Search Markers

Grand Ledge, MI

Carved by the Grand River through soft sandstone, Grand Ledge's dramatic ledges made it a natural draw in the late 19th century. From 1870 to about 1910 this island anchored the Seven Islands Resort, a popular getaway of boardwalks, pavilions, and pleasure grounds that turned the little Michigan town into one of the state's most-visited destinations. Excursion trains and steamboats brought crowds to picnic beneath the cliffs before the resort era faded.

Fort Worth, TX

The Wayside School began in 1883 on land donated by W. E. Boswell in the Dozier community, one of the small rural schoolhouses that once dotted Tarrant County. From 1898 to 1948 it stood on this second site through two successive buildings, on ground given by A. W. Moore. Its lineage lives on in the Eagle Mountain-Saginaw district, whose W. E. Boswell High School honors the man who gave the school its first home.

Palo Alto, CA · est. 1969

In 1847, brothers Secundino and Teodoro Robles bought the sprawling Rancho Rincon de San Francisquito, more than four thousand acres, from José Peña. The original adobe had begun humbly as a sheep-herder's shelter tied to Mission Santa Clara. Secundino turned it into a lively social center of Mexican-era California, complete with a ring for the bull-and-bear contests popular in that day.

Palo Alto, CA

In 1847, Secundino and Teodoro Robles purchased Rancho Rincon de San Francisquito, a sprawling 4,418-acre grant, from José Peña. During the Mexican-era rancho period, Secundino made the adobe a hub of social life, complete with a ring for bull and bear contests. The site captures Alta California life on the eve of American annexation.

Wharton, TX

Security Bank and Trust Company traces its roots to Wharton National Bank, the town's second bank, founded in 1902. After that institution closed in 1915, it reorganized and reopened in 1916 as Security Bank and Trust, earning a state charter in 1918. Led by local businessmen, the bank became a fixture of community life, helping launch the Wharton County Youth Fair and playing a catalytic role in founding Wharton County Junior College.

Spotsylvania County, VA

On the morning of May 9, 1864, during the brutal Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Major General John Sedgwick—commander of the Union's Sixth Army Corps—was killed by a Confederate sharpshooter while positioning his artillery. Famously, moments before he fell he is said to have reassured nervous troops about the distant marksmen. This memorial, raised after the war by the soldiers who had served under him and their friends, marks the very spot where one of the highest-ranking Union officers to die in the Civil War lost his life.

Whitley County, IN

This marker stands within the former Seek's Village, a Miami Indian reservation in northeastern Indiana named for the Miami leader Seek. Under the mounting pressure of federal Indian removal policy in the 1830s, the U.S. government ordered the resident Miami to a reservation near Leavenworth, Kansas, and they left in 1837. The site records both a Native homeland and the moment it was forcibly emptied.

Brenham, TX

This handsome Victorian residence — with 18-foot-square rooms, 13-inch plastered brick walls, and a copper roof piping rainwater to a cistern — was built around 1879 by W. E. Seelhorst, a German immigrant known for many of Brenham's fine houses. His nephew Adolph and wife Louisa moved in around 1883, and the Seelhorst family held the home until 1944, when the Lehrmanns bought it. It survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark and a showcase of German-settler craftsmanship.

Vail, CO

This fountain in the heart of Vail honors Pete Seibert, the World War II veteran and skier who envisioned and helped found the Vail ski resort in the early 1960s. What began as a gamble on an empty Colorado mountainside grew into one of North America's largest and most famous ski destinations, transforming the Eagle Valley's economy and identity.

Austin, TX

These oaks mark where Gideon White built a home in 1839 on the edge of the Texas frontier, only to be killed in 1842 in the violence between settlers and Native peoples that shadowed early Austin. His daughter Louisa married Edward Seiders in 1846, giving the grove its lasting name. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1967.

Stephenville vicinity, TX

First called Garrett Springs for settler J. B. Garrett along Sims Creek, this Erath County community was renamed Selden after John Selden arrived in the mid-1850s. It grew into an important local trade center with a grist mill and cotton gin, a school, post office, lodge hall, and stores serving the surrounding farms. Its story is a reminder of the farming hamlets that once dotted the Texas countryside.

Mineola, TX

The Select Theater was the latest in a line of Mineola entertainment venues reaching back to 1886, named by Mattie Hooks in 1920 for a Texas motion-picture franchise. She and her husband ran it for years, and a 1948 remodel added a sloping floor, elevated stage, and a 24-foot neon tower visible for miles. It anchored the town's Main Street entertainment into the late 20th century.

Amarillo, TX

This 1936 monument honors the Franciscan missionary Fray Juan de Padilla, who accompanied Francisco Vásquez de Coronado's expedition into the Texas Panhandle and Palo Duro Canyon in the 1540s in search of the fabled Quivira. Returning to labor among the Wichita and other Native nations, Padilla was killed in 1544—remembered here as the first Christian martyr in what is now the United States.

Seligman, AZ · est. 2001

When Interstate 40 bypassed the town, barber Angel Delgadillo organized to save the 'Mother Road.' His effort revived Route 66 as a nostalgic travel corridor across the Southwest.

Matagorda County, TX

William Selkirk came to Texas from New York in 1822 as one of Stephen F. Austin's original 'Old Three Hundred' colonists, working as a surveyor, serving in the militia, and joining a party sent to treat with the Waco and Tawakoni peoples. His 1824 land grant near the mouth of the Colorado River — among the first the Mexican government issued to Austin's settlers — became known as Selkirk Island, a stretch once cut into islands by river channels and long famed in legend for pirate treasure buried by one of Jean Lafitte's men.

Upper Darby, PA · est. 1985

Built around 1684, Sellers Hall was the first permanent home in Upper Darby, raised by Samuel Sellers and his bride Anna Gibbons in the earliest days of Penn's colony. The family became famous for its bent toward mechanics and science across generations. One son, John Sellers, helped found the American Philosophical Society and in 1769 joined the celebrated observation of Venus crossing the face of the sun.

Norristown, PA · est. 1949

Selma was the home of Andrew Porter, a general of the Revolution, but it is best remembered as the birthplace of his remarkable sons. David R. Porter became governor of Pennsylvania from 1839 to 1845; James M. Porter served as U.S. Secretary of War in 1843; and George B. Porter was governor of Michigan Territory from 1831 to 1834. From one Montgomery County household came a striking concentration of public service in the early republic.

Linwood, TX

When surveyor William Roark brought his family from Tennessee to Texas in 1834, the frontier was still raw and burials came early — his mother and brother were laid to rest here around 1837. As the Linwood community grew, the half-acre plot became a shared resting ground, and marriage into the Selman family gave it the name it still carries. Generations of settlers expanded and tended the grounds across the 19th century.

Seminole, TX

Founded and named county seat in 1905 when Gaines County organized, Seminole took its name from the nearby Seminole Wells watering places and grew slowly around its first store, post office and 1906 courthouse. The arrival of the Midland & Northwestern Railroad in 1918, followed by highways and oil, transformed the sleepy trading point into a farming and petroleum hub.

Brackettville, TX

Established on the Fort Clark reservation in 1872, this cemetery holds the graves of the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts and their families. Descendants of Seminoles and formerly enslaved people who had come from Florida around 1850 and lived in Mexico and Texas, these scouts served under Lieutenant John L. Bullis and Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie in the frontier campaigns of the 1870s, and four of them earned the Medal of Honor.

Brackettville, TX

For decades the descendants of Africans who had fled slavery for Spanish Florida — where they joined the Seminole people and forged the distinct Black Seminole community — carried their hard-won freedom across the continent. After removal to Indian Territory and a sojourn in Mexico, one group crossed back into Texas in 1870 to serve the U.S. Army as the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts. They made their home at 'the camp' on Fort Clark, building jacal houses and digging irrigation ditches along Las Moras Creek while scouting the border country until their disbandment in 1914.

Del Rio, TX

From 1870 to 1881, roughly a hundred Seminole-Negro Scouts served the U.S. Army along the Texas border at Forts Duncan and Clark and Camp Del Rio. Mostly descendants of runaway slaves who had intermarried with Florida Seminoles before removal to Indian Territory, they were prized for extraordinary tracking skill, courage, and endurance on the trail. Under Lieutenant John L. Bullis they fought for eight years without losing a single scout, and four earned the Medal of Honor.

Corsicana, TX

Built in 1900 of longleaf pine, with leaded plate-glass entry panels and a children's skating rink in the attic, this was the home of James H. Woods, who arrived in Corsicana from Tennessee as a teenager in 1873. He became a lawyer and a fixture of civic life — councilman, mayor, fire commissioner, library director, school trustee — before serving in the Texas House and Senate. His family occupied the house for nearly four decades.

Marion, KY

William J. Deboe rose from a Crittenden County farm boy—born in 1849 just southeast of Marion—into one of western Kentucky's notable public men. After winning election as county school superintendent and opening a law practice in 1889, he served a term in the state senate in the 1890s before going on to national prominence. His career bridged the Gilded Age and the Progressive era, when reformers were pushing to make government answer more directly to ordinary voters—the very spirit behind the Seventeenth Amendment's shift to popular election of U.S. senators.

Glade Township, PA · est. 2007

Long before roads crossed this country, an eight-mile footpath linked Conewango Creek to the upper Allegheny River, sparing travelers the grueling 26-mile trip upstream to the heart of the Seneca Nation. Generations of Seneca people, French explorers, and later Revolutionary War soldiers all wore this portage smooth, its lower branches converging near this midpoint before the route continued on toward Kinzua. It was a highway of the wilderness, connecting waterways and peoples across northwestern Pennsylvania.

Town of Cuba, NY

The Seneca Oil Spring near Cuba is the oldest known oil spring in North America, long used by the Seneca and other Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) peoples, who skimmed its dark seep for medicine and trade. In 1627 a Franciscan friar recorded the oily waters, leaving one of the earliest European accounts of petroleum on the continent. Two centuries before the first drilled well launched the modern oil age, this quiet spring in the western New York hills already marked the place where Americans first took notice of oil.

Kane, PA · est. 1951

A spring just southwest of here marked a resting place on one of the great Native footpaths that laced the eastern woodlands long before European roads. This trail crossed the high plateau known as the Big Level and formed part of the main artery linking Onondaga — the political heart of the Iroquois Confederacy — with the Ohio country and the distant Carolinas. Travelers, traders, and war parties alike relied on such springs to break the journey.

Lometa, TX

Pioneer Reuben S. Senterfitt arrived in the 1860s, and a town bearing his name grew up around him—at its height boasting hotels, mills, stores, saloons, a school, churches, and a stage stop. When the railroad bypassed the town in the 1890s, it withered away, leaving this cemetery as one of its few surviving traces. Among the graves are early settlers and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War through Vietnam, the oldest being three-year-old Joseph C. Howell, who died in 1877.

Menard, TX

Built in 1852 by soldiers of the 8th Infantry, this cypress-and-limestone structure served as an officer-of-the-day station and sentry post along the road toward Fort Concho. It was part of the network of frontier posts—anchored here by nearby Fort McKavett—that the U.S. Army maintained to shield settlers pressing into the Texas Hill Country. The building is a rare survivor of the everyday military architecture that guarded the mid-19th-century frontier.

Plymouth, PA · est. 1992

In the coal town of Plymouth, Sephaniah Reese built and drove a three-wheeled, one-cylinder motor vehicle on the streets in 1887–88, making him one of America's earliest automobile experimenters. His machine shop, incorporated in 1888, was also an early bicycle manufacturer. The firm remained a fixture here for more than eighty years.

Zanesville, OH

On September 11, 2001, coordinated terrorist attacks on New York City, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania killed nearly 3,000 people and reshaped American life. In the months that followed, communities far from the crash sites — including Zanesville, deep in the Ohio countryside — raised memorials to mourn the dead and to honor the firefighters, police, service members, and ordinary neighbors who 'carried on' in the aftermath. This marker turns that shared national grief and resolve into a single local place of remembrance.

Mariposa County, CA

This memorial marks the attacks of September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 people were killed in the coordinated assaults on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Communities across the country, including this one in the Sierra foothills of Mariposa County, erected local tributes bearing the vow "We Will Never Forget" to keep the memory of that day alive far from the sites themselves.

Martinez, CA

This memorial commemorates the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when nearly 3,000 people were killed in coordinated strikes on New York, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field. Its reflective inscription invites passersby to look toward the flag in remembrance and shared grief. Communities across the country erected such local memorials to keep the memory and resolve of that day alive.

Davidson County, NC

This small memorial in Davidson County keeps faith with a single date — September 11, 2001 — when coordinated terrorist attacks on New York, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field killed nearly 3,000 people. Markers like this one appeared in towns far from the attack sites, local expressions of a national wound. It asks passersby simply to remember.

Medina, WA

This marker in Medina commemorates September 11, 2001, the day coordinated terrorist attacks struck the United States and killed thousands. Communities across the country raised memorials in the years that followed, turning a shared national trauma into places of quiet reflection. This one gathers that remembrance close to home.

Scranton, PA

This memorial remembers the innocent victims and the heroes of September 11, 2001, with special honor to those tied to Lackawanna County. Among them are county native Laura Lee (DeFazio) Marabito, a passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 11; Jerry Moran, Jr., who died at the Pentagon; and Daniel Christian Schaufler, a paramedic who volunteered at Ground Zero. Their names bind a small Pennsylvania region to the national tragedy of that day.

Charleston, SC

Septima Poinsette Clark (1898–1987) was a Charleston-born teacher who became one of the most important architects of the civil rights movement, though she rarely stood at its podiums. Barred for decades from teaching in Charleston's own public schools because she was Black, she poured her energy into the Citizenship Schools, teaching adults across the South to read and write so they could pass the literacy tests that blocked them from voting. In 1978 the South Carolina legislature honored her by naming this Charleston expressway for her, a rare official tribute to a living Black woman in the state that had once shut her out of its classrooms.

Serbin, TX

In 1854, some 588 Wends—Slavic Lutherans from what is now eastern Germany—sailed to Texas under the Rev. John Kilian and founded this trilingual settlement, naming it Serbin for their Serbian ancestry. Perched on the Smithville-Houston oxcart road, the town boomed from 1865 to 1890 with stores, tradesmen's shops, doctors, dentists, and a busy trade sending out cotton and hauling in staples. When the railroads passed several miles away around 1890, the little Wendish capital began its slow decline.

Serbin, TX

In 1854, some 600 Wends—a Slavic people from the borderlands of Germany—crossed the Atlantic under the leadership of the Reverend John Kilian and founded Serbin, the first Wendish settlement in Texas. Like so many who came before, they were seeking the freedom to worship as they chose. Their colony became the heart of Wendish culture in America, anchored by the Lutheran faith that had drawn them across the ocean.

Chicago, IL

Sergeant Gregory J. Sintic (1947–1968) enlisted in the U.S. Army and was killed by a land mine in Vietnam on January 28, 1968, at the height of the war during the Tet Offensive year. Awarded the Bronze Star for valor and the Purple Heart, he was just twenty-one. Chicago's honor-roll memorials keep such young lives from fading into a statistic.

New York, NY

The Russian composer and virtuoso pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff, who had fled his homeland after the 1917 Revolution, lived at this address from 1926 until his death in 1943. In these American years he toured relentlessly as a concert artist while still finding time to compose late masterworks like the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. His music carried the lush Romantic tradition deep into the modern age.

Charleston, SC

In 1824 a group of Charleston physicians founded the Medical College of South Carolina, making it one of the oldest medical schools in the nation and the first in the Deep South. Chartered in the bustling port city just decades after the Revolution, the school trained generations of doctors in an era when formal medical education was still rare and often improvised. This monument was raised in 1974 to mark 150 years — the sesquicentennial — of that institution, by then part of the Medical University of South Carolina.

Kirvin, TX

The largest of three slave graveyards said to have been established in this part of Freestone County in the early 1850s, this cemetery was named for G. A. Sessions, a prominent local citizen and delegate to Texas's 1875 Constitutional Convention, who donated the land. Its oldest burial is believed to be that of Anderson Carter, who died in the 1850s. Closely tied to the nearby Shiloh Primitive Baptist Church, it holds the graves of many enslaved people and their descendants.

Houston, TX

Built in 1911 by a prominent architectural firm, this Courtlandt Place house was home to civic and Episcopal Church leader Alexander Sessums Cleveland and his wife Virginia. "Sess" Cleveland led the Houston public school board and served as a trustee of the new Rice Institute, helping shape the city's schools in a formative era. The eclectic house blended Classical, Italianate, and Prairie styles and stayed in the family for six decades.

Groesbeck, TX

Born in 1811, Seth H. Bates served as an early Texas Ranger during the struggle for Texas independence, enrolling in Captain Seale's Company in 1835–1836 — a unit raised, as his marker notes, by order of the provisional Council of Texas. He lived on until 1886, his gravestone erected by the State of Texas in 1962. His service placed him among the volunteer fighters who secured the young republic.

Matagorda County, TX

Seth Ingram, born in Vermont in 1790, served as a sergeant in the 11th U.S. Infantry during the War of 1812 before heading to Mexican Texas. As one of Stephen F. Austin's surveyors, he helped lay out San Felipe de Austin, the capital of Austin's colony and the administrative heart of Anglo settlement. He died in 1857, his grave marked in Matagorda County.

Texas City, TX

During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved people founded a community on land that Judge William J. Jones platted for sale to freedmen near the Gulf Coast. Many had been brought to the area by cattlemen, and after the war some stayed on as cowboys for the Butler Ranch while building their own settlement, a church and a school by 1871. Proud of owning land and their freedom, residents called the place "Our Settlement"; it prospered into the early 1900s with an unusually high literacy rate before industry, integration and incorporation into Texas City gradually dispersed it.

Ridgefield, CT

In 1708, as English colonists pushed inland from the Connecticut coast to settle the western frontier, a scouting party sent to lay out the new town of Ridgefield is said to have sheltered against this boulder on their first night in the wilderness. The town they founded became one of the last of Connecticut's colonial-era settlements, purchased from the Ramapoo people and chartered soon after. This rock, marked in 1958 on the 250th anniversary of that founding, memorializes the humble beginning of a community that would later see Revolutionary War fighting at the 1777 Battle of Ridgefield.

Big Spring, TX

When oil was struck on the Settles ranch in 1927, Will and Lillian Settles poured their new fortune into this fifteen-story hotel, which opened in grand style on October 1, 1930. Designed by David Castle, it was for years the tallest building between Fort Worth and El Paso, with 150 rooms, ballrooms, restaurants, and a private club crowning the top floor. Though the family ran it for only two years, the skyscraper stood as a bold emblem of West Texas oil-boom optimism.

Salisbury, NC

The Setzer School is a rare survivor from the frontier days of North Carolina education — a one-room log schoolhouse built in the 1840s, when a single teacher taught children of all ages together in one rough-hewn room. Long after such buildings fell out of use, this one was preserved and relocated near a modern junior high, where it serves as a tangible link to how rural Americans first learned their letters.

Liberty, TX

The town of Liberty has governed this corner of Texas across seven courthouses and two nations. The first, a building of hewn logs, went up in 1831 when Liberty was a municipality of Mexican Texas; independence in 1836 turned the municipality into a county. From frame structures of split cypress to brick halls lost to fire and condemnation, each courthouse rose and fell until the Cordova-limestone building of 1931, enlarged in 1957, finally endured.

Palestine, TX

Built in 1848 as the home of Judge John B. Mallard, Palestine's first lawyer, this house later became the residence of Judge William Alexander, who served as Chief Justice of Anderson County from 1860 to 1865 and helped found the town's first school. The dwelling has stood since the early days of the county seat and was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Liberty, TX

Benjamin Franklin Hardin arrived in the Atascosito District of Mexican Texas in 1826 and became surveyor of the district in 1834. As a member of the Liberty Volunteers he fought at Concepcion, the Siege of Bexar, and the decisive Battle of San Jacinto that won Texas independence, then built a home on this site in 1839. The place, later known as Seven Pines, stayed in the Hardin family for four generations, and in 1858 the legislature created Hardin County in the family's honor.

Temple, TX

Established in the 1860s along the MKT rail line near Temple, this burial ground has gone by many names but is remembered today as Seven Star Cemetery — a reference to the North Star and the constellation traditions said to have guided people escaping slavery toward freedom. Though fewer than 100 of its roughly 500 graves keep their original markers, those buried here include formerly enslaved people and veterans of the Spanish-American War and World War I. The local Juneteenth Association tends the site.

Colorado City, TX

The springs once here — now beneath Lake Champion — bubbled up in seven basins so round they looked man-made, earning the name Seven Wells. Fed by the same underground water that supplied Champion Creek, they drew great herds of buffalo whose tracks cut deep into the soft sandstone banks, and at least four trails converged where the creeks met. Native peoples camped at this watering place for centuries, and in the 1880s a small settlement called Artesia briefly rose at the site.

Waco, TX

A group of Waco Baptists formed the Third Street Baptist Church in the summer of 1898 under the Rev. William Bowen, dedicating their first building a year later. Relocating in 1903, they took the name Seventh and James Baptist Church and soon built a larger sanctuary. Its close ties to Baylor University — drawing students and religion professors alike — have long given the congregation a scholarly character.

Smyrna, TN

During World War II the airfield outside Smyrna became one of the many training bases that transformed sleepy Southern towns into hubs of the American war effort. This memorial honors Major Allan J. Sewart, Jr., a Tennessee airman lost in the Pacific theater in 1942, whose name the installation later carried in tribute. It is a reminder that behind every base name stood a real person and a real loss.

Jacksboro, TX

Dan Roland Sewell wore many hats in early Jacksboro — teacher, lumberman, rancher, and mayor — and it was during his term that the town got its first waterworks. In 1921 he gave the city a tract on Lost Creek that became Jacksboro's first public park. The gift capped a life of civic service to a young North Texas frontier town.

Goldsboro, NC

This Goldsboro airfield was first used from 1942 to 1946 for flight training by the Army Air Forces during World War II, then reopened in 1956 as a permanent Air Force base during the Cold War. It was named for Seymour Johnson, a Goldsboro native and naval aviator. The base remains an active military installation today.

Las Cruces, NM

This highway interchange near Las Cruces is dedicated to Sergeant First Class Antonio Rey 'Rod' Rodriguez, honoring his service and sacrifice in the U.S. Army. Naming a stretch of road for a fallen service member is a common way New Mexico communities keep a local soldier's memory before daily travelers. The dedication ties a busy modern interchange to one family's and one town's loss.