Search Markers

Sierra Blanca, TX

In the far-West Texas rail town of Sierra Blanca, settlers organized a Methodist congregation in 1907 — the first Protestant church in Hudspeth County. Services were first held in a schoolhouse until 1909, when the congregation raised a modest adobe sanctuary with Gothic windows and a bell tower. In a sparsely settled corner of the desert, early residents of every faith gathered under its roof.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2015

When engineer Joseph Tarsia opened Sigma Sound Studios in 1968, he gave a home to what became known worldwide as "The Sound of Philadelphia." Working with producers Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and Thom Bell, the studio's lush, string-swept records by The O'Jays, the Stylistics, and others helped define soul music in the 1970s. Its reputation for sonic craft grew so large that artists like David Bowie and Stevie Wonder made pilgrimages to record within its walls.

Cumberland Township, PA

This memorial tablet honors the U.S. Signal Corps for its service at Little Round Top on July 2–4, 1863, and across the battlefields of the Civil War. From the heights, signal officers used flags to relay observations of enemy movements, giving Union commanders a crucial view of the field. The Signal Corps was then a young branch, and Gettysburg showcased the value of rapid battlefield communication.

Macon County, NC

Silas McDowell was a self-taught man of the southern mountains whose curiosity ranged across botany, horticulture, and local history. Observing how frost spared the slopes above valley floors, he articulated the idea of a "thermal belt" — a band of milder air on hillsides that shaped the region's orchards and farming. His writings recorded both the plants and the past of western North Carolina.

Silsbee, TX

The Silsbee Ice, Light, and Power Company — absorbed by Gulf States Utilities in 1926 — flourished after moving into this brick building in 1930. A new rail spur of the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe let the plant ship ice across the region, making it a major distributor in an age before home refrigeration was common. Designed by D. H. Paulson with Spanish Revival touches like tiled pent roofs, the plant ran until 1981.

Silver, TX

Silver began about 1880 as a pioneer ranching center in Coke County, its earliest landowners running stock and its lone physician, Dr. J. E. Reed, serving the area for half a century. The town took its name from a nearby peak. When oil was discovered in 1946, drilling, refining, and workers' camps transformed the quiet ranch community into a busy oil-and-gas center, until the camps closed in 1966 and the population fell away.

Lyon County, NV

The Comstock-era mining town of Silver City built a schoolhouse on this site in 1867–1868, and by the 1880s enrollment climbed as high as 166 students. It taught local children for nearly a century before closing in 1958, then served as a community center and volunteer fire station. A fire destroyed the schoolhouse in 2004; the community rebuilt on the same spot in 2007, echoing the old building's size and style and incorporating salvaged original materials.

Eola, TX

John A. Loomis of Syracuse, New York, and his brother-in-law Welton B. Ostrander founded this 46,000-acre ranch in 1882, part of the great wave of Eastern and foreign capital that opened West Texas to large-scale ranching. Using rock quarried on the property, German stonemasons raised a distinctive Pennsylvania Dutch-style barn and house in 1883. The enterprise reflects the ambition and outside investment that transformed the Concho country into cattle range.

Azle, TX

The Silver Creek Methodist congregation organized on November 15, 1900, and within a year raised this frame sanctuary on land deeded by farmers Joseph Gillis Steele and Thomas Nelson Clayton. Beyond Sunday worship, the building doubled as a gathering place for the surrounding rural community. Regular services continued here until 1967.

Concan, TX

This rugged pass takes its name from a silver mine the Spanish are said to have opened in the 1700s; the ore proved poor, but fourteen shafts still honeycomb the hills. In the early 1830s James Bowie—later a hero and casualty of the Alamo—built a fortification nearby, and in 1831 his men fought off a daylong Comanche attack. The fight's celebrated hero was Bowie's enslaved companion, remembered as 'Black Jim Bowie,' who braved the open ground to bring water to the besieged.

Esmeralda County, NV

Silver Peak ranks among Nevada's oldest mining districts, running a 10-stamp mill by 1865 and a 20-stamp mill two years later amid the lawlessness of a frontier camp. In 1906 the Pittsburg Silver Peak Gold Mining Company consolidated the area's properties, built the Silver Peak Railroad, and raised a 100-stamp mill at nearby Blair. The town rose and fell over decades, was abandoned by 1917, and burned in 1948—until the Foote Mineral Company began drawing lithium from beneath Clayton Valley.

Silver Spring Township, PA · est. 1947

Among the very first Europeans to push into the Cumberland Valley were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who in 1734 gathered a congregation on land held by James Silver. The stone church that still stands was raised in 1783, in the hopeful early years of American independence, and was carefully restored in 1928 to its 18th-century form. Nearly three centuries on, worship continues on the same ground.

Pompano Beach, FL

During World War II, the ground around Colony Club Road served as the corrals and paddocks for the U.S. Coast Guard's Silver Thatch Mounted Beach Patrol. From here, riders swept the shoreline on horseback, watching for the German U-boats and would-be saboteurs that prowled dangerously close to Florida's Atlantic coast. The mounted patrols were part of a nationwide home-front effort to secure thousands of miles of vulnerable beach.

Silver Valley, TX

The first known grave here belongs to Helen A. Averitt, an early spiritual leader and educator buried in 1881, two decades before the land was formally designated a cemetery. Originally called Robinson's Peak Cemetery, it holds early settlers, veterans of every branch of the U.S. military, and the families of Mexican railroad workers who came to the region in the early 20th century. An association formed in 1958 keeps the still-active grounds.

Victoria, TX

Silvestre De León (1802–1842) was a son of empresario Martín De León, founder of the De León Colony and the city of Victoria. Active in the church and serving as alcalde of Victoria, he was a soldier and Indian fighter who was taken prisoner by the Mexican Army during the Texas War for Independence. He also owned and traded vast herds of horses, mules, and cattle.

San Antonio, TX

The gifted Mexican composer and violinist Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) came to San Antonio in 1926, serving as concertmaster at the Aztec Theatre and teaching at the San Antonio College of Music. While living for a time at this address, he composed his septet 'Batik' and sent it to his friend Carlos Chávez, whose championing brought him wider recognition. In 1928 Chávez drew him back to Mexico City to help lead its symphony orchestra.

Reagan, TX

Silvia King was already a married mother in Morocco when slave traders kidnapped her, carried her to France, and forced her through the Middle Passage to New Orleans. Sold at auction and marched hundreds of miles to a Texas cotton plantation near La Grange, she was placed in a forced marriage and made to cook and weave for her enslaver. In 1937 the WPA's Federal Writers' Project recorded her extensive oral history in Marlin, capturing rare firsthand testimony of slavery and acts of resistance such as the ring shout—she died that same year, reportedly at the astonishing age of 133.

Harleton, TX

This Baptist congregation began in the 1850s near the Upshur County line, first taking the name County Line Baptist Church, and by 1869 counted 58 members under Pastor W. W. Lee. Early in the twentieth century it gathered in the Simmons School House, and when that school consolidated with Harleton, the community remodeled the building into a sanctuary and adopted the name Simmons Hill in 1944. A new sanctuary followed in 1996.

Sweetwater, TX

The cotton-oil magnate and civic leader Robert Mosby Simmons built this Sweetwater home as a modest one-story house in 1919, then hired Dallas architect Anton Korn in 1934–35 to transform it into a two-story Spanish Colonial Revival showpiece. Its barrel-tile roof, bracketed soffits, bow window and classical doorway reflected the prosperity and tastes of West Texas business leaders between the wars.

Denton, TX

Built in 1915 by civic leader James W. Simmons and his wife Susan—granddaughter of Denton County founder Darius Gregg—this Arts and Crafts Mission-style home reflects the era's taste for open plans, stucco walls, and leaded glass. In 1948 it passed to Colonel F.W. Maxwell, a decorated veteran of both World Wars who was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge, and his wife Louise, honored by the American Red Cross for four decades of volunteer service.

Salt Lake City, UT

Built around 1880, this was the home of Simon Bamberger, a Salt Lake City businessman who built and ran interurban rail lines and went on to serve as governor of Utah from 1917 to 1921. His career bridged the Gilded Age entrepreneurship of the intermountain West and the Progressive Era's public leadership. The house was converted to offices in the 1970s.

East Donegal Township, PA · est. 1951

Simon Cameron was born in 1799 in a log house that once stood on this site, rising from modest beginnings to become one of the most powerful figures in Pennsylvania and national politics. A U.S. Senator and shrewd party organizer, he served briefly as Abraham Lincoln's first Secretary of War at the outbreak of the Civil War before a diplomatic posting to Russia. He died in 1889 at nearby Donegal Springs, having shaped his state's political machine for a generation.

Susquehanna Township, PA · est. 2001

Born near this spot, Simon Girty became one of the American frontier's most divisive figures. Captured by Native forces in 1756 as a boy, he spent years among the Senecas, mastering their language and ways, and later served the American army as an interpreter before deserting in 1778. Thereafter he led British and allied Native war parties against frontier settlements and remained hostile to the United States through the War of 1812, dying in exile in Canada.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2017

Born near Harrisburg, Simon Girty was captured and adopted by the Seneca as a teenager in 1756, and he came to move fluidly between Native and colonial worlds. He worked as an interpreter at Fort Pitt before defecting to the British in 1778, after which he advised and accompanied Native war parties in raids on frontier settlements during the Revolution. Reviled by many American settlers, he remains a deeply contested figure and is buried in Canada.

Corpus Christi, TX

Simon Gugenheim arrived in Corpus Christi in 1882 with forty dollars and built a fortune, first through the Gugenheim and Cohn drygoods firm and later as a petroleum investor who helped steady the city's economy in the 1890s. Around 1900 he and his wife Lila Belle built this exuberant Victorian house, crowned by a turret that outlasted every other in the city's domestic architecture. The couple's philanthropy included donating land for a local YMCA.

Muldoon, TX

Simon Peter Ford came to Texas in 1830 as a teenager and, at twenty, fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in Captain William Wood's company—the decisive 1836 clash that secured Texas independence. He lived on into the 1890s, a link between the revolutionary generation and the settled state. Texas erected his marker in 1962, its Star and Wreath honoring a veteran of the founding fight.

Burkburnett, TX

Tennessee-born Simon Peter Hawkins brought his family to present Wichita County in 1875 in search of good grass, settling along Gilbert Creek in a colony cowboys nicknamed Nesterville. He signed the petition to organize the county, voted in its first election, sat on its first grand jury, and helped found the area's first Baptist church, Masonic lodge, and school. When the railroad shifted settlement to the new town of Burkburnett, the community he helped build moved with it.

Selinsgrove, PA · est. 1947

In the young republic's early decades, Selinsgrove sent one of its own to the highest office in Pennsylvania. Simon Snyder rose from the General Assembly to serve three terms as governor from 1808 to 1817, the first man of German descent to hold the post in a commonwealth shaped heavily by its German-speaking communities. The home he built here in the early 1800s remained his residence until his death, and he was laid to rest in the nearby Lutheran churchyard.

Penn Township, PA · est. 1947

Simon Snyder made Selinsgrove his home through the years he governed Pennsylvania, serving three terms from 1808 to 1817 after a decade in the state Assembly. His Market Street house still stood when this marker was raised, a tangible link to a governor who lived and died among the neighbors he represented. He passed away there in 1819 and was buried in the First Lutheran Church cemetery.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1950

Simon Snyder was born here in 1759 and rose from humble beginnings to serve three terms as governor of Pennsylvania, from 1808 to 1817. A champion of the common citizen in the Jeffersonian mold, he pressed for a strong defense and sound money during the War of 1812. His long tenure made him one of the defining figures of Pennsylvania's early statehood.

San Antonio, TX

This state marker honors Simona Smith Fisk, born in San Antonio in 1829 as a daughter of Erastus "Deaf" Smith, the celebrated scout whose reconnaissance served Sam Houston's army during the Texas Revolution. She married James Nathaniel Fisk and lived until 1890, her grave marked by the State of Texas in 1936. Her life spanned the era of Texas independence, statehood, and the Civil War.

Simonton, TX

The Simonton Common School District formed in 1893, and by 1911 local landowners had deeded ground for a frame schoolhouse. In 1925 the noted Houston architect Louis Glover designed the two-story Art Deco building that stands here, its stuccoed brick façade dressed with porticoes, grouped windows, and ornamental tiles. Classrooms filled the ground floor while an auditorium and stage sat above—a space that doubled as the community's hall for dances, elections, church services, and Depression-era home canning until Lamar Consolidated ISD absorbed the district in 1950.

Quanah, TX

After managing lumberyards in Quanah and Waco, L. Simpson launched his own lumber company and in 1910 built this three-story commercial block to house his offices. Over the decades it sheltered a corner drugstore, other local businesses, and the Elks Lodge on its top floor, its decorative brickwork and corner entry a proud statement of early boomtown prosperity. It remains a landmark of Quanah's architectural heritage.

Palo Pinto County, TX

Simpson Crawford carried a soldier's life west: a Kentucky native, he fought in the Mexican War at Vera Cruz and Mexico City before marrying and moving to Texas in 1852. By 1854 he had settled in the Keechi Valley of Palo Pinto County, part of the Peters Colony land-grant settlement, where he built a home and grew a ranch of some 3,100 acres. He also rode with the Texas Rangers, patrolling a still-dangerous frontier.

Mechanicsburg, PA · est. 1954

Laid out around 1792, Simpson Ferry Road ran from Michael Simpson's ferry crossing on the Susquehanna River inland toward Carlisle, tracing at this point a route later remembered as Simpson Street. In the young republic it was a vital artery for settlers and travelers pushing toward the western part of the state.

Seagraves, TX

When the railroad town of Seagraves was platted in 1917, Alice Jenkins built this two-story lodging as the Hotel Texan. R.P. and Emma Simpson, who first owned it in the early 1920s, bought it back in 1927 and reopened it under their own name. With its stucco exterior and simple detailing, the Simpson Hotel typified the modest hotels that served travelers in early twentieth-century West Texas until it closed in 1974.

Austin, TX

This congregation grew from a Sunday School class organized in 1880 to serve Black residents of far-eastern Austin, taking the name Simpson Mission in honor of Bishop Matthew Simpson — a Methodist leader, abolitionist, and famed orator. Early worship met in a community schoolhouse and then a frame sanctuary before the congregation moved to this site in 1922. For well over a century its missions, service projects, and revivals have shaped Austin's Black community.

Columbus, TX

Friench Simpson came to Colorado County as a young Virginian in the 1860s and rose to become a farmer, banker, Columbus mayor, state senator, and published poet — a portrait of Gilded Age ambition in a small Texas town. In 1882 he built this ornate house, its Italianate and Eastlake milled woodwork and roof cresting advertising the prosperity of the era. After 1916 it passed to physician Dr. C. A. Williamson, whose family kept it until 1968.

Wilmington, OH

In the decades after World War II, American towns poured new energy into public recreation—laying out ballfields, building parks, and hiring the first professional directors to run youth leagues and community programs. Wilmington, a small Clinton County seat in southwest Ohio, was part of that wave, and C. Ebby Sims served as its City Recreation Director from 1954 to 1969. This field carries his name, marking the fifteen years he spent shaping how the town played.

Hillsboro, TX

This Hill County house began before 1870 as two rooms with a detached kitchen and grew under Dr. William Thomas Sims, a prominent early Hillsboro dentist and Methodist and civic leader who bought it in 1906. Later it passed to Leroy and Lalia Womack, business and civic figures who purchased it on their 1934 wedding day. It has remained in the family ever since.

Fort Worth, TX

Completed in 1930 at the height of Fort Worth's oil-fueled prosperity, this high-rise was designed by prominent local architect Wiley G. Clarkson for oilman Richard O. Dulaney. It soon took the name of the Sinclair Oil Company, whose offices—and later the headquarters of the billion-dollar Sinclair-Prairie firm—filled its floors. Its Art Deco exterior, rich with zig-zag ornament, Mayan-inspired accents, and terra cotta detailing, captured the confident glamour of the era.

Matagorda, TX

A South Carolinian and a soldier of the War of 1812, Sinclair David Gervais came to Texas with two daughters in 1835, on the eve of the Texas Revolution. Provisional governor Henry Smith named him the first alcalde of the municipality of Mina, later Bastrop, and after moving to Matagorda in 1837 he was appointed the county's second chief justice by President Sam Houston. His career places him among the officeholders who built local government in the earliest days of the Texas Republic.

El Paso, TX

Completed in 1928 for the Singer company, this Spanish Colonial Revival building was designed by the prolific El Paso architect Henry Trost. For more than fifty years its ground floor housed Singer's retail store, while the upper story held a school that trained seamstresses on the company's famous sewing machines. Its corner tower, red tile roof, iron grillwork, and the Singer crest set over an upper window still mark it as a showpiece of 1920s commercial design.

San Marcos, TX

The Sink Springs are part of the artesian spring system that pushes water up through the San Marcos fault to feed the San Marcos River. The land around them once belonged to Republic of Texas figures Thomas Jefferson Chambers and Edward Burleson, and since the late nineteenth century their steady flow has been put to work for homes, farm irrigation, a woolen mill, and a dairy. Their reliable water was central to the growth of San Marcos.

Surfside, TX

The Canadian-owned sidewheel steamer Acadia set out on her maiden voyage in December 1864, running the Federal blockade to carry food, hardware, and clothing to hard-pressed Texans. In heavy fog on February 6, 1865, she grounded in sticky clay just offshore here; her crew and cargo reached the beach safely. When the fog cleared, Union guns shelled the stranded ship, but Confederate cavalry on shore kept the enemy from boarding and burning her, and the wreck became a coastal landmark.

Lumber Township, PA · est. 1950

Long before roads followed these ridges, Native travelers wore a path up the Sinnemahoning Creek valley, reaching Canoe Place — today's Emporium Junction — and continuing to the Seneca towns at the Big Bend of the Allegheny. Such trails were the region's highways, threading through mountains along the easiest grades. Early settlers pushing into Clinton, McKean, Cameron, and Potter Counties followed the very route the Seneca and their neighbors had established.

San Saba, TX

Sion Record Bostick lived the whole sweep of early Texas history. As a teenager he was among the party of young Texans who captured the fleeing General Santa Anna after the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. He went on to fight Comanches at Plum Creek, serve in the Mexican War, and enlist with Hood's Brigade during the Civil War before becoming a fixture at veterans' reunions.

Groesbeck, TX

Sion Roberts fought in the Texas War for Independence and stood among the victors at San Jacinto, the April 1836 battle that won Texas its freedom from Mexico. The State of Texas placed this marker at his Limestone County resting place in 1962 to honor his service. He was one of the ordinary settlers-turned-soldiers whose ranks made the young republic possible.

Sipe Springs vicinity, TX

Settlers found seeping spring water here about 1870 and built a milling and ginning town whose very name—pronounced 'seep'—stirred spelling disputes from the start. John C. Smith donated five acres for this cemetery in 1873, and residents added a tabernacle in 1890 that still hosts an annual July homecoming. When an oil boom struck in the winter of 1918, sleepy Sipe Springs swelled toward 10,000 people, complete with an opera house and a pro baseball team, before the boom passed.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2011

Sister Rosetta Tharpe rose to fame in the 1930s and 1940s as one of gospel music's first true crossover stars, electrifying audiences with a guitar style and stage presence far ahead of her time. Blending sacred song with the swing and showmanship of secular music, she shared stages with jazz titans like Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and Benny Goodman across America and Europe. Her home once stood here in Philadelphia, a city long central to Black musical life.

Sisterdale, TX

Sisterdale sits along the old Pinto Trail, an ancient Native American route linking San Antonio's missions to lands north, at a crossing of the Guadalupe's tributaries. German settlers of the Adelsverein began arriving in the 1840s, and engineer Nicolaus Zink built the first home here in 1847; Ottmar von Behr, who named the village and became its first postmaster, drew the name from nearby Sister Hills. Populated by educated free-thinkers—many refugees of the failed 1848 German revolution—it became one of the Hill Country's 'Latin settlements,' impressing even the traveler Frederick Law Olmsted in 1854.

Greensburg, PA · est. 2021

In 1870 Mother Aloysia Lowe and a small band of companions came from Cincinnati to found the Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill, making Greensburg their permanent home in 1882. Rooted in the tradition of Elizabeth Ann Seton, the sisters built a far-reaching ministry of teaching and healing, serving scores of schools and hospitals across a dozen states. In 1918 they founded Seton Hill College — now a university — and by 1960 had carried their mission overseas to Korea.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1993

In December 1843, Frances Ward and six fellow Sisters of Mercy arrived from Carlow, Ireland, and opened the first convent of their order in the United States on this Pittsburgh ground. In a growing industrial city crowded with poor and immigrant families, the sisters set to work at once teaching, nursing the sick, and caring for the destitute. From this modest beginning, Mercy convents and their schools and hospitals spread across the nation.

Baden, PA · est. 2024

Tracing their origins to Le Puy, France, the Sisters of St. Joseph established a convent in Ebensburg in 1869 and moved their motherhouse to Baden in 1901. For generations they served Pennsylvania and beyond through schools, hospitals, and social welfare work, and sent missionaries abroad, including to China from 1926 to 1948. In 1894 the order found itself at the center of a public controversy over sisters wearing their religious habits while teaching in a public school.

Corpus Christi, TX

In 1871 four Sisters of the Incarnate Word came from Brownsville at a bishop's request and settled into a run-down adobe building in Corpus Christi, quickly opening a convent and school. Recognizing the need for Spanish-speaking instruction, they expanded, earned state accreditation in 1885, and grew to 220 pupils by 1890. Over the following century the order built a network of schools across South Texas, from a junior college to elementary schools.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 1953

Built in 1744 and first used as a Brothers' House, this Bethlehem building soon became home to the Moravian community's unmarried women, who lived and worked here practicing the arts and crafts assigned to the sisterhood. In 1778, during the Revolutionary War, the sisters stitched the banner carried by Casimir Pulaski's cavalry legion—a piece of needlework later immortalized in American memory. The Single Sisters' choir was a distinctive feature of Moravian communal life, giving women a defined economic and spiritual role.

Melrose, TX

In 1782 the Spanish official Antonio Gil Y'Barbo granted a league of land at El Atascoso to Nacogdoches citizen Miguel de Cordova for a ranch and farming. Straddling El Camino Real between the Mexican border and Louisiana, the rancho was a typical outpost of Spanish Texas and a busy site of trade—both legal and illegal—until it faded in the 1820s and gave way to a small settlement that lingered into the days of the Texas Republic.

Nacogdoches, TX

Before 1800, this spot was known across East Texas as "Old Soledad," the headquarters of William Barr and Samuel Davenport, licensed traders who did business with the region's Native nations. In the Spanish borderlands, such traders were the crucial go-betweens, exchanging manufactured goods for hides and deerskins and knitting frontier economies together. A 1936 state marker fixes the site's place in that vanished world.

West Columbia, TX

Orozimbo was the plantation home of Dr. James Aeneas Phelps, one of the "Old Three Hundred" families of Stephen F. Austin's colony and a surgeon for the Texas Army at San Jacinto. Following that decisive 1836 battle, the captured Mexican general and president Antonio López de Santa Anna was held here as a prisoner from July to November of that year. The site marks where the defeated commander was detained during the fragile first months of Texas independence.

Canton, TX

Approved in 1894, this brick courthouse replaced a plain frame building that had served Van Zandt County since just after the Civil War. Designed by the celebrated San Antonio architect J. Riely Gordon in his signature Richardsonian Romanesque style, it rose on a Greek-cross plan with a soaring six-story tower crowned by a copper eagle. The grand structure stood only into the 1930s before being demolished.