Search Markers

Town of Oyster Bay, NY

This pier honors Sergeant James A. Harrington Jr., a longtime Oyster Bay bayman who worked the local waters before serving in the Vietnam War. He was killed in action in the Republic of Vietnam on March 28, 1968, one of the war's costliest years for American forces. Naming a working waterfront spot for him ties his hometown life and his sacrifice together.

Franklin, PA · est. 1986

Born in Czechoslovakia and raised in the coal-country borough of Franklin, Michael Strank became a Marine sergeant in the Pacific war. On February 23, 1945, he was the oldest and senior man among the six who raised the flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima — the moment Joe Rosenthal's camera froze into one of the most famous images in American history. Strank was killed in action days later and now rests at Arlington, his likeness cast into the Marine Corps War Memorial.

Villa Hills, KY

Born in Covington in 1948, Sergeant Ronald L. Niewahner served as a squad leader in the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam. Under heavy fire he carried a fallen comrade to safety, then was fatally wounded returning to rescue a second soldier. His valor earned him the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Gallantry Cross, and Purple Heart.

Hoboken, NJ

This memorial field honors Sergeant William Fesken of Hoboken, killed in action in Vietnam on May 2, 1967, and through him all local men and women who died in that conflict. Presented by Teamsters Local 560, it reflects how working-class communities across the industrial Northeast marked the personal cost of the Vietnam War. The naming of a neighborhood athletic field is a distinctly American form of remembrance — turning a place of everyday life into a living tribute.

Port Lavaca, TX

William Henry Barnes enlisted in the Union Army in early 1864, joining the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War. That September he was wounded storming the Confederate works at the Battle of New Market Heights in Virginia—valor that earned him the Medal of Honor. Promoted to sergeant and posted to the Texas border, he died of consumption in 1866 and was ultimately reinterred in the San Antonio National Cemetery.

Albany, TX

Created in 1858 on land roamed by nomadic Indian tribes, Shackelford County took its name from a physician of the Texas Revolution. Its first Anglo settlers arrived on the eve of the Civil War, sheltering during the fighting in 'family forts' until the U.S. Army built Fort Griffin in 1867. The rough town of Griffin that grew around the post drew buffalo hunters and trail drivers on the Western Cattle Trail before the railroad arrived in 1881 and, later, an oil boom transformed the county's economy.

Albany, TX

Created in 1858 and organized in 1874, Shackelford County was named for Dr. Jack Shackelford, captain of the 'Red Rovers,' an Alabama company that joined Fannin's command in the Texas Revolution. Shackelford was among the few spared in the Goliad Massacre of 1836. Albany serves as the county seat.

Albany, TX

Completed in 1883–84 to designs by Dallas architect J. E. Flanders, this courthouse rose from local stone quarried just outside town and laid up by kilted Scottish masons, its foundations sunk into the caliche hardpan. Budgeted at $27,000, it ended up costing nearly $50,000, and a clock tower was added at the public's request. It has anchored the county seat of Albany ever since.

Albany, TX

Built in 1877–78 by the Fort Worth firm of Thomas & Woerner with ironwork shipped from St. Louis, this native limestone jail served frontier Shackelford County when Albany was a raw cattle town. The masons' initials still cut into the blocks are a rare record of stonemasons claiming payment for their labor. Among its early inmates was John Selman, who years later would gun down the infamous John Wesley Hardin in El Paso. Superseded by a new jail in 1929, the building later safeguarded the archives of playwright Robert Nail.

Lampasas, TX

This house was raised during the Civil War era by Shadrick T. Denson, who served in Forney's Brigade of the Confederate Army. He later became sheriff of Lampasas County from 1870 to 1874, a lawman's post in a hard-fought frontier county wracked by deadly feuds, and he died from a wound suffered in the line of duty.

Shadeland, IN

For more than six decades, a country schoolhouse stood on this Tippecanoe County ground, teaching the children of Shadeland from 1911 until it closed in 1975. Such community schools were the beating heart of rural Indiana, doubling as gathering places long before consolidation carried students off to larger districts. Alumni later placed this marker to honor everyone who learned here.

DeBerry, TX

Shady Grove Baptist Church was serving the rural residents of northeast Panola County by 1880, with the Rev. J. R. Alexander leading the congregation for nearly three decades. Its original one-room wooden building did double duty as church and school before a brick facility replaced it in 1954, and the adjacent cemetery holds burials dating to 1892. The church remained a fixture of country community life.

Center, TX

Shady Grove Cemetery began in September 1878 with the burial of Anna Sparks Ramsey, laid to rest here when impassable roads kept her from the family plot at nearby Bobo. Within a year, landowners deeded two acres for a shared burial ground, school, and Methodist church, whose sanctuary later moved beneath the oaks near a spring after fire. Generations of families — the Cammacks, Bakers, Ramseys, and others — have fenced and tended it, and its headstones record the veterans, farmers, teachers, and preachers of the community.

Winnsboro, TX

One of the oldest burial grounds in Wood County, Shady Grove served the pioneer community of the same name, whose leading settler Reuben Elledge arrived around 1845 and helped organize the county as a commissioner and judge. In 1850 he donated land for a school and Methodist church, and an acre was later set aside for this cemetery, where young Bobby Scoggins—drowned in 1855—may be the earliest burial. Rock cairns, obelisks, Woodmen of the World stones, and graves of Civil War veterans mark the site of early settlement.

Gilmer, TX

In 1852 land promoter Frost Thorn gave four acres to the Shady Grove Missionary Baptist congregation for a church and school, and the churchyard became a cemetery when two young children were buried a day apart in November 1855. The growing community gained businesses, a high school, and a post office before the Church of Christ built a new sanctuary here in 1889. Local women's clubs and, later, a cemetery association took up the long work of tending the grounds that record the once-thriving village of Shady Grove.

Grand Prairie, TX

Shady Grove Cemetery began in 1877 when Louis H. Caster deeded an acre for a community graveyard, church, and schoolhouse near Grand Prairie, with his son-in-law Lewis Dowd adding land in 1888. Once the social heart of the pioneer Shady Grove settlement, the site saw its church and school relocated while the cemetery, with its oldest marked grave dated 1878, stayed in use. Among its 450 marked graves rest veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, and the Korean War, and a cemetery association formed in 1962 still tends the grounds.

Paris, TX

This shaded grove near a creek crossing began as a resting place in 1844 for a dying young traveler who asked to be buried in the beautiful spot, and it soon became ground for camp meetings led by traveling frontier preachers. A local family deeded the land in the 1840s, and a Methodist church grew directly from those open-air revivals. An adjoining African American burial ground, its earliest marked grave from 1875, tells of the Black community that lived and worshiped alongside.

Greenville, TX

Shady Grove grew out of Charles F. Mercer's 1844 colony, chartered when Sam Houston's Republic of Texas granted land to settle families across a vast tract that included this site. Early arrivals founded the Concord Missionary Baptist Church in 1844 and raised a log building that doubled as church and school; the Reverend Benjamin Watson also built Hunt County's first flour mill in 1849. A naming dispute in the late 1850s pitted 'Alexander,' after benefactors who donated land for a schoolhouse, against 'Shady Grove,' and the trees won. Cotton gins, mills, and churches followed until the school consolidated away in 1918.

Bertram, TX

In the 1850s and 60s families put down roots along the Middle Gabriel River, where the Austin-Lampasas and Burnet-Belton roads crossed. On land deeded in 1877 a schoolhouse, church, and cemetery took shape, and the growing settlement — known at various times as Russell Gabriel, Grove, and Tamega — gained a cotton gin, corn mill, store, blacksmith, doctor, and Masonic lodge. Its school consolidated with Bertram in 1942, and the church property became a community gathering place.

Irving, TX

The Shady Grove Road Bridge rose in 1931 across the Trinity River, part of a broader flood-control effort that followed the disastrous 1908 flood and reshaped the river's channels by 1930. Its 1,778-foot span, anchored by a Parker pony truss, connected southeast Irving to the new industrial district of west Dallas and fueled Irving's growth, eventually carrying more than 14,000 vehicles a day. Closed for safety in 1984, it was replaced in 1990 by a new bridge that still links Irving and Dallas.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1958

On these Monongahela lowlands in 1792, just as the young republic was pushing industry west of the Alleghenies, a small charcoal-fired furnace began casting stoves and grates. It is remembered as the first stirring of what would become Pittsburgh's defining trade. The venture proved fragile, though: within roughly a year the nearby supplies of iron ore and hardwood for charcoal ran short and the fire went cold.

Georgetown, TX

This hand-cut limestone building, raised in 1870 by John H. Shafer, stands where a cabin served as the county's first courthouse back in 1848. Shafer worked leather here as a frontier saddlery, living with his family in quarters upstairs. In the years since, its rooms have housed attorneys, a newspaper, and a long parade of other tenants.

Frankel City, TX

Just after the turn of the twentieth century, a burial ground took shape on the south bank of Shafter Lake, near a settlement that has since vanished from the map. It took its name from Colonel William R. Shafter, who had led a military expedition across this stretch of West Texas in 1875. The oldest legible stones date to 1909, and the once-neglected plot — now down to a dozen known graves — holds ranchers and travelers who died far from any town.

Andrews, TX

Platted in 1908, Shafter Lake was the first town in still-unorganized Andrews County, growing up around a water trough that served ranchers and freighters hauling between New Mexico and Texas. It took its name from the lake charted in Colonel William R. Shafter's 1875 survey, part of the campaigns that opened the Permian Basin to Anglo settlement. When the 1910 organization vote made Andrews the county seat, the town simply picked up and moved there, leaving Shafter Lake to fade away.

Andrews, TX

In 1875 Colonel William R. Shafter led a company of soldiers from Fort Concho across the arid plains toward Monument Springs, New Mexico, mapping the scarce watering holes that made the country passable. Along the way he skirmished with Native fighters and located the salt lake that still carries his name. The maps his expedition produced charted a land that had been largely unknown to newcomers, opening the Permian Basin to settlement.

Philadelphia, PA

The words come from Shakespeare's As You Like It, spoken by the melancholy Jaques as he begins the celebrated "Seven Ages of Man" speech — the conceit that every human life moves through set roles, from squalling infant to old age. This monument stands in Philadelphia, a city that long embraced Shakespeare on its stages and in its great libraries, honoring the English playwright whose work became a cornerstone of American theater and schooling. Civic tributes to Shakespeare like this one flourished in American cities in the early twentieth century, when leaders adorned parks and cultural institutions with monuments to the literary canon.

Tyler, TX

The Shamburger family arrived from Mississippi in 1847 and put down deep roots in Smith County, where son Mathew and grandson T. J. helped pioneer the commercial growing of fruit trees and roses that would define East Texas agriculture. This family graveyard began in 1874–75 with the burial of T. J. and Settie's infant daughter, Nettie, and grew over generations to hold parents, children, and in-laws, with the last interment in 1967.

Shamrock, TX

As the Texas Panhandle filled with settlers around the turn of the twentieth century, a circuit-riding minister organized this Methodist congregation in a walnut grove in 1901 with seventeen charter members. Services moved from members' homes to the Shamrock schoolhouse and then into a succession of church buildings — one lost to a tornado in 1907 — as the community grew. The present sanctuary was completed in 1965.

Shamrock, TX

When Shamrock incorporated in 1911, residents still drew water from town wells or hauled it in barrels, so the young city voted bonds for a modern waterworks. In 1915 the Chicago Bridge and Iron Company erected this 176-foot all-steel standpipe—the tallest tank of its class the firm ever built—engineered to withstand the fierce Panhandle winds. Long a landmark for travelers watering their teams in the troughs below, it remains one of the tallest water towers in Texas.

Shamrock, TX

The Panhandle town of Shamrock owes its name to settler George Nickel, who in 1890 proposed the word for its Irish luck and courage when a post office was approved at his dugout home. Seizing on that heritage, bandmaster Glenn Truax and the local Boosters Club launched a St. Patrick's Day festival in 1938 that drew 12,000 people to a town of under 4,000—and more than 30,000 the next year. Now a multi-day tradition, it was proclaimed Texas's official St. Patrick's Day celebration in 2013.

Pierce, TX

In the decades after the Civil War, Texas cattle moved north up the great trail drives, and few names loomed larger than Abel Head "Shanghai" Pierce. Arriving with almost nothing, he built one of the era's vast cattle empires through relentless drive and sharp dealing, earning the title "cattle king" of the coastal plains. His ranch near this spot became a center of the open-range cattle world that defined Gilded Age Texas.

Pierce, TX

Built in 1886 in lavish style, this house served as the working headquarters of Shanghai Pierce's enormously successful cattle operation, with the ranch office on its first floor. Pierce—the flamboyant "cattle king" credited with introducing hardy Brahma cattle to Texas—loomed large in local legend, said to hold forth from the nearby Southern Pacific railroad station. The home reflects the wealth the open-range era brought to the Texas coastal plains.

Burkeville, TX

Jim and Winnie Shankle, both born into slavery, became the first Black landowners and community leaders in Newton County after emancipation—but their story begins with an act of extraordinary devotion. Separated when Winnie and her children were sold to a Texan, Jim escaped his Mississippi owner and traveled 400 miles by night, swimming rivers, to find her. Freed and reunited, the couple and their allies eventually amassed over 4,000 acres, anchoring a thriving Black community of farms, churches, mills, and even McBride College (1883–1909).

Kirvin, TX

Two brothers from Alabama settled here with their families in 1859, and a small farming community grew up around a school built in 1870 on donated land. The adjoining ground became a public burial place known as Shanks Cemetery after the local post office opened in 1896, and a cemetery association has cared for the site since 1935.

Shannon, TX

This burial ground began with a settlement called Stampede Springs, drawn together in 1878 by a reliable spring and a general store. By 1880 the community had bought land for a school, church, and graveyard, and after a post office opened in 1893 the town took the name Shannon. Its population peaked near 112 in the 1920s before dwindling to a couple dozen by 1990, leaving the cemetery—with hundreds of graves and scores of family names—as the fullest record of a fading rural community.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1958

Before Pittsburgh existed, a Delaware (Lenape) community stood on this ground from about 1731 until the French moved into the region in 1754. It sat at the Allegheny River end of the Raystown Path, an Indian and traders' route running from Carlisle out to the western country. In an era when rivers and footpaths were the highways of the continent, this was a hub of Native trade and travel at the strategic forks of the Ohio.

Madisonville, TX

Russian-born Jewish immigrants Jake and Sarah Shapira ran a boarding house on this Madisonville site until it burned in 1903, the same year Jake died. The next year the widowed Sarah had this lavish Victorian hotel built, its Eastlake styling dressed in fishscale and diamond shingling. One of the region's grandest buildings, it became a hub of business and social life and later operated as the Wills Hotel under Clara Wills.

Sharp, TX

In the fertile blackland prairie of Milam County, settlers drawn by the rich soil began putting down roots in the years just after the Civil War. By the 1890s a store, a blacksmith shop, and a cotton gin had knit the scattered farms into a recognizable community, and when the post office opened in 1901 the place took the name Sharp to honor a nearby physician. Cotton drove the local economy, and the tight-knit community endured well enough to launch an annual reunion in 1978.

Rockdale vicinity, TX

The oldest marked grave here dates to 1880, and in 1882 John and M. L. Gordon deeded land for Mt. Zion Presbyterian Church with its western half set aside for burials. After the church was moved and demolished, the cemetery endured for the Sharp community, its early stones marking many children and infants. A caretaking association formed in 1949, and by the 21st century nearly 400 graves lay here.

Killeen, TX

This cemetery began as a family burial ground when the Sharp family, having moved to the Lampasas River country in 1859, laid their six-year-old daughter Sarah to rest here in 1864. In 1879 the widowed Emily Sharp deeded three acres to create a community cemetery, and neighboring families gave land for a church and school, leading to the founding of the Rock Creek Baptist Church of Christ in 1882. The oldest graves, some marked only with field stones and ringed by nineteenth-century rock fences, hold the settlers, war veterans, and lost children of a young Central Texas community.

San Gabriel, TX

Civil War veteran Daniel G. Davis Sr. built this commercial building in two stages in 1895 and 1896. Operated as the Sharp General Store by Davis and his descendants until 1985, it was the area's largest mercantile business and the main outlet for local produce, offering banking, public scales, and a barrel of drinking water on the porch where neighbors gathered. It survives as a fine example of late-19th-century free-standing commercial architecture.

Buckholts, TX

This Milam County congregation traces to the 1872 founding of the Mt. Herman Cumberland Presbyterian Church, which split into the Davilla and Leachville congregations in 1893. The Leachville church was renamed Sharp in 1902, the same year the present building went up—a vernacular structure with Italianate touches, a truncated tower, window hoods, and horizontal milled siding.

Odem, TX

In the 1870s Sharpsburg blossomed into a South Texas trade hub as Sidney Gail Borden ran a store, cotton gin, gristmill, and meat packery and expanded a ferry across the Nueces River. Flat-bottomed sailing vessels carried local goods downriver to markets like Corpus Christi, drawing farmers from twenty-five miles around. The town peaked in the 1890s, then faded when the railroads bypassed it, and today its site has returned to ranchland.

Mission, TX

Designed by San Antonio architect Harvey P. Smith and completed in just 150 days in 1939, this two-story building was raised on the site of Mission founder John Conway's offices to house the enterprises of John H. Shary, the "Father of the Texas Citrus Industry." Its Spanish Colonial Revival design borrows from Mexican domestic architecture, from the clipped-eave tile roof to window tiers evoking wrought-iron balconies. Sold in 1960 by Shary's daughter and her husband, former Governor Allan Shivers, it became Mission's city hall.

Riverside County, CA · est. 1977

Deep in the Riverside County desert, this plaque honors John Shaver (1854–1935), the man who dug the well that gave travelers precious water in an unforgiving landscape. Placed by the Billy Holcomb Chapter of E Clampus Vitus in 1977 and rededicated in 1997, it keeps alive the memory of the wells that made desert crossings survivable.

Weatherford, TX

Tennessee-born Thomas J. Shaw — farmer, rancher, and carpenter — reached Parker County in 1854 and two years later raised the original log room of this house. He and his wife Louisa Ann lived there for twenty years, and eight of their thirteen children were born under its roof before Shaw added a board-and-batten room in 1876. The resulting double-pen cabin stayed in the family until 1975, a survivor of Texas frontier homebuilding.

Raleigh, NC

Founded in 1865 by Baptist missionary Henry Martin Tupper in the first months after emancipation, Shaw University became one of the earliest historically Black colleges in the South. Chartered in 1875, it was named for benefactor Elijah Shaw of Massachusetts and went on to educate generations of Black ministers, teachers, doctors, and leaders. It pioneered coeducation and professional training for African Americans.

Canyon, TX

Banker and civic leader Travis Shaw, who managed West Texas State Normal College, commissioned Dallas architects Lang and Witchell to design this brick Craftsman home, built by local contractors in 1908–09. Land developer, banker, and newspaper owner C.O. Keiser bought the house in 1911 and added a second story with fine Craftsman detailing by a master carpenter. Its gallery porches, pyramidal roof, and exposed rafter tails typify the style.

Schellsburg, PA · est. 1947

In the early 1700s the Shawnee were a mobile people pushed and pulled across the mid-Atlantic backcountry by war, trade, and colonial pressure. A band of them paused at this village site along the Raystown Path—one of the great Indian trails threading Pennsylvania's ridges—while withdrawing from the Potomac country toward the lower Allegheny Valley. The place name preserved the memory of that passage long after they had gone.

Italy vicinity, TX

In use from about 1850 to 1873, the Shawnee Trail was the earliest and easternmost of the great cattle trails that drove Texas herds north to market, crossing western Ellis County and fording the Brazos at Waco, the Trinity at Dallas, and the Red River at Preston en route to Missouri. The Blackland Prairie's forage, water, and gentle terrain made ideal droving country, and towns like Waxahachie rose as supply stops. Outbreaks of tick fever and the Civil War disrupted the drives, and after Joseph McCoy opened the Chisholm Trail in 1867 the Shawnee slowly gave way, though herds still moved up it through 1873.

Plymouth, PA · est. 2003

As the Revolution began, the Continental Congress ordered a chain of frontier forts to shield settlers in the contested Wyoming Valley, and Shawnee Fort was one of them. It guarded Connecticut-backed Yankee settlers — both from British-allied raiders and from Pennsylvanians who claimed the same lands — and served as the garrison of Capt. Samuel Ransom's company, which fought under Washington. Burned after the bloody Battle of Wyoming in 1778 and rebuilt, it was finally swept away by a flood in 1784.

Smithfield Township, PA · est. 2010

Near where the Brodhead Creek meets the Delaware River, the Shawnee-Minisink site preserves traces of some of the earliest known people in the northeastern United States — campfires, hundreds of stone tools, and the remains of fish and fruit left nearly 13,000 years ago. These finds surprised archaeologists, revealing that late Ice Age inhabitants ate a more varied diet than the big-game-hunter image long suggested. The site is a touchstone for understanding the first Americans in the region.

Nacogdoches, TX

Ephraim Shay's 1880 design, with its vertical pistons and direct gearing, gave loggers a locomotive that could crawl over the rough, twisting tram roads of the timber woods where ordinary engines failed. This 36-ton example, built by Lima in 1907, hauled logs for Texas lumber companies from forest to mill and later ran on the company-owned Moscow, Camden & San Augustine Railroad. After decades parked on a Camden siding, it was rescued in 1970 and preserved with a log car of the same era.

Dallas, TX

In 1886 a group of Dallas-area Jews—who first gathered for services in a grocery store—won a state charter for their Orthodox congregation and its burial ground, with the earliest graves dating to 1881. Over the decades the congregation changed its name from Sharis Israel to Shearith Israel, built synagogues, and beautified the cemetery through its Women's Auxiliary. Marked by obelisks, grave houses, Woodmen of the World stones, a ritual washing station, and a genizah for worn sacred books, the park holds rabbis, cantors, community leaders, veterans, and Holocaust survivors.

Wharton, TX

Jewish families in Wharton began gathering for worship around 1899 and received a formal charter in 1913 as Shearith Israel. They built a synagogue on S. Rusk Street in 1921 and later, in 1956, a striking new building shaped like the Star of David. The congregation drew members from many surrounding towns and became a civic and religious anchor of the area.

San Angelo, TX

Spanish explorers brought the first sheep to the Southwest in the 1500s, and Spanish missions relied on them for food and cloth. Angora goats arrived in Texas in 1853, and from 1857 George Wilkins Kendall pioneered modern sheep ranching, crossbreeding Mexican churro with fine-wooled merino. The Edwards Plateau's land and climate proved ideal, and after 1870 the industry boomed—making Texas the nation's leading producer and San Angelo its great wool and mohair market.

Sheffield, TX

The Pecos River Valley here carried Spanish explorers along Indian trails as early as 1590, and later the U.S. Cavalry, a famous camel experiment, and the San Antonio–San Diego stage and mail line. Settlers drawn by Pecos Spring lived in tents in the 1880s and '90s until Will Sheffield opened a store and post office around 1901, giving the town its name; a school of sixty-four pupils followed, and Garrett Bean platted the townsite in 1905. Legendary Texas Ranger Frank Hamer began his law career here.

Bellville, TX

Built in 1882 as a one-story residence by lawyer, legislator, and merchant James Henry Shelburne and his wife Mary Ann Perkins, this Bellville house reflected the standing of a prominent Austin County family. In 1913 new owners William and Bertha Reinecker added a second story, a wraparound porch, and indoor plumbing, remaking the farmhouse into a Prairie School–influenced bungalow. The Reinecker family held the home until 1981, and it was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1994.

Athens, TX

North Carolina native James Madison Shelby brought his large family through Alabama to Texas in the 1870s, settling in southeastern Henderson County where they founded a Presbyterian congregation that met in homes until a building rose. After relocating near Athens in 1891, the extended family reserved land for a new sanctuary, and in 1895 son-in-law Thomas Dunklin built Shelby Chapel. The church served the community—turning non-denominational in 1964—while its cemetery gathered generations of settlers, including Confederate veterans.

Center, TX

This corner of East Texas lay within the lawless 'neutral ground' between 1803 and 1819 before Anglo-American settlement began in the 1820s, first organized as the district and then municipality of Tenehaw. Renamed in 1836 to honor Revolutionary War officer Isaac Shelby, the county sent delegates to Texas's early conventions and soldiers to San Jacinto, and its seat moved from Shelbyville to Center in 1866. From 1841 to 1844 it was torn by the Regulator-Moderator Feud, a bloody vigilante conflict finally ended when Republic of Texas troops under Gen. James Smith restored order.