Search Markers

Rio Hondo, TX

In the tense weeks after the United States annexed Texas, Zachary Taylor pushed his army to the Rio Grande, and supply trains moved along the dangerous frontier between Corpus Christi and Point Isabel. In May 1846, at the outbreak of the Mexican-American War, a supply party led by the Rogers family was ambushed near here, and after a false promise of quarter, the men, women, and children were murdered. Only the gravely wounded William Long Rogers survived, walking over forty miles to safety.

Normangee, TX

Along the historic Old San Antonio Road, Robert Rogers settled this Leon County prairie in 1835 on a grant from the Mexican government, and a community grew up around him with a church, school, post office, Masonic lodge, and stores. When the railroad bypassed the town in 1906, residents picked it up and moved it 1.6 miles west, renaming it Normangee. Only a cemetery now marks the original site.

Nelson County, KY

In the dangerous years of the Revolution, frontier surveyor and soldier James Rogers marked out a thousand-acre claim here in 1775 and by 1780 had planted a fortified station on it. A veteran of Dunmore's War and the Revolution, Rogers was commissioned a militia colonel and justice of the peace by Virginia's governor Patrick Henry, and he signed the early petitions asking that Kentucky be separated from Virginia. Stations like his were the seeds of permanent settlement.

Waxahachie, TX

Where pioneers once forded Waxahachie Creek, Ellis County commissioners in 1889 spanned the water with an iron truss bridge—one of thirteen they ordered from the Wrought Iron Bridge Company of Canton, Ohio, between 1888 and 1890. The span carried Rogers Street, named for Emory Rogers, who had donated the townsite itself. As a link in an important north-south commercial road, the bridge helped the growing town move goods and people.

Henderson, TX

Anna Caroline Montgomery Rogers, widow of a sheriff killed in the line of duty, built a modest four-room frame house here around 1890 on ground that had once held the Fowler Institute. When East Texas oil money flowed in the 1930s, Judge R.M. Leath and his wife Alma reshaped it in 1935 into the brick, second-story Dutch Revival home that stands today. A later owner added a library, layering three generations of taste onto one dwelling.

Fort Worth, TX

William Joseph Rogers built this home on a 137-acre farm in 1901, and in 1925 it was remodeled from a Queen Anne frame house by W. Lee 'Pappy' O'Daniel. O'Daniel had come to Fort Worth to manage Burrus Mills and gained fame sponsoring the Light Crust Doughboys radio band before riding that popularity into the Texas governor's office in 1939 and the U.S. Senate in 1941. He sold the property in 1945 while serving in Washington.

Huntsville, TX

Rogersville is Huntsville's oldest African-American neighborhood, born when former mayor Micajah Rogers began selling tracts to freed people in 1866 — among the buyers, Sam Houston's former body servant Joshua Houston. Freedpeople here built homes, churches, and businesses from blacksmith shops to cafes, and turned their churches into schools when public ones were denied. It became the heart of Huntsville's Black community and the home of its annual Juneteenth celebration.

Johnstown, PA · est. 2022

On July 10, 1902, a gas explosion tore through the Cambria Iron Company's Rolling Mill Mine on this Johnstown hillside, killing 112 bituminous coal miners, most of them immigrants. It was the first of four major Pennsylvania mining disasters in a decade that became the deadliest in the history of American underground coal mining. Coming the same year as the great anthracite coal strike, the tragedy spurred the creation of a state Department of Mines in 1903 to promote workplace safety.

Wake County, NC

These stone ruins mark the dam of the Rollins Mill, a water-powered mill that operated in the Wake County countryside in the early-to-mid 1800s. In that era, small grist and saw mills sat on nearly every reliable stream, grinding local farmers' corn and wheat and cutting timber for a growing rural community. A mill was often the social and economic hub of its neighborhood, a place where families gathered while waiting on their grain. What survives today is the quiet skeleton of that vanished agrarian economy.

Gilchrist, TX

In 1955 the Texas Game and Fish Commission cut a narrow channel across Bolivar Peninsula, letting Gulf saltwater flow into East Bay to raise its salinity and open a path for marine fish to reach their spawning and feeding grounds. Freshwater streams draining off the mainland had been diluting the bay, choking the submerged vegetation that anchors the coastal food web. The site had long been called 'Rollover,' from a smuggler's trick of rolling barrels of goods over the thin neck of land to dodge the Galveston customs house — a practice said to reach back to Spanish days and revive during Prohibition.

Roma, TX

Built over the Rio Grande in 1928 by the Starr County Bridge Company, this single-span steel suspension bridge linked Roma, Texas, with San Pedro, Mexico. Designed by Houston engineer George Cole and built by Joseph Erastus Pate, its 700-foot span is the only surviving suspension bridge on the U.S.–Mexico border. The crossing it served has been in use, the marker notes, since long before the bridge existed.

Charlotte, NC

Born a block from this marker in 1911, Romare Bearden became one of the most celebrated American artists of the twentieth century. Though his family joined the Great Migration north, his vivid collages drew again and again on childhood memories of North Carolina. His work gave enduring visual form to African American life and community.

Rome, OH

Founded in 1835 by William Stout along the Ohio River, this riverport town of Rome grew where the earlier settlement of Adamsville had briefly served as Adams County's seat in 1797–1798, complete with a log courthouse and jail. Stout's son Elisha later carried the westering impulse further, helping found the frontier cities of Omaha and Denver.

Romney, WV

In the decades before the Civil War, the small town of Romney in the eastern panhandle of what was then Virginia became home to a classical academy—an institution meant to school young people in Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and the liberal arts that defined an educated citizen of the early republic. Such classical institutes were the private and community-founded engines of higher learning across antebellum America, filling the gap before public high schools and state universities were widespread. Perched in the Potomac highlands along a well-traveled corridor, the school reflected Romney's ambition to be a seat of culture and learning in the mountainous frontier of the Old Dominion.

Hampshire County, WV

Along the South Branch of the Potomac at Romney—one of the oldest settlements in what became West Virginia—stands an earthen mound raised by Indigenous people long before European traders and colonists pushed into the valley. Such mounds across the Ohio and Potomac watersheds were built by Woodland-era cultures as burial and ceremonial sites, quiet testaments to communities who lived, farmed, and honored their dead here for centuries. By the time settlers named the town Romney in the 18th century, the mound was already ancient, a landmark from a world that predated the written records of the region.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2019

Founded in 1974 on Spruce Street and moved to this location in 1981, this was the first Ronald McDonald House — a place where families of hospitalized children could stay near their kids at little or no cost. It grew from the vision of pediatric oncologist Dr. Audrey Evans, who joined forces with Philadelphia Eagles GM Jimmy Murray and a McDonald's executive to make it real. What began as one Philadelphia house became a model copied by hundreds of chapters around the world.

Junction, TX

The Kimble County community of Roosevelt got its start with an 1898 post office — and its name from Washington, apparently in honor of Theodore Roosevelt, whose Rough Riders had passed through the area before their famous Spanish-American War service. Sitting where two military roads crossed, it grew into a social hub for surrounding ranch families, with a lodge, churches, stores, and a school. It reflects the ranching frontier at the turn of the century.

Okanogan County, WA

In the rugged high country of Okanogan County, this timber ore bin is a relic of the region's hard-rock mining era, when prospectors chased iron and other ores through the eastern slopes of the Washington Cascades. An ore bin stored blasted rock before it was hauled off for crushing and processing.

Floydada, TX

The Catholic faith first reached this stretch of the South Plains with Coronado's 1540s search for the fabled cities of gold, when his men camped in nearby Blanco Canyon. Over the centuries the region passed through Mexican and then American church jurisdictions, and by the early 1900s priests were ministering to a growing flock of settlers and immigrants drawn by cheap land. Waves of newcomers from Mexico — during the Revolution and later through the Bracero labor program — fueled decades of church-building, culminating in the creation of the Diocese of Lubbock in 1983.

Ropesville, TX

Ropesville owes its existence to a 1917 deal in which rancher I.L. Ellwood traded 85 acres to the Santa Fe railroad for a depot on his Spade Ranch, complete with the rope corrals that gave the town its name. In its early years there was no local cemetery, so the dead had to be carried to distant towns — until injured rancher Lee Cowan asked in 1933 to be buried on a knoll west of town, prompting Ellwood to donate an acre and create Ropesville Cemetery. A cemetery association soon formed, and the grounds grew over the following decades.

Ropesville, TX

At the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal sought to rescue struggling farm families, and the Ropesville Resettlement Project was one of 78 federal experiments to give them a fresh start. Beginning in 1936, federal money built homes, wells, and barns on the South Plains, and eventually 77 carefully chosen families farmed the land under a community manager until they gained individual ownership in 1943.

Roanoke, VA

In 1878, merchant and developer Ferdinand Rorer raised a two-story wooden building on this corner that locals dubbed "The Opera House." For a decade it served as the beating heart of community life, hosting civic gatherings and entertainment while also sheltering the municipal offices of the brand-new City of Roanoke. The hall's working life ran until 1888, just as the railroad boomtown was rapidly transforming from a small junction into a bustling Virginia city.

Newark, NJ

This monument honors Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 helped ignite the modern civil rights movement. The quotation carved here distills the quiet conviction that made her act of defiance so powerful — a stand rooted not in anger but in a steady sense of what was right. Newark, a city with its own deep African American history and civil rights struggles, claims her legacy as part of the national story it shares.

Eugene, OR

This monument in Eugene honors Rosa Parks, whose 1955 refusal to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, helped ignite the modern Civil Rights Movement. Her words carved here express a lifelong commitment to freedom, equality, and justice for all people.

La Feria, TX

La Feria's oldest residence was built in 1909 by local carpenter Felipe Perez for Rosalio Ponce Longoria, a contractor who cleared land so developers could lay railroads and other improvements across the Rio Grande Valley. The original board-and-batten house held two main rooms, two small bedrooms, a long front porch, and a kitchen with a brick chimney for a wood stove. A bathroom, a small porch, and a family room were added around 1950.

Roscoe, TX

When the settlement that became Roscoe was still called Vista, rancher and wheat grower W. J. Turner bought this ground around 1887 to bury his brother-in-law, Joe Clecker. The earliest marked graves that followed were those of infants in the 1890s, with other pioneer burials now lost to record. The little cemetery holds the first chapter of a West Texas farming community's history.

Goodrich, TX

Mississippi-born Roscoe D. Holliday came to Polk County before 1910 and spent a decade as constable and deputy before winning election as sheriff in 1920. After seventeen years in that office he joined the Texas Rangers, serving thirteen more years and earning a reputation as a shrewd investigator who solved numerous murders and rounded up bootleggers during the Prohibition years.

Snyder, TX

Backed by an Abilene banker and his family and steered to success by owner H. O. Wooten, this short-line railroad began daily runs from Roscoe to Snyder in 1908 and reached Fluvanna the next year. Its steam engines burned tons of coal on each round trip until oil and then diesel took over, and it hauled the equipment that fed Scurry County's oil booms. Over time the little line became a busy connection for transcontinental freight.

Roscoe, TX

Chartered in 1906 by General F. W. James and a group of Abilene businessmen, the Roscoe, Snyder & Pacific ran from Roscoe up to Snyder and Fluvanna and became one of the nation's most successful short-line railroads. Manager H. O. Wooten pulled it through a financial crisis by brokering deals with California produce shippers and the Santa Fe and Texas & Pacific lines, turning the little road into a valuable connecting link. It carried on until railroad deregulation led to its closing in 1984, having been a driving force in Roscoe's settlement and growth.

Durham, NC

Rose Butler Browne was an educator and civil rights activist who devoted her life to opening the doors of learning. From 1948 to 1963 she chaired the Education Department at the North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham, shaping generations of Black teachers. Her scholarship and advocacy joined the classroom to the broader fight for equality.

Boston, MA

This rose garden on Boston's waterfront honors Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890–1995), the daughter of colorful Boston mayor John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald and matriarch of one of America's most storied political families. Born in the North End to Irish-American parents at the height of Boston's immigrant era, she raised nine children—among them a president, an attorney general, and a long-serving U.S. senator—and became a public symbol of faith and perseverance through decades of family triumph and tragedy. The garden's setting near the harbor ties her memory to the Boston neighborhoods where the Fitzgerald and Kennedy families rose from immigrant roots to national prominence.

Wills Point, TX

German-born brothers B. W. and Isaac 'Ike' Rose arrived near Wills Point in 1873 and opened Rose Dry Goods Store, with Ike later making his fortune as a Dallas entrepreneur while B. W. stayed on. In 1916 Ike, wanting to thank a town he loved, worked with Mayor Henry Gilchrist to give Wills Point a fountain rather than a memorial. The ornate concrete fountain, with its stepped base, water troughs, and globe-lit central column, has served ever since as a gathering place and gateway to the historic commercial district.

Texarkana, TX

Founded as City Cemetery in 1874, just months after Texarkana was established, Rose Hill holds the town's first citizens—doctors, lawyers, tradespeople, and legislators—alongside some seventy Confederate and three Union soldiers. Later burials include victims of the 1882 Paragon Saloon disaster and soldiers of both World Wars, with many older graves resting in concrete 'cradles' typical of the era.

Terrell, TX

When Tennessee settlers camped on this hillside in 1866 the slopes were thick with wild roses, and the land became a burial ground after a settler's son died that August. Dr. James R. Stovall, who led the pioneers, later gave the property, and a small farming community of store, school, and church grew up around the graves. The village faded away by the late 1930s, but a care association and, later, a perpetual trust kept the cemetery tended.

Tulia, TX

This hillside burial ground began in October 1890, just months after Swisher County organized and Tulia became county seat, when the family of 18-year-old Louis Harral won permission to bury him above Middle Tule Creek. A four-year-old boy joined him twelve days later, and by 1906 five acres were set aside as a community cemetery, formally named Rose Hill by a cemetery association in 1916. Among those interred are county officials, two lawmen killed in the line of duty, and veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Tomball, TX

The Rose Hill Methodist congregation built this vernacular Gothic sanctuary in 1888 to replace an original frame church from 1876, funding it through special offerings. With its arched windows and arched transom over the front door, the building served as the congregation's principal place of worship until 1968, its storm-damaged steeple rebuilt in 1962.

Tomball, TX

Pioneer German immigrants who settled the Rose Hill area organized this fellowship in 1875 as the Spring Creek Mission, under the Rev. Friedrich Ries. The earliest services met in the home of Friederick Oeft, who donated the land, and the first sanctuary was built here in 1876. For well over a century the church has anchored the community and helped preserve its German heritage.

Gladewater, TX

When John Kettle Armstrong and his wife Sarah bought 160 acres of East Texas land in 1844, they were among the region's first settlers; after Sarah's death in 1856 the couple set aside this tract as a burial ground that neighbors came to call Stewart Cemetery. Renamed Rosedale by a cemetery association in 1911, the graveyard's clever practice of selling burial permits rather than lots kept its surface and mineral rights intact — so when the East Texas oil boom roared in, two wells drilled on the grounds in 1932 funded a caretaker's cottage, roads, and a rock fence. The tradition that the Armstrong slaves were buried outside the grounds is a quiet, telling detail of the antebellum South.

Brenham, TX

English immigrant William H. Watson founded Rosedale around 1860 as Texas's first commercial nursery, growing it from three acres in Brenham to some 200 acres by 1897. Specializing in peaches and grapes, Watson issued detailed catalogs, stocked ornamental plants, and in 1874 introduced his own "Rosedale Hybrid" arborvitae. He employed gardeners trained at England's renowned Kew Gardens, and his sons carried the business into the twentieth century.

Edom, TX

Built in 1854 by Virginia transplant B.H. Hambrick as the headquarters of a 3,000-acre plantation, Roseland rose in colonial style with pegged mortise-and-tenon joinery, 48-foot joists, and bricks handmade on site. Positioned halfway between Dallas and Shreveport, it doubled as an overnight stagecoach stop and horse-change station, becoming an early social center for the region. It was restored in 1954 and recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

McAllen, TX

In 1908, just a year after McAllen's founding, residents established this cemetery on land donated by the Hidalgo Canal Company, with its oldest marked grave dating to 1909. The McAllen Chamber of Commerce cared for it until 1924, when a cemetery association took over. Originally called Valhalla, it was renamed Roselawn in 1930 after roses planted in a beautification effort, and it has since grown to 22 acres.

Webster Township, IA

The Roseman Covered Bridge is one of the surviving historic covered bridges of Madison County, Iowa, built in the late 19th century when timber trusses sheltered under a roof to protect the deck from weather. These bridges served rural farm-to-market roads and became beloved local landmarks, later famous through the novel and film "The Bridges of Madison County." Roseman's flat-roofed, red-sided span is a classic example of the county's distinctive style.

Maysville, KY

Born in the Ohio River town of Maysville, Rosemary Clooney rose from a small-city childhood to national stardom, topping the charts in 1951 with the novelty hit "Come On-A My House" and following it with standards like "Hey There" and "This Ole House." Hollywood soon called, and she co-starred with Bing Crosby in the beloved 1954 film White Christmas. Across a six-decade career the acclaimed "girl singer" stayed tied to her hometown, launching a music festival there in 1999.

Waxahachie, TX

This lavish 20-room house was built in 1894 for $12,000 by flour-mill owners Eliza and Burt Ringo Moffett, who christened it 'Rosemont.' With wide verandas, ten carved-oak fireplaces, an elaborate onion dome, and gingerbread trim, it is a showpiece of 1890s architectural fashion. Amanda B. Cox, mother of fourteen, bought the home in 1930, and her heirs lived there until 1978.

Alexandria, VA

Rosemont is a leafy residential neighborhood just west of Alexandria's historic core, laid out in the early twentieth century as electric streetcar and rail lines were reshaping how Americans lived and commuted. Its cohesive blocks of gabled frame and brick houses took shape as families spread outward from Washington, D.C., into new suburbs while still working in the city. The National Register listing noted in the inscription recognizes that well-preserved early-suburban character.

Rosenberg, TX

A nameless shipping point had clung to the Brazos River since about 1830, but the modern town was born of the railroad. When the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe crossed an older line here in 1880 and platted a townsite in 1883, Rosenberg took shape between the river and the tracks—named for a Galveston financier who backed the line. Promoters like R. T. Mulcahy built its schools and businesses, and 20th-century oil and sulphur strikes cemented it as a trade center.

Rosenberg, TX

Rosenberg Cemetery grew from three adjacent burial grounds, beginning with the Woodmen of the World cemetery established in 1905 by Rosenberg Camp No. 535, though some graves date to the 1890s. The fraternal order also carved out the strip that became Magnolia Street, flanked by the later Moers and Klauke additions. The City of Rosenberg gradually acquired all three, uniting them by 1973 into a single cemetery that holds the graves of the town's early settlers and leaders.

Corsicana, TX

Ben Rosenberg left Poland around 1882 and, after a few years in Waco, put down roots in Corsicana at the turn of the boomtown's cotton-and-oil prosperity. He ran the Cotton Exchange Saloon and later founded an implement company, becoming a generous fixture of the town's sizeable Jewish community. This house, built for his wife Rachel and their son, stayed in the family for more than half a century.

Rosenberg, TX

Established in 1881, just a year after the railroad gave birth to Rosenberg, the town's post office grew right alongside the community. By 1928 it was sorting mail from 24 trains a day, a measure of the town's booming rail traffic, and a federal post office building followed in 1939. The march from hotel counter to modern facility mirrors Rosenberg's own rise.

Columbus, TX

Columbus was one of the oldest Anglo settlements in Texas, and this corner held one of its earliest downtown commercial structures, raised in 1837 and later home to a doctor's family and practice. In 1872 merchant John Rosenfield acquired the property, and around 1896 he built the handsome brick storefront that stands today. With its buff-brick walls, terra cotta trim, and paired-bay upper facade, it is a textbook example of a turn-of-the-century small-town Main Street.

Lebanon, KY

This Rosenwald School, operating from 1931 to 1961, was one of 158 built in Kentucky during a remarkable partnership between African American communities and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. Initiated by Black families themselves and matched with outside funding, these schools brought quality education to children long denied it under segregation. Across the South, the Rosenwald program educated more than half a million students.

Luling, TX

Opened in 1925, Luling's Rosenwald School was built with help from the fund Julius Rosenwald established in 1917 to endow schools for African American children across the South. Replacing the earlier Luling Colored School of 1874, its 2.5-acre campus held classrooms for ten grades plus shop, library, and home economics and vocational departments, and under principal P. W. Tucker it earned a strong local reputation until it closed in 1966.

Edenton, NC

In 1912, businessman Julius Rosenwald and educator Booker T. Washington created a fund that provided matching grants to help African American communities build better schools across the segregated South. In North Carolina alone the fund aided 817 projects in 93 counties, beginning with the two-teacher Warren Grove School, completed in October 1915 about five miles northeast. Local Black families raised much of the money and labor themselves.

Hawkins, TX

In the 1920s, Black children across the rural South studied in dilapidated schoolhouses until Sears president Julius Rosenwald, working with educator Booker T. Washington, seeded a fund to build better ones. Communities matched the grants with their own money and labor; by the time the program ended in 1932, more than 5,300 Rosenwald schools stood in fifteen states, including eight in Wood County. Local families gave money and sweat to raise schools like Hawkins, Muddy Creek, and Fouke.

Rosewood, TX

Founded in 1872 as Double Springs Baptist Church under the Rev. Jacob Zeigler, this East Texas congregation took root in a scattered rural settlement soon after the Civil War. When the Marshall & East Texas Railway arrived and a townsite was platted, the community—and the church—were renamed Rosewood in 1907. Part of the original meeting house survives within the later building, a rare thread of continuity in a region reshaped by the railroad.

Galveston, TX

In 1911 a group of African American Galvestonians formed the Rosewood Cemetery Association and bought land near the beach, because Black citizens were barred from most of the city's cemeteries. Churches, lodges, and individuals bought shares, and burials continued into the 1940s. Later seawall construction and development gradually erased the site until, in 2006, a surviving acre was donated to the Galveston Historical Foundation for preservation.

Gilmer, TX

When the Marshall and East Texas Railroad arrived in 1907, the new town of Rosewood absorbed the older settlements of Double Springs and Essex. That same year the grieving McDonald family donated land for a community cemetery and reinterred their young son here. Maintained for decades by neighbors who took turns digging graves, the cemetery holds granite markers, Woodmen of the World monuments, a carved angel, and memorials to local veterans, including one lost at sea in World War II.

Austin, TX

Austin's 1928 city plan pushed communities of color to the east side by withholding services elsewhere, and in response the city established Rosewood Park in 1930 as its first public park for African Americans. Carved from the Bertram family's Boggy Creek homestead, it opened with a pool, ballfields, and a clubhouse in a remodeled 1870s limestone home, and it has hosted Juneteenth celebrations every year since. Its Doris Miller Auditorium, built in 1944, later became a noted stop on the "Chitlin' Circuit" before Austin's pools and parks integrated in 1963.

Village of Roslyn, NY

When Dutch and English settlers were carving farms out of colonial Long Island, a mill was the beating heart of a village—the place where a community's grain became its daily bread. This water-powered gristmill, timber-framed in the sturdy Dutch tradition between 1715 and 1741, ground meal for the surrounding countryside for more than a century and a half. After its milling days ended, the building found a gentle second life as a tea house from 1920 to 1974, welcoming visitors rather than farmers. Its survival makes it a genuine rarity among early American industrial buildings.

Pittsburgh, PA

On a short cul-de-sac in Pittsburgh's Shadyside neighborhood, Roslyn Place is paved not with brick or asphalt but with tens of thousands of creosote-treated wooden blocks, laid in 1914. Wood-block paving briefly caught on in American cities because it muffled the clatter of horses and early automobiles, but nearly all of it has since rotted away or been paved over. Roslyn Place endures as one of the very few wooden streets left in the United States.