Search Markers

Rogers vicinity, TX

Founded in 1834 by settlers of the Sterling Robertson colony, Reed's Lake was the earliest settlement in Bell County, established while Texas was still part of Mexico. It took its name from the family of John Burnett Reed, who in 1859 built a large house that still stands, added a cotton gin, and donated land for a school and cemetery. The settlement anchored the surrounding countryside as Anglo colonization pushed into central Texas.

Galveston, TX

This Galveston sanctuary was built to replace an earlier Reedy Chapel lost to the great fire of 1885. Contractor E. F. Campbell began work in 1886, but four storms that year pushed completion into 1887, and the 1900 hurricane badly damaged the building before it was restored to its original Gothic style. Repaired and enlarged again in the mid-twentieth century, it remains a landmark of the island's African Methodist Episcopal community.

Galveston, TX

Methodist trustees bought this Galveston lot in 1848 as a worship site for enslaved Black people, who met outdoors until a building rose in 1863. At the Civil War's end in 1865, ownership passed to the newly freed congregation, who organized the first African Methodist Episcopal church in Texas—later named for its first pastor, the Rev. Houston Reedy. The congregation rebuilt after fire, storm, and the catastrophic 1900 hurricane.

Portland, TX

For early settlers of San Patricio County, crossing Corpus Christi Bay to the region's main trading center meant taking the Reef Road — a natural causeway of oyster-shell reefs lying just below the surface, said by local tradition to have been discovered by Indians. Passable only at low tide, it was the shortest and most favored route across the water. The building of the railroad in 1887 and the first causeway in 1915 ended its usefulness, but it remains woven into the county's history.

Lubbock, TX

After a decade of lobbying by Lubbock officials, an Army Air Corps advanced flying school opened west of the city in January 1942, replacing cotton fields with barracks and runways. As the Lubbock Army Flying School it trained more than 7,000 pilots before deactivating in 1945, then reactivated in 1949 and was renamed for First Lt. Augustus F. Reese, Jr., a Shallowater native killed in action during World War II. Over a 56-year run, Reese Air Force Base sent more than 25,000 men and women — including hundreds from 40 allied nations — into the sky before its closure in the 1990s.

Pittsburg, TX

When a migrant worker died in 1879 with no place to be buried, Georgia-born Civil War veteran Counce Reeves and his wife Selina donated two acres for a church and burial ground in this Camp County community. A visiting minister organized the Reeves Chapel Methodist congregation, which first met under a brush arbor before building a frame meetinghouse that same autumn. As the fellowship grew, the family gave still more land and the members set out to raise a larger building.

Pecos, TX

Carved out of Pecos County in 1883 and organized the following year, Reeves County took shape as railroads and settlers pushed into far West Texas. It was named for George Robertson Reeves, a Confederate colonel who also served in the Texas Legislature, and the town of Pecos became its seat. Markers like this, erected in 1936 for the Texas Centennial, fixed the young county's origins in public memory.

Pecos, TX

The flat, arid Toyah Valley around Pecos drew farmers to its river and springs long before the town existed—Native people are believed to have irrigated crops here in the 16th century, and Mexican farmers later raised grain and vegetables. Cattlemen arrived in the 1870s, and the Texas & Pacific Railway's 1882 line to El Paso brought merchants and mechanics to Pecos City and Toyah. Large-scale irrigated agriculture began around 1900, aided by deep wells and the 1935 dam, the only one on the Pecos River in Texas.

Carthage, TX

Born in South Carolina in 1788, William McMillan Sr. moved to Alabama, married Elizabeth Wren, and brought his family to Texas in the late 1830s, receiving a Republic of Texas land patent in 1846 just as the Republic became a state. The settlement around his home was named McMillan's Post in 1848, with William as its first postmaster. The family set aside this ground for neighbors who had nowhere else to bury their dead; its infant graves and five victims of the 1919 influenza epidemic testify to hard frontier conditions. A Reeves descendant's 1976 gift added the family name to the more than 300 graves.

Caldwell, TX

Built before the turn of the twentieth century by Caldwell merchant and banker William Reeves, this ornate late-Victorian home passed in 1907 to Capt. Mansell Lewis Womack, a Civil War veteran, former county sheriff, and civic leader. His family held the house until 1957, and its intricate Eastlake detailing still marks it as a showpiece of the era.

Baltimore, MD

This memorial gathers the recollections of those who endured the Second World War, among them the landings at Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944 — D-Day. On that stretch of Normandy sand, American troops pushed through murderous fire to establish the beachhead that opened the liberation of Western Europe. The inscription speaks in the voice of a veteran returning to honor the men who fell there.

Silver Spring Township, PA · est. 2010

On a late-summer day in 1752, some 250 Scottish Covenanter Presbyterians gathered at Joseph and Elizabeth Junkin's frontier farm for what is recorded as the first Communion of their faith in the New World. The nine-hour outdoor service at the "Junkin Tent" was led by Rev. John Cuthbertson, the first Reformed Presbyterian missionary in America. This scattered congregation of immigrants helped plant the roots of the denomination on American soil.

Mercersburg, PA · est. 1953

From 1837 to 1871, this Mercersburg campus was home to the German Reformed Church's theological seminary and to a remarkable trio of thinkers—Frederick A. Rauch, John W. Nevin, and Philip Schaff. Their work on theology, philosophy, and church history, later known as the "Mercersburg Theology," drew attention on both sides of the Atlantic. For a time this small town was a center of serious religious scholarship.

Grapeland, TX

Reuben and Sarah Brown left Illinois to settle here in 1833, and their son John lived his whole long life within a mile of his birthplace at Old Fort Brown. In 1865 John deeded two acres for a church and school, on a site his mother-in-law had already chosen and named 'Refuge' as the family's resting place. Another acre followed in 1889, and a cemetery association tends the ground today.

Tionesta Township, PA · est. 1947

By 1750 the powerful Seneca had set aside this reach of the Allegheny for Munsee and other displaced Native groups pushed from their homelands farther east. In the years 1767–70 the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger worked among these refugees, who lived in three towns strung along the river here. The settlements were part of the great mid-18th-century displacement that reshaped Native geography across the Ohio Valley frontier.

Hickory Township, PA · est. 1947

This part of the Allegheny was allotted by the Seneca before 1750 to Munsee and other Native peoples displaced from lands to the east. From 1767 to 1770 the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger lived and preached among these refugee groups, who occupied three towns along the river here. Their presence reflects the broad mid-1700s upheaval that scattered Indigenous nations across the Pennsylvania frontier.

Laredo, TX

A descendant of Laredo's 1755 founder Tomás Sánchez, Refugio Benavides was a pillar of one of the border city's leading families. He served as alderman and mayor before the Civil War, then rose to captain in the 3rd Texas Cavalry, commanding a company that defended the Rio Grande frontier and helped keep the valley open as a Confederate cotton-export route. After Reconstruction he returned to the mayor's office for three terms, improving schools, sewers, and the city charter.

Refugio, TX

When the Great Depression gripped Texas, Refugio built itself a new civic heart on its original public square, financed in part by the federal Public Works Administration and dedicated with a grand celebration in the spring of 1936. Its architect gave the little coastal town a touch of romance in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, with a red tile roof and an arcaded front porch that nodded to the region's mission-era past. The building rose during Mayor Leonard Jeter's administration as one of countless New Deal projects that put Americans to work.

Refugio, TX

Refugio takes its name from Mission Nuestra Señora del Refugio, the last Spanish mission founded in Texas, established in 1791 to draw Indigenous people of the coast into Catholic mission life. When Mexican Texas reorganized in 1835 and the revolution created new counties in 1836, Refugio became one of them, with the old mission town as its seat. The county was formally organized in 1837.

Refugio, TX

Refugio takes its name from the Spanish mission Nuestra Señora del Refugio, founded here in 1795, whose building later served as an early courthouse for the new county. From a shell-concrete structure of about 1850 on the old Mexican-era plaza through fire and replacement, the county's seat of justice evolved until architect Atlee B. Ayres designed the fifth and grandest courthouse, completed in 1917. The oil and gas discoveries of the 1920s swelled the county and prompted the courthouse's mid-century expansion.

Victoria, TX

Irish immigrant Dominick Regan came to Texas, served as a Union soldier in the Civil War, and built a chain of general stores along the coast while raising thirteen children with his wife Mary. He had this Italianate home built in Indianola in 1883, then moved and rebuilt it in Victoria under architect Jules Leffland after hurricanes wrecked the port city.

Goldthwaite, TX

Slung across the Colorado River near the now-vanished town of Regency, this crossing was born of hard rural necessity: the first area bridge went up in 1903 to link ranchers and farmers across the Mills–San Saba county line. Two spans were lost—one collapsing fatally into the river in 1924, another swept away by a 1936 flood—before the current suspension bridge was raised in 1939, built almost entirely by hand. In the 1940s it became a gathering place where young people came to picnic, dance, and sing, and though paved highways later bypassed it, it endures as one of the last suspension bridges in Texas.

Richland Springs, TX

After repeated floods destroyed earlier crossings of the Colorado River here, San Saba and Mills Counties joined forces to build this bridge, named for the Mills County town of Regency, with the Austin Bridge Company of Dallas finishing it in October 1939. Its road deck hangs from two steel cables more than three inches thick, each spun from 475 galvanized wire strands. Restored by the Texas Department of Transportation in 1999, it is one of the last suspension bridges in Texas still open to vehicle traffic.

Hillsborough, NC

In 1771 backcountry North Carolinians known as Regulators rose up against corrupt colonial officials and crushing fees, a rebellion put down by the royal governor's militia at the Battle of Alamance. In its aftermath several Regulators were tried and hanged at Hillsborough that June. This monument, placed by the Colonial Dames in 1963, marks the reputed spot where these men were executed for defying colonial authority.

Hillsborough, NC

After Royal Governor William Tryon crushed the Regulators at the Battle of Alamance on May 16, 1771, retribution followed swiftly. Six of the captured Regulators were hanged a quarter mile east of here on June 19, 1771. Their execution marked the grim end of the War of the Regulation, a farmers' uprising against colonial corruption and taxation.

Goliad, TX

When the Civil War ended, South Texas ranch country dissolved into lawlessness, with wild cattle running unbranded and federal occupation troops unable to check the thieving and violence. In 1868 the Union commander appointed Jack Helm as a special marshal, and he raised a vigilante band of some fifty ranchers—the Regulators—based at Middletown, now Weesatche. They pursued suspected outlaws ruthlessly, ordering many to leave the state and shooting those who defied them without trial, until reorganized Texas Rangers and the passage of time finally restored order in the 1870s.

Ladonia, TX

This site has drawn worshippers since 1840, when it became the first house of worship in this corner of Fannin County and a gathering place for camp meetings, burials, and annual reunions. A chapel built in 1850 was destroyed by a tornado and rebuilt in 1885. It endures as one of the region's oldest continuously used sacred grounds.

Carthage, TX

In 1878, as freed-and-settled families were knitting rural East Texas into communities, the Rev. J. M. Mills held the first services of what became Rehobeth United Methodist Church, and members raised a sanctuary on land deeded by John Wesley Biggs and his wife Mary Ann. The building served exactly a century before fire took it in February 1978; the congregation rebuilt within a year. A cross carved from the first church's foundation logs still ties the new sanctuary to the old.

Arlington, TX

This burial ground opened in 1871 with the grave of infant Mary Miller and became the resting place for the vanished community of Sublett, named for settler John Sublett. The little town once held a school, post office, and church, and the one-room schoolhouse beside the cemetery doubled as the Rehoboth Baptist meeting house. More than 500 graves fill the 2.5-acre site, many marked by headstones now worn illegible, among them pioneer settlers and their descendants.

London, TX

For more than a century, travelers on the road from Mason to Junction threaded through this Hill Country pass. It carries the name of Adolph A. Reichenau, a German emigrant who settled nearby in the Big Saline Valley in 1860 as one of the area's early landholders — only to move on in 1866 amid the dangers of frontier raids. The pass was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Dallas, TX

Jacob Reichenstein, born in Dallas in 1881, rose through the city's retail lumber business from clerk to company president within sixteen years. In 1931 he commissioned this family residence from the noted Dallas firm of Fooshee and Cheek, who gave it decorative brickwork, Palladian transoms, and a steeply pitched hip roof. The house was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1984.

Waller, TX

Seventeen worshippers organized Reid's Prairie Baptist Church in August 1890, and by 1895 they had raised a sanctuary along the old Navasota Stage Road. Rural congregations like this one were the social spine of frontier Texas, doubling as gathering places in scattered farming country.

Dallas, TX

This school's story began in the 1880s with a frame schoolhouse on John Chenault's farm. When the Santa Fe Railroad ran a line through and built a depot around 1885, a town grew up and took the name Reinhardt after a Dallas merchant, complete with stores, a gin, and a bank. The school moved and rebuilt across the decades — a brick building in 1921, a larger campus at this site in 1941 — and was folded into the Dallas system when the town was annexed in 1945.

New Caney, TX

In 1918 Conrad Reinhardt bought this East Texas land and, around 1920, raised a bungalow-style farmhouse from heart-pine and magnolia timber cut on the property itself. He and his wife Lillie Bell Freeman built a family homestead here — house, garage, barns, and sheds — and lived out their lives on the place. The hipped roof and tapered-column porch mark it as a classic early-20th-century Texas farmhouse.

Mercedes, TX

Once part of a Spanish land grant, Relampago — 'lightning' — Ranch sat along the stage and military road linking Rio Grande City and Brownsville. Thaddeus Rhodes arrived in 1852 as Hidalgo county clerk, later serving as commissioner and judge, and Jose Maria Mora bought adjoining land around 1856; together they helped bring stability to the region. Mora's family farmed, ranched, and ran the area's only general store, and their descendants still live on the land.

Bryan, TX

In 1874 two Bryan attorneys donated four acres for a Baptist church, school and cemetery in a community first called Little Georgia, named for the home state of an early-1850s wagon train of settlers. More families arrived in the 1870s, fleeing hard times in the post–Civil War Southeast, and David Lloyd renamed the place Reliance around the founding of its Baptist church. The village grew a store, gristmill, cotton gin and post office; as cotton wore out the soil, farms gave way to cattle ranches, and the church and cemetery endured among century-old oaks.

Bowling Green, OH

This is a cast-iron printing press built around 1890 by Chicago's Paul Shniedewend & Co., a maker of presses during the golden age of American letterpress. Named the 'Reliance,' the machine stayed in working service until 2000 before being retired for display — more than a century in which small presses like it turned out the handbills, forms, and local news of everyday American life.

Longview, TX

Frank Taylor Rembert came to Texas from Mississippi in 1872, working for the railroad before marrying Kate Womack and settling in Longview. He became a leading merchant and investor—running a mercantile firm, a cotton oil mill, and a bank—and served as mayor from 1896 to 1898. Around 1895, inspired by the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, he remodeled the couple's 1870s cottage with Classical Revival columns, and around 1912 added a garage for one of Longview's first automobiles.

Georgetown, KY

In August 1812, Georgetown served as the rendezvous for Kentucky volunteers ordered north to relieve General Hull at Detroit. Their advance ended in catastrophe on the River Raisin in January 1813, where after taking Frenchtown the enemy attacked and killed, massacred, wounded, or captured all but thirty—fewer than half of the 1,050 men ever reached home. The rallying cry 'Remember the Raisin!' endured, and nine Kentucky counties bear the names of officers lost in the campaign.

Lansing, MI

This memorial in Lansing honors those who perished and those who persevered through the attacks of September 11, 2001. That day reshaped American life — nearly three thousand lives lost, two towers fallen, and a nation drawn into a new era of war and vigilance. Communities far from New York and Washington, like Michigan's capital, built their own places of remembrance to hold the grief and resolve of a shared national wound.

Baltimore, MD

In neighborhoods like Baltimore's Remington and Wyman Park, the Second World War touched nearly every household. As young men and women left their rowhouse blocks for battlefields, ships, and factories across the globe, communities gathered to honor the local sons and daughters who answered the call between 1941 and 1945. This memorial reflects the wave of neighborhood tributes raised across America in the war's aftermath, insisting that the sacrifice of ordinary people from ordinary streets be remembered.

Charleston, SC

During the American Revolution, Charleston was defended on its landward side by the Horn Work, a massive tabby-and-earthen fortification that anchored the American lines across the neck of the peninsula. In the spring of 1780 a British army under Sir Henry Clinton laid siege to the city, digging parallel trenches ever closer until the defenders were trapped. On May 12, 1780, the American garrison surrendered here, handing Britain one of the largest captures of Continental troops in the entire war. This surviving fragment of tabby is nearly all that remains of that once-imposing gateway defense.

Mountain Home, TX

This modest cabin of eight-inch elm logs was raised in the 1850s in the Texas Hill Country, when the road west from San Antonio was a hard and dangerous journey. By the 1870s it offered food and lodging to stagecoach travelers, and it is remembered as a spot where riders could swap tired horses for fresh mounts, earning it the name Remount Station and Stage Stop. Later moved to the Y.O. Ranch and restored, it survives as a token of the overland travel era.

Stratford, TX

In May 1901, Sherman County voters chose to move their seat from the ranching center of Coldwater to Stratford, a town growing along the new railroad — and tempers flared. With an injunction threatened, officials held a 1 a.m. court session, canvassed the votes, and spirited the county records under cover of darkness to a tent, where armed guards kept watch for days until a horseman arrived too late to stop them. A lawsuit followed but was dismissed once Stratford's status was settled.

Gonzales, TX

Built around 1907 by local craftsman Fred Meisenhelder, this one-story Victorian cottage was the home of Julius Frederick Remschel and his wife Luella. Remschel was the son of a German immigrant who had founded a local lumber company in 1888, and the house reflects its setting: siding milled from locally grown cypress, set atop brick columns from the Gonzales Sunset Brick and Tile Company. It stands as a record of a family and a town building with the materials at hand.

Boone County, KY · est. 2008

Raised around 1830 for Elijah Kirtley, this sturdy brick I-House stood at the heart of early Boone County life, doing duty as the Boone House Tavern for four decades before becoming a private home. Its later residents included Fountain Riddell — attorney, state legislator, and founder of the Boone County Deposit Bank — and his son-in-law Albert Boyers Renaker, the bank's cashier. Purchased by the county in 1967 and restored in 1992, it survives as a rare window into antebellum Kentucky building and hospitality.

Westbrook, TX

Founded in the 1870s on the open range of West Texas, Renderbrook grew into a sprawling cattle operation that eventually covered well over a hundred thousand acres. In 1889 it passed to Isaac Ellwood, a partner in the barbed-wire industry that was fencing in the plains, who paid partly in wire and stocked the range with Spade-brand cattle. His heirs still run that brand, a rare thread of continuity from the era of the great ranches.

Indianola, TX

The French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, spent decades pushing into the North American interior, and in 1682 traveled the Mississippi to its mouth. In 1684 he sailed from France to plant a colony there, but overshot and landed at Matagorda Bay in early 1685, where he established Fort St. Louis. His venture unraveled, and in 1687 he was murdered by his own men while trekking toward Canada near the Trinity River.

Golden, TX

Built in 1913 on land conveyed to Ella T. Reneau, this two-story brick building served as a lodge hall for Golden Masonic Lodge #1093, which met upstairs until merging with Mineola in 1938. Ella's husband, I.N. Reneau, opened a general merchandise store on the first floor in 1916 and, as Golden's postmaster, ran the post office here from about 1925 until his death in 1941. Its arched windows, broad storefront glass, and cantilevered canopy anchored the town's commercial life.

Angelina County, TX

In 1839, John and Rebecca Renfro rolled into East Texas by wagon from Missouri, part of the great migration into the young Republic of Texas. Settling the tallgrass they called Renfro Prairie, they raised ten children, anchored the local Methodist congregation, and helped greener settlers find their footing in the piney backcountry. The burial ground that grew up here gathered the Renfros together with the neighboring Spivey, Berry, Davis, Kirby and Payne families.

Burleson, TX

When Henry C. Renfro gave land for the M.K.T. Railroad line, he won the right to name the new town for his friend Dr. Rufus Burleson, a pioneer Baptist preacher and longtime president of Baylor University. Renfro's widow and daughter built this house in 1894 as the first home in the town's Clark addition. It stands as a reminder that a single landowner's deal with a railroad could conjure a whole community into being.

Castroville, TX

German immigrant Henry Renken opened this small burial ground in 1876 to lay his first wife, Lissette, to rest on land he had earlier sold to a neighbor. A pillar of the Alsatian-founded town of Castroville, Renken served as alderman and mayor and belonged to the Masonic Lodge before being buried here beside Lissette in 1885. The diminutive graveyard now sits surrounded by Castroville Regional Park.

Reno, NV

Long before Europeans arrived, the Washoe and Paiute lived in the Truckee Meadows; the Stevens-Murphy party passed through in 1844 and settlement began in the early 1850s. Charles Fuller launched a river ferry in 1859 and built a bridge and hotel, holdings soon acquired by Myron Lake, whose "Lake's Crossing" became the town's nucleus when the Central Pacific laid out a depot in 1868. Named for Civil War General Jesse Lee Reno, the town grew on railroads, lumber, and ranching — and later on its reputations for quick divorces, beginning in 1906, and legalized gambling in 1931.

Reno, NV

The Reno Arch first spanned Virginia Street in 1926, built to celebrate the completion of the Lincoln and Victory Highways that funneled early automobile travelers through northern Nevada. Its famous slogan—"The Biggest Little City in the World"—was chosen in a 1929 contest, and the glowing arch quickly became the emblem of a town whose fortunes rode on liberal divorce laws, legalized gambling, and the tourists who came for both. Successive arches have risen over the same spot, but the boast has never changed.

Reno, TX

Established in 1888, this burial ground served the African American community of Reno, Texas, in the decades after emancipation. Though its marker records only a founding date, the cemetery itself is a lasting record of the families who lived, worked, and were laid to rest here, and it carries an official Historic Texas Cemetery designation.

Williamsport, PA · est. 2017

Founded in Williamsport in 1831 and named for its cherished director Daniel Repasz, the Repasz Band is among the oldest community bands in America. It reportedly played at Lee's surrender at Appomattox in 1865, marched in the inaugural parades of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft as the band of the 12th Pennsylvania National Guard, and performed at the dedications of Grant's Tomb a century apart. Its signature "Repasz Band March" is still played the world over.

Littlefield, TX

The sprawling three-million-acre XIT Ranch built a 132-foot windmill on its Yellowhouse Division in 1887, setting it deep in a canyon so it stood tall enough to catch the wind and pump water. Reputed to be the tallest windmill in the world, it stood until high winds finally toppled it in 1926. This replica, raised in 1969, keeps the memory of that engineering marvel alive.

Evansville, IN

On this site during World War II, Republic Aviation Corporation ran a plant that became a linchpin of Evansville's remarkable wartime industrial mobilization. Between 1942 and 1945, more than five thousand men and women here built 6,242 P-47 Thunderbolts—the rugged, hard-hitting fighter prized for its speed and durability. Evansville, like many mid-American cities, transformed almost overnight from a regional manufacturing town into an arsenal-of-democracy powerhouse.

Bridgeport, TX

In June 1841, President Mirabeau B. Lamar dispatched an expedition of 321 merchants, engineers, and soldiers to extend the Republic of Texas' reach toward Santa Fe, then held by Mexico. Struggling through the dense Western Cross Timbers, the men burned much of their gear to move faster and forded the West Fork of the Trinity near this site that July. They were captured before reaching Santa Fe and marched to prison in Mexico City. One survivor, surveyor William Hudson Hunt, later settled in Wise County, where he had spotted the region's ranching promise.

Laredo, TX

In January 1840, Antonio Canales and fellow Mexican Federalists met near Guerrero, along the Rio Grande, to proclaim the short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande. They were loyal to Mexico's liberal 1824 constitution, which centralist leaders in Mexico City had set aside, and their breakaway state claimed lands on both sides of the river with Laredo as a capital. The republic lasted less than a year before Canales reconciled with the central government.