Search Markers

Nacogdoches, TX

Land here was deeded for burials in 1853, though graves may date to the 1840s, and for decades the historic Cumberland Presbyterian Church oversaw the ground. Families of the deceased tended it until a cemetery association formed in 1965. Among the interred are Rock Springs pioneers and veterans of conflicts from the Texas War for Independence through the Civil War, resting beneath vertical stones, Masonic markers, and interior fencing.

Peaster, TX

This cemetery holds the pioneers of Rock Springs, a vanished village that once served as a social center for area farmers. Thirty-one graves are marked only with native stones; the earliest identifiable burial, from 1867, is that of Mary L. Sullivan. The last marked grave dates to 1882, the very year nearby Peaster was founded and Rock Springs began to fade.

Valley Mills, TX

The Rev. James B. Sadler, a self-educated former slave, gathered this Black congregation in 1870 and helped organize a separate Black Presbytery in 1876, worshiping in a brush arbor and homes until the present church was built in 1890. The building doubled for a time as a community school, and Sadler and his wife Susan owned the property until 1909. The congregation still tends the church and its cemetery and gathers each November for homecoming.

Gladewater, TX

Raised in 1849 with donated lumber and neighborly labor, the Rock Springs Schoolhouse served East Texas pioneers — many of them Tennessee transplants — for the better part of a century. A single teacher held class here into the 1930s, but the building was really the community's beating heart, doubling as church, Grange hall, lodge, and stage for socials and political rallies. It stands as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Mount Vernon, KY

Rockcastle County, created in 1810, took its name from a lone rock that hunter Isaac Lindsey thought resembled an ancient castle when he passed through in 1767. Dr. Thomas Walker and his party, the first white men to explore Kentucky's interior, had reached this rock as early as 1750, and the river and later the county drew their names from it.

Humboldt County, CA

This marker commemorates the preservation of the Rockefeller Forest, one of the largest tracts of old-growth coast redwoods left on earth, made possible by a major gift from John D. Rockefeller Jr. in the 1920s. As commercial logging threatened to consume the last of the ancient groves, his philanthropy—channeled through the Save-the-Redwoods League—purchased and protected this stretch of the Bull Creek and Eel River flats. The towering trees here have stood for well over a thousand years.

Rockett, TX

Growing out of worship services begun around 1853, the Rockett Christian Church was formally organized in 1894 and raised this Carpenter Gothic sanctuary in 1900–01. Its lancet windows, octagonal porch, beaded-board wainscoting, and original pews survive, and the building reopened for services after a quiet stretch in the 1960s.

Biardstown, TX

On the eve of the Civil War's final year, Cumberland Presbyterians gathered in rural Lamar County to found the Rockford church under the Rev. W. W. Havanaugh. The congregation later joined the larger Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., before dissolving in 1958, but its cemetery—opened by the mid-1870s—endured and grew to more than a thousand graves. The burial ground remains the community's lasting mark on the North Texas prairie.

Mt. Vernon, TX

Rockhill Cemetery is the enduring trace of a farming community that took root after the Civil War. Its many small graves reflect the high childhood mortality of the era, with the earliest known burial around 1875. A cemetery committee purchased the ground in 1919, and though the settlement's churches and school faded during the Depression of the 1930s, the burial ground remains.

Collingsworth County, TX

The Rocking Chair Ranch was a grand experiment in absentee ownership: financed by the Scottish Earls of Aberdeen and Tweedmouth, it ran from 1883 to 1893 out of a headquarters called Aberdeen. Beginning with nearly 15,000 cattle, it turned a profit for a few years before faltering, and the town of Wellington was named at the owners' wish to honor a kinsman who died as an aide to the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. W. E. Hughes bought the land in 1893, folding it into the Mill Iron Ranch before it was eventually broken into farms and smaller ranches.

Lovelady vicinity, TX

Benjamin Thomas Ellis, born in Alabama in 1825, came to Texas as a boy and by mid-century was farming the land around this site, where his family began burying its dead. Two of the men laid here—John Milliken and Ellis himself—served in the Texas militia during the Confederacy. In 1890 the family deeded the ground to a new Rockland Church, and by 1892 a combined church and school stood before the cemetery, serving as a community center until the school consolidated with Lovelady in the 1940s.

Rockne, TX

Rockne grew from farms broken by German immigrants who reached this Bastrop County creek country beginning in the 1840s, families like the Lehmans and Meuths arriving from Prussia and central Germany. A Catholic parish anchored the community, which cycled through names—Walnut Creek, Lehman, Hilbigville—as stores and post offices came and went. In 1931 schoolchildren renamed it for Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne, killed that year in a plane crash.

Rockport, TX

Cattlemen J. M. and T. H. Mathis founded Rockport on the Gulf coast in 1867, and by 1871 it was the seat of newly formed Aransas County. Shipping and fishing drove its early economy until the railroad arrived in 1888 and drew commerce inland, though its shipyards revived to build vessels through both World Wars. In the decades since, the town's mild coast and abundant fishing have made tourism its enduring livelihood.

Fulton, TX

In 1943 wartime need turned 700 acres of Aransas County into a military airfield, leased first to the U.S. Navy and, from 1955, to the Air Force as a coastal radar station. During the tense days of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis the site scanned the skies for approaching aircraft as part of a strengthened American coastal defense. Behind its fences stood operations buildings, barracks, family housing, and even a recreation hall with a bowling alley.

Rockport, TX

For more than a century this cemetery has served the coastal towns of Rockport and Fulton, its oldest marked grave that of young Emma Fulton, granddaughter of area developer George Ware Fulton, who was buried here in 1893. A wave of burials in 1918 records the toll of the great influenza epidemic. Among its graves lie veterans of conflicts from the Texas Revolution through Vietnam.

Rockport, TX

The Rockport Marine Laboratory began humbly in 1935 aboard a houseboat named Vivian, helping the Texas Game, Fish and Oyster Commission manage the coast's fisheries. A permanent lab with a public aquarium followed in 1947, and after the agency became Texas Parks and Wildlife, the facility anchored long-term research into finfish, shellfish, and other marine life on the Gulf. Its decades of work helped make Texas a national leader in sustainable fisheries management.

Rockport, TX

The area's first newspaper, 'The Vaquero,' appeared in nearby St. Mary's in 1868, and its publisher Charles Bailey moved to Rockport the next year to found 'The Transcript.' A succession of papers followed, until 'The Rockport Enterprise' merged with the new 'Rockport Pilot' in 1916. Since then 'The Pilot' has been the county's steady voice, chronicling Aransas County's life and events.

Rockport, TX

Built in 1935 at the depth of the Great Depression, Rockport School rose as Project No. 2813 under Franklin Roosevelt's Public Works Administration, with local bonds helping fund the federal effort. It replaced an 1892 wooden schoolhouse on the same ground and opened housing eleven grades before earning full accreditation. Its striking Zigzag Moderne design crowns the entry with a stylized sunburst.

Mansfield Township, NJ

In the pre-dawn dark of June 16, 1925, an eastbound train jumped the rails here and its locomotive's boiler burst, scalding the passengers with steam. Townspeople and workers from the nearby state Game Farm rushed to pull victims from the wreckage, but fifty people lost their lives. It endures as one of the deadliest rail disasters in New Jersey's history.

Rockport, TX

As Rockport grew into a commerce and tourism center in the 1880s, businessman Sam Smith donated its first firefighting equipment—a horse-drawn wagon with chemical tanks—and volunteers organized the department in 1885. A Model T joined the ranks in 1913, and after a 1938 blaze the effort was revived under the new Aransas County Emergency Corps, which added beach patrols and ambulance service. Bond money soon paid for water mains and a pumper, and a permanent station opened in 1939.

Rocksprings, TX

Rocksprings sprang up on the arid Edwards Plateau after J. R. Sweeten sank the area's first water well in 1889, and within a few years a two-acre plot was set aside to bury the settlers and passing travelers of this remote ranching country. The graveyard grew alongside the town, absorbing the dead from the catastrophic tornado that tore through Rocksprings in April 1927. Even its iron fencing tells a story, given up to World War II scrap drives.

Rocksprings, TX

In 1898 a local businessman and a Kerrville partner strung a long-distance line across the Hill Country to Rocksprings, installing the town's first telephone in a general store. From crank-handled magneto phones shared by as many as seventeen parties, the enterprise grew into a family-run company that survived the 1927 tornado and converted every exchange to dial service by 1958. A century on, descendants of the founder still sat on its board.

Spicewood, TX

Rockvale grew from a pioneer settlement of the 1850s, where an 1855 log cabin doubled as school and church and a Baptist congregation organized in 1856. Thomas Lloyd Denniston deeded more than 36 acres to the Methodist church in 1872 for a stone sanctuary and a cemetery whose earliest recorded burial dates to 1870. That still-used cemetery is now among the few remnants of the vanished community.

Marysville, PA · est. 1986

At the turn of the 20th century the Pennsylvania Railroad was one of the mightiest corporations on earth, and it needed to move ever-heavier freight across the Susquehanna. Its answer, completed in 1902, was a colossal forty-eight-arch stone span—the longest stone masonry arch railroad bridge ever built. It was the third crossing at this spot, replacing a wooden bridge of the 1840s and an iron one of 1877, each outgrown as rail traffic exploded.

Susquehanna Township, PA · est. 2010

At the dawn of the 20th century, the Pennsylvania Railroad built the Rockville Bridge across the Susquehanna—a 3,820-foot span of forty-eight stone arches that remains the longest stone masonry arch railroad bridge in the world. Completed in 1902, it was the third crossing the railroad raised at this spot, succeeding a wooden bridge of the 1840s and an iron one of 1877. Its massive, graceful arches testify to an age when the Pennsylvania Railroad was among the mightiest corporations on earth.

Terrell, TX

Beginning in members' homes and organized in 1896, this Church of Christ congregation met in an Odd Fellows Hall before building its first frame church on College Street in 1900. Its first full-time minister arrived in 1914, the year a brick sanctuary went up, and the growing membership built the present house of worship in 1948. The congregation has long supported Southwestern Christian College in Terrell and a children's home in Quinlan.

Rockwall, TX

First settled in the 1840s, this region remained part of Kaufman County until Rockwall County was created in 1873. At just 147 square miles, it is the smallest of Texas' 254 counties, and both county and town take their name from a curious underground rock formation discovered in the early 1850s. Crossed by the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, it long thrived as fertile farmland.

Rockwall, TX

Carved from Kaufman County and organized in March 1873, Rockwall County took its name from one of Texas's strangest natural curiosities—an underground formation of rock that surfaces in places like a buried masonry wall. Early settlers puzzled over whether it was natural or the work of some ancient hand, and the mystery gave both the county and its seat their enduring name. It remains the smallest county in Texas by area.

Rockwall, TX

In the small North Texas county of Rockwall, citizens raised this memorial to honor everyone from the community who served in the nation's armed forces, and above all those who never came home. Its language — echoing Lincoln's phrase 'the last full measure of devotion' — deliberately reaches across every American conflict rather than singling out one war. Memorials like this became a fixture of county courthouse squares and city parks across the twentieth century.

Longview, TX

Built in 1854, Rockwall Farm's large plantation-style home was an overnight stop on William T. Brooks's stagecoach line running from Monroe, Louisiana, to Tyler. Enslaved people hewed its lumber and made its chimney brick from clay on the place, and the first-floor partitions folded away to open a ballroom. Restored by later owners and opened to visitors, the storied house burned in 1952.

Brownsville, TX

Brownsville city engineer Fayette L. Rockwell built this two-story Spanish Revival house in the Los Ebanos estates in 1930, designed by architect Roscious Newell Waters and built by S. W. McKenzie. Its red tile roof, exterior chimney stack, and prominent metal sailboat figure gave it a distinctive silhouette that the Rockwell family enjoyed through the 1960s. Rockwell served on several city boards and was engaged in citrus cultivation.

Slaton, TX

In 1911 Rockwell Brothers and Co. bought land from the Pecos and Northern (Santa Fe) Railway to open a lumberyard serving the brand-new railroad town of Slaton. This two-story vernacular building housed the company office, with living quarters above for the manager and his family — Robert W. Parker being the first to occupy it. It remained the main office until Rockwell closed its Slaton operation in 1941.

Barrow County, GA

This marker records a congregation of the Universalist faith, one of the more unusual religious traditions to take root in the 19th-century rural South. Universalism — the belief that all souls are ultimately reconciled to God — spread quietly through the Georgia countryside as a hopeful and often controversial alternative to the region's dominant evangelical churches. A modest country meetinghouse like this one typically anchored the social as well as the spiritual life of its community for generations.

Daingerfield, TX

Drawn by an abundance of creeks, settlers reached this corner of Northeast Texas as early as the 1820s and named the community for the rocky beds of its streams. Through the nineteenth century Rocky Branch grew into a full rural settlement with grist, lumber, and syrup mills, a cotton gin, a broom factory, and a general store, plus a rodeo arena and a baseball team. Its school served families for more than sixty years before consolidating with neighboring districts.

Brownwood, TX

Eighteen people gathered under a brush arbor near Rocky Creek in August 1877 to organize this Baptist congregation, calling their first pastor and raising a one-room church by November. A larger building followed in 1889, and after a 1919 storm destroyed it, the members regrouped and rebuilt in 1921. The congregation has continued to grow and serve its Brown County community ever since.

Round Top, TX

The original one-story house here was built around 1854 for settler James Wade on land that had been the Nassau Farm, a tract the German Emigration Society (Adelsverein) acquired through its agent Count Boos-Waldeck for planned immigrant colonization—though the society ultimately settled its colonists elsewhere. In 1894 Rudolph Weigelt, newly arrived from Germany, bought the farm, and in 1913 he built the present house right around the original, enclosing the older structure within it.

Lancaster, TX

In 1868, just after emancipation, Lancaster's first school for African American children opened inside a former Confederate pistol factory, soon serving 73 pupils on Keller Branch. Known over the years as the Lancaster Colored School and later Rocky Crest, it moved among several locations, once reusing brick from the absorbed Rawlins School. Led by longtime principals like Laura B. and R. B. White, it taught eight grades and anchored community life until integration in 1965-66.

Amherst, TX

On the High Plains near the head of the Brazos' Double Mountain Fork, the river was both lifeline and obstacle to settlers who moved in after the vast XIT Ranch was broken up around 1912. In 1926 the community solved the problem of wet-weather travel themselves, laying a gyp-rock road across the valley and lining the riverbed with stone to make a passable ford. They also raised a brush tabernacle that hosted church services, elections, and gatherings, keeping the community alive even as new roads later bypassed the crossing.

Moosic, PA · est. 2008

Opened in 1886, Rocky Glen Park grew into a beloved amusement and social center for northeastern Pennsylvania, drawing crowds for a century until it closed in 1987. The "Laurel Line" electric railroad widened its reach in the early 1900s, and the grounds became known for ethnic celebration days that mirrored the region's immigrant diversity. Live performances and rides — including the famed "Million Dollar" roller coaster — made it a cherished summer destination.

Independence, TX

In the years just after the Civil War, rural Texas communities pieced together schooling however they could. Rocky Hill began with a Methodist private school in 1867, then won a public school in 1883 through a citizens' petition, and moved from farm to farm — the Kruse, Engelke, and Klatte places — as the community's needs shifted. It served local children for nine decades until consolidation with Brenham in 1957 ended the era of the one-community country school.

Andice, TX

In the 1850s a group of enslaved Black people brought from Union County, Arkansas, put down roots here and founded what became the Rocky Hollow Community, known in earlier days as Bullion and Little Arkansas. A cemetery soon rose on land given by Thomas P. Chapman, its oldest marked grave dated 1865. Descendants of the founders and of formerly enslaved families have tended the burial ground ever since.

Nash County, NC

Begun in 1818 on the falls of the Tar River, Rocky Mount Mills was the second cotton mill established in North Carolina, harnessing water power to spin the region's cotton. Union forces burned the mill in 1863 during the Civil War, but it was quickly rebuilt and returned to production. The mill anchored one of the state's earliest industrial communities.

Adams County, CO

The Rocky Mountain Arsenal was built on the plains northeast of Denver in 1942 to manufacture chemical weapons and incendiary munitions for the American war effort in World War II, and later served Cold War production needs. When its military mission ended, the same ground became one of the nation's most ambitious environmental cleanups, its contaminated acres eventually transformed into a national wildlife refuge. This marker honors the generations of workers who carried the site through all three chapters — production, demilitarization, and restoration — from 1942 to 2012.

Burnet, TX

Rocky Rest was raised in 1860 from hand-hewn stone and logs, its thick walls and high windows built as much for defense as for shelter on the still-contested Texas frontier. It was the work of Adam R. Johnson, who would go on to notable Civil War service, and it stands as a rare survivor of the fortified homesteads that dotted the Hill Country. Named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Cabarrus County, NC

Established in the early 1750s, this congregation took root among the Scots-Irish Presbyterians who poured into the North Carolina backcountry along the Great Wagon Road. The traveling minister Hugh McAden preached here in 1755, and Alexander Craighead—a fiery advocate of religious and civil liberty—became its first settled pastor in 1758. The present sanctuary dates to 1860, but the community's roots reach back a century earlier.

Dialville, TX

Just three years after Texas joined the Union, a group of newly arrived settlers gathered in Thomas J. Lindsey's home in 1848 to organize this Baptist congregation under Elder Walter Ross. The bubbling springs nearby likely gave the church its name, and a log cabin soon rose on the site as a place of worship. Its first pastor, the Rev. George Washington Slover, was said to have built the Atlanta hotel later depicted in the novel "Gone with the Wind."

Yellow Springs, OH

After serving as a paratrooper in World War II, a young veteran arrived at Antioch College in Yellow Springs during the late 1940s, part of the wave of ex-servicemen who filled American campuses on the GI Bill. It was here, in this small progressive Ohio town, that Rod Serling first found his voice as a writer and began working in early radio and television. Within a decade he would become one of the defining talents of television's live-drama golden age, best remembered for the anthology series that blended science fiction with sharp social commentary.

Mabank, TX

Chartered on May 14, 1892, this Masonic lodge began in the community of Roddy, founded by Stephen G. Roddy in 1884, meeting above a general store. When the railroad town of Mabank boomed after 1900, the lodge followed, meeting in a succession of halls — one lost to a 1914 fire — before building its own quarters in 1958. The lodge has long raised money for local schools and awards scholarships to graduating seniors.

Valley Mills, TX

Roden Taylor Crain left Tennessee to join the fight for Texas independence, serving in a San Augustine County volunteer company at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836. Like many veterans of that struggle, he was rewarded with a land grant and pension, and he built his life on that frontier acreage in what became Bosque County until his drowning in the Bosque River in 1891.

Baltimore, MD

This cannon marks Rodgers Bastion, a key point in the chain of earthworks that ringed Baltimore against British attack in September 1814. Manned in part by sailors under Commodore John Rodgers, the fortifications formed part of a defensive line of some 12,000 men and 100 guns commanded by General Samuel Smith. The marker was placed in 1914 to mark the centennial of the city's defense.

Kennedale, TX

Georgia native Thomas F. Rodgers and his wife Mary came to Texas from Kansas in the late 1850s, and he built a life as a successful farmer and stock raiser—service in the Confederate Army interrupting those years. He became one of Kennedale's leading landowners, and part of his property was set aside as this burial ground. Most who rest here are Rodgers family, though the earliest marked grave belongs to a neighbor's infant son.

Rankin, TX

In January 1953, oil veterans E. G. Rodman and W. D. Noel brought in their No. 1 Radford Grocery well a couple of miles south of here, opening a rich new field in the Permian Basin's Upton County. The strike came nearly three decades after the great McCamey boom, proving deep petroleum wealth still lay beneath the West Texas plains. Wells here flowed at extraordinary rates—some topping 3,000 barrels a day—feeding a county total that ran past 270 million barrels.

San Elizario, TX

In 1581, drawn by Indian accounts of settlements to the north, the Franciscan Fray Agustin Rodriguez led a small missionary expedition up the Rio Grande, guided by the red-bearded soldier Francisco Sanchez, known as El Chamuscado, "The Singed." They became likely the first Spaniards to pass through the Pass of the North near present El Paso, exploring from New Mexico to the Texas Panhandle before hardship and death overtook their leaders.

City of Rensselaer, NY

On September 10, 1881, in the young days of the National League, Troy's own Roger Connor came to bat with the bases loaded and drove in four runs at once — the first grand slam in Major League history — lifting the Troy club past the Worcester Ruby Legs 8–7. Connor was a towering slugger for his era, and his power at the plate made him one of the game's early stars during the rough-and-tumble Gilded Age when professional baseball was still finding its footing. He would go on to a career so distinguished that the Hall of Fame enshrined him in 1976, long after his playing days. This marker fixes the spot where one of baseball's enduring milestones was set.

Urbana, IL

This modest Urbana house was the boyhood home of Roger Ebert (1942–2013), who grew up in this university town and went on to become one of America's most widely read and influential film critics. Writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, he became the first film critic ever awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and his televised reviews brought serious film conversation into millions of living rooms. The unassuming setting is a reminder that a national cultural voice began on an ordinary Midwestern street.

Thunderbolt, GA

In 1734, just a year after James Oglethorpe founded Georgia as Britain's thirteenth colony, Roger Lacy arrived in the young settlement of Savannah. He spent much of his time upriver at Augusta, a frontier trading post established to anchor the lucrative deerskin trade with the Creek, Cherokee, and other Native nations of the interior. As both a licensed trader and the post's commander, Lacy occupied the volatile seam where colonial ambition met Indigenous power, a role that demanded diplomacy as much as commerce.

Corsicana, TX

This Corsicana home was long the residence of Roger Quarles Mills, who came from Kentucky in 1852, served as a colonel in the Civil War, and then represented Texas in Congress and the U.S. Senate for 27 years. He began the house in 1856 using logs from an 1847 cabin on the site and finished it in 1875. Its broad verandas and carriage lamps recall the plantation era.

New Boston, NH

Placed in 1959, this granite marker commemorates Roger W. Babson and his colleagues' earnest research into anti-gravity through the Gravity Research Foundation he founded in New Boston. Babson, the entrepreneur and forecaster behind Babson College, poured his fortune into a quixotic quest to conquer gravity after a family drowning.

Jefferson, TX

Built in 1839, this is the oldest house in Jefferson, once a bustling riverport in East Texas. It was home to Gen. J. H. Rogers, a Civil War leader, and has served as a Presbyterian manse since 1903. Its long survival mirrors the town's own arc from antebellum boomtown to quiet historic community.

Jefferson, TX

This home in the riverport town of Jefferson dates to the 1850s, when Jefferson was one of the busiest inland ports in Texas. It was the residence of Captain T. J. Rogers, founder and president of a private bank, and was later restored by Judge and Mrs. Joe McCasland.