Search Markers

Bellville, GA

Bellville was founded in 1890 on land platted beside the newly laid tracks of the Savannah & Western Railroad and named for pioneer Frances Bell Smith. Its depot quickly became the town's commercial and social center, and Bellville grew into a regional shipping point for cotton, naval stores, and lumber, home as well to the Bellville Academy.

Bellville, TX

Brothers Thomas and James Bell arrived with Austin's colony in 1822, and by 1846 Thomas's land offer won Bellville the county seat over old San Felipe. Settlers from England, Germany and across the eastern states poured in, and after the hard Reconstruction years the Santa Fe railroad's 1880 arrival doubled the population. Cotton, and later a 1915 oil strike, kept the town thriving through the twentieth century.

Bellville, TX

German settlers around Piney, east of Bellville, organized a singing society in Fritz Schlecht's home in 1860, part of the rich Sängerfest tradition that immigrants carried from central Europe to the Texas hill and prairie country. The group built a hall in 1877; after an 1900 storm wrecked it, members moved and rebuilt it on land given by Henry Strauss. The society adopted the name Concordia in 1938.

Bellville, TX

Bellville rose as the Austin County seat in 1848 and boomed after the railroad arrived in 1879-80. In 1928 two local physicians, Dr. Jubal Allen Neely—a World War I Army Medical Corps veteran—and Dr. Herbert Edward Roensch, opened the town's first hospital with just four beds, timed with an oil-field discovery that swelled the population. Over the following decades the little clinic grew into a voter-supported hospital district still serving the community.

Bellville, TX

Bellville's growing student body outgrew its 1918 brick schoolhouse by the 1930s, but a first bid for federal New Deal money was rejected in 1936. A citizens' petition and a bond issue finally unlocked Public Works Administration funds, and a new high school and gymnasium opened in 1939, dedicated by U.S. Senator Tom Connally. The building served as the high school until 1970 and today houses the school district's offices and museum.

Bellville, TX

In the late nineteenth century the German-descended residents of Bellville poured their social life into clubs like the Bellville Turnverein Gut Heil, a chapter of the gymnastic-and-fellowship societies German immigrants carried across the Atlantic. In 1897 the Turnverein completed this striking twelve-sided pavilion, built of extra-long lumber shipped from the mills, as the town's gathering place. The city bought the park in 1937 and, with a Works Progress Administration grant, modernized it while keeping the pavilion at its heart.

Nye County, NV

A reliable year-round spring in Buena Vista Canyon long drew Shoshone people to this high valley for rabbit drives and gatherings before silver strikes in 1865 transformed it into the boomtown of Belmont. At its peak it boasted schools, churches, a newspaper, a Chinatown, and a rowdy reputation for brawls, feuds, and vigilante justice, serving as the Nye County seat from 1867 to 1905. When the shallow, high-grade ore played out around 1890, residents drifted off to newer strikes, leaving the surviving courthouse to preside over a quiet townscape.

Belpre, OH

When New England pioneers laid out Belpre on the north bank of the Ohio in 1789, they were among the first waves of settlers pushing into the newly organized Northwest Territory, farming the rich bottomland and trading along the river highway that carried people and goods west. The settlement was well enough established by the early 1800s to greet the Lewis and Clark expedition as it made its way downriver toward the frontier. A century later the same current that floated flatboats of grain was harnessed by locks and dams, and barge traffic turned the old farm town into a working industrial river port.

Belton, TX

Built in 1927 along Nolan Creek, the Belton Farmers Co-op Gin replaced an earlier gin that had burned on the site. Where most central Texas gins were frame buildings, local cotton farmers who owned this one built it of load-bearing brick, a two-story structure topped by a hipped metal roof and small cupola. It stands as a rare survivor from the years when Belton was the hub of Bell County's cotton trade, closing only after World War II.

Belton, TX

After a religious vision in 1867, Martha White McWhirter gathered Belton women into a celibate, communal sisterhood that broke from husbands and churches to live and earn on their own terms. Barred from their families' support, they sold bread, took in laundry, even practiced dentistry, and in 1886 opened the celebrated Central Hotel. McWhirter became the first woman on the Belton Board of Trade before the group relocated near Washington, D.C., in 1900, its last member dying in 1983.

Beltrami County, MN

In 1823 the Italian adventurer Giacomo Costantino Beltrami wandered the headwaters country of northern Minnesota, convinced he had traced the source of the Mississippi River. A political exile with a flair for the dramatic, he named nearby waters and left his own stamp on the map before later explorers pinpointed the true source at Lake Itasca. This monument, and the county that bears his name, keep his eccentric quest alive.

San Marcos, TX

As San Marcos matured in the decades after the Civil War, prosperous families built substantial homes along a street named in 1876 for a local college president. The district preserves a remarkable run of late 19th-century architecture, from the 1875 Belvin house through gracious homes of the 1880s and 1890s and into the early 1900s. Together they trace a small Texas town's rising ambitions and improving craftsmanship.

Albany Township, PA · est. 1995

Born in Reading in 1870, Ben Austrian was a largely self-taught painter who won international fame for his lifelike renderings of barnyard fowl, woodland creatures, still lifes, and landscapes. His most famous creation, the little chick of the Bon Ami cleanser advertisements, became one of the era's best-known commercial images. Austrian kept studios in Paris, Florida, and at Mount Penn, but his heart belonged to his beloved retreat "Clovelly-at-the-Pinnacle" near here, where he died in 1921 and is buried.

Maydelle, TX

Long before bridges spanned the Neches River, Native people and early Anglo settlers forded it here at Duty Crossing, named for settler Richard Duty. By 1848 Ben Cannon was running a ferry at the site, a vital link in regional travel until a toll bridge took over the traffic in 1854. The crossing marks a spot where the routes of river, road, and eventually the Texas State Railroad all converged.

San Angelo, TX

When a catastrophic flood swept away the town of Ben Ficklin on August 24, 1882, it inundated the settlement's cemetery and exposed many graves. Charles B. Metcalfe chose this higher ground to reinter his relatives—including Col. Francis C. Taylor, the town's founder—and to bury his mother, sister, and uncle among the flood's victims. The site became the resting place of many Tom Green County pioneers, in a village and cemetery named for Ben Ficklin, owner of the San Antonio–El Paso mail line.

Fitzgerald, GA

Ben Hill County was carved from Irwin and Wilcox Counties in 1906 and named for Benjamin Harvey Hill, the celebrated orator who backed the Confederacy in its Senate and later served in the U.S. House and Senate. Its first officers were commissioned in January 1907.

Columbus, TX

Ben Marshall Baker and his brothers founded the "Colorado Citizen" newspaper in 1857, and all three joined the Confederate Army when the Civil War came — one brother, Hicks, was killed in the fighting. Ben returned to publish the paper from 1873 until his death in 1907, making this house the center of the town's press. His widow Virginia lived on here until 1916.

Cameron, TX

Kentucky-born Benjamin Rush Milam fought in the War of 1812, traded with the Comanche, and became an empresario recruiting settlers to Mexican Texas before joining the fight for independence. In late 1835 he rallied hesitant Texian volunteers with the cry 'Who will follow Old Ben Milam into San Antonio?' and led the assault that took the town—though he was killed by a sniper on December 7 before it fell. The State of Texas raised this monument in 1936 for the independence centennial.

Upshur County, TX

Raised in 1872 of broad-axe-hewn boards and square nails, this home became a gathering place where, as the marker recalls, "a stranger never passed." Its builder, Ben F. Phillips—Confederate veteran, Church of Christ minister, and self-styled philosopher—performed many marriages here and represented Upshur and Camp counties in the Texas Legislature from 1890 to 1894. He and his wife Mattie raised nine daughters under its roof.

Athens, GA

A self-taught mechanic and inventor, Ben T. Epps designed, built, and flew the first airplane in Georgia in 1907 — just four years after the Wright brothers. From his Athens shop he built a series of ever-lighter monoplanes, including a 1924 model weighing just 350 pounds and powered by a motorcycle engine, and he opened an airfield here in 1917. He died in 1937 from a crash on takeoff at this very field.

Ben Wheeler, TX

First known as Clough for the settler who bought the land in 1868 and opened a post office in his home, this East Texas community was renamed Ben Wheeler in honor of a Kentucky-born mail carrier — the first to bring the mail into Van Zandt County. The town grew quickly in the 1880s and early 1890s, boasting general stores, gins, mills, hotels, churches, and the Alamo Institute, before a series of fires and shifting fortunes slowed its growth. It stabilized in the mid-twentieth century as area farmers turned to ranching and haying.

Laredo, TX

The three Benavides brothers descended from Tomás Sánchez, who founded Laredo in 1755, and became the town's best-known Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. Santos Benavides rose to colonel—the highest rank achieved by a Mexican-American in the Confederate army—while his brothers Refugio and Cristóbal earned captaincies; together they defeated a raiding party under Juan Cortina at Carrizo in 1862 and, badly outnumbered, held Laredo against Union sympathizers in 1864. Their victories helped keep open the vital Confederate cotton trade with Mexico, and they were leading merchants and politicians in Laredo.

Laredo, TX

Built about 1879 in Laredo's San Agustín district, this house is a fine surviving example of the region's vernacular Mexican architecture. Rancher Natividad Herrera raised it for his wife, Ester Benavides de Herrera, daughter of the noted local figure Captain Refugio Benavides. Its adobe-and-stone lines root the family firmly in the Tejano ranching society that shaped early Laredo.

Starks, ME

This marker commemorates Colonel Benedict Arnold's 1775 expedition to Quebec, a grueling march that pushed hundreds of Continental soldiers up through the Maine wilderness and along the Kennebec River. The campaign aimed to seize Quebec and bring Britain's northern province into the Revolutionary cause. Cold, hunger, and rough country made the trek one of the war's most punishing ordeals.

Maydelle, TX

George Clinton Benge moved from Alabama to this part of Cherokee County in 1850 with his wife Nancy and seven of their children, working as a farmer, blacksmith, and gunsmith and serving as a justice of the peace at Old Jacksonville. When Nancy died in 1861 he opened this burial ground on his own property. Family members interred here contributed to Jacksonville and neighboring communities, and a cemetery association tends the grounds today.

Woodbridge, VA

This roadway in Woodbridge honors Benita Fitzgerald, a Prince William County native who became one of the great American sprint hurdlers of her generation. At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics—the XXIII Olympiad—she captured gold in the 100-meter hurdles, becoming only the second American woman ever to win that event. She also reigned as Pan American Games champion in 1983 and claimed U.S. national titles in 1983 and 1986, building a résumé that made her a hometown hero.

Houston, TX

Finished in 1924, this apartment building answered the demand for stylish multi-family housing in downtown Houston's south end after World War I. A successful businessman hired a noted local architect — later famous for grand civic works — to design it, and the couple lived in one unit while renting the others to well-off tenants. After decades as a hospital and then long vacancy, a 2000 rehabilitation returned it to use as offices.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

In 1854, free Black Philadelphians founded this literary and educational society in a city that was a hub of antebellum African-American intellectual life. Named for Benjamin Banneker—the self-taught astronomer, almanac author, and surveyor of the new federal capital—the institute embodied the belief that learning was a form of liberation. In an era when most Black Americans were still enslaved, its members cultivated debate, study, and self-improvement as acts of dignity and resistance.

Columbus, TX

For a week in March 1836, this Colorado River crossing was the campsite of the Texas Army under General Sam Houston during the anxious retreat that followed the fall of the Alamo. Houston paused here before continuing the withdrawal from Gonzales that would end in triumph at San Jacinto. The marker fixes one waypoint in that fateful spring march.

Trinity County, TX

Benjamin Burke came to Texas around 1829 and secured an 1834 land grant from the Mexican government, then took up arms with the Texas Army in the fight for independence. He later settled with his large family in Trinity County, where two of his sons went on to serve in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

Greene County, AR

Crowley's Ridge is a long, narrow upland winding through the flat lowlands of eastern Arkansas, and this monument honors the settler whose name it carries. Benjamin Crowley (1758–1842) came west in the early 1800s to help pioneer this corner of the Arkansas country, joining the first wave of Anglo-American families to put down roots on the ridge. His name has stuck to the landform ever since.

Greenville, TX

Benjamin D. Martin came to Hunt County from Virginia in the 1850s and, during the Civil War, organized the Texas Sharpshooters known as "Ben Martin's Company." After the war he became Greenville's first mayor in 1873, helped draft the Texas Constitution of 1875, and served in the state senate. His public life spanned the wrenching passage from Confederacy to Reconstruction-era Texas.

Evant, TX

Benjamin F. Gholson, born in 1842 to early Texas settlers, served with the Texas Rangers as a young man and in 1860 took part in the company that recovered Cynthia Ann Parker, the Anglo woman taken by the Comanche as a child in 1836. He went on to serve in the 2nd Texas Cavalry during the Civil War before becoming a prominent stockman. In later life he was active in the Texas Ex-Rangers Association, helping to preserve the memory of the frontier era he had lived.

Utopia, TX

Benjamin F. Highsmith came to Texas as a young Missourian and threw himself into the fight for independence, serving in the Army of Texas in 1835–36 and later riding as a Ranger under the famed Captain John Coffee Hays. He joined the 1842 Somervell Expedition against Mexican forces and lived on into the twentieth century, a link to the founding generation of the Republic.

Wilson, NC

This monument honors Benjamin Farmer, one of the countless ordinary men who took up arms during the American Revolution and served through the long war between 1775 and 1783. The inscription places him in Captain Lyttle's Company, the kind of local militia and Continental unit that formed the backbone of the Patriot war effort across the Carolinas, where the Revolution's final campaigns were bitterly fought. The stone was set by the Thomas Hadley Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, part of the early-twentieth-century movement to locate and mark the graves and service of Revolutionary soldiers before their memory faded.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1990

Benjamin Franklin, arguably the eighteenth century's most versatile American, built a fine brick house in this Philadelphia courtyard beginning in 1763. After decades abroad as a printer, diplomat, and revolutionary statesman, he returned to live his final five years here until his death in 1790. From this address the aging Franklin remained a fixture of the young nation's public life, corresponding, inventing, and advising to the last.

Boston, MA

Here, beginning in 1719, James Franklin ran the printing office of the New England Courant, one of colonial America's boldest and most independent newspapers. His younger brother Benjamin Franklin served here as an apprentice, learning the printing trade that would help make him famous. Later, from 1769 to 1776, Edes and Gill published the Boston Gazette on this spot — a fiercely patriotic paper that helped fan the flames of revolution.

Bandera, TX

Bandera's early settlers included Lyman Wight's Mormon colony, which arrived in 1854, and this house grew from a home built for the Miller family with help from settler Isaac Berry Langford. In 1904 the Millers sold it to Frank Langford Jr. and his bride Mary Emma Hay, who expanded the one-story dwelling into a two-story home and donated land across the street for a Mormon church.

Grand Saline, TX

Born in Kentucky in 1818, Benjamin Franklin Wheeler spent years as a Mississippi River boatman before settling in Van Zandt County, Texas, in the late 1840s. He became one of the first mail carriers in the region, riding routes between Tyler, Edom, and Canton, helped improve the Shreveport–Dallas road, and carried mail for the Confederacy during the Civil War. In 1876 a friend's request for a post office produced the community of Ben Wheeler, named in his honor.

Warrenton, NC

Benjamin Hawkins served in the Continental Congress and as one of the first U.S. senators from 1789 to 1795 before accepting the demanding post of U.S. Indian Agent to the Creek Nation from 1796 to 1816. Living among the Creek in the Southeast, he sought to introduce European-style farming and governance while navigating the mounting pressures of American expansion. His home stood several miles southwest of Warrenton.

Franklin, GA

Benjamin Hawkins, appointed U.S. Indian agent by President Washington, was so trusted by the Creeks that they called him "the Beloved Man of the Four Nations." A soldier, congressman, and senator, he ran his agency on the Flint River and sought — with a mix of firmness and kindness — to reshape Native life along Euro-American lines. His careful journals, measured by elapsed time on horseback, left the first written record of travel through this region.

New Orleans, LA

Purchased in 1853 by Judah P. and Joseph Benjamin, this Hurstville-suburb house sheltered their widowed sister Rebecca Benjamin Levy until the U.S. Treasury confiscated it in 1889 as enemy property. Its frequent visitor, Judah P. Benjamin, rose from U.S. Senator for Louisiana to Secretary of War and then State for the Confederacy. The house once faced St. Charles Avenue and was relocated to this spot in 1892.

Berkeley, CA

Benjamin Ide Wheeler (1854–1927) led the University of California at Berkeley as its president from 1899 to 1919, a transformative era when the campus grew into a major public research university. This memorial, a gift of the class of 1928, was placed by grateful graduates shortly after his death. His long stewardship coincided with the Progressive Era's faith in higher education as an engine of civic and scientific progress.

Sabine Pass, TX

Benjamin Johnson, born in Louisiana in 1815, settled in Texas in 1832 and took up arms in the fight for independence. He fought in the Texas army's capture of Bexar in December 1835 and served in Captain James Gillaspie's company at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836. He lived out his days as a respected farmer and stockman in the Sabine Pass area.

Abington Township, PA · est. 2018

Long before abolition became a mass movement, Benjamin Lay—a Quaker, a dwarf, and a man of ferocious conviction—was denouncing slavery in colonial Pennsylvania. He staged dramatic public protests, boycotted everything made by enslaved labor, and wrote a blistering pamphlet against Quaker slaveholders that got him disowned by his own meeting. He lived simply, reportedly in a cave, and his moral witness helped push Quakers to become the first religious body in America to renounce slavery within their ranks by 1776.

Macon, GA

This Blue Star Memorial Highway marker near Macon honors the U.S. Armed Forces and singles out Colonel Benjamin H. Purcell for recognition. Placed by the Meadowbrook Garden Club with the Garden Club of Georgia, it joins a national network of blue-star tributes to those who have defended the country. The dedication personalizes the memorial by naming a local officer's service.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2002

Benjamin Rush, born on this Philadelphia site, was a physician, teacher, and reformer whose signature joined the Declaration of Independence. A tireless humanitarian, he spoke out against slavery and championed public health and social reform in the young republic. His pioneering study of mental illness earned him the lasting title "Father of American Psychiatry."

San Antonio, TX

Kentucky-born Benjamin Rush Milam packed a lifetime of frontier daring into his years: a soldier in the War of 1812, a trader among the Comanches, a colonizer, and the first to navigate the upper Red River. When the Texas Revolution erupted, he helped take Goliad and then rallied volunteers with the cry to storm San Antonio, planning the attack that would capture the town. He was killed leading that assault on December 7, 1835. This monument was raised by the State of Texas in 1936 for the independence centennial.

Benjamin, TX

Built in 1896, the Benjamin School is the oldest surviving school building in this Knox County town. In 1910 the local Masonic lodge bought the structure and moved it here, giving it a second life as a community hub. Its lower floor became a gathering place, hosting the Sorosis Club—a women's organization formed here in 1924.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2004

Benjamin Smith Barton was among early America's foremost men of science, a physician and University of Pennsylvania professor who wrote the first botany textbook published in the United States. In 1803, at the request of the expedition's planners, he tutored Meriwether Lewis in natural history to prepare him to observe and record the plants, animals, and peoples of the West. From this Philadelphia home he stood at the crossroads of American medicine, natural science, and continental exploration.

Honey Grove, TX

A New Englander who came to Fannin County in 1846, Benjamin Stuart Walcott founded and developed the town of Honey Grove. He opened its first store in a settler's log cabin, built the first frame store when the town was platted in 1848, erected its first school in 1853, and gave land for a Union Church in 1856. His sons went on to become community leaders in their own right.

Ravenna Township, OH

Benjamin Tappan arrived in the wooded Connecticut Western Reserve in 1799 and laid out Ravenna Township while northeastern Ohio was still raw frontier, barely settled by Americans pushing west of the Alleghenies. Over a long public life he wore many hats—militia officer during the War of 1812, state judge, and U.S. senator—while helping steer the canal boom that stitched Ohio's farms to eastern markets. His most lasting mark was national: in 1844 he shepherded the legislation that turned James Smithson's mysterious bequest into the Smithsonian Institution.

Liberty, TX

Benjamin Watson Hardin, born in Georgia in 1796, served in the Ninth Congress of the Republic of Texas and as sheriff of Liberty County. His public life placed him among the men who staffed the young Republic's fragile government and enforced its laws on the frontier. He died in Liberty County in 1850, having helped guide it through the transition into statehood.

West Saint Clair Township, PA · est. 2006

In the tense years before and during the Civil War, the Walker Homestead in Bedford County served as a vital station on the Underground Railroad, perilously close to the Maryland line and the reach of slave catchers. Benjamin Walker, Abner Walker, Sr., and George Harbaugh worked hand in hand with African American conductors John Fiddler, Elisa Rouse, and Joseph Crawley, guiding hundreds of freedom seekers from the Pennsylvania border across the mountains and northward toward liberty.

Connellsville, PA · est. 1994

Near this spot in Fayette County stood the home of Benjamin Wells, a federal collector of the deeply unpopular excise tax on whiskey. In the summer of 1794, as the Whiskey Rebellion turned violent across western Pennsylvania, an angry crowd burned his house after he ignored their warnings. The attack was part of the frontier resistance that ultimately drew a federalized militia and President Washington's personal attention.

Carthage, NC

Benjamin Williams served his state and country across a remarkable career—first as an officer in the Revolution, then in Congress, and four separate times as governor of North Carolina. A leading figure of the early republic, he helped guide the young state through its formative decades. His grave lies to the north at the Alston House.

Gonzales, TX

This marker honors Bennet Valentine, who from 1835 until his death in 1843 fought to win and defend the independence of Texas. His years of service spanned the Texas Revolution and the early struggles of the young Republic. Little else is recorded on the stone, but it commemorates one of the many who gave their lives to the cause.

La Salle, TX

Cattlemen John M. Bennett and George W. West began assembling this Jackson County ranch in 1875, eventually acquiring more than 35,000 acres of rich prairie between the Garcitas and Lavaca rivers. Bennett had earned his stake driving herds up the Chisholm Trail to Kansas. By 1902 the operation ran 7,000 head bred from longhorns and Herefords, and for three generations the James family served as its foremen.

Groveton, TX

Georgia native Micajah Y. Bennett reached Texas by 1850, and family tradition holds that while clearing this hilltop he chose a spot beneath a great tree for his own grave. When he died in 1856, kin honored the wish, and the site grew into a burying ground first called Pleasant Hill, though local history traces burials here to 1843. Renamed for the Bennetts after his son donated the land to the farming community of Crecy, the cemetery now holds more than 1,500 graves, including pioneer settlers and military veterans.

Sweet Home, TX

Stephen Bennett, a War of 1812 veteran born in South Carolina, led a wagon train with his wife Polly to the Republic of Texas around 1841, settling in what became Lavaca County. The cemetery began in 1846 with the burial of their daughter Sarah, and in 1871 the Bennetts deeded an acre to their children for a family burial ground. Their descendants became physicians, cattlemen, county officials, Masons, and teachers, and the graveyard—known by many names over the years—held its last interment in 1977.