Search Markers

Stamford, CT

The Rippowam River — its name borrowed from the Native people who first settled this stretch of the Connecticut shore — gave Stamford the falling water that turned its wheels for two centuries. From the era of the Revolution onward, grist, saw, and later manufacturing mills lined its banks, harnessing the current to grind grain and drive the machinery that grew a colonial settlement into a busy industrial city. This marker, spanning 1776 to 1976, was raised for the nation's Bicentennial to honor those two hundred years of water-powered work.

Rising Star, TX

In January 1876 a handful of families rolled in by wagon train from Gregg County to a place marked by Indian raids, vigilante justice, and gunfights. A log building that served as both school and church anchored the community, and when the settlers' first choice of post-office name was rejected, they argued through the night and settled on "Rising Star" after glimpsing the morning star on their way home. The town incorporated in 1891 and grew into a center of ranching, peanuts, pecans, and oil, and even a poet laureate.

Center Point, TX

Chartered in 1875, this Hill Country Masonic lodge lost its first home, along with all its records, to a fire in 1900. For decades afterward its members met in the local bank building before moving to the present site in 1964. Its founding charter carried the names of fifteen early settlers of the Center Point area, including Joshua D. Brown, an early figure in the settlement of Kerr County.

Bonham, TX

Built around 1915 as the home of merchant and banker D.W. Sweeney, this Bonham building found a second life in 1956 when Dr. Joe Risser opened it as an 18-bed hospital — one of the small doctor-run clinics that once handled a town's medical care. It gained national attention on November 16, 1961, when Sam Rayburn, the long-serving Speaker of the U.S. House and Risser's own patient, died here. The hospital closed in 1971.

Alpine, TX

Built in 1886 of frame and adobe, the Ritchey Hotel rose beside the cattle-loading pens of the Southern Pacific Railway in the vast, remote Big Bend country. Here cowhands and ranchers who had driven stock in from scattered ranches could find a bed, a drink, and company while waiting to ship their cattle east by rail. It captures the moment when the railroad transformed West Texas ranching from an isolated frontier trade into part of a national market.

Seabrook, TX

Virginia-born Ritson Morris reached Texas around 1827, married into the Edwards family, and settled near his father-in-law's grant in Stephen F. Austin's colony. On a 3,000-acre Mexican land grant he built the Elmwood plantation, raising crops and livestock and joining the 1832 and 1835 skirmishes at Anahuac that helped ignite the Texas Revolution. His family sheltered in New Orleans during the war, then returned to farm the land for generations.

West Norriton Township, PA · est. 1947

David Rittenhouse, one of colonial America's foremost men of science, farmed near this spot and pursued astronomy with instruments he built by hand. He is credited with constructing what many consider the first telescope made in America, and in 1769 he joined an international scientific effort to observe the transit of Venus across the sun. His careful measurements helped place American science on the world stage before the Revolution.

East Norriton Township, PA · est. 1949

David Rittenhouse, born in 1732, spent his early life on this farm, where he launched one of colonial America's most remarkable scientific careers. A self-taught clockmaker and astronomer, he built precise instruments and in 1769 computed and observed the transit of Venus across the sun—a globe-spanning effort to measure the solar system that placed American science on the world stage. He later moved to Philadelphia, serving the young republic until his death in 1796.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

In 1690 William Rittenhouse, the first Mennonite minister in America, built the English colonies' first paper mill along the Wissahickon Creek. Generations of his family expanded the operation, turning this valley into the birthplace of American papermaking. By the 1850s the village had grown to more than forty buildings, seven of which still survive from this once-thriving industrial hamlet. It was also the birthplace, in 1732, of the noted astronomer and instrument-maker David Rittenhouse.

Conoy Township, PA · est. 2012

Around 1780, amid the ferment of the Revolutionary era, a small band of Pennsylvania German believers gathered along Conoy Creek for their first baptism, founding one of the earliest home-grown American religious denominations. They worshipped down this lane at Magdalena House, the home of co-founder Jacob Engel, and came to be called the River Brethren for the streams in which they baptized. By the mid-19th century the group took the name Brethren in Christ, and its offshoots — the Old Order River Brethren and the United Zion Church — carry the lineage still.

New York, NY

On the morning of September 11, 2001, hijacked airliners struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, and within hours both towers had fallen, killing thousands of office workers, first responders, and passersby from across the New York region. This quiet garden in the Riverdale section of the Bronx was planted so that neighbors from this corner of the city — people who commuted downtown and never came home — would have a living place of remembrance close to where they lived. The inscription also widens its embrace to the first responders and civilians who, in the years since, have died from illnesses linked to the toxic dust and smoke of Ground Zero.

San Marcos, TX

In 1905 William Green set out to build a modern, self-sustaining farm along the San Marcos River, drawing irrigation from the river and Sink Springs to supply an ambitious truck-farming operation. Headquartered at the former home of Major Edward Burleson Jr. and backed by his father's capital, Green raised Berkshire hogs and Jersey cattle and grew fruit and vegetables, especially onions, for market. He harnessed hydroelectric power for irrigation and to make ice for insulating railcars, creating an integrated farm-to-market system. Though the business closed in 1909, his methods pointed toward more advanced agricultural practices.

Orange, TX

When the U.S. Navy placed shipbuilding orders in Orange on the eve of World War II, a sleepy Sabine River town of 7,400 swelled past 60,000 as Depression-weary workers chased steady wages at the Levingston, Consolidated Western, and Weaver yards. To house them, the federal government threw up the Riverside Addition in 1942 — thousands of prefabricated 'demountable' duplexes, three schools, and shops, all within walking distance of the yards to conserve rationed fuel and tires. Billed as the largest federal housing project ever undertaken, it was always meant to be temporary, and after the war the units were sold, moved, or torn down, with the last gone by the 1980s.

Wichita Falls, TX

Riverside Cemetery dates to the earliest days of Wichita Falls, chartered as a cemetery association in 1885 soon after the Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad reached the young town. Named for its site near the Wichita River, it passed to city ownership in 1892, and Black residents organized the "Riverside Colored Burial Association," purchasing a half-acre where hundreds were laid to rest. Among those interred are Texas governor James V. Allred, "Father of Wichita Falls" Joseph H. Barwise, and the city's first female realtor, Minnie Mae Kemp Adickes.

Iredell, TX

According to local tradition, the land for this cemetery and its neighboring church was given by the family of Ward Keeler, a New York native who reached Bosque County around 1870 and founded the town of Iredell. The oldest documented grave is that of James W.P. Ware, who died in November 1870. For generations the primary burial ground for Iredell, Riverside holds more than a thousand marked and unmarked graves whose varied headstones recall the community's pioneer heritage.

Seguin, TX

Riverside Cemetery began as the family graveyard of Ezekiel and Susanna Smith, Virginia migrants who reached Texas in the 1830s; Ezekiel received a Guadalupe County land grant in 1837. Their son French Smith, an early shareholder in Seguin, donated land for a park, school, and church and in 1880 deeded the family plot to the city, which combined it with adjoining grounds into a 15-acre public cemetery. Its more than 2,000 burials include pioneers, officials, business leaders, clergy, and former slaves, and volunteers restored the neglected site in the 1990s.

Asheville, NC

Riverside Cemetery, laid out in the 1880s on a hillside above the French Broad River, became the resting place for some of North Carolina's most celebrated figures. Among them are novelist Thomas Wolfe, whose 'Look Homeward, Angel' immortalized his native Asheville, and short-story master William Sydney Porter, better known as 'O. Henry.' They lie near Zebulon B. Vance, the Civil War-era governor, and two men who served the state in the U.S. Senate, Thomas L. Clingman and Robert R. Reynolds. This marker points the way to a quiet green acre where literature and statecraft share the same ground.

Riverside, CA

This memorial honors the men and women of Riverside County who have served in the United States armed forces across generations. Riverside County, in inland Southern California, sent many of its sons and daughters to every major American conflict of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The monument gathers that collective service into a single place of remembrance.

Fort Worth, TX

Local tradition holds that this Methodist congregation began in 1888 when a minister and ten worshippers gathered for Sunday School in an abandoned saloon. Over the following decades the church moved several times, changed its name twice, and was served in its early years by visiting ministers and students from nearby Polytechnic College, now Texas Wesleyan University. Highway construction and neighborhood change finally brought it to its present site in 1982.

Gonzales, TX

Opened in 1914 as the Water Street Mexican School and later renamed Riverside, this one-story brick schoolhouse was the only facility for Mexican American children in segregated Gonzales. As enrollment grew it absorbed a surplus Army building from Camp Swift and the relocated Stieren School, serving Hispanic students until 1948 and then African American students until 1965.

Riviera, TX

Riviera was founded on the South Texas coastal plain by Theodore F. Koch, a Dutch immigrant who dedicated land for a burial ground in 1907 and formally deeded it to a cemetery association in 1910. The earliest recorded graves, from 1909, belong to Maudie Ethel Poteet and Wilson A. Myers. Community leaders, war veterans, and victims of flu and yellow fever epidemics rest here under the association's care.

Riviera, TX

Founded in 1910, just three years after the town of Riviera itself, this congregation began with 31 charter members meeting in a one-room schoolhouse before building its sanctuary in 1912. The church anchored a sprawling South Texas district of vegetable and citrus farms. Through hurricanes and drought that shrank the town, it has held on in that same 1912 building.

San Francisco, CA · est. 1930

This site once displayed the Gjoa, the small 69-foot herring boat in which Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first to navigate the Northwest Passage between 1903 and 1906. San Francisco's Norwegian community bought the ship and gave it to the city in 1909, and it rested here in Golden Gate Park until returning to Oslo in 1972.

Corsicana, TX

Roane Baptist Church was organized in 1897 by 26 charter members, who first worshiped monthly in the Roane School building under their first pastor, the Rev. E. T. Jones. In 1901 they built a church of their own on land donated by two local men, and the congregation called its first full-time pastor in 1948. Improved over the years, the church remains an integral part of its community.

Roanoke, TX

When the Texas & Pacific Railroad pushed through North Texas in 1881, a surveyor homesick for Roanoke, Virginia gave this new depot town its name — though settlers had been working the land here since the 1840s. Sitting halfway between Fort Worth and Denton, Roanoke thrived as a shipping point where ranchers loaded cattle for northern markets and farmers sent out wheat and cotton. By 1890 it had four churches, a school, and a cotton gin; by the early 1900s a newspaper, bank, and grain elevator. Notably, the property of John and Almedia Jones served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Roanoke, TX

In 1897 members of the local Independent Order of Odd Fellows lodge bought this five-and-a-half-acre tract as a public burial ground, open to all rather than reserved for their own families. Its stones tell the story of a young North Texas community — pioneer families, a railroad crew's section from the 1920s, and even an alleged horse thief hanged from a tree here in 1906. James DeWitt Pressley, who died in 1897, was the first laid to rest.

Dare County, NC

Established in 1863 by Union troops, the Freedmen's Colony on Roanoke Island was the first refugee community for formerly enslaved people in North Carolina. On land nearby extending to the south, thousands of freedpeople built homes, schools, and churches as they made the first fragile steps into freedom. The colony endured until 1867, when the government returned the land to its prewar owners.

Roanoke, TX

Chartered in 1888, Roanoke Lodge No. 668 succeeded an earlier Masonic lodge from nearby Elizabethtown, meeting in rented rooms until members raised a two-story frame hall in 1908. The upper floor was reserved for Masonic ritual while the ground floor opened to the wider community. Fraternal lodges like this one were pillars of civic, educational, and charitable life in small North Texas towns.

Williamston, NC

The Roanoke River — known to earlier peoples as the "Moratuck" — was for generations a highway of trade whose fertile valley filled with plantations. Its beauty came with danger, as frequent floods swept the lowlands until the completion of Kerr Dam brought the waters under control in 1952. The river carried the region's fortunes long before roads and railroads reached its banks.

Roanoke, TX

Rising about 150 feet on four steel legs, the Roanoke Water Tower was built in 1936 as the newly incorporated town's primary water source. First mayor Hugh H. Jenkins championed the municipal water system, consolidating it under the city in 1934 and securing Public Works Administration funding during the Great Depression to construct the tower and its 100,000-gallon tank. Though no longer in service, it still stands as a local landmark.

Ranger, TX

When World War I drove oil demand sky-high, Texas Pacific Coal Company manager W.K. Gordon gambled on deep drilling, and in October 1917 the McClesky No. 1 blew in as a 1,700-barrel-a-day gusher a mile south of here. Later wells yielded many thousands of barrels daily, and a village of a dozen houses exploded into a boomtown so crowded that beds were shared in shifts and stuffed chairs were rented for sleeping. Amid a two-year sea of mud, easy money drew both fortune-seekers and vice, until lawmen cracked down after five murders in a single day.

Roaring Springs, TX

When the Quanah, Acme & Pacific Railroad pushed across Motley County in the early 1910s, it created towns along its route, and Roaring Springs was platted in 1912 in anticipation of the tracks. This brick mission-revival depot was completed within a year and handled passengers and freight into 1971. Now the town's oldest building, it was bought by the city in 1972 and recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Cross Roads, TX

Stoneware pottery was vital everyday industry in 19th-century Texas, and this site was one of five kilns that made Denton County a pottery center. Missouri-trained master potter James M. Roark apprenticed nearby before partnering to start a pottery works near Big Elm Creek in 1871, later selling it to the Griffith family. At its heart was a 12-foot beehive brick kiln that fired utilitarian ware—pitchers, crocks, churns, and preserve jars—until the business closed around 1900.

Norfolk, CT

Robbins Battell (1819–1895) was Norfolk, Connecticut's great benefactor — a Yale-educated lawyer, musician, and civic patron who shaped his hilltown's institutions and gave generously beyond it, including to the chapel that still bears his family's name at Yale. The memorial's Latin charge — to be ever faithful to God, country, family, and town — distills the civic ideal of a Gilded Age gentleman. His family's patronage would help make little Norfolk a summer home of American music.

Midway, TX

Where the San Antonio and La Bahia roads met the Trinity River, travelers once forded a spot called Paso Tomas. About 1821 Joel Leakey established a ferry here, and it took its lasting name from Nathaniel Robbins, who ran it for years. The Clapp family acquired the crossing around 1852 and operated it until a bridge finally replaced the ferry in 1930.

Palestine, TX

Orphaned young and raised at the state orphans' home in Corsicana, Robert "Bob" Knight found his footing as a class president and team captain before starring on a championship football team at Sam Houston State. In 1937 he began a long career coaching basketball, volleyball, and physical education in the Palestine schools, also running the summer baseball league and working at the YMCA. Apart from World War II service training Navy personnel to swim, he coached and mentored Palestine's young people for more than three decades until his 1974 retirement.

Navasota, TX

Alabama-born Robert Augustus Horlock arrived in Navasota in 1871 and rose to become one of its leading merchants and civic figures. In the early 1890s he and his wife Agnes built this ornate home in the Eastlake and Stick styles, all corner porch, arched windows, and finely turned woodwork. It stayed in the Horlock family for nearly a century.

Terrell, TX

Robert Adams Terrell wandered from Tennessee through Kentucky, Missouri, and Louisiana before reaching the Republic of Texas around 1840. As a surveyor he located headright land grants across North Texas—paid in vast tracts of land—served in Republic expeditions, and enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861. The town of Terrell rose on land he had surveyed and took his name.

Terrell, TX

This octagon-shaped house was built in 1864 for Robert A. Terrell (1820–1881), a pioneer settler whose 1845 log cabin once stood here and for whom the town of Terrell was named. Octagon houses were a briefly fashionable American experiment, believed to offer better light and air, and few survive in Texas today. The home passed through a succession of owners after 1897.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2012

In the tense years around American independence, printing was a political act—and Robert Aitken's Philadelphia shop sat at the center of it. In 1782 he produced the first complete English-language Bible printed in the new United States, a feat made possible by wartime import embargoes that cut off British editions, and notable enough to win an endorsement from Congress. Aitken also printed the official Journals of Congress and, through The Pennsylvania Magazine, first carried Thomas Paine's electrifying prose to American readers.

Helena, MT

Robert E. Fisk arrived in Montana with the 1866 wagon expedition led by his brother James, a famed trail guide who steered settlers across the northern plains. That same November the brothers and partners founded the Helena Herald, giving the raw gold-rush capital one of its earliest newspapers. A printer by trade before the Civil War, Robert helped shape public life in territorial Montana through the press.

Dallas, TX

Robert Campbell Stubbs came to Dallas from Mississippi in 1887 and built a paving business just as the automobile age created enormous demand for modern streets; by 1922 he had patented a 'vibrolithic' paving method and was regarded as a leading national authority. His success paid for this stately Tudor-style home on fashionable Swiss Avenue, completed in 1926 and possibly designed by Dallas architect Otto H. Lang. Stubbs died a year later, and his widow Marie entertained here into 1940 before the house passed through use as apartments and back to a single family.

San Antonio, TX

Robert B. Evans left Tennessee in 1847 and joined the 1849 rush to California, where he panned enough gold to buy this Texas land in 1865. Built in 1882 of stone quarried from Buda, the house sheltered Evans, his wife Rebecca, and the nine children they raised here; an 1865 smokehouse still stands on the east side. It earned recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1969.

Wortham, TX

Robert B. Longbotham (1797–1883) was born in Sunderland, England, and crossed the Atlantic as a carpenter's apprentice aboard ship. After marrying in Alabama, he came to Texas in 1832, secured a land grant from Mexico, and fought in the 1836 Texas Revolution and in Indian conflicts of 1839. He settled at this place in 1848, and the town bore his name until its post office was renamed Wortham in 1874.

Orange, TX

Robert B. Russell's life traces the arc of nineteenth-century Texas itself. A Connecticut-born young man, he came to San Augustine in 1835 and fought at San Jacinto, the 1836 battle that won Texas its independence, before turning to newspaper publishing on the frontier. He later settled in the raw lumber country around Orange, served as its postmaster during the Confederacy, and built a steam-powered shingle mill—only to die in a mill accident in 1880.

Houston, TX

Robert Barr fought at San Jacinto, the 1836 battle that won Texas its independence, and went on to serve the young Republic of Texas as postmaster general under both Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar. An Ohio native, he died of yellow fever in Houston in 1839, a reminder of how disease stalked the coastal republic. His burial by the Masonic and Odd Fellows lodges and the Milam Guards reflects the tight civic fraternity of frontier Houston.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

In 1813 Robert Bogle, a free Black Philadelphian, opened a fashionable eatery on this spot and built a reputation as the city's premier caterer. Famous for his savory meat pies, he became the sought-after master of ceremonies for the elaborate weddings, funerals, and banquets of Philadelphia's wealthy elite. In effect a pioneer of the American catering trade, he made a name and a living in a business he helped define.

Salado, TX

Arriving in Bell County around 1853, Georgia-born Robert B. Halley helped turn a frontier settlement into a working community, running a liquor distillery and a flour-and-grist mill on the Lampasas River. He served as county commissioner and a state Democratic convention delegate, then recruited and captained a volunteer cavalry company during the Civil War. Elected county sheriff in 1874, he died in office the following year.

Chico, TX

Robert Calvin Mount came from Tennessee to Texas in 1855 and helped organize the brand-new Wise County, winning election as its first tax assessor-collector in 1856. During the Civil War he served as a first lieutenant in Blythe's militia, and in 1874 he built a fort-like rock house near Chico as protection on a still-dangerous frontier. He is remembered as one of the county's founding pioneers.

Paris, TX

Robert Cooke Buckner arrived in Texas in 1859 and became a leading Baptist minister, pastoring this Paris congregation and helping charter the first Ladies' Aid group in the state. In 1877 he founded a Baptist orphans' home, giving the first dollar himself under a shady oak in Dallas. That seed grew into the sprawling network of charities known today as Buckner Benevolences.

Winters, TX

Robert Cooke, a Texas-born son of pioneers, earned his medical degree in Kentucky in 1886 and came to the Winters area in 1889, becoming the fledgling town's first physician. He doubled as a man of the church — a Baptist deacon and later preacher — beloved as both healer of bodies and shepherd of souls.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1994

In the spring of 1840, only months after photography was announced to an astonished world, the Philadelphia metallurgist and brass founder Robert Cornelius opened one of its very first commercial studios here. Working with chemist Paul Beck Goddard, he found ways to shorten exposure times dramatically — the breakthrough that made it possible to sit for a portrait without holding still for agonizing minutes. Cornelius had already made himself one of the first people ever photographed.

Austin, TX

This headstone marks the grave of Robert Crudup (1804–1870), remembered on its reverse as a member of the Twelfth Legislature. That body convened in 1870 during Reconstruction, as Texas rebuilt its government after the Civil War. The spare inscription preserves the memory of a man who helped shape the state at a turbulent political moment.

Hearne, TX

Robert Cyrus Allen (1871–1933) built this ornate Victorian home in 1900 as a wedding present for his bride, Florence Blair, on the site of his family's earlier house. A leading merchant, banker, mayor, and organizer of the Hearne and Brazos Valley Railroad, Allen commissioned noted Waco architect W. W. Larmour to design a residence rich with decorative shingling, classical detailing, intricate woodwork, and seven fireplaces.

Seguin, TX

Born in Kentucky in 1806, Robert D. McAnelly came to Texas in 1835 and joined the army marching on San Antonio. He was among the storming party that entered Bexar on December 5, 1835, one of the opening blows of the Texas Revolution against Mexican rule. He lived out his days in Guadalupe County, dying there in 1888, and the State of Texas raised this marker to him in 1962.

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth native Robert David Law enlisted in the Army in 1967, trained as an airborne infantryman, and joined a Ranger company of the 75th Infantry in Vietnam. On February 22, 1969, while on a small patrol near the Cambodian border, his rangers came under fire and a grenade landed among them—Law threw himself onto it, dying instantly to save his comrades. In 1970 President Nixon presented his family with a posthumous Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award for valor.

Giddings, TX

Robert and Sarah McClellan opened Giddings' first private school in 1874 and, when the town organized its public free schools in 1883, they led the very first faculty. Robert, remembered as a gifted mathematician, taught until his death, while Sarah stayed at her post more than a decade longer. Together they set the standards that shaped local education for generations.

Brownwood, TX

Raised in the small towns of Brown and Callahan counties, Robert E. Howard began publishing fiction while still in school and went on to write poetry and pulp stories for popular magazines. In 1932 he created Conan the Barbarian, virtually inventing the sword-and-sorcery genre before his death by suicide at just thirty. Through books, magazines, and movies, his Conan has since become a worldwide cultural figure.

Baytown, TX

When oil transformed the Goose Creek field after 1908, the booming tri-cities of Goose Creek, Pelly, and Baytown needed a school to match, and in 1928 architect Harry D. Payne delivered a striking Art Deco building. Named Robert E. Lee High School in an era when the Confederate general's memory was widely honored locally, it became the civic heart of the district, hosting churches, clubs, and even a junior college's night classes. It survived an arson fire in 1987, restored by alumni to its original appearance.

Rio Grande City, TX

This house overlooking a Rio Grande steamboat dock served as field quarters for Colonel Robert E. Lee in 1860, when he commanded U.S. Army forces in Texas along the turbulent Mexican border. Its main rooms were lined with military maps of the surrounding country, reflecting the strategic concerns of the era. Within a year Lee would resign to lead Confederate armies, making his Texas posting one of the last chapters of his prewar career.