech Creek community in 1852 and built the area's first sawmill; three years later, eight charter members organized this Baptist church in his home. Remarkably for its time and place, the congregation welcomed both Anglo and African American members, and in 1867 it ordained Henry Gainer, a Black man, as minister. From baptisms in nearby creeks to its first sanctuary on land Collier donated in 1892, the church grew alongside the community it served.

Jasper, TX

Baptist worship reached this corner of Jasper County as early as the 1850s at Allen's Chapel, on the homestead of pioneer George W. Smyth. As the Beech Grove community grew, settlers built a combined church and school in 1875 and formally organized the congregation, holding baptisms in nearby Sandy Creek into the 1950s. Fire, relocation, and rebuilding carried the church through a series of sanctuaries across more than a century.

Kyle, TX

During the Civil War, Hays County's established cattle industry became a supply line for the Confederate army, with ranchers designated as "Government Stockraisers" tasked with feeding the Commissary Department. Driving herds across quicksand-bedded, flooded rivers while dodging raiders and enemy patrols, men like the Day brothers, Jesse Driskill, and Mexican War veteran William Washington Moon turned Texas beef into a war effort — some of them serving in uniform besides.

Danville, NH

Across New England the woods hide dry-stone "beehive" chambers — small corbelled huts of carefully stacked fieldstone whose builders and purpose have never been settled. Some scholars read them as colonial-era root cellars, cold stores, or field shelters raised by early farmers clearing this rocky ground; others insist their age and makers remain a genuine puzzle. This marker frames its little hut in exactly that spirit, tying it to the far more famous stone complex at America's Stonehenge in nearby Salem, New Hampshire, where the same questions have drawn curious visitors for generations.

Dallas, TX

John and Emily Hunnicutt Beeman brought their family to Texas during its days as an independent republic, gaining title around 1842 to a 640-acre tract where they founded this cemetery. Among the first burials, in 1845, was their infant grandson Holland Coffee Bryan — son of their daughter Margaret and John Neely Bryan, the founder of Dallas. John and Emily lie here alongside other family members and early neighbors in a burial ground now holding more than a hundred graves.

La Grange, TX

German-Texan stonemasons raised this Italianate commercial building for F. W. Grassmeyer in the late 1850s, and for decades it served as a hotel. In 1893 German immigrant Fritz Presun bought it as a regional sales office for large American breweries, adding a bottling works — the Crown Soda Factory — a few years later. His son carried the business forward, even branching into oil and gas, tying the little building to the wave of German enterprise that shaped central Texas.

Lincoln, CA

Fritz Beermann and his son Charles arrived in the young railroad town of Lincoln, California, in 1880 and worked side by side in a harness and saddle shop at 5th and F Streets—an essential trade in a horse-drawn frontier economy. Charles went on to serve as Lincoln's Town Treasurer after the 1892 election, a mark of how immigrant craftsmen put down roots and helped govern the communities they helped build. Their story traces the rise of a Gilded Age California town from its earliest tradesmen.

Houston County, TX

In the years after Texas won its independence, families like the Beesons and Boxes carved farms out of the East Texas woods, and their private burial grounds became the enduring record of that first generation. Established in 1852 with the burial of William R. Box, this family graveyard gathers together settlers who arrived in the early 1840s, three brothers who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, and Confederate soldiers of the next generation. The Beeson descendants who still tend the plot keep an unbroken line of memory stretching back to Houston County's founding families.

Beeville, TX

Mexico granted land on Poesta Creek in 1834 to settlers Anne Burke and James Heffernan, but the young colony soon met disaster: a Comanche raid in 1836 killed Heffernan, his kin, and companions as they planted a crop. Bee County organized in 1858, and after a bitter county-seat dispute the town of Beeville rose on land donated by Burke.

Beeville, TX

Beeville got its first post office in 1859, but the 1918 Classical Revival building — with its Doric portico, fanlight doorway, and brick parapet — was the first raised on federal ground. During its construction a feud between two dirt-hauling contractors turned deadly: in 1917 Robert B. Brown shot and killed J. P. Hermes, who had come at him with a knife. Brown's conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that helped establish the right to meet a lethal threat with lethal force.

Mico, TX

In 1854 sixteen Mormon families led by Lyman Wight founded a settlement called Mountain Valley along the Medina River, building homes and mills in the Texas Hill Country. Pressed by conflict with Native raiders, they abandoned the community in 1858, and its lands were later submerged beneath the waters of Medina Lake. Today the drowned townsite lies hidden above this dam.

Cache County, UT

This summit marker on Beirdneau Peak in Utah's Bear River Range names the mountain for Nehemiah Wood Beirdneau, one of the 19th-century founders of Logan City. Logan grew from a Mormon pioneer settlement in the Cache Valley into a hub of northern Utah, and the peak carries a founder's name into the high country above it.

Spokane, WA

This Spokane memorial honors the 283 American service members who lost their lives in Beirut on October 23, 1983, when a suicide truck bomb destroyed the barracks housing U.S. peacekeepers in Lebanon. It was the deadliest single day for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima, and it stunned a nation grappling with a new kind of conflict far from any declared front line. Memorials like this one carried that grief home to communities across the country.

Bedford, MA

This memorial gathers four of America's late-Cold-War and post-Cold-War deployments onto a single stone: the 1982–84 peacekeeping mission in Beirut, where a barracks bombing killed 241 U.S. service members; the 1983 invasion of Grenada; the 1989 operation in Panama; and the 1990–91 Persian Gulf War. Each was a short, sharp conflict of the 1980s and early 1990s, fought by an all-volunteer force far from home. Set in Bedford, Massachusetts, the marker honors local men and women who answered the call across these scattered campaigns.

Kerrville, TX

When the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad made Kerrville its last stop, San Antonio lumberman Frank J. Beitel bought land here in 1889 to open a lumberyard, betting on the county's timber and coming growth. The business thrived, expanding into a warehouse, retail building, and lumber shed, and gained its own rail spur for loading goods after the town's depot was rebuilt in the 1910s. For more than a century the yard supplied the materials that built Kerrville.

Asherton, TX

Designed by noted San Antonio architect Alfred Giles and built in 1910, Bel-Asher was the home of Asher Richardson and his wife Mary Isabelle, whose combined names christened the house. Richardson founded the town of Asherton and routed his Asherton and Gulf Railway Co. through it in 1905, tying the community into the wider rail network. Built of native sandstone with prairie-school influences and broad projecting eaves, the house has stayed in the family for generations and was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1990.

Weymouth, MA

Laid out in 1811 in the old New England town of Weymouth, Belcher Cemetery gathered the graves of local families in the early years of the American republic. Its inscription offers a quiet epitaph — that the dead rest here while their works live on — a sentiment typical of the era's burying grounds. Weymouth was among the earliest English settlements in Massachusetts, and cemeteries like this one hold generations who built the town.

Aubrey, TX

Around 1856 Richard and Mary Jane Belew led their family and 39 other households by wagon from Tennessee to a hilltop north of Aubrey, founding the Belew Schoolhouse settlement. The community bought its first burial ground from Belew in 1880, and more than 70 red-sandstone markers still note its earliest graves. In 1902 a Ladies Cemetery Society formed, and its 85-year run of Thanksgiving dinners funded new land, a sexton's house, and a pavilion; veterans from the Civil War to the Gulf War lie here.

San Antonio, TX

The rare passage of Venus across the face of the sun, which Edmond Halley realized could help measure the size of the solar system, drew astronomers around the world when the paired transits came due. For the December 1882 event, Belgian astronomer Jean-Charles Houzeau—an abolitionist who had once surveyed in Uvalde and left Texas at the outbreak of the Civil War—chose San Antonio as one of his two observing stations for its clear skies and good communications. Using a heliometer of his own design, his team captured 124 photographic plates, matching the work of far larger nations.

San Antonio, TX

Laid down in 1914 in San Antonio's Monte Vista district, Belknap Place is the oldest surviving concrete street in Texas and a landmark of early road engineering. It used a patented two-layer "granitoid" process, developed in the wake of the nation's first concrete street in Bellefontaine, Ohio, that has let the pavement endure a century without major repair. Its stamped brick surface even gave horseshoes a non-slip grip — a telling detail from the moment when horse traffic was giving way to the automobile.

Palestine, TX

Uriah Jasper Bell, a Confederate veteran and ordained Baptist minister, brought his family to Anderson County in 1871 to lead the Ft. Houston Baptist Church. The family cemetery began in sorrow when his only daughter, Lula Bell Kent, died in a fire in January 1890, just months after her wedding, becoming its first burial. Bell, his wife Nancy, their six sons, and generations of descendants rest here.

Belton vicinity, TX

Settlement along the Lampasas River began in 1847, and Bell County was created in 1850, taking its name from Peter Hansbrough Bell—a San Jacinto veteran, Mexican War officer, and governor of Texas. The county seat soon moved from Nolanville to Belton, and by 1860 nearly 4,800 people lived there. When the Civil War came, the county sent a dozen troop companies and supplied its cause with flour mills, a hat factory, tanneries, and workshops.

Belton, TX

Designed by Jasper N. Preston & Son of Austin and built in 1885, the Bell County Courthouse rose in Renaissance Revival style with arched passageways, a columned clock tower, and rusticated limestone. Its original tower was removed in the 1950s but faithfully rebuilt in 1999 from historic photographs. The building's style echoes through downtown Belton, much of which was rebuilt after an 1889 fire.

Belton, TX

Three successive courthouses have stood on this square since Bell County was organized in 1850, on land donated by Matilda F. Connell Allen for the county seat. Before any courthouse existed, the county's first business was conducted in John Danley's blacksmith shop, where his anvil served as the council table. A modest $199 frame building of 1851 gave way to a limestone courthouse in 1859 whose cost so angered voters that every commissioner was turned out of office, and a grander third courthouse followed in 1885.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 1953

Raised in 1745 by Bethlehem's Moravians, this sturdy Germanic building first sheltered the community as a Family House before opening in 1749 as a school for girls — an unusually early commitment to educating young women in colonial America. Its turret carried the town's first clock in 1746 and a bell cast right in Bethlehem that still rings, while a weathervane fashioned as the church seal crowns the roof. The details speak to a close-knit religious settlement that built for permanence and for learning.

Sturgis, KY

Two miles south of here lay mines owned by John Bell of Tennessee, a national political figure in the tense years before the Civil War. In 1860 the Constitutional Union Party nominated Bell for president on a platform of preserving the Union, and he carried Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia against Abraham Lincoln. A longtime congressman and senator, Bell would later reverse course and back secession once war came.

New York, NY

In the raw first year after September 11, 2001, London answered lower Manhattan's grief with a gift cast in bronze. On the 2002 anniversary of the attacks, the Lord Mayor of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury presented this Bell of Hope to New York, a token of the old bond between two English-speaking nations sharpened by shared loss. It came from London's Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the same centuries-old workshop whose bells rang out from Big Ben and, generations earlier, the Liberty Bell. Rung each year near Ground Zero, the bell turns a moment of mourning into an act of remembrance and resolve.

Baytown, TX

Henry Falvel Gillette, a Connecticut-born educator, came to Texas in 1840 and by 1859 had bought land on Galveston Bay for a plantation he named Bell Prairie. The estate included a two-story brick home, a carriage house, and quarters for the enslaved people whose labor sustained it, along with a wharf used to import cattle from England. Gillette also superintended a nearby orphans' home and helped found a Masonic lodge; his plantation house, battered by the 1900 hurricane, finally burned after a lightning strike in 1915.

DeBerry, TX

This East Texas farming community grew up around the early Kinlock post office, its settlers sharing a five-acre burial ground deeded to the Bell-Fountain Baptist Church, founded before the Civil War. The earliest marked grave, a child who died in 1850, and the several Confederate veterans laid to rest here mark the sweep of pioneer life through the war years. After the church burned in 1880 and the congregation dispersed, descendants preserved the site, fencing the plot and raising a tabernacle where the church once stood.

Rockett Community, TX

Founded in 1875 on land given by John and Elizabeth Gibbons, this cemetery and its associated church took the name of Confederate veteran Jodie M. Bell, a church and civic leader in the Rockett Community and the first person buried here in 1877. The Red Oak Masonic Lodge helped raise a two-story chapel and meeting hall on the deeded ground. The lodge later moved to Red Oak in 1894.

Waco, TX

The neighborhood took its name in 1886 when Joseph Bell drilled Waco's first artesian well atop the rise that became Bell's Hill. The local school opened as the Sixth District School in 1889 and was renamed for the hill in 1906. When unstable soil caused the building to collapse in 1923, a new schoolhouse rose on the site of the old Bell water well, and the school has served the neighborhood's children ever since.

East Columbia, TX

Established in 1823 as a Brazos River landing for Josiah H. Bell's plantation, this spot grew into the town of Marion—later East Columbia—laid out in 1824. During the Texas Revolution it served as an army enlistment point and ferrying dock, and in the years of the Republic it thrived as a key river port and trade center. The Brazos was then a highway, and landings like this one were its ports.

Bellaire, TX

In 1908, land-company president William Wright Baldwin founded Bellaire on part of a former ranch once owned by Rice University benefactor William Marsh Rice. He carved truck farms out of the prairie and platted Bellaire — advertised to Midwestern farmers as "Good Air" for its gulf breezes — as an exclusive residential and trading center linked to Houston by an electric streetcar line. Incorporated in 1918 and engulfed by Houston's growth by 1949, Bellaire nonetheless kept its independence and its own city government.

Bellaire, TX

Bellaire's oldest continuing congregation began in 1911 as a non-denominational union church and Sunday school, meeting in the local schoolhouse and even in the town's streetcar pavilion. In 1919 members turned to Houston's First Presbyterian Church and founded the Bellaire Mission, which grew steadily — a brick sanctuary in 1942, self-support in 1943, and by 1957 a thousand-seat sanctuary serving a congregation that neared 1,800 members. Its history mirrors Bellaire's own transformation from a small streetcar suburb into a substantial community inside greater Houston.

Bellaire, TX

In the streetcar age, the suburb of Bellaire was stitched to Houston by rail. Developer William Wright Baldwin's Westmoreland Railroad began building an electric line down the esplanade of Bellaire Boulevard in 1909, and service to a waiting pavilion and turnaround loop here opened in December 1910. Nicknamed the "Toonerville Trolley," the line carried commuters until worn-out track and the rise of automobiles ended it in 1927—replaced the very next day by motor buses.

Baird vicinity, TX

Belle Plain served as the first official county seat of Callahan County from 1877 to 1883, chosen after a tangle of disputed elections that first organized the commissioners court at nearby Callahan City. In 1883 the seat moved on to Baird, and Belle Plain faded. Its brief prominence captures the fierce, fast-shifting contests over county-seat status that shaped the settling Texas frontier.

Baird, TX

Belle Plaine's residents were burying their dead here by 1878, the oldest marked grave belonging to sixteen-year-old Virgil Hill. The little community's fate turned on the railroad: when the Texas & Pacific rerouted its line through nearby Baird in 1883 instead of Belle Plaine, the town began to wither, and the railway deeded the graveyard to Callahan County the following year. Though the town had all but vanished by 1909, burials of area pioneers and veterans continued.

Houston, TX

Belle Sherman, daughter of Texas Revolution general Sidney Sherman, was born at Harrisburg in 1847 and made Houston her home after marrying William E. Kendall. A founding member of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas and the Woman's Club of Houston, she led the club in a pivotal effort to build the city's public library system. After she secured funds from philanthropist Andrew Carnegie for Houston's first public library building, she was honored at its 1902 cornerstone ceremony.

Jasper, TX

In 1910, as railroads and traveling salesmen crisscrossed East Texas, Mamie Cornellia Neyland Patten built this hotel in the Piney Woods town of Jasper and named it for her daughters Belle and "Miss Jim." A widow raising four children active in civic life, she ran a respectable establishment that drew commercial travelers, and after her death her daughter carried on for decades. From the 1930s the building even housed the town's Western Union telegraph office, a lifeline of long-distance communication.

Des Plaines, IL

This memorial gives the name Belleau Wood to a grove once called Senne Wood, honoring the American soldiers of the Second Division who fought in the World War of 1917–1918. At the real Belleau Wood in France, U.S. Marines and soldiers halted a German advance in 1918 in some of the fiercest fighting of the war. The renaming carries that hard-won battlefield memory home to Illinois.

Bellefonte, PA · est. 1947

James Dunlap and James Harris laid out Bellefonte in 1795, and legend holds that the visiting French statesman Talleyrand admired its spring and christened it "beautiful fountain." The town quickly became an early center of Pennsylvania's charcoal-iron industry, its furnaces feeding the young nation's hunger for metal. Its prominence ran deep enough that five of the state's governors once called it home.

Bellefonte, PA · est. 1947

James Dunlap and James Harris laid out Bellefonte in 1795, and tradition credits the French diplomat Talleyrand with naming it for its "beautiful fountain." The town rose as an early hub of the charcoal-iron trade, its works helping supply a growing country. So central was it to Pennsylvania life that five of the commonwealth's governors once lived here.

Bellefonte, PA · est. 1969

On December 18, 1918, this field hosted the first stop on the inaugural scheduled westbound air mail flight, flown by pilot Leon D. Smith. Chosen by pioneer aviator Max Miller, the site sat amid the ridges of central Pennsylvania — a crucial and treacherous waypoint for early pilots crossing the Alleghenies. It remained in regular air mail service until 1925, when advancing routes and aircraft moved on.

Bellefonte, PA

Bellefonte, a small county seat tucked into the mountains of central Pennsylvania, holds a distinction few American towns can claim: it produced an extraordinary number of state governors. This memorial honors seven men who lived, worked, or were educated here, among them Andrew Gregg Curtin, Pennsylvania's forceful Civil War governor who raised troops for the Union; James A. Beaver, a Civil War veteran who later took the statehouse; and Daniel H. Hastings. Their careers stretch from the crisis of the 1860s into the Gilded Age, when Bellefonte's iron industry and political connections gave it influence far beyond its size.

Mineral County, NV

Founded in 1874 by Alsop J. Holmes, Belleville sprang up to mill ore from his Northern Belle Mine at Candelaria, shipping its first bullion bar in 1875. When the Carson and Colorado Railroad reached town in 1881, Belleville's population peaked near five hundred, supporting hotels, restaurants, a schoolhouse, and seven saloons. But once pipelines carried water directly to Candelaria's own mills in the late 1880s, the town lost its purpose and stood deserted by 1892.

LaGrange, GA

Bellevue, completed in 1855, was the Greek Revival home of U.S. Senator Benjamin Harvey Hill, a leading orator who hosted Jefferson Davis and other Confederate figures. Hill became a fierce champion of the South during Reconstruction, and it was partly at his urging that President Hayes withdrew federal occupation troops. The LaGrange Woman's Club has maintained the house since 1942.

Cuero, TX

Pioneer settlers, many of English descent, acquired this land in 1876 to establish a community church, school, and burial ground, with a Woodmen of the World lodge nearby. The still-used Bellevue Cemetery served the Cheapside community a mile and a half north, a town named for the famous London street that once held a cotton gin, grist mill, hotel, saloons, and shops. Though Cheapside later declined, the mark of its English founders lingers.

LaGrange, GA

Benjamin Harvey Hill rose from a Troup County farm to become one of Georgia's foremost orators — a Whig legislator who opposed secession yet became a staunch defender of the Confederacy in its Senate. After the war he vigorously fought the Reconstruction Acts and, with Senator John B. Gordon, pressed President Hayes to remove federal troops from the South, later serving in the U.S. Senate until his death in 1882. His home, Bellevue, was built in 1854–55.

Bellingham, WA · est. 1991

Bellingham's 'Flatiron Building,' built in 1908 on a narrow wedge of land at Bellingham Bay, is a distinctive triangular commercial block of the early twentieth century. Renovated in 1990, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places, recognized for its exceptional value in illustrating the region's commercial architecture and growth.

Plainview, TX

The story of this rural community is really the story of its schoolhouses. Residents organized a school district in 1902 and built their first schoolhouse the next year, naming it for trustee John Bell; it opened with 12 students. A four-room building erected in 1918 served as the hub of social and church life for decades until the school merged with Plainview in 1942, and the last building was razed in 1968.