Search Markers

Balch Springs, TX

This burial ground began in 1847 when Hiram Bennett's family—drawn to Texas by a Peters Colony land grant in 1845—lost an infant daughter and laid her on a tree-covered knoll of the family farm. What started as a family plot grew to hold neighbors, Citizens of the Republic of Texas, Civil War veterans, and members of fraternal orders like the Woodmen of the World, many under primitive or hand-carved stones. In the 1950s a perpetual-care cemetery absorbed the historic ground and renamed it Bennett Family Gardens.

Edgewood, TX

B.J. Carter, a former schoolteacher turned pharmacist, moved his family to Edgewood in 1911 and, with his wife Sallie, opened and jointly ran a downtown drugstore. In 1912 they built this Queen Anne–style house, with shiplap siding, a wraparound porch on Doric columns, and a hipped roof with projecting gables. The Carters spent the rest of their lives here as community leaders in the small Van Zandt County town.

Durham, NC

At this modest farmhouse belonging to James Bennett, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered his army to Union General William T. Sherman on April 26, 1865. Coming seventeen days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, it was the largest surrender of the war and ended Confederate resistance across the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida.

Whitesboro, TX

This handsome residence was built in 1902 for business leader Bland Bennett and his wife Grace, blending Victorian ornament with classical revival details like a pedimented wraparound porch and corbelled chimneys. Its floor plan echoes both the center-passage house and the emerging American foursquare. The Richardson family bought the home in 1942.

Bennington, VT

On August 16, 1777, New England militia under General John Stark and Vermont troops led by Colonel Seth Warner routed British and German forces sent by General Burgoyne to seize American supplies near Bennington. The victory stripped Burgoyne of men and provisions and helped set the stage for his surrender at Saratoga weeks later. A century afterward, Americans raised this 306-foot stone shaft to mark the ground where the tide turned.

Lytle, TX

Established in 1870 on land given by pioneer James M. Jones, this was the first public cemetery in the once-thriving frontier town of Benton City, known in its day for a fine school, busy businesses, and its own newspaper. Jones and his family had settled here in 1869, when Atascosa County was still a raw edge of South Texas. Buried in its grounds are pioneers and veterans reaching from the Indian-frontier era through the Civil War and both World Wars.

Lytle, TX

Built in 1875 in the small Atascosa County community of Benton City, this two-story structure housed a private academy on its lower floors while the Masonic Atascosa Lodge 379 occupied the top. Operating under a Texas law that supplemented private tuition with state funds, the institute offered surprisingly ambitious coursework for a rural school—accounting, law, music, and surveying alongside the basics. It grew into a fully tax-supported school before consolidating with the Lytle district in 1919.

Fort Worth, TX

When businessman Meredith A. Benton built this Victorian "gingerbread" cottage in 1898, the four-lot parcel sat out in the country, and his young St. Louis–born wife reportedly feared the still-wild West. Designed by the builder's father, the six-room house had a central hall and tiled fireplaces, and Mrs. Benton, a civic worker, helped plant rose beds that later became part of the celebrated Fort Worth Botanic Gardens.

Atlanta, GA

On July 22, 1864, during the Battle of Atlanta, Benton's Mississippi and Coltart's Alabama brigades of Cheatham's corps struck the Federal line east of here, dislodging Union brigades and briefly seizing ground astride the Georgia Railroad before reinforced counterattacks recovered it. Colonel Samuel Benton was mortally wounded in the fighting and died days later at a hospital in Griffin.

Borger, TX

Named for brothers Charles and William Bent, whose Colorado-based trading empire reached deep into the Texas Panhandle. From the mid-1830s they and their men rode out from their post near present-day La Junta to trade with the Kiowa and Comanche along the Canadian River, eventually raising several posts here—most notably the adobe-walled Fort Adobe of 1843–44. Those crumbling walls later framed two famous frontier fights: Kit Carson's hard-pressed 1864 clash and the 1874 Battle of Adobe Walls between buffalo hunters and Plains warriors.

Mission, TX

Before it was cleared for farming, this stretch of the Lower Rio Grande Valley was a lush thicket where northern and southern plant and animal species mingled on rich river-deposited soil. In the 18th century Spain granted the land in narrow riverfront strips called porciones; this ground was part of Porción 50, awarded to José Antonio Zamora under the jurisdiction of Reynosa. As citrus groves swallowed the valley in the early 1900s, more than 586 acres were saved in 1944 when the Bentsen family donated them to the Texas State Parks Board.

Jefferson, TX

In 1913, Jefferson boosters began dreaming of a Seventh-Day Adventist colony and school in Marion County, and church leaders soon made it real: W.A. McCutchen spent his own money to buy 1,770 acres near Black Cypress Bayou, deeding it to the Adventist conference in 1915 and drawing settlers with land and schooling for their children. Named Berea after a city in the Book of Acts, the community opened its first three-room school in 1914 and built church and academy buildings that carried on under changing names for decades.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1990

Founded in 1899 by Rev. Matthew Anderson, pastor of Berean Presbyterian Church, the Berean Institute set out to teach Black Philadelphians skilled trades that segregation and prejudice had closed off to them elsewhere. Anderson also launched the Berean Savings Association, weaving education together with Black economic self-reliance. Over time the school broadened its curriculum to meet the changing needs of its students.

Dudley, MA

Beresik Square honors Stephen E. Beresik, a young sailor from the mill town of Dudley, Massachusetts, who became the community's first resident killed in World War II. He died on August 9, 1942, aboard the heavy cruiser USS Quincy, which was sunk that night in the ferocious Battle of Savo Island off Guadalcanal — one of the U.S. Navy's costliest surface defeats of the Pacific war. Barely twenty-three, Beresik was among the hundreds lost when Japanese warships caught the Allied fleet by surprise in the war's early, uncertain months. His hometown answered that loss by naming a public square in his memory.

Martinez, CA

Maximillian Bergamini raised this commercial building in 1905 to replace a grocery and notions store destroyed the previous year in a block-wide fire that swept through downtown Martinez. Such fires were a constant hazard in early twentieth-century business districts crowded with wood-frame buildings, and rebuilding in sturdier form was a common response. The new structure carried on the everyday commerce of a growing California town.

Seattle, WA

Bergen Place honors Seattle's sister-city ties with Bergen, Norway, and the deep Norwegian roots of the surrounding Ballard neighborhood. The plaza was dedicated in 1975 by King Olav V of Norway during a royal visit, marking the bond between the immigrant community and its homeland. Ballard grew as a hub for Scandinavian fishermen and mill workers, and the site celebrates that heritage.

Houston, TX

Organized in 1848 by the Rev. Charles Goldberg as the First German Methodist Church of Houston, this congregation gathered the city's German immigrants, including brothers August and Conrad Bering, who had arrived in Texas in 1846. The church took the Bering name in 1911, around the same time English joined German in its services. From 1858 the congregation worshipped at Milam and McKinney streets before moving to this location in 1924.

Berkeley, CA · est. 2010

For nearly half a century this 1925–27 Classical Revival tower was Berkeley's only "skyscraper," designed by Walter Ratcliff Jr. at the height of his career. Steel-framed and clad in brick and terra cotta, it housed the Chamber of Commerce and Wells Fargo Bank, its planned upper stories cancelled by the Depression. In 1930 the prized Stanford Axe was famously stolen from outside its doors by students in disguise.

Berkeley, CA

This plaque records the listing of the Berkeley Public Library on the National Register of Historic Places, the federal roll of buildings deemed worthy of preservation. Berkeley's library grew alongside the University of California and the Progressive-era faith that free public reading rooms were engines of democracy and civic uplift. The recognition affirms the architectural and cultural value of a building that has served its community for generations.

Berkeley, CA

In the early 1920s Alameda County voters taxed themselves to build halls honoring the veterans of the Great War and to give their organizations a home. Completed in 1928 to county architect Henry Meyers's Classic Moderne design, Berkeley's Veterans Memorial Building anchored the city's harmonious Civic Center around the park. Decades later it even hosted one of the first indoor Grateful Dead concerts, in 1966.

Berkeley, CA

This building was dedicated by the Berkeley War Council to the city's young men and women who gave their lives in World War II. Across the country in the 1940s, communities built 'living memorials' — halls and youth centers rather than statues — to honor their war dead by serving the next generation. Berkeley channeled its grief into a place devoted to its youth.

Berkeley, CA

Founded amid England's working class in 1844 and carried to America in 1851, the Young Men's Christian Association reached Berkeley in 1903. Community and business leaders raised more than $118,000 to erect this Georgian Revival hall in 1910 on land given by Rosa Shattuck, designed by Benjamin McDougall. An adjoining building later served WWII servicemen through the USO before postwar expansion.

Reading, PA · est. 1982

Formed in 1752 from parts of three older counties and named for Berkshire in England, this region centered on the town of Reading. Its early iron forges and furnaces, drawing on rich local ore, helped launch what would become Pennsylvania's mighty iron industry. Reading grew from a colonial borough into a thriving 19th-century city built on that industrial foundation.

Berlin, PA · est. 1994

In 1794, the newly independent United States faced its first great test of federal authority when western Pennsylvania farmers rose up against a tax on whiskey — the region's chief cash crop and de facto currency. Berlin sat at the heart of that unrest: a schoolhouse riot broke out that June, and local merchant Robert Philson raised a liberty pole and urged neighbors to defy the law. When President Washington sent troops that autumn, Governor Thomas Mifflin made his headquarters at a doctor's house on this very ground.

Baltimore, MD

This fragment of the Berlin Wall once stood near the Lichterfelde district before being broken free on November 11, 1989, days after East Germany opened its borders. Brought to Baltimore and dedicated to all who crossed — and those who died trying — it is a tangible piece of the barrier that divided a city and the Cold War world.

Spartanburg County, SC

This monument gathers the two most famous American voices of the Cold War into a single stone. In June 1963, standing in a city freshly split by concrete and barbed wire, John F. Kennedy told a vast West Berlin crowd 'Ich bin ein Berliner' — I am a Berliner — pledging the free world's solidarity with a walled-in people. Twenty-four years later Ronald Reagan returned to the divided city and, before the Brandenburg Gate, challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to 'tear down this wall.' The barrier fell in November 1989, and this Spartanburg County memorial preserves those words far from the streets where they were spoken.

Schulenburg, TX

In 1889 Dr. I. E. Clark, a state senator and physician, traced out a racetrack on his farm by driving his buggy free-style across the ground — a plan for a half-mile oval that came out at five-eighths of a mile. Graded by mule-drawn scoops and chartered in 1894 for the Schulenburg fair association, the track drew famous horses in its heyday, and Clark and his son bred two of Texas's best-known runners here. In later years, automobiles took their turn on the same course.

Rio Rancho, NM

Bernalillo sits along the old Camino Real in the Rio Grande valley, on ground once part of the Pueblo province of Tiguex. Coronado's expedition wintered here in 1540–42 during its search for the fabled Cities of Cíbola, an occupation that brought violent conflict with the region's Pueblo peoples. The town that grew nearby became a stop on the royal road linking Mexico City to Santa Fe.

Galveston, TX

Virginia-born Bernard Moore Temple served in the Confederate army before heading west to build a career in civil engineering. As chief engineer for the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad in the early 1880s, he oversaw much of the line's expansion across Texas and insisted on quality construction, and the railroad town of Temple, Texas, was named in his honor in 1881. This marker commemorates the engineer whose work helped stitch the state together by rail.

Round Top, TX

Bernard Scherrer left his native Switzerland at 22, wandering for years before reaching Texas in 1833, and fought in Burleson's regiment during the Texas Revolution. Granted land but settling in the Biegel community of Fayette County around 1838, he served as justice of the peace and county commissioner, married in 1845, and later took up arms again for the Confederacy in the Civil War. This cabin, his first Texas home, was relocated here in 1975.

Nashville, GA

Berrien County was created in 1856 and named for John MacPherson Berrien, "the American Cicero," a judge, U.S. senator, and attorney general. Its county seat, Nashville, honors General Francis Nash of North Carolina, a Revolutionary War soldier. The first county officers were commissioned that April.

Lufkin, TX

In 1850 Samuel and Elizabeth Berry brought their family and enslaved workers from Alabama to a plantation of hundreds of acres, complete with a cotton gin and gristmill. The cemetery began in 1863 with the burial of Samuel's young grandson on a hilltop, its family plot ringed by a low red rock wall with an adjoining section set aside for the enslaved. The land later became a community graveyard, its stones cut from granite, marble, and even petrified wood.

Detroit, MI

In 1959 Berry Gordy launched his record company on this Detroit site with an $800 family loan, soon naming it Motown in honor of the Motor City. From this modest house-turned-studio poured a stream of hits and stars that defined the 'Motown Sound.' Over the next dozen years the company grew from a family business into an international enterprise.

Bainbridge Island, WA

Identified by the Bainbridge Island Historical Society and dating to 1948, this berry shed is a relic of the island's celebrated strawberry-farming era. For decades Bainbridge's fields were tended largely by Japanese American and Filipino immigrant families, whose berries shipped across Puget Sound to Seattle markets. Sheds like this one processed and stored the harvest at the heart of that agricultural economy.

Alto, TX

The land around Berryman Cemetery traces back to a 1802 Spanish grant sought by James Dill, who would become the first alcalde of Nacogdoches under Mexican rule. His daughter Helena and her husband, West Point graduate Capt. Henry Berryman, built the plantation home 'Forest Hill' and encouraged farmers to settle the area; after Henry's death in 1859, Helena stayed on and raised thirty orphans alongside her own children. The burial ground that grew here holds the family, former slaves Sally and Alex Berryman, a Civil War veteran and county commissioner, and even a former Cleveland Indians ballplayer.

Louisville, KY

The Berrytown community began in 1874 when Alfred Berry bought five acres, and its cemetery—purchased in 1890 by the United Brothers of Friendship Lodge #83—became the settlement's focal point. Lodge trustees tended the grounds and built its stone columns and entrance gate in 1902. Among its more than 300 burials are the Berry family, early settlers, and several military graves; since 1984 a corporation of area residents has owned and cared for it.

Narberth, PA · est. 1997

From his home in Narberth, Bert Bell helped build professional football into a national institution. As NFL Commissioner from 1946 to 1959, he championed competitive balance, strengthened the league's ethics, and shaped the modern game, having earlier owned the Eagles and held a stake in the Steelers. Neighbors recalled him talking sports with locals at Davis's store, a reminder that the architect of pro football's rise remained a hometown figure.

Bertram, TX

Bertram was born in 1882 when the Austin and Northwestern Railroad ran its line through the area, drawing residents — and even whole buildings — from the older settlement of South Gabriel two miles away. Named for Austin merchant Rudolph Bertram, who helped finance the railroad, the town became an agricultural marketing hub, booming during World War I before Depression and changing transportation slowed its growth. It remains a farming community whose founders' descendants still live nearby.

Bertram, TX

When the railroad reached this spot in 1882, the new town of Bertram raised one of its first buildings as a combined school, Sunday school, and Masonic hall—seeded by a $50 gift from the railroad executive it was named for. By 1909 a booming cotton economy had swelled enrollment past 260 students, prompting a handsome two-story brick schoolhouse. In its early years children often skipped the first weeks of class to pick cotton in the fields.

Tredyffrin Township, PA · est. 2020

In 1932 the Tredyffrin and Easttown school districts began segregating their elementary schools, sending Black children to separate classrooms. Local Black families and their allies gathered at Mt. Zion A.M.E. Church and organized a boycott, keeping their children out of school for more than 300 days rather than accept the order. The pressure worked: officials rescinded segregation, and by 1934 the children returned to integrated schools — a victory that helped spur Pennsylvania's 1935 Equal Rights Bill.

Welfare, TX

Carl Joseph and Augusta Beseler brought their family from Germany to Texas in 1848 and settled on a Kendall County land grant, where the community of Welfare took root. The family's story tracks Texas's divided loyalties: their son Ernst died at the Battle of the Nueces, where Confederate forces killed German Unionists, while his brother Carl Philipp went on to build Welfare into a railroad shipping point and hold a string of county offices in the 1880s. The old general store is among the few remnants of the community they founded.

Boerne, TX

Charles Beseler left Prussia for Texas in 1848 and spent decades as a Kendall County public official, part of the wave of German immigrants who shaped the Hill Country. In 1903 his son Maximilian, a Boerne businessman and civic leader, had this stone Victorian cottage built for his aging parents, with a curved front porch, decorative woodwork, and shingle detailing crafted by local mason Ed Clemens from quarried rock. The house stayed in the family for more than eighty years.

Huntsville, TX

John Slater Besser had already been a brigadier general, legislator, and judge in Missouri before he moved his family to Texas in 1842. Over the following decades he held a string of public offices in Montgomery and Walker counties, serving as director and financial agent of the state penitentiary under a long line of governors and as Walker County Judge from 1878 to 1880. His career spanned the years bracketing the Civil War.

McAllen, TX

In the mid-1800s, steamboats owned by shipping magnates Mifflin Kenedy and Richard King moved goods and people up and down the Rio Grande. The steamboat Bessie was the last of that fleet, and instead of a whistle she carried this 400-pound bell. After her final voyage in 1902 the bell served on a plantation, survived a church fire, was cracked and recast, and eventually found a home at St. Joseph the Worker Church in McAllen.

Waxahachie, TX

Born in Atlanta, Texas, in 1892, Bessie Coleman grew up in Waxahachie before moving to Chicago at 23 with a dream of flight. Barred by race and sex from American flight schools, she trained in France and earned her international pilot's license in 1921, returning home as the first Black woman pilot. "Queen Bess" thrilled integrated crowds as a barnstormer until her death in a 1926 air accident.

Atlanta, TX

Born in Atlanta, Texas, in 1892, the tenth of thirteen children of tenant farmers, Bessie Coleman dreamed of flight but found no American school that would teach an African American woman. So she went to France, earning her international pilot's license in 1921 and returning home hailed as the first Black woman to fly an airplane. She died in an air accident in 1926.

West, TX

Built around 1890 by town founder Thomas M. West, this whimsical building first held two saloons until Prohibition arrived in 1919 and turned it into a grocery and bakery. In 1923 Jim Tobola remade it as the Best Theatre, which brought vaudeville, local acts, and movies to the Czech farming town of West until it closed in 1976. Its metal semicircular awnings and globe-like concrete finials still mark it as a small-town landmark.

Galveston, TX

Catherine Best bought this Galveston lot in 1866, and within years the improved property passed among a series of tradespeople, including her carpenter husband and later the noted brickmason Thomas Lucas. It changed hands repeatedly over the following decades, often serving as rental housing, until it was slated for demolition in the 1980s and rescued through restoration. Today it displays its original Greek Revival details — a three-bay porch, gabled windows, and period interior features.

Houston, TX

Established around 1844, this Houston burial ground dates to the era of the Republic of Texas, when the young city was little more than a raw settlement on Buffalo Bayou. Its founding reflects the arrival of Jewish families among Texas's earliest settlers, who set aside sacred ground to bury their dead according to their faith.

Cheltenham Township, PA · est. 2008

Completed in 1959, Beth Sholom Synagogue is the only house of worship designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, created in close collaboration with Rabbi Mortimer J. Cohen. Its soaring, luminous form — built of concrete, steel, aluminum, and glass — was conceived to evoke the biblical Mount Sinai in modern materials. The building stands today as a National Historic Landmark.

Houston, TX

Beth Yeshurun is the oldest continuously active Conservative Jewish congregation in Texas, formed in 1946 by the merger of an Orthodox congregation dating to 1891 and a Conservative one founded in 1925. Under Rabbi William S. Malev it grew into one of the largest Conservative congregations in the world, opened a pioneering synagogue day school in 1954, and dedicated its 80,000-square-foot Modernist building on Beechnut Street in 1962.

Fort Worth, TX

Reform Jewish life in Fort Worth began in 1879 with a Hebrew Benevolent Society Sabbath school and home services, gaining momentum around 1900 under Henry Gernsbacher. In 1902 forty-three people gathered to found Beth-El Congregation, electing Sam Levy president, and after years of borrowed rooms and visiting student rabbis they built a temple in 1908 and a larger one on this site in 1919. Fire destroyed that building in 1946, and the rebuilt Beth-El Temple was dedicated in 1949.

Lexington, GA

Beth-Salem Presbyterian Church was organized in 1785 in the wilderness west of here under the licentiate John Newton, becoming the first in a chain of Presbyterian churches planted across North Georgia by the Presbytery of South Carolina. Newton served until his death in 1797; the congregation later relocated to this site and was chartered by the legislature in 1827.

Wichita Falls, TX

Riding the oil-boom growth that swelled Wichita Falls to 55,000 residents, doctors Hargrave and Walker opened a clinic and hospital on 11th Street in 1926. In 1934 the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth — a Polish order that had come to America to serve immigrants — bought it and renamed it Bethania Hospital in 1935. Under Mother Marie Delourdes the hospital expanded across decades, trained top-ranked vocational nurses beginning in 1959, and served the city until its 1997 merger into United Regional Health Care.

Houston, TX

Organized in 1935 as Houston Garden Baptist Church, this congregation took root in the Houston Gardens neighborhood that the federal government helped create through Franklin D. Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration. Renamed Bethany Baptist in 1946, it was the only one of four white congregations in its Baptist association to survive the demographic shift of the mid-20th century without merging or foreclosing. In 1971 it welcomed the Rev. Curley Edward Carr as its first African American head pastor, becoming a model of peaceful institutional integration.

Austin, TX

Bethany Cemetery was established in the late 1800s after burial space for African Americans in Austin's Oakwood Cemetery ran out, its oldest recorded grave that of an infant, Hellen Moore, in 1879. C. W. Jones bought the land in 1892, and the Bethany Cemetery Company—formed in 1893 by William Holland, Henderson Rollins, Allen Bradley, and William M. Tears—cared for it for decades. A community association took up its upkeep in 1976, and the graveyard still serves the area today.

Fredericksburg, TX

Fredericksburg's German settlers first worshiped together in the communal Vereins Kirche, but in 1887 the Rev. John Heinzelmann and about 80 families organized their own Evangelical congregation. They built a sanctuary on East Austin Street in 1889 and carried on services in German well into the 1940s, only gradually shifting to English as the community Americanized. Renamed over the decades, the congregation became Bethany Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1954.

Alvarado, TX

In 1857 a small group of Alabama families settled near Chambers Creek, founding a rural community called Fairview north of this site. Decades later, in 1903, the Head family donated land for a church—first called Head's Chapel—and in 1908 its trustees set part of it aside as a burial ground. The earliest marked grave, that of fifteen-year-old Marcy Thompson, dates to that year, and a cemetery association later fenced and cared for the plots that still serve the surrounding countryside.

Riverside, TX

Bethea Creek, a tributary of the Trinity River, carries the name of John and Elizabeth Bethea, who settled in present-day Walker County in the 1830s. John ran a gristmill and served as postmaster at Newport, a riverport that has since faded into a ghost town, before the couple moved to the new rail town of Riverside in the early 1870s. The stream keeps their name where the settlements they served have vanished.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1995

Founded in 1808 as the African Church and chartered a decade later, Pittsburgh's Bethel A.M.E. congregation became far more than a place of worship. It opened the area's first school for Black children in 1831 and, in 1841, hosted a statewide civil rights convention where free African Americans organized for their rights. As the community grew, the congregation moved to Wylie Avenue and later Webster Avenue, carrying its long tradition of faith and activism with it.