Search Markers

St. Tammany Parish, LA

St. Tammany Parish lay within the Spanish-governed West Florida parishes and was not part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. In September 1810 residents revolted against Spanish rule and declared the Republic of West Florida, raising their own flag and electing a president. The republic lasted just 74 days before the United States annexed the territory by force in December 1810.

Pampa, TX

On November 8, 1874, during the Red River War against the Southern Plains tribes, Lieutenant Frank D. Baldwin led two companies of U.S. troops in an attack on a large Cheyenne band about ten miles southwest of here, freeing two young girls held captive. The clash came amid the army's final campaign to force the Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa onto reservations and open the Texas Panhandle to settlement.

Salt Flat, TX

Bitter resentment over private control of the region's salt lakes—long known as the Guadalupe Lakes—boiled over into the El Paso Salt War of 1877. The dispute over who could gather this essential mineral cost many lives and much property in far West Texas. The state erected this marker in 1936 to commemorate the violent episode.

Fredericksburg, TX

This Fredericksburg home is a small chronicle of frontier building written in its own walls. The oldest section, from about 1845, is fachwerk — the timber-and-infill method German immigrants carried to the Texas Hill Country — while later additions in log and clapboard frame show how families adapted with what they had. The Ressmanns bought it in 1866 and the Boos family held it into the 1970s, more than a century in the hands of two settler households.

Quitaque, TX

Resthaven Cemetery has served Quitaque since the 1920s, in a region whose name may derive from the Quitaca Indians who passed through on a 1683–84 Spanish expedition. The area saw a trading post in 1865, the Lazy F Ranch later sold to famed cattleman Charles Goodnight, and a town platted in the 1890s. When brothers Alvin and Edgar Howard donated ten acres in 1922, the cemetery took shape, later enclosed by a WPA-built sandstone wall.

Edinburg, TX

Founded in 1928, Restlawn is believed to be the only cemetery in Hidalgo County set aside for African American burials, established for a growing Black community of workers and entrepreneurs who had previously been allowed graves only in private ranch cemeteries. County sheriff A.Y. Baker designated a half-acre in a corner of Hillcrest Cemetery for a segregated "Black Cemetery," renamed Restlawn in 1993. Among those buried here is World War II veteran Jacob White, namesake of a local American Legion post.

Montgomery, TX

Born in Appomattox County, Virginia in 1829 and educated at Randolph-Macon College, Reuben Jonathan Palmer came to Texas in 1856 and made Montgomery his home as a lawyer. He served in the state's Ninth Legislature and, in 1861, sat in the Secession Convention that carried Texas out of the Union on the eve of the Civil War. He died in 1868, leaving a wife and three children.

Golden, TX

Reuben Leon Simmons and Fairess Clark Simmons gave a combined eighty-three years to public education in rural Texas. Reuben left school after the third grade to farm but returned as a determined young man, earned his certification, and rose to become a school superintendent while adding a graduate degree from the University of Texas; Fairess taught English and earned a master's degree of her own. Together they shaped the schools of Wood County and beyond across the first half of the twentieth century.

Graford, TX

Alabama-born Reuben Vaughan migrated to Texas in 1852 and in 1854 brought his family to this area as the first permanent settlers in present Palo Pinto County, raising a cabin of cedar and stone. A farmer and stock raiser who kept friendly relations with the region's Indian tribes, he served in a frontier battalion protecting settlements during the Civil War and lies buried in this family cemetery.

Brenham, TX

Wilhelm Reue, who grew up in the Sandy Hill area, married Alma Muegge of the William Penn Community in 1914 and finished this home near Prairie Hill the following year. For decades it hosted community parties, dances, and meetings before the couple sold it in 1950 to Wilhelmina and Henry Eickenhorst, who kept farming the land. The Queen Anne house still shows its original L-shaped porch, roof cresting, star-and-ribbon porch brackets, and an oval glass inset in the front door.

Lander County, NV

This modest stone store, opened in 1863, became the launching point for one of the Civil War's most remarkable fundraising stunts. Merchant Reuel Colt Gridley lost an 1864 election wager and, honoring it, auctioned a sack of flour for the Sanitary Fund—the wartime forerunner of the American Red Cross. Resold again and again across Nevada, California, and finally at the St. Louis Sanitary Fair, the single sack raised roughly $275,000 for wounded Union soldiers, even as Gridley himself died nearly penniless six years later.

Austin, TX

Built in 1934 for grocer Louis Reuter and his wife, this rambling stone-veneer home with its barrel-tile roof looked out over the city in the Spanish Colonial Revival style. Reuter had worked as a grocer in his native San Antonio before coming to Austin in 1918 to open a self-service grocery store — a novel idea at the time that let customers pick goods off the shelves themselves.

Lowell, MA

André-Marie Garin was a French-born priest of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate who spent his life ministering in the mill city of Lowell, where thousands of French-Canadian and immigrant laborers crowded the textile factories. Arriving in the mid-19th century, he founded parishes and schools that anchored a growing Catholic immigrant community until his death in 1895. The simple tribute—"He went about doing good"—captures the esteem in which working-class Lowell held him.

Bell Township, PA · est. 2007

Born just south of here in the rural community of LaJose, Aiden Wilson Tozer rose from Clearfield County farm country to become one of the 20th century's most widely read evangelical Christian writers. A pastor with The Christian and Missionary Alliance, he preached at the Mahaffey Camp Summer Bible Conference in the 1940s and 1950s, near the ground this marker commemorates. His more than forty books have sold over three million copies worldwide.

Elkhart, TX

Born in Virginia in 1781, Daniel Parker became a pioneer Baptist minister who carried his faith to the Texas frontier before his death in 1844. His wife, Patsy Dixon Parker, is remembered alongside him. The Parker name loomed large in early Anderson County history.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2017

Known as the "Lion of Zion," the Rev. Dr. Leon Howard Sullivan pastored Philadelphia's Zion Baptist Church for 37 years and turned his pulpit into an engine for economic justice. His Selective Patronage Movement — boycotting companies that refused to hire Black workers — opened thousands of jobs nationwide, and his gospel of self-help built lasting institutions to train minority workers. Decades later, his Global Sullivan Principles pressed corporations toward human rights and helped isolate apartheid South Africa, earning him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Fairfield, TX

A self-made North Carolinian who rafted timber at 21 to pay for schooling, George Washington Baines became a noted Texas Baptist leader—pastor to Sam Houston, founder of the state's first Baptist newspaper in 1855, and president of Baylor University during the hard Civil War years of 1861–63. He founded churches across the South and led congregations in wartime relief and prayer in Confederate Texas. One of his great-grandsons was Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the United States.

Burkeville, TX

Born in Virginia in 1772, the Rev. Henry Stephenson was among the very first Methodist preachers to work in Texas, delivering a sermon at Jonesboro in 1817 when the region still lay under Spanish rule. By 1834 he had organized the first permanent Methodist church in Texas and was overseeing all the denomination's work in the province. He died in 1841, a few years into the life of the Republic he had helped to evangelize.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1998

Isaac Leeser served as minister of Philadelphia's historic Congregation Mikveh Israel and became one of the most influential Jewish leaders in antebellum America. He founded The Occident, an early Jewish periodical, and in 1853 produced an English translation of the Hebrew Bible for American Jews. As a teacher and scholar he helped shape Jewish religious and communal life across the young republic.

Scranton, PA · est. 1999

In the late nineteenth century, deaf children in Pennsylvania often went without formal schooling, and Rev. Jacob M. Koehler—an ordained minister who was himself deaf—set out to change that. In 1882 he founded the Scranton institute that grew into the Scranton State School for the Deaf, and he became a national voice for the education of deaf children, serving as president of the National Association of the Deaf and representing the United States at the 1889 World Congress of the Deaf in Paris.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1998

In 1834 the Rev. Jehu Jones, Jr. led his congregation in building a brick church on this site — the home of St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church, the nation's first African American Lutheran congregation. Jones, the first Black Lutheran pastor in the United States, shepherded the community here through the 1830s, a time when free Black Philadelphians were building enduring institutions amid deep racial hostility. His church stood as a landmark of Black faith and self-determination.

Frankfort, KY

This Frankfort residence grew out of a chance 1910 shipboard meeting between the Rev. Jesse R. Zeigler and architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Built that same year, it is an example of Wright's open-plan "prairie house" style—and the only building of his design erected in Kentucky during his lifetime. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.

Greene Township, PA · est. 1994

On the western Pennsylvania frontier of the 1790s, a federal excise tax on whiskey struck at the livelihood of farmers who distilled their grain into a marketable, transportable product. Baptist minister John Corbley became the area's most prominent voice against the tax, and on the "Dreadful Night" of November 13, 1794, he was among roughly 150 men rounded up by federal troops sent to crush the resistance. Jailed for a time in Philadelphia, he returned to Greene County and resumed his ministry.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1995

From his pulpit at Holy Savior Parish, which he founded in 1895, Rev. John J. Curran earned the name the Labor Priest for standing with the coal miners of Pennsylvania's hard-coal country. He played a key role in resolving the great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, a bitter standoff that drew in President Theodore Roosevelt, who counted Curran a friend and visited Wilkes-Barre often. His work placed the church squarely in the era's fierce struggles between labor and capital.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1990

Father Joseph Murgas was a Catholic priest in Wilkes-Barre who was also a restless inventor, and on these grounds in 1898 he began experimenting with wireless telegraphy. In 1905 he transmitted sound here in a public demonstration, part of the frantic international race to master radio in the years around Marconi's breakthroughs. A painter, naturalist, and passionate advocate for Slovak causes, Murgas embodied the immigrant clergy who bridged Old World loyalties and New World innovation before his death in 1929.

Maysfield, TX

Joseph P. Sneed, born in 1804, was licensed as a Methodist minister in Tennessee in 1828 and, after a visit in 1834, volunteered as a missionary to the young Republic of Texas in 1838. He organized many churches and once rode a circuit covering seven counties, while prospering as a farmer and rancher. He died in 1881, having helped plant Methodism across frontier Texas.

Daingerfield, TX

Born in Virginia in 1802 and raised near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Nathan Johnson was licensed to preach in 1824 and served as a Methodist missionary to the Cherokee and others. He brought his family to Texas in 1851 and rode the East Texas circuit for seven years, ministering in towns like Marshall, Jefferson, and Clarksville before ending his life as pastor at Daingerfield, where he died of pneumonia in 1860.

Marlin, TX

Born into slavery in Arkansas in 1845 and brought to Falls County as a boy, Nelson Taylor Denson was taken into the Confederate Army by his enslaver during the Civil War before returning to Marlin as a freedman. Educated and inspired by Sam Houston's example, he founded Marlin Missionary Baptist Church in 1868—the county's earliest Black congregation—and established Black schools that opened formal education to the area's freed people. In 1882 he became the county's first elected Black official.

Clearfield Township, PA · est. 2004

When the Civil War came, Richard C. Christy left this parish to serve as chaplain of the 78th Pennsylvania Volunteers, ministering to a regiment that was overwhelmingly not Catholic. In an age thick with anti-Catholic suspicion, he won over the soldiers with plain courage under fire, earning the nickname the "Fighting Chaplain of the Army of the Cumberland." He returned to his pastorate after the war, and hundreds of veterans came to bury him in 1878.

Calvert, TX

Born in South Carolina in 1815, Robert Crawford fought at San Jacinto, the 1836 battle that won Texas its independence, and went on to serve as a Methodist minister until his death in 1888. The State of Texas placed this marker in 1936, the centennial of Texas independence.

San Augustine, TX

Born in Tennessee around 1804, Samuel A. Williams became the first Methodist minister regularly stationed in East Texas, arriving in 1838 when the Republic of Texas was made a district of the church. Riding circuits out of San Augustine and Nacogdoches, he organized far-flung congregations and chaired the region's early Methodist conferences. A respected preacher, he retired in 1863 and was buried at his San Augustine home.

Montgomery Township, PA · est. 1947

On the mid-1750s frontier, the line between pulpit and battlement often blurred. The Reverend John Steel, pastor of the Upper West Conococheague congregation, was commissioned a militia captain, and his church at Church Hill was stockaded in 1755 to shield the community from raids during the French and Indian War. A house of worship thus doubled as a fortress in the war's most dangerous years.

Scranton, PA · est. 1948

Born in England in 1749, William Bishop became the first ordained minister to serve the future city of Scranton. Around 1795 he raised a combined log church and dwelling near this spot, where he preached to the scattered settlers of the region until moving on; he died in nearby Scott Township in 1816. His humble log meetinghouse was among the first institutions of faith in the Lackawanna Valley.

Henderson, TX

Born in South Carolina in 1785, the Rev. William Craig entered the Methodist ministry at eighteen and, about 1841, brought his family to San Augustine, Texas, settling in Rusk County's Oakland community by 1849. A circuit rider in the truest sense, he rode his mule Tobe as far as 300 miles on a single circuit, preaching across East Texas and holding services in Nacogdoches's Old Stone Fort. He organized the Henderson circuit and served as chaplain of the Texas Senate.

Louisville, KY

Born in Virginia in 1865, William H. Sheppard trained at Hampton and Stillman before being sent to the Belgian Congo as a Presbyterian missionary in 1890. His explorations won him a fellowship in London's Royal Geographic Society, and he became an early and courageous voice denouncing the brutal cruelties of Belgian colonial rule. Returning home, he served as a beloved pastor in Louisville's Smoketown community until his death in 1927.

North Reading, MA

Built in 1720, this early-Georgian dwelling is remembered as the home of the Reverend Daniel Putnam, a minister in colonial Massachusetts. In the New England towns of that era the settled minister was among the most influential residents, and the parsonage stood near the center of community life. The Putnam name runs deep through the region's colonial past.

North Strabane Township, PA · est. 1931

The Reverend John McMillan carried Presbyterian faith and formal schooling into the rugged country of western Pennsylvania in the years after the Revolution. Over six decades of ministry he helped plant churches at Chartiers, Pigeon Creek, and beyond, and lent his energy to founding institutions that became Jefferson College and Western Theological Seminary. He and his wife endured the hardships of frontier life to build lasting religious and educational roots in the region.

Marlboro County, SC

During the American Revolution, a "cartel" was a formal agreement between opposing forces for the exchange of captured prisoners under agreed terms. In the Carolina backcountry, where the war became a brutal contest of raids and reprisals between Patriots and Loyalists, such arrangements offered a rare moment of negotiated order amid the chaos. This marker in Marlboro County recalls one of those understandings, a reminder that even a bitter civil conflict on the frontier followed certain rules of war.

Langhorne, PA · est. 1999

In the winter of 1776–77, the village then called Four Lanes End became a place of recovery and death for Continental soldiers. Wounded in the two Battles of Trenton and stricken by disease during that brutal winter, the men were treated in four hospital buildings here after Washington's forces passed through. Archaeological work in 1992 confirmed the burial ground, where written accounts say roughly 166 soldiers were laid to rest.

Hummelstown, PA · est. 2012

When British troops seized Philadelphia in 1777, Pennsylvania's revolutionary government fled westward and needed weapons for the fight. Near Hummelstown it set up its official state gun factory, working in secret from 1777 to 1779 to turn out muskets and rifles for the Continental Army. In an age when a single skilled gunsmith might finish only a few arms a month, the concentrated production here was a small but vital arsenal for a cause perpetually short of firepower.

Phoenixville, PA

This marker records the farthest inland point reached by British forces during their 1777 campaign to capture Philadelphia. In late September of that year, after the Battle of Brandywine, British and American armies maneuvered across Chester County — including the rain-drenched 'Battle of the Clouds' — before General Howe's troops pressed on toward the rebel capital and Washington's army withdrew.

Perkiomen Township, PA

In the autumn of 1777, George Washington's army fought a costly battle at Germantown just outside British-held Philadelphia. Among the wounded was Major Edward Sherburne of New Hampshire, an aide to General John Sullivan, who was struck down on October 4 and died the following evening. This grave marker remembers a young staff officer whose service ended far from home in the war's brutal Philadelphia campaign.

Cincinnati, OH

Placed in 1909 by the Cincinnati chapter of the Sons of the Revolution, this tablet honors Revolutionary War soldiers who, after winning independence, moved west to help settle the Ohio country and now lie buried in Hamilton County. The dates 1775 and 1783 mark the span of the war for independence. The memorial links the founding generation to the westward push that opened the trans-Appalachian frontier.

Greenville, KY

This marker records the names of Revolutionary War veterans who settled in Muhlenberg County after independence. Drawn from many states, these men traded wartime service for land and new lives on the Kentucky frontier, becoming founders of their communities. Their listed names preserve a roster of the county's earliest citizen-soldiers.

Bethlehem, PA

During the Revolutionary War, the Moravian town of Bethlehem served as a refuge and a major Continental Army hospital, and scores of soldiers who died of their wounds or of camp diseases were buried in its ground. Two centuries later, when those long-forgotten graves were disturbed or rediscovered, the remains were gathered and reinterred with honor, marked by this monument dedicated on May 25, 1996. The stone stands not for a battle but for the quiet toll of the war's sick and wounded far from any front line.

Frankfort, KY

This monument, presented by the Kentucky Society of the Sons of the Revolution, honors the many Revolutionary War veterans who went on to lead the new state of Kentucky. Governors such as Isaac Shelby, James Garrard, Christopher Greenup, Charles Scott, George Madison, and John Adair, along with early U.S. Senators from Kentucky, had all served in Continental or state forces during the fight for independence. Their military ranks are recorded alongside their offices.

Corsicana, TX

Corsicana native Rex Ingram rose from a Texas boyhood to become one of the most respected Black actors of his era, with a career that spanned half a century. A Northwestern University graduate, he made his screen debut in a 1918 silent Tarzan film and won lasting acclaim as "De Lawd" in the 1936 film Green Pastures. On stage, screen, and television he brought a rare skill and dignity to every role.

Grapeland, TX

Reynard began as one of the scattered farm settlements that filled East Texas after the late 1830s, first known as Trinity Chapel until Thomas Jefferson Fox established his family's farm here in the 1880s. When a post office opened in 1901, the community took the name Reynard — French for "fox," a nod to its leading family. At its height it held two general stores, a church, a school, a cotton gin, and a sawmill before fading by the 1940s into the memory of the families who remain in Houston County.

Bovina, TX

In 1901 the Rhea brothers bought a slice of the vast XIT Ranch and resold parcels to farmers, seeding a settlement of midwestern and German immigrant families on the Texas panhandle. A post office, a school, and Immanuel Lutheran Church—one of the panhandle's earliest of its denomination when it organized in 1910—anchored the community. The schoolhouse doubled as a gathering place until the district was divided between Friona and Bovina in 1949.

Alvord, TX

Abner and Chloe Rhoads came by covered wagon from Kentucky in 1870, joined on their 205-acre tract by their son Moses, a Methodist circuit rider, schoolteacher, and carpenter. The cemetery's oldest graves — two young sons who died in 1879 and 1880 — testify to the hardships of settling the land. When decades of cotton cultivation exhausted the soil, the families relocated in the 1920s and 30s, and much of the property was sold in 1940 to become part of the LBJ National Grasslands.

Boyertown, PA · est. 2008

On the night of January 13, 1908, a fire tore through the Rhoads Opera House in Boyertown during a crowded performance, killing 170 people. Overcrowding, badly designed and unmarked exits, and inadequate fire escapes turned a theater into a death trap, and many of the victims were laid to rest nearby. The horror shocked Pennsylvania into action.

Gilmer, TX

When the Marshall & East Texas Railroad reached this Upshur County pine country in 1901, a sleepy sawmill site named for operator W. M. Rhone erupted into a boomtown. Within a few years Rhonesboro counted fifteen sawmills, ten stores, churches, a school, a bank, and a cotton gin, its fortunes riding entirely on East Texas timber. When the surrounding pine forest was exhausted around 1917, the mills moved on and the railroad was pulled up, leaving the town to fade.

Beeville, TX

Brothers Henry and Sydney Hall opened the Rialto in 1922 as the flagship of a 22-theater south Texas chain, its stage large enough for vaudeville and its opening night packed for a Douglas Fairbanks silent film. The Halls even ran an early radio station, KFRB, from a rooftop transmitter, and added sound for talkies in 1929. After a 1935 fire gutted the interior, designer John Eberson rebuilt it in exuberant Art Deco before the theater finally closed in 1986.

Three Rivers, TX

Movies came to Three Rivers first under canvas tents, from 1913 into the mid-1920s, before Beeville theater owners W.S. and J.S. Hall Jr. built a modest movie house by the railroad tracks. In 1948 they replaced it with this streamline moderne theater by noted Dallas architect Jack Corgan, complete with air conditioning and a balcony. Closed in 1981, the Rialto was restored by the city's economic development corporation and reopened in 2001.

Rice, TX

Settlers displaced by an 1866 flood at nearby Porter's Bluff gathered here, and when the Houston and Texas Central Railroad bypassed the old town and ran through this site, a Houston businessman donated five hundred acres for a station and townsite that took his name. Cotton drove the local economy, with one of the town's first businesses a gin and its depot a busy shipping point, while troop trains and a Liberty Bell tour later rolled through on the rails that had made the place.

Rice, TX

The Rice community grew up in the late 1860s, named for William Marsh Rice, the merchant who donated land for its railroad station and later endowed Rice University. The citizens received land for this cemetery in 1868, and it was moved to its present site in the 1870s. Its graves span Texas history — a veteran of the Texas War for Independence lies here alongside Civil War, Spanish-American War, and two World Wars' veterans, while rows of small stones testify to high infant mortality and the early-20th-century flu epidemic.

Crockett, TX

Joseph Redmond Rice and his wife Wille built a log cabin along the old San Antonio Road in 1828, in the years when Anglo families were first putting down roots in what would soon become the Republic of Texas. Grief came early: the burial ground likely began with the deaths of their infant twins around 1830, and the high toll of childhood illness filled the plot with young graves, including four grandchildren. Deeded to trustees in 1953, the cemetery is still tended by the family's descendants.

Eagle Lake, TX

In 1898 Captain William Dunovant, a local plantation owner, gambled forty acres near Eagle Lake on an experimental rice crop, using convict labor from a nearby prison farm to build the levees. The results were so encouraging that within two years more than 30,000 acres of rice grew across the Colorado River Valley, and rice swiftly displaced cotton and sugar cane as the region's cash crop. The boom drew new families, revived abandoned fields, spurred railroad construction, and gave rise to rice mills and irrigation companies that still shape the county today.

Uvalde, TX

Built in 1909–10, this two-story building has long anchored Uvalde's commercial life, its ground floor first holding an ice house and meat market while the upper floor served as a dance hall, private club and grand jury room. In 1913 saddle maker Prentice Carrington Rice, working in Uvalde since 1883, moved his saddlery and harness business to the first floor, and the second floor was later divided into rooms that operated as The Rice Hotel into the 1940s. Its layered uses trace the everyday economy of a South Texas ranching town.

Houston, TX

The oil-and-real-estate fortune of William Marsh Rice endowed a university he insisted open only after his death, a wish tangled by his mysterious 1900 murder and the legal battles that followed. When the Rice Institute finally opened in Houston in 1912 under president Edgar Odell Lovett, it united teaching and research on a Mediterranean-inspired campus and quickly earned distinction. In 1962 its stadium hosted John F. Kennedy's call for the nation to reach the moon "in this decade."