Search Markers

Whitewright, TX

Civil War veteran Sam Marshall and his wife Mary came from Kentucky to Grayson County in the late 1860s and moved to the new railroad town of Whitewright by 1880. Prospering in land and commerce, they built this Queen Anne Free Classic house in 1899–1900, rich with a gabled roof, classical columns, decorative woodwork, and a balconied porch. After Mary's death in 1924 it passed through several local families.

Boston, MA

Samuel Eliot Morison was a Boston-born historian who spent much of his life teaching at Harvard while insisting that the past be felt as well as footnoted. Famous for retracing the ocean voyages he wrote about — sailing the very routes of Columbus and other mariners under his own canvas — he became one of America's great narrative historians and a Pulitzer Prize winner. A lifelong sailor, he served in the Navy and rose to rear admiral, earning the fitting epitaph carved here: 'Sailor · Historian.'

Crockett, TX

A Georgia native and Civil War veteran, Samuel Fisher Tenney (1840-1926) graduated from the University of Georgia and a South Carolina seminary before settling in Crockett in 1870. For 54 years he served as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, while also helping build educational facilities for Black residents and starting a mission in 1880 for the Alabama-Coushatta Indians in Polk County. His long ministry left a deep mark on the region.

Willow Point, TX

A Tennessee native, Samuel G. Evetts came to Texas in the 1830s and was wounded at the Siege of Bexar in December 1835, an early clash of the Texas Revolution. He later lived in several counties, earning land grants for his Republic of Texas military service and a state pension in 1870, before moving to Wise County, where he died in 1884. Thrice married and father of eleven, he saw his name spelled variously as Evetts and Evitts over the years.

Chicago, IL

Samuel Guthrie (1782–1848) was an American physician and chemist working in the early republic, a restless age when self-taught experimenters transformed science. He is credited with the discovery of chloroform, a compound that would later revolutionize surgery by making anesthesia possible. The Chicago Medical Society raised this monument to a pioneer whose work helped ease human suffering.

Orange, TX

Born in northern Ireland in 1832, Samuel H. Levingston left home at fourteen and learned ship carpentry in Apalachicola, Florida, before moving near present-day Orange just before the Civil War. He served the Confederacy as a ship carpenter and blockade runner, then returned to build paddle-wheel boats hauling cotton down the Sabine. His son George later grew the family trade into the Levingston Shipbuilding Company, and the land the family once farmed became a city park.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2000

Samuel Hopkins, who lived here, holds a singular place in American history: on July 31, 1790, he received the very first patent issued under the new United States Constitution, signed by President George Washington himself. The patent covered an improved method of making potash, a caustic potassium compound essential to soap, glass, and gunpowder and one of early America's leading exports. From that first grant would flow millions of American patents, the engine of a nation built on invention.

Waco, TX

Born in Sweden in 1828, Samuel Johan Forsgard joined the first wave of Swedish immigration to Texas in 1855 and settled in Waco, where he opened a bakery, restaurant, and confectionery. He served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, then returned to business, patented farming equipment, and helped establish a sporting goods company. Over more than fifty years he became a well-known figure in the city's 19th-century growth.

Edenton, NC

Samuel Johnston was among the most influential leaders of Revolutionary-era North Carolina, presiding over provincial congresses, serving as governor, and later representing the state in the U.S. Senate. His plantation home, "Hayes," and his grave lie about a mile to the southeast. Few figures did more to guide the colony through independence and into statehood.

Weatherford, TX

This memorial gathers a family whose lives spanned continents and the violent frontier. Mary Yergins, born in Germany, was captured by Indians in 1836; shortly afterward she gave birth to a daughter, Jane, and mother and child were later ransomed. Mary went on to marry Samuel Joseph Redgate, an England-born settler who served in the Texas Legislature from 1858 to 1861. The State of Texas erected the marker in 1936 to preserve their intertwined story.

Round Top, TX

Samuel Knight Lewis left a Mississippi plantation to bring his family to Texas in 1838, serving Austin County in the Republic of Texas House of Representatives before settling near Round Top in 1848. Sensing opportunity along a planned stage route, he bought land whose home grew into a welcome stopping place for travelers, later known as the Winedale Inn. Given to the University of Texas in the 1960s, the property became the heart of the Winedale Historical Center.

Park City, UT

Samuel LePage Raddon (1858–1948) owned, edited, and published The Park Record, the newspaper that chronicled life in the silver-mining boomtown of Park City, Utah. For decades his press recorded the fortunes, fires, and daily happenings of a Rocky Mountain mining community. A long-lived editor, he tied several generations of townsfolk to their own history through his columns.

Glenville, WV

This marker honors Samuel Lewis Hays, a 19th-century public figure tied to the early history of Glenville and Gilmer County. Active when central West Virginia was still a sparsely settled frontier region, Hays was among the local leaders remembered for the area's founding and early growth. The community has preserved his name as part of its heritage.

Buffalo Township, PA · est. 1947

Samuel Maclay was among the first generation of statesmen to represent the new United States, serving in the U.S. House and Senate as well as Pennsylvania's General Assembly in the decades after independence. He had put down roots in the Buffalo Valley of central Pennsylvania as early as 1770, when the region was still a raw frontier, and he lived out his life there until his death in 1811. His grave lies in the churchyard near this spot.

Galveston, TX

Samuel May Williams sailed from Rhode Island into a life of business and language, learning Spanish in Buenos Aires before joining Stephen F. Austin's Texas colony in 1823 as translator and clerk. He and Thomas F. McKinney ran a mercantile firm whose credit helped bankroll the Texas Revolution, extending some ninety-nine thousand dollars in support, and later helped build ships for the young republic's navy. In 1848 he opened a Galveston bank and lived out his days in this home.

Galveston, TX

Born in Rhode Island in 1795, Samuel May Williams became one of the most influential figures of early Texas as the intimate friend and colony secretary of Stephen F. Austin. A pioneer banker who handled important commissions for the colony, Republic, and state, he lived out his life in Galveston, dying there in 1858. This state monument honors a man remembered for years of patriotic and self-sacrificing service.

Houston, TX

Samuel McCarley, his wife Celia, and their ten children settled on Spring Creek in 1831, and by 1836 their home sat on a well-traveled road between Washington-on-the-Brazos and Harrisburg. On April 15, 1836, Sam Houston's Texas Army arrived at dusk and, over one hungry night, consumed the family's cattle, corn, and bacon and burned some four thousand fence rails for fuel. The next day Houston took the Harrisburg road and, on April 21, won independence at San Jacinto; decades later the state paid the widowed Celia $460 for the damage.

Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1948

This memorial honors Samuel Meredith, a Revolutionary-era patriot and financier who became the first Treasurer of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1801 under the new federal government. Together with fellow signer George Clymer, Meredith held extensive lands in this corner of northeastern Pennsylvania, and he died at his estate, Belmont, in 1817. His life spanned the war for independence and the building of the nation's earliest financial institutions.

Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1949

Samuel Meredith was a Philadelphia merchant and Revolutionary patriot who served in the militia and helped finance the struggle for independence. In 1789 President Washington named him the first Treasurer of the United States, a post he held through the government's fragile founding decade. He retired to his estate, Belmont, in the quiet hills of northeastern Pennsylvania, where he died in 1817.

Seguin, TX

This marker honors Samuel Millett, who took up arms in the Texas Revolution of 1835–1836 and fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. In eighteen minutes of fighting on the San Jacinto plain, Sam Houston's outnumbered army routed Santa Anna and secured Texas independence. Millett was among the ordinary soldiers who made that victory possible.

Breckenridge, TX

Samuel P. Newcomb traveled alone from Connecticut to Texas at seventeen, settling by 1857 on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, where he taught school, held county offices, and served in a state ranger unit during the Civil War. What outlasted his brief life was his pen: his diaries vividly recorded frontier daily life, buffalo herds, and the fort where he lived, as did those of his wife Susan Reynolds. He died in 1870 at just thirty-one.

Houston, TX

Samuel Paschall, born in Tennessee in 1815, served as a private in Captain Amasa Turner's company at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive clash that won Texas its independence. He remained in the Army of Texas from early 1836 into 1837 during the young republic's most fragile years. He lived until 1874, and the state raised this marker to his memory in 1957.

Easton, PA · est. 1953

Around 1846, in his Easton gunsmith shop on this site, Samuel Phillippe crafted what is widely recognized as the first split-bamboo fishing rod made in the United States. By splitting cane into strips and gluing them back together, he produced a rod that was lighter, stronger, and more responsive than solid wood—a breakthrough that transformed sport fishing. His technique became the foundation of American rod-making for the century that followed.

Corsicana, TX

Samuel R. Frost, born in Huntsville in 1846, grew up in Navarro County and enlisted in the Confederate army in 1863 as a teenager. After the Civil War he studied law, joined the bar in 1870, and built a long public career as county attorney, county judge, district judge, and state legislator. The nearby town of Frost was named in his honor, marking the imprint one dedicated jurist left on his corner of Texas.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2005

Founded in 1898 as the Graphic Sketch Club, the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial opened its doors on the principle that art instruction should be free to anyone who wished to learn—making it the oldest free community art school in the country. Generations of students have passed through its studios, among them Frank Gasparro, who became chief engraver at the U.S. Mint, and Louis Kahn, one of the 20th century's most revered architects.

Conoy Township, PA · est. 1991

Samuel S. Haldeman was born in 1812 a quarter-mile from here at Locust Grove, the Susquehanna-side mansion his grandfather built in 1811. A restlessly curious naturalist who later turned to the study of language, he produced more than 150 books and scientific papers and lectured across the country. His work bridged the natural sciences and philology at a time when American scholarship was coming into its own.

San Antonio, TX

Boston-born Samuel S. Smith rode with the Woll and Somervell expeditions of 1842, the volatile border campaigns that followed Mexican incursions into the young Republic of Texas. He lived until 1882 and is remembered here alongside his wife Sarah.

Hoboken, NJ

Samuel Sloan (1817–1907) was one of the towering railroad executives of the Gilded Age, long serving as president of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, whose terminal anchored Hoboken's waterfront. Under his leadership the line became a major carrier of anthracite coal and commuters between New Jersey and the industrial Northeast. His monument stands near the great rail-and-ferry gateway his company built.

New Summerfield, TX

Born in Switzerland in 1800, Samuel Smith emigrated to Tennessee at nineteen, earned his U.S. citizenship, and in 1849 joined a party of settlers bound for Texas, helping found the town of Knoxville in Cherokee County. He built this farmhouse in 1859, and his family went on to give land for a church and cemetery, run the settlement's first blacksmith shop, and connect with the railroad that arrived in 1872.

Cabarrus County, NC

Samuel Suther was among the earliest ministers of the German Reformed Church in North Carolina, serving from 1768 to 1782 during the turbulent years of the American Revolution. He preached at the Coldwater Union Church, a gathering place for German settlers in the Cabarrus County backcountry. His ministry helped sustain a community of immigrants far from the established centers of colonial religion.

West Columbia, TX

Born in Massachusetts in 1792, Samuel Tubbs took his grandmother's surname Angier and earned a Brown University medical degree before joining Stephen F. Austin's Old 300 colony in 1824. As one of the first American families to settle the Mexican province, he practiced medicine, served as a Freemason, and acted as an election judge for delegates to the 1836 convention that declared Texas independent. He also worked to establish public education in the young Republic of Texas.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2025

Samuel V. Merrick was one of Philadelphia's great early industrialists, helping found the Franklin Institute in 1825 to advance the mechanical arts and later bringing coal-gas street lighting to the city through the Philadelphia Gas Works. His Southwark Iron Foundry turned out steam engines, turbines, and ship machinery—work that supplied the Union navy during the Civil War. In 1847 he became the first president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, a line that would remake American commerce.

Orange, TX

Born in Alabama in 1847 and raised in the East Texas piney woods, Samuel Sholars served in the Confederate army before earning his medical degree in 1872. He built a full civic life in Orange — practicing medicine, founding a drugstore, sitting on the city council and school board, and helping lead the region's medical society. His helping organize a local volunteer militia company reflects how a country doctor often became a pillar of a small Gulf Coast town.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 2003

A chemist and inventor as well as a Civil War officer, Samuel Wetherill devised a process in 1852 for extracting white zinc oxide straight from zinc ore. The next year he founded the Lehigh Zinc Company, whose plant stood here, pioneering the American manufacture of zinc spelter and rolled zinc sheet. His work helped make the Lehigh Valley an early powerhouse of the country's metals industry.

Weatherford, TX

Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham carried his life across the great fault line of 19th-century America: a South Carolina teenager who enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861 and was wounded at Spotsylvania, then a young lawyer who rebuilt in postwar Weatherford. From the Texas bench and the courtroom of the Warren Wagontrain Raid cases he rose to five terms in Congress and two terms as governor of Texas beginning in 1902.

Corsicana, TX

Georgia native Dr. Samuel Wistar Johnson began his medical career in Atlanta before settling in Corsicana, where he became a respected physician and was elected mayor in 1900. During his term the city gained a public library, spurred by its women's clubs, and Johnson also had a hand in Corsicana's pioneering oil industry. He later moved to Dallas, died there in 1922, and is buried in Corsicana.

Rockne, TX

Samuel Wolfenberger came to Texas in 1831, while it was still part of Mexico, as one of Stephen F. Austin's colonists, and received a Spanish league of land — some 4,444 acres — in this area. When revolution came he took up arms, joining the storming of Bexar in 1835 and riding with Robert Coleman's Rangers in 1836. He settled at Bastrop, helped campaign to make it capital of the young Republic, and served as a town official before his death in 1860.

Rockne, TX

Samuel Wolfenberger came to Texas from Virginia in 1831, arriving as Anglo colonists and Mexican authorities edged toward open conflict. He fought under Lt. W. J. Russell at the 1832 clash at Velasco, took part in the 1835 storming and capture of Bexar, and served in Colonel Robert M. Coleman's Rangers during the 1836 revolution. His grave and that of his wife Caroline were marked by the State of Texas in 1956.

El Paso, TX

In 1824, Mexican families from Socorro and San Elizario blazed the roughly 90-mile San Andres Salt Trail north to the salt flats near present-day Lake Lucero — salt being vital for preserving food and processing silver ore. Under Spanish and Mexican custom the deposits were a public resource, but after the U.S.-Mexico War brought the region into the United States, pioneer James Magoffin tried to charge fees, sparking the 1854 Magoffin Salt War when armed miners clashed with a sheriff's posse. The trail faded from commercial use afterward, a monument to salt's frontier importance.

Kerrville, TX

In 1887 Kerrville became the western terminus of the San Antonio & Aransas Pass Railroad, and a depot rose to handle the surge of travelers and trade the line brought. After the original wooden station burned in 1913, lumberman Frank J. Beitel sold the railroad land for a new brick depot, completed in 1915 with arched doorways, twin waiting rooms, and wood-burning stoves. When passenger service ended in 1970 the building found new life as a restaurant and shops, its wavy original glass still in place.

Rockport, TX

Before the railroad, Rockport depended entirely on Gulf shipping, but the arrival of the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad in 1888 transformed the coastal town. Its population leapt from 600 to 2,500 in just two years, and new hotels and businesses rose to serve a booming tourist trade fed by four daily trains. Passenger service ended by the 1940s and freight in 1985, when highway trucking finally took over.

Port Lavaca, TX

Chartered in 1850, the San Antonio & Mexican Gulf was among the very first railroads in Texas, built by San Antonio investors hoping to link the interior to Gulf trade. As tracks pushed west from Port Lavaca, wagons met the trains out on the open prairie to exchange freight. Confederates tore up the line in 1863 to deny it to Union forces; rebuilt and absorbed by larger companies, it later carried weekend beachgoers well into the 1930s.

San Juan, TX

Beginning operations in 1909 and becoming a branch of the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway in 1912, the line nicknamed "Old Flossie" carried freight and passengers to the young towns of Chapin (Edinburg) and San Juan during a pivotal era of Rio Grande Valley growth. Passenger service dwindled after World War II, and the Missouri Pacific system absorbed the line in 1956. By the late 1960s all service ended, the rails were pulled up, and the depots were razed.

San Antonio, TX

San Antonio's German community founded the exclusive Casino Club in 1854, a social and cultural anchor for the city's large Deutsch-speaking population, while the literary San Antonio Club followed in 1881. Their 1925 merger produced the San Antonio Casino Club, and by 1927 this domed downtown showpiece housed ballrooms, dining halls, and dormitories. When oilman Thomas Gilcrease bought it in 1942, it took on his name and a second life as the Gilcrease Building.

Ysleta, TX

Near this El Paso–area site stood the mission and pueblo of San Antonio de Senecú, established in 1682 by Spanish governor Antonio de Otermín and the Franciscan Fray Francisco Ayeta. Founded in the wake of the Pueblo Revolt that drove the Spanish south, it gathered Piro and Tompiro Indian refugees under Franciscan direction. The mission was part of the chain of settlements that took hold along the Rio Grande.

San Antonio, TX

San Antonio's first public secondary school opened in 1879 with a single teacher and a borrowed room in the Fireman's Hall, graduating three young women in its first class. Renamed and repurposed over the decades—Main Avenue High in 1917, a vocational and technical school by 1932, and finally Louis W. Fox in 1961—it became a proving ground for Texas vocational education. Its student government is among the state's three oldest, and its 'Chili Bowl' football rivalry has run since 1940.

San Antonio, TX

Organized in November 1862 and incorporated by the Texas Legislature the next year, the San Antonio Mutual Aid Association worked to hold down the price of wartime necessities—candles, flour, cloth, shoes, coffee—for a strained Confederate home front. Its capital included $8,000 the city subscribed to help the needy and the families of soldiers away at war, and it aided some 10,000 people. To buy goods, the group sold cotton in Mexico, a trade so vital that the Confederate army detailed soldiers to drive its wagons.

San Antonio, TX

On May 13, 1907, fifteen charter members organized the San Antonio Section of the National Council of Jewish Women in the Menger Hotel, electing Anna Hertzberg president. The council quickly launched social services—a night school teaching English to adult immigrants, literacy and public-health projects, a well-baby clinic in the 1930s, wartime day care, and the Lighthouse for the Blind. It continued adapting its programs to the city's needs for generations.

Van Horn, TX

Surveyed in 1848 by a party under the famed Ranger Jack Hays, the San Antonio–El Paso segment became one of Texas's first cross-country wagon roads, carrying emigrants and gold-seekers west. By 1857 it formed part of the pioneering San Antonio–San Diego mail line, whose passengers paid dearly to jolt across 1,500 miles of dust, floods, and danger in a crowded Concord coach over nearly a month. The service ran only until the Civil War broke out in 1861.

Fort Davis, TX

Blazed by westward expeditions in the late 1840s, the San Antonio–El Paso Road split into upper and lower routes that rejoined at the Pecos to cross the Davis Mountains. Couriers like Henry Skillman and George Giddings ran mail and relay stations along it, Fort Davis guarded it, and by 1867 troopers of the 9th U.S. Cavalry patrolled a route traveled under army escort until railroads made it obsolete in the 1880s.

Pleasanton, TX

Born in 1909 as the short-line Crystal City and Uvalde, this railroad grew as deep artesian wells turned the dry brush country into profitable irrigated farmland that needed a way to reach market. By 1912 it reached a new depot at North Pleasanton and, extended toward the coast, took the name San Antonio, Uvalde and Gulf—nicknamed 'The Sausage.' Later absorbed by Missouri Pacific and then Union Pacific, its tracks remain the last line between San Antonio and Corpus Christi.

San Augustine, TX

San Augustine stood as an eastern gate into Texas in country claimed by both France and Spain, where Spain chartered El Camino Real past this site in 1691 and founded nearby Mission Dolores de los Ais in 1717. Anglo families arrived in the 1790s and after, building a water mill by 1824 and a cotton gin by 1826, and in 1827 townsmen put down the Fredonian uprising at the Battle of Ayish Bayou. The town sent delegates to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence and fielded companies in the War for Independence, later producing governors, cabinet officers, and diplomats of the Republic and state.

San Augustine, TX

This East Texas burial ground began as the private cemetery of the J. C. Anderson family, its oldest graves dating to the 1830s, when Texas was still winning its independence. Among those interred here is Col. Stephen William Blount, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, alongside a Confederate captain killed in the Civil War and a noted Episcopal clergyman-historian. The city bought the cemetery in 1911, and an association has cared for it since 1921.

San Augustine, TX

When surveyors platted San Augustine in 1834 they set aside this square for public use, though it took twenty years and one of the 23 original counties of the new Republic of Texas before a courthouse rose here. Early judges convened in a hotel and a customs house until the first courthouse of 1854; an 1890 Italianate building followed, and in 1927 the present Classical Revival structure of Texas Lueders stone took its place. Its grounds hold a statue of James Pinckney Henderson, the state's first governor and a San Augustine man.

San Augustine, TX

Built in 1919, this two-story brick jail was raised in part from the bones of an earlier 1882 lockup, whose iron bars and cells were literally hauled from the old brick by teams of horses and reused. Cells bought from San Antonio expanded it in the 1950s, and a coat of stucco added in 1973 hid its red and buff brick until a 2016 restoration stripped it away. It held prisoners until 2000 and was named for longtime sheriff N.L. Tindall.

San Benito, TX

San Benito grew up along the Gulf Coast railroad that engineer Col. Sam Robertson pushed into the lower Rio Grande Valley in 1904, on land colonized under Mexico around 1770. First called 'Bessie' and then 'Diaz' before taking its present name for landowner Benjamin Hicks, the town gained land, water, and sugar companies in 1906 and its first school and postmaster in 1907. It was incorporated in June 1911.

San Benito, TX

Chartered in 1908, just a year after San Benito was founded, this bank was started by brothers W. Scott and Alba Heywood. In 1911 it moved into this Spanish Colonial Revival building, whose second floor held offices and the city library, organized here in 1914. Flags flown from the building even warned area farmers of coming bad weather, making it a hub of Rio Grande Valley town life.

San Benito, TX

When this Rio Grande Valley community won its first post office in 1907, it was called Diaz, but because another Texas town already held that name, it was rechristened San Benito the same year. Colonel Samuel A. Robertson served as first postmaster, and Emma Agar was the first of several women to clerk there. In 1933 the office moved into a handsome new Federal building on donated park land, drawing 3,000 people to its open house and housing the Boundary Commission and federal agriculture, immigration, and civil service offices.

Laredo, TX

San Bernardo Avenue grew from a simple commercial road in Laredo into a principal artery, becoming known as the San Antonio Highway by 1938 and supplanting the older route along Santa Maria Avenue. The shift came as automobile travel and anticipated tourism reshaped the border city, encouraging new development along the corridor. It captures a moment when Texas towns were reorganizing themselves around the highway and the promise of motoring visitors.

McMullen County, TX

San Caja Hill's name — from "Sin Caja," or "without coffin" — recalls the December 1872 Turkey Creek fight, when ranchers from Oakville overtook a raiding party after a herder had been killed. The warriors' bones, placed in a cave here, later mysteriously vanished. The "Caja," or box, wordplay also spawned enduring legends of buried bandit loot and lost San Saba silver.