Search Markers

Mt. Enterprise, TX

Established in the 1850s, Shiloh Cemetery is among the older burial grounds in Rusk County, dating to the decades when farming families were settling East Texas before the Civil War. Now recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery, it preserves a quiet record of that early community.

Sutherland Springs, TX

The Shiloh community grew up along the Lodi–Sutherland Springs Road in Wilson County, and by 1886 landowners had formalized this burial ground already in use, later adding land for a Methodist church and a school. Its graves include Florence Price, buried in 1884, and James Madison Smith, a Confederate veteran of the 2nd Florida Cavalry, with the last known burial in 1939. Today the cemetery's mix of headstones and unmarked graves is one of the few surviving traces of the settlement.

Mt. Enterprise, TX

Shiloh Cemetery took root in 1853 with the burial of Maranda Gilbreath, and four years later settler Josiah Johnson formally set the land aside as a public burial ground for a young East Texas community. Among its graves lie pioneers, community leaders, and war veterans, along with many unmarked burials thought to be those of enslaved people. Its Fourth of July cleaning tradition, begun in 1876, turned upkeep of the dead into an annual civic ritual, and the ground sits beside Trammel's Trace, one of the region's oldest wagon roads.

Ovilla, TX

Burials at Shiloh began with the Peters Colony pioneers who founded Ovilla in 1844, the oldest marked grave being that of Mary C. Patton, who died in 1851. The Berry family and the Rev. Finis E. King deeded land for the Shiloh Cumberland Presbyterian church and its cemetery, whose stones record the pastors who served the congregation, two nineteenth-century Ovilla postmasters, and veterans from the Civil War through Korea. It is a chronicle of one of North Texas's earliest settlements.

Hallettsville, TX

The first settlers of the Shiloh community were English and Scots-Irish families who had moved from South Carolina to Mississippi before pushing on to this timbered, fertile Texas land, naming it for the Mississippi settlement they left behind. They built a church and school and laid out a cemetery beside the local Methodist congregation; when German immigrants arrived in the 1880s, they bought its eastern portion for their own. Its east-facing graves—many carved in German—hold pioneers, teachers, veterans, and five immigrant Lorfing brothers who came from Austria as tradesmen.

Richland Spring, TX

Shiloh Cemetery was established in 1892, serving the rural community around Richland Springs in San Saba County. Burial grounds like this one were often the first permanent institutions in late-19th-century Texas settlements, tying scattered farming families to a shared place. It was designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 1998 in recognition of that heritage.

Winchester, TX

First known as Winchester Colored Cemetery, Shiloh has served the town's Black community since 1890, when residents bought the 3.6-acre plot during a local boom. Segregation shaped even the dead: it abuts the white public cemetery, and after its original access road was fenced off following World War II, visitors could reach it only by a dirt drive. Renamed Shiloh in the 1980s for the churches that used it, the cemetery holds ex-slaves, church founders, and decorated veterans — including men honored for valor at Iwo Jima and in Korea.

Waller County, TX

In 1881 Thomas Armer deeded land in the Shiloh community for a Baptist church and, two years later, an adjoining acre for this cemetery. As the community grew, more land was added for a larger sanctuary, a school, and the Armer family burial ground, whose earliest marked grave dates to 1882. A 1957 tornado destroyed the sanctuary and damaged the cemetery, but the congregation rebuilt.

Leming, TX

The Shiloh Cemetery began in 1857 with the burial of fourteen-year-old John Uzell on land owned by his kinsman Isaac H. Cavender, who then opened his property to other graves. The burial ground took its name from the surrounding community, which centered on a log cabin built in 1868 that served as both schoolhouse and Baptist meeting place until a proper church rose in 1898. Family names on the old stones—Cavender, Williams, McAda, and others—still belong to descendants living nearby.

College Station, TX

Settled in the 1860s by Czech, German, and Polish immigrants, Shiloh was a community of large family farms bound by mutual aid — neighbors joined for planting, harvesting, and barn raisings. In 1883 they organized the Slavonic Agricultural and Benevolent Society, which still survives as the Shiloh Club, to pool purchases and coordinate help. The settlement was eventually swallowed by College Station, leaving its old graveyard as the chief reminder of a once-thriving place.

Hallettsville, TX

About thirty families from Mississippi settled this corner of Lavaca County in the 1850s, naming their new home Shiloh after the church they had left behind. The mostly Methodist settlers built a combined church and school, later sharing worship with German Lutheran newcomers who organized St. John Lutheran Church in 1901. A community school ran here until 1952, and the old schoolhouse still serves for gatherings alongside the pioneer cemeteries.

Clarksville, TX

The Shiloh Cumberland Presbyterian Church was organized near this spot in June 1833 by the Reverend Milton Estill, when this corner of northeast Texas was still frontier under Mexican rule. Congregations like this one were among the first institutions Anglo-American settlers established, anchoring scattered families into communities years before Texas independence.

Ovilla, TX

Chartered on July 25, 1847—two years before Ellis County itself existed—Shiloh Cumberland Presbyterian was the county's first organized church. Early worshipers met under a brush arbor and then a cedar log tabernacle built by Matt McElroy and his eight sons. In 1872 the congregation completed the frame sanctuary that still stands, framed with lumber hauled from East Texas.

Alto, TX

This wooded rise in Cherokee County became sacred ground in 1850 with the burial of a child, and four years later landowners Edwin and Martha Harry set aside an acre for a Methodist church named Shiloh. Worshipers gathered first in a log building, then a frame structure in 1870, and finally the present sanctuary in 1912. The congregation remained active until 1954, its founding trustees still resting in the churchyard.

Winchester, TX

Shiloh grew from the brush-arbor prayer meetings of freed slaves in 1867 into one of the founding congregations of organized Black Baptist life in Texas. Formally organized in 1872, it helped form the La Grange Baptist District Association in 1874 and planted daughter churches, while worshiping for a century alongside its sister Methodist congregation and hosting the Cokesbury school. Rebuilt after an 1916 fire and remodeled in 1983, Shiloh is the last surviving institution carrying forward Winchester's Black community history.

Matagorda County, TX

In 1866, only a year after Emancipation, formerly enslaved men and women near Caney Creek founded Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church—one of the first institutions Black Texans built for themselves in freedom. The Reverend Dennis Grey bought and donated the land, and the first building served as both church and a school of roughly a hundred pupils, with an 1856 bell later hung in its belfry. Through storms, rebuildings, and the terror of Hurricane Carla in 1961, when it sheltered neighbors, the church has anchored its community for well over a century.

Madisonville, TX

Organized in 1885 by the Rev. N. C. McCloud, Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church grew from a congregation of freedpeople worshipping in a Black schoolhouse into a cornerstone of Madisonville's African American community. The members built their first sanctuary here in 1902, added classrooms around 1940, and dedicated a new sanctuary and called their first full-time pastor in 1950. Its steady expansion mirrors the slow, hard-won building of Black institutional life across the post-Emancipation South.

Kirvin, TX

In the early 1850s, enslaved people in this part of Freestone County worshipped under a brush arbor at informal services. After emancipation the congregation formally organized as Freedmen in 1866, electing Boney Moffett their first elder, and a school inspired by the church followed about a year later. Shiloh became the "mother church" of a wider Primitive Baptist association and still serves its community today.

Hutto, TX

The community of Shiloh took shape in 1848 with stores along Brushy Creek near a much-used crossing, and its cemetery sits on land granted to the heirs of William Gatlin for his service in the Texas Revolution. The first burials, in 1853, were two Kuykendall brothers who died of smallpox — one stricken while nursing the other. William McCutcheon deeded the ground as a cemetery in 1890, and it holds veterans of conflicts from the Texas Revolution through World War II.

Shiner, TX

Shiner grew out of the German-Czech settlement of Half Moon when the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad arrived in 1887 and residents moved to the line, where Victoria landowner H. B. Shiner had donated a townsite. Built up by cattlemen, the town developed industries including a brewery and a wire works. Today it keeps a museum recording its immigrant heritage.

Shiner, TX

Established in 1890, the Shiner Brethren Cemetery served the community of Brethren settlers in the Lavaca County town of Shiner, an area shaped by German and Central European immigration. Terse as its marker is, the burial ground carries the state's Historic Texas Cemetery designation and stands as a record of the faith community that founded it. Its late-19th-century origin ties it to the wave of settlement that filled this part of south-central Texas.

Shiner, TX

Emigrants from Bohemia and Moravia settled the Vlastenec area south of Shiner in the mid-1880s, carrying with them the Brethren faith of the old Czech lands. After years worshiping in a schoolhouse, they organized formally and in 1905 consecrated a wooden church, which soon hosted a convention that founded a mutual-aid society. Services and records stayed in Czech into the mid-20th century, and during World War II the congregation hung a service flag with a star for each of sixteen young men who served.

Shiner, TX

Shiner Cemetery was established in 1891, as the Lavaca County town of Shiner took shape around the railroad and its German and Czech farming families. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2002, its grounds hold generations of the community's settlers.

Shiner, TX

In February 1898 four trustees of the Shiner Colored Cemetery Association bought 1.2 acres to establish a burial ground for the town's African American citizens, set beside the city cemetery. Newspaper accounts recorded burials here and noted that Black children then made up a fifth of Shiner's students. By the 1940s the plots were full and the low-lying, often-neglected ground drained poorly, so in 1947 remains and gravestones were moved to a new site, Blue Bonnet Hill Memory Garden—though not every grave was relocated, and several unmarked burials remain.

Shiner, TX

Built in 1895 by William Wendtland and Louis Wagener and later enlarged by William Koch, this two-story building housed a saloon and shops below and a true opera house above. Until the 1920s the upstairs hall was Shiner's main public auditorium, hosting theatrical shows, dances, political rallies, and lodge meetings. It was the beating social heart of a small Central Texas town.

Shiner, TX

In 1875 Henry B. Shiner staked out a cattle operation on this Lavaca County land, part of the great post-war expansion of ranching across central Texas. When the railroad pushed through in 1887, Shiner gave land for a townsite that took his name, and the homestead passed to the Welhausen family, who still hold it. Long after the last round-up, the property stayed a gathering place for picnics, ballgames, and community life.

Town of Southampton, NY

This monument bears the seal of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, whose people have lived and fished along eastern Long Island for thousands of years, long before English settlers founded Southampton in 1640. Their reservation on Shinnecock Neck is among the oldest self-governing Native communities in the country. The seal stands as an emblem of a nation that endures on its ancestral shore.

Sturgeon Bay, WI

Sturgeon Bay's fortunes have long been tied to the ships and boats moving through its harbor, and the marine propeller was central to that story as vessels shifted from sail to steam. This display of ship propellers recalls the technology that powered the transition, driving the steamers that carried the region's cargo. The city grew as a shipbuilding and shipping center on the bay.

Sturgeon Bay, WI

Mounted at the stern above the rudder, a ship's double wheel served as backup steering when the main system failed, its twin wheels giving crews room to add extra hands in heavy weather. Displayed among Sturgeon Bay's maritime relics, it shows how sailors engineered redundancy into vessels that faced the sudden storms of the Great Lakes. The device speaks to the practical seamanship of the age.

Glen Burnie, MD

This Maryland Historical marker commemorates 'Shipley's Choice,' a colonial land tract tied to Adam Shipley, who arrived in Anne Arundel County in 1668 and patented 200 acres along the South River in 1681. It was dedicated in 1968 during a tercentenary celebration of the Shipley family in Maryland. The name preserves the practice by which English settlers claimed and named their patented ground in the young Chesapeake colony.

Marietta, OH

Built in 1852 for J.B. Shipman, this Marietta house was purchased in 1877 by Marietta College professor J.L. Mills, whose descendants lived here into the 1960s. In 1893 Mills founded Elizabeth College, a school for women — part of the broad late-nineteenth-century movement to open higher education to American women. The home carries the memory of that pioneering effort.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1950

Edward Shippen was one of colonial Lancaster's leading citizens, a lawyer and judge who chaired the local Committee of Observation as the Revolution approached. His home stood here for three decades in the mid-1700s, an era when Lancaster was among the largest inland towns in the colonies. He is remembered too as grandfather of Peggy Shippen, who married Benedict Arnold and became entangled in the most infamous treason of the war.

Shippensburg Township, PA · est. 1948

Edward Shippen laid out Shippensburg in 1730, planting one of the earliest English towns west of the Susquehanna River on what was then the raw edge of colonial Pennsylvania. As settlement pushed inland, the town became an important stopping point on the frontier and briefly served as the seat of newly formed Cumberland County, hosting its first courts in 1750-51 before the seat moved on. Second only to Carlisle in age among towns in the region, it anchored the advance of settlers into the Cumberland Valley.

Southampton Township, PA · est. 1948

Founded in 1730 by Edward Shippen, this settlement became one of the earliest towns on Pennsylvania's colonial frontier and the second oldest west of the Susquehanna River. Its importance was such that when Cumberland County was organized, its first courts convened here in 1750-51 before a permanent seat was chosen. For early travelers and traders, Shippensburg was a vital waypoint on the edge of European settlement.

Shippensburg, PA · est. 1925

Settled about 1733, this Cumberland Valley town was laid out and named for Edward Shippen, a Philadelphia merchant and mayor who later served as a paymaster in the Forbes Expedition against Fort Duquesne and helped found what became Princeton University. He came from a prominent colonial family; his grandfather of the same name had hosted William Penn and risen to chief justice of Pennsylvania. The town grew as a frontier gateway into the valley beyond.

Shiro, TX

Eleven settlers of the Prairie Plains community, also called Red Top, founded a Cumberland Presbyterian congregation in October 1853, and in 1857 Jesse Bookman deeded five acres for its cemetery, manse, and sanctuary. The lone church building served as the area's community center as well as its house of worship. When residents shifted to Shiro to follow the Trinity & Brazos Valley rail line, the congregation moved and renamed itself in 1909, weathering decades of decline before celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2003.

Hamilton, TX

Settlers began arriving in this Hamilton County country in the 1870s, and the community took shape with its first school, Union Hill, in 1883 and a post office in 1884 inside the Shive brothers' store. A wave of German immigrants arrived in 1885, bringing new strands of culture and enterprise, and by 1908 Shive boasted four churches, a school, stores, blacksmiths, a hotel, a gin, and two doctors. The marker preserves the memory of a once-bustling crossroads town.

Austin, TX

This shallow, sandy crossing of Shoal Creek was a natural ford long used by Native Americans, settlers, and cattle drovers moving through the Colorado River valley. During the days of the Republic of Texas in the late 1830s, Vice President Mirabeau B. Lamar camped near here by the tiny village of Waterloo while on a buffalo hunt — and was so taken by the setting that he championed it as the site of the new nation's capital. Waterloo was soon renamed Austin and became the capital of Texas.

Texas City, TX

As families settled along Galveston Bay in the 1830s on grants awarded to Texas Republic veterans, shipping traffic swelled and the government moved to mark the bay's dangers. In 1854 it raised a frame lighthouse at Half Moon Shoal, a red-and-white structure with galleries and a fog bell, one of several built along the Texas coast that year. Decommissioned during the Civil War and restored in 1868, it guided mariners until the catastrophic 1900 hurricane drove a runaway steamship into it, destroying the light and killing keeper Charles K. Bowen.

Lakeview, TX

The Shoe Bar was the first ranch in Hall County, launched in the 1880s by pioneer cattlemen T.S. Bugbee and O.H. Nelson as the open range gave way to organized ranching. This thick-walled adobe headquarters, built around 1884 with clay bricks made on site, reflected the quirks of a nearsighted owner who installed just one outer door to guard against surprise visitors. In 1890 local citizens gathered here to organize Hall County's government.

Tenaha, TX

Families from Henry County, Alabama, settled this Shelby County land in 1846, and the ground became a cemetery in 1854 when six young cousins died within a single summer, likely of the same illness. A chapel, a post office, and the community of Eagle Mills grew up around it. Veterans of conflicts reaching back to the U.S.-Mexico War lie here, their graves marked by prominent Masonic and Woodmen of the World stones.

Sulphur Springs, TX

This Methodist congregation dates to 1886, when settlers gathered under the leadership of the Rev. W. A. Shook, who preached its first revival and gave it his name. Worshippers met in a brush arbor and a schoolhouse until they built a sanctuary on donated land, served by student pastors who were sometimes paid in produce. An adjoining cemetery begun in 1889 and a succession of new sanctuaries mark the congregation's long endurance.

Dimmitt, TX

The choice of a county seat was serious business on the Texas Panhandle frontier, serious enough to draw blood. At an 1891 meeting, heated words passed between Ira Aten, a retired Texas Ranger backing rival Castro City, and Andrew McClelland, spokesman for Dimmitt. Days after Dimmitt won the vote, the two shot it out in the middle of Jones Street; Aten wounded both McClelland and his brother, was acquitted, and was soon appointed county sheriff.

Pittsburg, TX

On February 10, 1885, a tangled domestic dispute among George "Dallas" Smart, his wife Annie, and U.S. Army Lt. John W. Heard boiled over into a public confrontation at the Pittsburg railroad depot. As Heard prepared to leave town, a struggle egged on by the gathered crowd ended with Heard shooting and killing Smart. A county judge ruled it self-defense the next day, and after later clearing himself in a court-martial and another trial, Heard went on to a distinguished military career. Annie remarried and died in New Mexico Territory in 1900.

Bridgton, ME

Shorey Park was named to preserve the memory of Harry Shorey (1877–1952), remembered as a county editor and community leader. As a small-town newspaperman in the early twentieth century, Shorey would have shaped local opinion and civic life at a time when the county paper was the central forum for news, debate, and community identity in rural Maine.

Giddings, TX

Founded in 1875, a decade after emancipation, Shorter Chapel was among the first Black congregations in Giddings, a Central Texas town on the Houston & Texas Central Railway. It took its name from a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent Black denomination in America, and one of its founders personally supplied the lumber for the first sanctuary. Storms and time have carried away earlier buildings, but the congregation still gathers on the same ground in its third church.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997

Built in 1808 by Thomas Sparks and John Bishop, this was the first shot tower in the United States, where molten lead was dropped from a great height to form perfectly round hunting shot as it cooled. When the works began producing ammunition for the War of 1812, Bishop, a Quaker opposed to war, sold his share. The Sparks family kept the tower in operation until 1903.

Crescent Township, PA

Along the Ohio River just below Pittsburgh, Peter Shouse launched the steamboat "Kentuckian" here in 1829, founding a boatyard that would become one of the region's busiest. Western Pennsylvania sat at the heart of America's steamboat age, where fast-flowing rivers and abundant coal and timber turned river towns into shipbuilding hubs feeding the Ohio and Mississippi trade. Over the next four decades the yard sent more than eighty vessels down the ways, culminating in the mighty 1,727-ton "Great Republic," celebrated on the Mississippi for its size and elegance.

Amarillo, TX

Completed in 1913 for cattleman J.D. Shuford, this Amarillo residence was designed by a Kansas City firm in the Prairie School style, with a low hipped roof, wide eaves, and a columned porch. In 1927 it passed to physician and civic leader R.S. Killough, remaining in his family until 1946. The home reflects the prosperity that cattle wealth brought to the early Panhandle city.

Washington County, OR

This Washington County farmhouse grew wing by wing across nearly a century, beginning with the South Wing raised by John and Elizabeth Shute in 1890. Later owners, the Meierjurgens and the Haags, each added their own sections in 1910 and 1976, so the house itself became a kind of layered record of the families who lived in it. It survives on the county's historic inventory as a document of rural Oregon domestic life.

Athens, TX

Sid Williams Richardson was born in the East Texas town of Athens in 1891 and rose from trading cattle as a teenager to become one of the great independent oilmen of the twentieth century. His 1929 strike in the Keystone field of Winkler County—reportedly 80 producing wells without a dry hole—made him fabulously wealthy, and the lifelong bachelor became a confidant of presidents, hosting Franklin Roosevelt and later Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson at his island retreat off the Gulf Coast.

Corpus Christi, TX

Charlotte Scott Sidbury (1830–1904), a North Carolina native who came to Texas before the Revolution, built this Victorian house around 1893. A civic leader and bank director, she took over her late husband's lumber company and constructed rental houses during the 'Ropes boom,' when Colonel E.H. Ropes tried and failed to dredge Corpus Christi into a deep-water port. The elaborately galleried structure was later home to Padre Island rancher Patrick Dunn and was moved to Old Irishtown in 1926.

Corpus Christi, TX

North Carolina native Edward D. Sidbury came to Corpus Christi in 1867 and built a lumber business and commercial wharf served by the Texas-Mexican Railroad. He raised this Greek Revival home before his 1875 marriage to Charlotte Cook Scott. After Sidbury's death, Charlotte took over the family lumber company and became a leading Corpus Christi business and civic figure; the house later passed to descendants and was moved in 1946 to the old Irishtown neighborhood.

Chico, TX

Believed to have been raised in the early 1870s, this small oak-log cabin served area Methodists as their first place of worship and doubled as a schoolhouse on the Wise County frontier. Dr. J. A. Siddons and his wife bought it in 1883 and built rooms around it, and the Barnes family took it over in 1918. Stripped back to its original half-notched logs and moved to this site in 1987, the 256-square-foot cabin survives as a relic of pioneer beginnings.

Baltimore, MD

In the years after the Civil War, Sidney Lanier earned a national reputation as a poet and flutist while helping shape the intellectual life of the new Johns Hopkins University, where he became its first writer-in-residence. Known as "the sweet singer of the South," he also taught in Baltimore and retold Arthurian legend for young readers in The Boys' King Arthur. He died young, at 39, but left a lasting mark on American letters.

Victoria, TX

Sidney Roper Weisiger grew up in a pioneer Victoria County family, steeped in the region's early history. After serving as county sheriff and in the Navy during World War II, he spent his final years preserving local heritage, writing "Vignettes of Old Victoria" and "Sidney's Journal" for The Victoria Advocate from 1971 until his death in 1975. His widow Hilda later gave his research collection to Victoria College.

Stratford, TX

Sidney Sherman was a Cincinnati businessman who threw himself into the Texas Revolution, selling off his interests to recruit and equip 52 Kentucky volunteers who sailed for Texas under a homemade "Liberty or Death" flag. He commanded the Second Regiment at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, opening the attack that broke the Mexican army, and was long credited with the cry "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!" He went on to serve the Republic of Texas as a legislator and militia general and helped launch the state's first railroad.

Washington, NC

Union troops seized the port town of Washington in March 1862, and it remained a contested Federal outpost deep in eastern North Carolina. Confederate efforts to retake it failed in 1862 and again in 1863, and the Union army finally withdrew on its own in April 1864. The struggle for the town reflected the wider fight for control of the state's rivers and sounds.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1994

From an optical shop on this block in 1897, Siegmund Lubin built one of America's first great motion-picture empires — six studios across five states — earning fame as the first movie mogul. A tinkerer and shrewd marketer, he helped turn flickering novelties into a popular entertainment that drew ordinary Americans into darkened theaters. The industry he helped create outgrew him; bankrupt by 1916, he died in obscurity.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2007

In the backyard of his Philadelphia home, film pioneer Siegmund Lubin made some of the nation's earliest motion pictures between 1897 and 1899. His subjects were the popular entertainments of the day — vaudeville and burlesque acts, boxing matches, circus and animal performers, even a filmed Passion Play. A German-Jewish immigrant and optician by trade, Lubin became an early force in the emerging American movie business.