Search Markers

Kerrville, TX

Whitfield Scott Schreiner and his wife Josephine built their lives on Kerrville's Water Street in a home designed by noted San Antonio architect Atlee B. Ayres. Scott led the family's Chas. Schreiner Co., the chamber of commerce, and the local telephone company, and the municipal golf course still carries his name. Josephine, trained in music at the Cincinnati Conservatory, founded the Kerrville Garden Club and was active in civic and women's organizations across the region.

Belton, TX

Doctors Arthur C. Scott and Raleigh White Jr. founded this nursing school in 1904 as part of their Temple Sanitarium, first teaching a handful of students in a former Catholic convent. Grounded in the philosophy of Florence Nightingale, the program grew into one of the nation's top-ranked schools by 1949 before its diploma program phased out in favor of a baccalaureate degree. Over 66 years it graduated 1,233 nurses who served in health care worldwide.

McKinney, TX

Scott Cemetery began in the 1850s on the land of pioneer James Preston Scott, whose two-year-old granddaughter, Mary C. Taylor, was the first person buried here. Among its more than 200 graves — at least 30 of them unmarked — are two enslaved people, Jake and Rhoda, laid to rest in the northwest corner. Scott himself, who died while serving in the Texas Legislature, was buried here in 1858, and the ground still serves the surrounding rural communities.

Georgetown, KY

Formed from Woodford County in 1792, Scott County was the second created after Kentucky became a state. It honors General Charles Scott, a Virginia-born Revolutionary officer who saw action at Trenton, Germantown, Monmouth, and Stony Point, settled in Kentucky in 1785, and later served as the state's fourth governor.

New York, NY

Scott Joplin, the 'King of Ragtime,' lived at this Harlem address in 1917, the final year of his life. A composer and pianist of extraordinary gifts, he gave America enduring rags like 'The Entertainer' and 'Maple Leaf Rag' and poured his ambitions into the opera 'Treemonisha.' His syncopated music captured the energy of turn-of-the-century America and laid groundwork for jazz.

Texarkana, TX

Scott Joplin was born near this spot in Texarkana around 1868, the son of a formerly enslaved fiddler and a banjo-playing mother, and got his early schooling and music lessons here before leaving home at fourteen. Wandering through the Midwest's saloons, he became one of the creators of ragtime, a syncopated new music blending Black and white traditions. His 1899 "Maple Leaf Rag" turned ragtime into a national craze, and he composed more than thirty piano rags and the folk opera "Treemonisha" before dying in 1917 — decades before a 1970s revival crowned him a genius.

Paris, TX

Built between 1908 and 1910 for the family of prominent businessman Rufus Fenner Scott Sr., this Paris landmark was designed by German-born architect J. L. Wees, who shaped many of the town's civic and commercial buildings. The mansion blends Art Nouveau and Dutch Renaissance styling and famously survived the devastating Paris fire of 1916.

Melissa, TX

This L-plan Victorian dwelling went up around the 1870s, as the young town of Melissa was taking root in the Blackland Prairie of North Texas. Merchant Louis A. Scott and his wife Louise bought it in 1880, and after 1903 it passed to the Barker family, whose daughters lived here for 85 years. When a devastating tornado tore through Melissa in 1921, the sturdy house lost only a chimney—a small testament to its solid construction and its distinctive dormers and Mansard-type roofs.

Hillsboro, TX

This burial ground served the vanished community of Scott's Chapel, tied to the family of James Williams Scott, a signer of the Goliad Declaration of Independence who came to Texas in 1831. His sons gave land for a school, church, and, in 1860, this cemetery. Among those resting here is Samuel McFall, a survivor of the deadly Black Bean Episode of the 1842–43 Mier Expedition.

Williamsburg, KY

In July 1863, Confederate Colonel John S. Scott led some 1,600 cavalry up from East Tennessee on a raid to wreck Union communications and seize livestock and arms. At Williamsburg on July 25, a hundred pickets of the 44th Ohio Infantry met his advance; after a sharp skirmish Scott drove them toward London before pressing on to Winchester and retreating into Tennessee with heavy losses. The raid was one of many mounted thrusts that made the Kentucky mountains a war of movement.

San Antonio, TX

Scottish Rite Masonry took hold in San Antonio in 1912 and swelled during World War I as soldiers stationed nearby joined the fraternity. The order bought this site in 1919 and, beginning in 1922, raised a monumental Classical Revival temple, dedicating it in 1924 at a cost of $1.5 million. Its eight fluted Corinthian columns and sculpted bronze doors — the work of noted artist Pompeo Coppini, depicting fellow Masons George Washington and Sam Houston — made it a South Texas landmark, and in recent decades it has become a hub for the performing arts.

Galveston, TX

Galveston's Scottish Rite Masonry took shape in 1867 when Philip C. Tucker read the charter establishing the San Felipe Lodge of Perfection, named for the old capital of Texas's first Anglo-American colony. Over the following decades the fraternity grew, adding a Rose Croix chapter, a Council of Kadosh, and the Texas Consistory No. 1 by the turn of the century. The order's imposing cathedral was dedicated in 1929.

Austin, TX

Built in 1871-72 as an opera house by the Austin Turn Verein, a German social society, this hall long served as a center for gymnastics, feasting, and dancing. Purchased in 1912 for the Ben Hur Shrine Temple, it was remodeled in a blend of Southwestern, Mission, and Arabic-accented styles. In 1914 it passed to the Scottish Rite bodies of Austin, who still host other Masonic groups there.

Exeter, NH

Senior Chief Petty Officer Daniel R. Healy was a U.S. Navy SEAL who died in Afghanistan in June 2005, when the helicopter carrying a quick-reaction force to reinforce a SEAL team under fire in the mountains was shot down — among the costliest single days in Naval Special Warfare history. This memorial stands in his New Hampshire hometown, where he grew up before volunteering for one of the most demanding paths in the U.S. military. It marks not a distant abstraction but a local son who did not come home.

Scranton, PA · est. 1948

Before 1800, Ebenezer Slocum built one of the first homes here and forged the valley's first iron, hinting at the industry to come. The city took its name and its momentum from George W. Scranton and his associates, who from the town's 1840 founding made it a national leader in iron and steel for six decades. What began as a frontier forge grew into one of America's great industrial centers.

Taylor, PA · est. 1948

Before 1800, Ebenezer Slocum built one of the first homes in the area and produced the valley's earliest iron. The community owed its name and growth to George W. Scranton and his associates, who from its 1840 founding drove it to national leadership in iron and steel for sixty years. A modest frontier forge became the cornerstone of a major American industrial city.

Scranton, PA · est. 1951

Iron-making began on this ground before 1800, when Ebenezer Slocum built the area's first house and forged its first iron. But the settlement's true rise came with George W. Scranton and his associates, whose ironworks after 1840 turned the place into a booming industrial city that bore his name. For six decades Scranton stood among the nation's leaders in iron and steel.

Cisco, TX

Settled in the 1870s, Scranton grew into a full community with a post office, stores, cotton gin, blacksmith, school, and academy. In 1896 Joseph Jackson Ray and his wife Sarah donated land for a Baptist church and graveyard, though the first burial — an infant of the Sprawls family — had already taken place that July. A cemetery association formed in 1968, and the nearby community center still hosts services and an annual homecoming. Veterans from the Civil War onward lie here alongside the settlement's pioneers, educators, and officials.

Denton, TX

The oldest part of this Denton house was built in 1885–86 for grocer Robert C. Scripture and his wife Annie, then later owned by merchant Robert Hann. Around 1912, under banker B. H. Deavenport, the Victorian residence was enlarged and remodeled in Mission Revival style by local contractor M. B. Whitlock, gaining its distinctive third-floor rose window.

Groveton, TX

After the Civil War, farming families drifted into this corner of Trinity County, founding the small communities of Scrub Creek and Crecy around a Baptist church, a general-store post office, and a school. Documented from 1877, the Scrub Creek School began as a single room with one teacher for all grades and grew to a three-room building as the population rose. For decades the schoolhouse doubled as the social heart of the community until consolidation closed it in 1935.

Clifton, TX

Set on two acres of an 1846 land survey, this cemetery was deeded to Bosque County for public burials by Lowry Hampton Scrutchfield in 1883. Family tradition holds that an infant, Minnie Henderson, was the first laid to rest here, though the oldest legible stone marks a six-month-old child from 1885. Scrutchfield, his wife, and his mother lie among more than fifty marked and unmarked graves of the county's early settlers.

Geneva, TX

This cemetery honors North Carolina native William Scurlock, a Texas Revolution veteran remembered as the 'Man with the Charmed Life.' He and his brother Mial settled here in 1834, enlisted the next year, and William survived the Siege of Bexar, the Matamoros Expedition, and escape from the Goliad Massacre before fighting at San Jacinto; Mial died at the Alamo. William later sat in the Republic's Congress, fought in the Mexican War, and settled here, where he lies alongside Confederate veteran W. J. Walton.

Snyder, TX

Scurry County was created in 1876 from older Texas territories and organized in 1884, with Snyder as its seat. It honors General William R. Scurry, a member of the last Congress of the Republic of Texas and a Confederate officer killed in 1864. The county's founding was part of the steady organization of West Texas as settlement pushed onto the plains.

Snyder, TX

Scurry County was created in 1876 and organized in 1884, and local landholders donated the lots at the center of town for a courthouse square built atop a former buffalo trail. Citizens themselves bought the construction bonds, and a two-story courthouse of locally made red brick went up in 1886, complete with board sidewalks, a chain hitching rail, and a public windmill that served as the town's social hub. The present courthouse replaced it in 1909–11, and the old precinct boundaries laid out along the lanes approaching the square are still in use.

Snyder, TX

By 1911 Scurry County's two earlier jails, built in 1884 and 1886, had proven too small, so the commissioners court used bond money to purchase this site and raise a sturdy brick building, finished with local labor in 1912. The jailer and his family lived on the first floor, while prisoner cells and even a small hospital occupied the upper two stories. A grim feature set into the design was a trapdoor meant to serve as a hanging gallows. The jail did its duty for more than sixty years.

Snyder, TX

Scurry County's oil story began with shallow San Andres wells in 1923, but the great boom came in late 1948 when deep rigs struck the Canyon Reef Formation below 6,000 feet. Wildcat wells from Sun, Magnolia, Standard, and Lion outlined an 85,000-acre field holding an estimated four billion barrels, and the strike transformed the fortunes of drought-weary farmers and ranchers. On October 8, 1973 — twenty-five years on — the field yielded its billionth barrel from the well beside this marker, celebrated in a week of festivities.

Snyder, TX

The 1948 discovery of the Canyon Reef Formation drew international attention as thousands of wells at 6,500 feet defined a field holding an estimated four billion barrels. The boom brought a flood of contractors, geologists, roughnecks, and $300 million in investment to Scurry County. When engineers realized that competitive drilling would recover only a fraction of the oil, operators pioneered voluntary "unitization" and pressure-injection programs that doubled recovery and set new standards in conservation.

Dallas, TX

Beginning as a buffalo trail, Scyene Road became one of the earliest roads in Dallas County, linking the town of Scyene with Dallas — a full day's wagon journey west — and reaching east toward Jefferson and Shreveport. Settled in the 1840s and 1850s and named for a town in ancient Egypt, Scyene reportedly sheltered outlaws such as Belle Starr and Jesse James along this route in the 1870s. Once a thriving town with a post office, stores, school, and churches, Scyene declined after the Texas & Pacific Railroad bypassed it in 1872.

Jacksonville, TX

Sea Scouting, a branch of the Boy Scouts of America, taught boys seamanship and self-discipline, and in 1936 Jacksonville attorney John C. Box, Jr. organized a local unit that sailed under the name Sea Scouts Ship 400. The group met in one of four red-ironstone buildings raised by the Works Progress Administration — one shaped like the hull and deck of a sailboat, fronted by a small amphitheater — where members learned signaling, knot-tying, and nautical procedure. The ship stayed afloat for fifteen years, through the Depression and World War II, before disbanding in 1951.

Bainbridge Island, WA

Built in 1910, the Seabold Community Church served the rural north end of Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, a district settled by farmers, loggers, and immigrant families in the early 20th century. Small community churches like this were the social and spiritual anchors of isolated island settlements before bridges and ferries knit the region together. It is recognized by the Bainbridge Island Historical Society as part of the island's heritage.

Bainbridge Island, WA

On the north end of Bainbridge Island, the Seabold community grew up around the ferry landings and small farms that dotted Puget Sound in the early twentieth century. Neighbors here organized a community club, and the hall that carried its name became the social heart of the district — the place for grange-style meetings, dances, potlucks, and holiday gatherings when scattered farm families needed a common roof. Such clubhouses were the civic glue of rural Washington before automobiles and bridges knit the islands to the mainland.

Seadrift, TX

Settlement near this spot began in the 1840s when German immigrants landing at Indianola lingered in the area. A post office arrived in 1888, its name drawn from the storm-blown "sea drift" that piled on the shore, and by 1912 A. D. Powers had organized a formal townsite. Within two years Seadrift boasted churches, banks, hotels, and a newspaper, and it survived a punishing 1919 hurricane to remain a coastal resort town.

Seadrift, TX

Seadrift Cemetery was established in 1912 when land promoter A.D. Powers deeded five acres to trustee J.L. Knight for a community burial ground. Among its first interments were infants lost to a measles epidemic in 1912–1913, and the earliest dated adult grave is that of Daisy E. Watkins, who died in 1913. The cemetery holds generations of local leaders and veterans of conflicts from the Texas Revolution through Vietnam, and a 1967 reorganization of its association brought fencing, a water well, and improved care.

Seagoville, TX

After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government not only relocated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans but also detained thousands of German, Italian, Japanese, and Latin American "enemy aliens" through the Justice Department and State Department. Originally built in 1941 as a women's reformatory, the Seagoville site was transferred to the immigration service in 1942 and held German and Italian couples and single women, plus Japanese Latin Americans housed in a "colony" of 50 Victory Huts. By 1943 its population peaked at 650 internees before it closed in May 1945 and reverted to a federal prison.

Austin, TX

The Seaholm Power Plant marks a turning point in Austin's growth, when the city harnessed the Colorado River—first dammed for electricity in 1895—to power its future. As a municipally owned generation and distribution system, it made Austin an early example of a city controlling its own utilities. Its striking Art Deco form later became a beloved architectural landmark on the downtown lakefront.

Spring, TX

Seal McDougle Cemetery was established in 1883 in the Spring area of Harris County, a burial ground serving the farming families who settled north of Houston in the late nineteenth century. It was recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2005. Like many such grounds, it endures as a quiet record of a rural community as the surrounding countryside gave way to suburban growth.

Boston, MA

This is the seal of the City of Boston, bearing the Latin motto 'Sicut patribus, sit Deus nobis' — 'As God was with our fathers, so may He be with us.' The inscription records the city's two founding moments: its establishment as a Puritan settlement in 1630 and its reincorporation under a chartered city government in 1822. The motto, drawn from the Book of Kings, echoes the faith of Boston's Puritan founders.

Sealy, TX

Sealy sprang up in 1879 along the new Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railroad, taking its name from Galveston businessman and railroad president George Sealy. A depot, roundhouse, turntable, and machine shops made it a busy division point between Galveston and Temple, with the railroad as its chief employer and trains rumbling through daily. When the division point moved to Bellville in 1899, Sealy leaned on cotton, additional rail lines, and diversified business to keep thriving, incorporating in 1949.

Sealy, TX

In 1879 railroad agent George Sealy bought nearly 12,000 acres from the old township of San Felipe de Austin to establish a depot, and the town of Sealy quickly grew up around it. The cemetery recorded its first burial—an infant, Annie Fowlkes—in 1883, and families bought plots from the railroad until the company donated the land to trustees in 1887. A ladies' society organized in 1904 rallied community support, even launching a Christmas bazaar that became a beloved local tradition.

Chicago, IL

James Humbert served as a Seaman First Class in the U.S. Navy during World War II and was killed in action in the Philippines on January 10, 1945—as American forces fought to retake the islands in the war's final year. Chicago honors such fallen sons with neighborhood memorials that keep an individual name attached to the vast sacrifice of the war.

Ellwood City, PA · est. 1994

In 1895, Swiss-born engineer Ralph C. Stiefel worked out the rotary piercing process at a plant in Ellwood City — a way to punch and roll a solid steel billet into seamless tubing without a welded seam. The breakthrough helped launch the Ellwood Weldless Tube Company, which grew into a core piece of U.S. Steel's National Tube Division.

Mason, TX

Work on this striking Mason County house began in 1887 under the Rev. Thomas Broad and was expanded after banker E. M. Reynolds acquired it in 1891, with architect Richard E. Grosse adding ornate stonecutting and woodcarving. In 1919 the property passed to Oscar E. Seaquist, a Swedish immigrant who completed the structure and whose family long occupied it. The house shows off fine craftsmanship and materials, right down to a third-floor ballroom.

Searchlight Township, NV

Gold discoveries in the spring of 1897 launched the Searchlight district, where G.F. Colton filed the first claim and the Quartette Mining Company, organized in 1900, grew into its mainstay and produced nearly half the area's output. To reach its mill on the Colorado River the company built a short narrow-gauge railroad, and in 1907 a longer line briefly tied the town to the main Santa Fe route until floods severed it for good in 1923. Searchlight is also the birthplace of U.S. Senator Harry Reid, who in 2007 became the first Nevadan to serve as Senate Majority Leader.

Searcy, AR

Erected in 1917, this monument honors the Confederate soldiers of White County, Arkansas, who served in the Civil War (1861–1865). Arkansas seceded in 1861, and thousands of its men fought for the Confederacy; a half-century later, aging veterans and their descendants across the South raised memorials like this one during the era's wave of Confederate commemoration.

Menallen Township, PA · est. 1966

This stone tollhouse was raised in 1835 to collect fees from travelers on the National Road, America's first federally funded highway, which stretched from Maryland toward the Ohio Valley. By the 1830s the road had passed to state control, and Pennsylvania built distinctive hexagonal tollhouses like this one to fund upkeep. Wagons, stagecoaches, and droves of livestock all paused here to pay before rolling west.

Temple, TX

Czech Moravian immigrants, heirs to the centuries-old "Unity of the Brethren" tradition rooted in the teachings of reformer Jan Hus, began settling this part of central Texas in 1881, drawn by both religious freedom and farmland. By 1891 the community had a post office and the name Seaton, and in 1906 residents organized the Seaton Czech Moravian Brethren Church, dedicating their first sanctuary the following year. The congregation grew across the decades, built a larger sanctuary in 1924, and remains a spiritual and cultural anchor for the area's Czech heritage.

Temple vicinity, TX

The Lost Prairie–Seaton community was settled in the 1880s by Czech immigrants and once supported a post office, school, store, and saloon. After Tomas Ondrasek died in 1896, Charles Motl Sr. donated two acres for a community cemetery, and a burial association formed the next year. Among its roughly 1,150 graves are veterans of both World Wars and the Korean conflict, and the cemetery still serves the surrounding community.

Seattle, WA

Between 1919 and 1940, electric trolleys hummed through Seattle's streets, carrying commuters in an era before the automobile fully took over. Streetcar lines shaped where neighborhoods grew and how working people moved through a rapidly expanding city. This marker recalls the age of urban rail that quietly organized daily life across early-20th-century America.

Seattle, WA

Seattle grew into one of the great fishing ports of the Pacific, its docks crowded with vessels bound for the cold and dangerous waters of the North Pacific and the Bering Sea. Many of the men who crewed them—often drawn from Scandinavian and other immigrant communities—never returned, lost to storms and the sea. This memorial honors the generations of fishermen who made their living from the water and died beneath it.

San Francisco, CA

This plaque records that the adjacent seawall was built by the Civil Works Administration in 1933–1934. The CWA was a short-lived but intense New Deal program that, in a single winter, put more than four million unemployed Americans to work on public projects to blunt the worst of the Great Depression. Waterfront works like this seawall were exactly the kind of durable infrastructure the program raced to build before its funding ran out.

Sebastian, TX

Carved from the old San Juan de Carricitos land grant and later part of the vast King Ranch, this South Texas townsite was renamed Sebastian in 1906 for a Rock Island Railroad officer and promoted after 1914 as a coming agricultural center. Its early years also caught the violence of the border troubles, when a bandit raid claimed two members of the Austin family.

Seguin, TX

Built in 1854–56 by Joshua W. Young, this Greek Revival house rose from an early form of concrete called limecrete—unreinforced, load-bearing walls cast from lime, sand, and gravel. Joseph Zorn, Jr., who served as mayor of Seguin from 1890 to 1910, bought the house in 1874, and it stayed in his family until 1961. It stands among the town's many concrete structures as a notable survivor of early concrete technology in the Southwest.

Mayfield, KY

In May 1861, delegates from the westernmost counties of Kentucky and Tennessee—the region known as the Jackson Purchase—gathered at Mayfield, frustrated by Kentucky's stubborn adherence to the Union and by Tennessee's slowness to leave it. Strongly sympathetic to the Southern cause, the convention voted to secede and form a new Confederate state. When Tennessee itself voted to secede in June, the separatist proposal was dropped.

Louisville, KY

Formally organized on September 29, 1844, this Louisville congregation—now Green Street Baptist Church—was founded during slavery under a protection committee appointed by the white First Baptist Church, as law and custom then required of Black worshipers. Elder George Wells served as its first pastor. Beyond worship, the church functioned as a school, a social center, and a training ground in self-organization; it moved to Green Street in 1848, took its present name in 1860, and relocated to East Gray Street in 1930.

Killeen, TX

Organized at Fort Benning in July 1940 as German panzers overran France, the 2nd Armored Division earned the name 'Hell on Wheels' from General George S. Patton Jr. in 1941. As the first U.S. armored force in combat, it fought from the 1942 North Africa landings through Sicily, Normandy, and the Battle of the Bulge, and provided the honor guard for President Truman at Potsdam. Fort Hood has been its permanent home since 1945.

Montpelier, ID

This marker names the Second Bank of Montpelier, a historic financial institution in the small southeastern Idaho town of Montpelier along the old Oregon Trail corridor. Banks were vital to frontier and railroad-era towns, holding the savings of ranchers, farmers, and merchants and lending the capital that let communities grow. The surviving bank name preserves a piece of the town's early commercial life.

Pleasanton, TX

In 1891 a small group of African American residents of Pleasanton gathered to organize a Baptist congregation, first named Saint James under founding pastor Reverend James Ellis, and soon bought a half-acre on East Adams Street for a church. The congregation weathered a discouraging setback when its first building was demolished in 1950 and the new one delayed, but a determined core held on, worshiping at a mission church until the new facility was dedicated in 1953 under the name Second Baptist. Today it remains a center of faith, scholarship, and community service.

San Antonio, TX

In 1879, the Rev. Charles Augustis and eleven other formerly enslaved men founded this San Antonio congregation, seeking a fellowship where they could worship as equals despite the lingering weight of slavery. Known first as Macedonia Baptist Church, the congregation baptized members in the nearby San Antonio River and raised an ornate Gothic sanctuary in 1910. Over more than a century it grew into a center of evangelism, education, and community service.

Seguin, TX

When the Civil War ended, freedmen in Seguin sought places to worship and to school their children. On November 16, 1865, the Rev. Leonard Ilsley—a Maine native who stayed to aid the freedmen and helped organize churches across the county—gathered a small group to found the Second Baptist Church of Seguin. Under the Rev. Hiram Wilson, once enslaved himself, the congregation bought its present site in 1874 and built both a sanctuary and a school; members included Buffalo Soldiers and educator William Ball, who helped organize the Abraham Lincoln School.

Waco, TX

On December 7, 1879, twenty-one members of New Hope Baptist Church organized this congregation to serve Black residents in southern Waco during the closing days of Reconstruction, an era when many African Americans were leaving the former slave states in search of new lives. First worshiping in a one-room building on Canal Street, the church weathered financial hardship and a 1922 fire that destroyed its sanctuary. Through every setback it kept growing, sustaining outreach and missionary work as an anchor of the community for more than a century.