Search Markers

Bangor, PA · est. 1947

When Welsh immigrant Robert M. Jones arrived in 1848, he opened the first slate quarries around Bangor, drawing on skills carried from the slate country of Wales. The industry boomed, and the region became one of the world's leading producers of slate for roofing and for the writing slates and pencils once found in every schoolhouse. Waves of Welsh workers followed, giving the area a distinct heritage that endured for generations.

Slatington, PA · est. 2002

The region around Slatington grew into one of the largest slate-producing centers in the United States after Welsh entrepreneur William Roberts spotted slate near a local barn in 1844. He and fellow Welsh immigrants opened a cluster of quarries, including the vast "Big Franklin" and the "Williams" quarry famous for making school slates. Their work helped fuel the popularity of slate roofing across America in the later 19th century.

Upper Mount Bethel Township, PA · est. 1951

At Slateford in 1808, a chartered company launched one of the earliest efforts to quarry slate in the United States, tapping the rich seams of the Lehigh Valley. Over the following century, quarries and slate mills in this vicinity turned local stone into roofing and building material, keeping their works running until 1917. The venture helped pioneer an industry that would make eastern Pennsylvania a national center of slate production.

Pearl, TX

The Slater Cemetery is nearly all that survives of a once-thriving farming and ranching community that took root in Coryell County in the late 1800s. By the early 1900s Slater supported two churches, a post office, a school, and businesses. In 1907 James and Ellen Martin donated land for a free burial ground, and their son Curry, buried that year, lies in its oldest marked grave.

Slaton, TX

Slaton owes its very existence to the Santa Fe Railroad. When the Pecos and Northern Texas branch reached the South Plains in 1911, banker O. L. Slaton — who had helped secure the right-of-way — lent his name to the brand-new townsite, which opened for business only a month after its first lots sold. As a railroad division point complete with a Harvey House, roundhouse, and machine shops, Slaton boomed almost overnight into a farming and ranching hub.

Slaton, TX

When two young bakeries in the West Texas railroad town of Slaton merged in 1923, they set in motion one of the state's most enduring family businesses, taken over by the Wilson family in 1943. Through wartime rationing the bakery kept its ovens going, introduced the area to sliced hamburger and hot dog buns, and later added homemade flour tortillas to reflect its community. Still operating today, it ranks among the oldest continuously running bakeries in Texas.

Slaton, TX

Slaton was born of the railroad: the Santa Fe bought this ranchland in 1911 for a division point and, a year later, built both a depot and a Harvey House. Part of the chain founded by Scottish immigrant Fred Harvey, the Slaton house served elegant meals to travelers around a horseshoe counter, staffed by the famed 'Harvey Girls' who roomed upstairs. A commercial and social hub for thirty years, it briefly reopened to feed troops during World War II before the building lived on as a depot into the 1980s, later rescued by local preservationists.

Slaton, TX

The Santa Fe Railroad laid out Slaton on the West Texas plains in 1911, and by 1919 residents had organized a bucket brigade to fight fires, drawing water from wells to fill chemical tanks and pails. Chief Alex DeLong led the early volunteers until the city built a water system and fire mains and bought its first fire truck in 1922. The department grew from a corner of City Hall into its own station by 1928.

Plainview, TX

After Plainview boosters saw irrigated wells in New Mexico in 1910, banker-farmer J. H. Slaton agreed to fund a test well on his land if it worked. Completed in January 1911, it drew 1,700 gallons a minute from just 130 feet—proof that the Ogallala water beneath the plains could be tapped.

Morton, TX

This was the working heart of the pioneering C.C. Slaughter Ranch, a 246,669-acre spread across Cochran and Hockley counties assembled by Col. C.C. Slaughter—a Texas leader in ranching, banking, and religion—between 1898 and 1901. The first headquarters was a humble half-dugout, but in 1915 the Slaughter cattle company brought workers from Mexico to build this adobe-and-concrete quadrangle in the form of a Spanish hacienda. It stood among the finest Texas ranch buildings of its day.

Edgewood, TX

As settlement thickened along the Dallas–Shreveport Road in the late 1800s, this part of Van Zandt County needed a school. Slaughter School existed by 1883, and in 1888 Elizabeth Slaughter conveyed a one-acre site to trustees for its construction southwest of Edgewood. By 1891 it shared its building with the Edgewood school and enrolled forty-six pupils, before eventually consolidating into the Edgewood district.

Round Rock, TX

In a corner of Old Round Rock Cemetery, near the grave of outlaw Sam Bass, half an acre was set aside for the burial of enslaved people and, later, freedmen. Enclosed by cedar posts and barbed wire, the graves are marked at head and foot with limestone rocks, some hand-grooved with names and dates. The earliest known grave of a freed slave dates to 1880, and although dozens of freedmen rest here, no former slaves were interred after the turn of the century.

Louisville, KY

By the 1850s Kentucky was shipping thousands of enslaved people each year down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to Deep South plantations. Traders operating near the Ohio kept people shackled in pens between sales, and even in a slaveholding society these dealers were often shunned as social outcasts. On this site the speculator Matthew Garrison ran one of four Louisville slave markets that an abolitionist minister said sold men, women, and children "like sheep," until the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865.

Louisville, KY

Kentucky's 1792 constitution wrote enslavement into the new state's founding, and by 1830 Black Kentuckians made up nearly a quarter of the population. Though the U.S. banned the African slave trade in 1808 and Kentucky's 1833 Nonimportation Act briefly halted the interstate resale of enslaved people, that law's 1849 repeal reopened Louisville's slave markets. On this ground the Arterburn brothers held people in iron-barred pens before marching them, chained, to riverboats bound south.

Slidell, TX

This Wise County community took its name from John Slidell, a Confederate diplomat at the center of the 1861 "Trent Affair," and grew up to supply the surrounding farmers. A post office opened in 1884, and as merchants moved in, a young doctor set up his office and drugstore while local donors gave land for a cemetery, church, public square, and school. Others strung the first telephone line, knitting the little town together.

Taylor, TX

David McCurdy Sloan and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Easley, came to Texas from South Carolina and raised this house in 1854, hauling finished lumber all the way from Houston while the rest was hand-hewn in the nearby river bottom by enslaved workers. It stands as one of the older surviving homesteads of Williamson County's Anglo settlement generation. The house was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Houston, TX

One of the oldest Black Methodist churches in Houston, this congregation began in 1880 at an open-air meeting under a tent, led by the Rev. Ed Roscoe. The next year trustees Wash Breed, Robert Swiley, and Dick Thomas bought the property on Sloan Street—later Sydnor—giving the church its first name. Fire destroyed the original sanctuary in 1912, but the congregation rebuilt and, active in community programs, became a lasting force in the surrounding neighborhood.

Arlington, TX

In the spring of 1838, Captains Robert Sloan and Nathaniel T. Journey led some ninety northeast Texas frontiersmen on a punitive raid against Indians who had struck their homes in present-day Fannin County. The trail carried them into what is now Tarrant County, where they attacked a small Native village. The episode was among the earliest recorded Anglo-American incursions into north Texas, part of the violent process that opened the region to white settlement.

Hampshire County, WV

The Sloan–Parker House stands in the mountain country of Hampshire County, in what was then the western frontier of Virginia and is today West Virginia's oldest county. Sturdy stone dwellings like this one were raised by early settling families who pushed into the Potomac highlands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, building to last against hard winters and uncertain times. Passed down and preserved, the house survives as a tangible link to the region's founding generations.

New York, NY

On June 15, 1904, the excursion steamer General Slocum caught fire in New York's East River during a church outing, killing more than a thousand people — most of them women and children from the German-American community of Kleindeutschland on the Lower East Side. It was the city's deadliest disaster until September 11, 2001. This memorial was dedicated in 1906 by the Sympathy Society of German Ladies in memory of the lost.

Paramus, NJ

Long before it was suburban, this corner of Bergen County was Dutch farming country, and locals knew it by the odd name "Sluckup." According to the marker, the name grew from a bit of local legend involving a Dutch farmer and a shirt that seemed to be swallowed up. Such nicknames preserve the everyday Dutch culture that shaped colonial and Revolutionary-era New Jersey.

New Braunfels, TX

This bend of the Guadalupe River has drawn swimmers and picnickers since the late 1800s, and in the 1930s it was developed into a tourist court whose eleven cabins were built one at a time and advertised as a 'paradise of the hills.' Automobile travelers flocked to it during the boom in car tourism along River Road until drought closed the camp in 1957. The United Church of Christ bought the site and reopened it in 1958 as Slumber Falls Camp, still serving youth and adults today.

Edgewood, TX

By the 1870s farming families had put down roots in this corner of Van Zandt County, and within a generation the settlement called Small had a school, a Baptist church, a cemetery, and even a post office tucked inside William Henry Luster's mercantile store. For a few decades it hummed with the ordinary machinery of a rural East Texas town — a drugstore, a doctor, a barber, a photographer, a gin, a grist mill, a blacksmith, and a woodworking shop. As nearby Edgewood drew off its churches and its schoolchildren in the 1930s and 40s, the town quietly emptied, until by 1999 only the cemetery and the Baptist church remained.

Plattville, IL

In 1923 tiny Plattville earned an unlikely distinction: the smallest village in the United States to be awarded a National Guard armory, home to Company E of the 129th Illinois. In an era when the National Guard was being reorganized and professionalized after World War I, a rural crossroads hosting a federally recognized unit was a genuine point of local pride.

Andice, TX

Bryce M. Smart built this home in 1855, when central Texas was still raw frontier and the great cattle drives were beginning to shape the land. A man of many trades, Smart ran a grist mill, a tannery, and a freight line, and family lore holds that his children rescued newborn calves abandoned along the nearby Chisholm Trail. Five generations later, McCormick descendants still keep the house.

El Paso, TX

Smelter Cemetery, established in 1882, took its name from the great ASARCO smelting works that made El Paso an industrial powerhouse of the Southwest. The surrounding neighborhood, largely Mexican-American, housed the laborers who fed the furnaces that processed ore from across the region. The cemetery, now a Historic Texas Cemetery, is the resting place of that working community.

El Paso, TX

In the late 19th century a smelting operation — bought by ASARCO in 1899 — turned this stretch of the Rio Grande into a center for refining lead, copper, and other ores. Thousands of Mexican immigrant workers and their families built a vibrant community around the smelter called Smeltertown, or La Esmelda, complete with schools, churches, businesses, and the pilgrimage site of Mount Cristo Rey. When dangerous levels of lead contamination were found in the early 1970s, the community's buildings were razed and its families relocated.

Smethport, PA · est. 1949

Smethport has served as the seat of McKean County since 1807, when land agent Francis King laid out its town lots amid the northern Pennsylvania wilderness. Growth came slowly on this rugged frontier: Arnold Hunter raised the first cabin in 1811, but lasting settlement waited until 1822, and the first courthouse rose in 1827. The town's steady establishment reflects the patient, hard-won process of settling the region.

Lexington, KY

For roughly fourteen years, from the spring of 1943 to the summer of 1957, a friendly ownerless dog made his daily rounds through downtown Lexington and became one of the city's best-loved characters. Known affectionately as "the Town Dog," he was fed and watched over by the shopkeepers, clerks, and passersby along his regular route, belonging to everyone and no one at once. When he died, Lexington marked his passing the way a town remembers a genuine local figure — with a plaque and the simple, heartfelt epitaph "Missed by All."

Smiley, TX

Methodists near Smiley were worshipping informally by 1879 and formally organized in 1885 as the Bundick Society, meeting first in a two-story schoolhouse that doubled as a Masonic lodge hall. When the railroad arrived in 1906, the whole community relocated toward the tracks, and the congregation built a new sanctuary in the fresh townsite the following year. The present church, dedicated in 1948, has long drawn its members from the area's farming and ranching families.

Brookston, TX

At roughly 2,100 acres, the Smiley-Woodfin meadow is the largest surviving remnant of the vast native grassland that once rolled from Texas to Canada. A lack of fuel and surface water spared it the plow, and owner M. L. Smiley used it for grazing and hay while neighboring fields eroded under cultivation. After his death the land passed to the Woodfin brothers, and it remains the state's largest supplier of native hay.

Columbia City, IN

This spot in Columbia City traces a lineage of local funeral directors reaching back to 1851, with the building here raised in 1919 by lumberman and philanthropist Simon J. Peabody — the same benefactor whose name graced the town's free library. In the boom decades when Indiana hardwood built fortunes, timber money often circled back into civic gifts, and the establishment served the community for eighty years until 1999.

Meridian, TX

John Jackson Smith and his wife Margaret migrated from Mississippi to Bosque County in the 1850s and founded the Smith Bend community, giving land for this cemetery after their son Burton died in 1856. Their daughter Ann and her husband Silas McCabe started the nearby settlement of Coon Creek, and the two communities have long shared the care of the burial ground. Enlarged over the years, the site now holds more than 500 graves of pioneers, their descendants, and friends.

Crockett, TX

When Francis Albert and Jim Smith joined forces in Houston County in 1904, they began with livery stables, farms, and real estate, but the automobile changed everything. Betting on the coming age of the car, they moved into road building and in 1923 paved a nearly seven-mile stretch of Old State Highway 21 with their own money, the first paved highway in the area. Their firm grew to lay roads and brick paving across Texas and nine other states before Jim's death in 1930 unwound the partnership.

Canyon, TX

J. Frank Smith raised this commercial building in 1906, the very year Canyon incorporated as a town, and served on its first board of aldermen while running a land company upstairs. The ground floor first held the Canyon Mercantile & Hardware Store, and in 1912 S. B. McClure opened the Palace Hotel here, sharing space over the years with a cafe. Through several owners the Palace Hotel served travelers and townspeople until it finally closed in 1960.

Lampasas County, TX

In the years after the Civil War, settlers pushed into the rolling prairies of central Texas, and the Browning Community took root in the 1870s along the Old Belton Road—a lifeline that carried goods, travelers, and mail between frontier towns. John R. Browning, his wife Julia, and their children were among the first families to put down roots here, farming the land and building the ties that knit a rural neighborhood together. The cemetery that survives is the enduring record of those pioneer households.

Athens, TX

Smith Cemetery was established in 1850 in Henderson County, Texas, in the early decades of the state's Anglo settlement. Such family and community burial grounds were frequently the first lasting institutions on newly settled land. It was designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2002.

Tyler, TX

This burial ground grew from land granted to Mary M. "Polly" Long by the State of Texas in 1846, part of which her son preserved as a cemetery when he sold the tract in 1881. In use as early as 1857, it holds the graves of local settlers, many of them Long relatives and neighbors, including early county commissioner William Green and Civil War veterans. Its name honors the many members of the Smith family laid to rest among the pioneers here.

Oakalla, TX

Tennessee-born James Gibson Smith Jr. and his Arkansas-born wife Sarah settled this part of Burnet County in 1850 and set aside ground as a family burial place while raising eight children. Their granddaughter Anita Fay, lost to diphtheria in 1901, was the first laid to rest here, soon followed by a neighbor and by the family patriarch. Descendants formed an association in 1981 to tend the site, which holds veterans of the Civil War and World War II.

Lewisville, TX

This area was known as Holford's Prairie for the pioneer Halford brothers who claimed 640 acres through the Peters Colony, and Basdeal Lewis platted nearby Lewisville in 1853. Thomas and Elizabeth Smith bought farmland here in 1859, and after their 20-year-old son died in 1862 the family began a burial ground that in 1881 became a community cemetery. Its 400-plus graves carry the surnames of Denton County's pioneer families, and oral tradition holds that some unmarked graves are those of people once enslaved by the Fox family—a poignant record of the era's harsh realities.

Palmer, TX

Established in 1852 on a lonely knoll then surrounded by wilderness, Smith Cemetery was founded by Nancy Owen Smith for her family and neighbors. Its first burial was her husband Hans Smith, a former lawmaker in Missouri and Arkansas who moved to Ellis County in 1846, opened the area's first cotton gin, and helped organize the county before being robbed and murdered in Houston. Generations of pioneer descendants followed him into the ground here, and a cemetery association was chartered in 1955.

Mineola, TX

About 1885 members of the Hoard community organized what began as Davis Chapel, meeting in the Democrat Schoolhouse and a brush arbor before the congregation took the name Smith Chapel. In 1915 B.B. Hart sold land for a new church, with 52 members pledging labor and money and sawmill owner W.H. Smith supplying much of the material. A 1957 merger with nearby Crow Methodist Church helped finance the present sanctuary, keeping the congregation at the center of rural Wood County life.

Tyler, TX

Carved from Nacogdoches County and organized in 1846, Smith County took its name from General James Smith, a soldier and statesman who counted Sam Houston, Thomas J. Rusk, and J. Pinckney Henderson among his friends. Tyler was chosen as the county seat, and Smith himself was buried with military honors at Henderson in 1855. The county's creation came just months after Texas joined the United States.

Tyler, TX

Soon after its 1846 founding, Smith County grew into a legal hub of East Texas, its first district court convening in an abandoned log cabin in Tyler in 1846. When the legislature spread the state Supreme Court across the state in 1850, Tyler became one of its three seats and also a U.S. District Court seat, and later hosted the new Court of Criminal Appeals created by the 1876 constitution. These high courts continued to sit in Tyler until they were consolidated permanently in Austin by the early twentieth century.

Tyler, TX

Houston architect Eugene T. Heiner and builder Henry Kane erected this Italianate structure in 1880–81 as Smith County's fourth jail, its stuccoed walls scored to imitate cut stone and dressed with elaborate window molds and classical beltcourses. A second story added in 1894 doubled its cell space. After a new jail replaced it in 1916, the building found a second life as the Lewis Hotel until 1986.

Tyler, TX

Sandy soil, steady rain, and a long growing season made the Tyler area ideal for roses, and commercial growers such as G. A. McKee and Mathew Shamburger began selling bushes there in the 1870s. The trade blossomed in the 1920s with new irrigation methods, gained a promotional showcase in the Texas Rose Festival launched in 1933, and drew scientific research that professionalized the field. By the 1970s the Tyler area supplied about half the rose bushes grown in the United States.

Tyler, TX

During the Civil War, Smith County became a major hub of Confederate activity in East Texas. Near Tyler stood the largest ordnance plant west of the Mississippi, turning out "Tyler Rifles," while Camp Ford held the biggest prisoner-of-war compound in the western Confederacy and salt works produced thousands of pounds of that vital commodity daily. On the home front, women, children, the elderly, and enslaved people raised the cotton and grain that fed the army and improvised clothing, hats, and coffee substitutes from what little they had.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2017

Opened in 1899 with a gift from Richard and Sarah Smith "for the recreation of the young," this Fairmount Park playground was a private benefaction placed on public land — free and open to every child. It arrived at the dawn of the American Playground Movement, when reformers argued that supervised, purpose-built play spaces could nurture healthy, well-rounded citizens. It stands as one of the earliest dedicated children's play spaces in the United States.

Smith Point, TX

On the isolated Gulf peninsula of Smith Point, worship began in the 1937 schoolhouse-and-community center, where traveling Baptist ministers preached once a month. Officially organized in 1948 as Smith Point Baptist Church, the congregation bought that school building and moved it to this site in 1960, adding classrooms as it grew and calling its first full-time pastor. In 1961 members even built a parsonage from the wreckage of Hurricane Carla, and in 2007 renamed the church to reflect its mission to the wider community.

Stephenville, TX

Established by 1907, this cemetery served the now-vanished Smith Springs community and holds many kin of Swiss-born stonemason Frederick Hook, who helped build the Erath County Courthouse. Among its graves is Milton Brown, remembered as one of the founders of Western swing—the dance music that fused string-band and jazz traditions in 1930s Texas. Woodmen of the World monuments, curbing, and grave slabs mark the pioneer-era plots, tended today by a cemetery association.

Rockport, TX

Built in 1903 in Old Rockport beneath giant oaks, this early frame bungalow blends Cottage and Craftsman styling. It passed in 1920 to W. H. Smith, a grandson of Refugio pioneers, and in 1934 to rancher John Frederick Brundrett, whose family worked thousands of acres on Matagorda Island and Port Bay. The devout Brundretts kept the home for 53 years, until Fred died in 1987 at ninety-nine.

Fort Worth, TX

As Fort Worth blossomed in the early 1900s, this neighborhood became a fashionable address for the city's rising elite. Banker Ben O. Smith bought the site in 1906 and built a home where his wife Frances hosted the town's social set; a decade later it passed to cattleman Tom Burnett, son of the legendary rancher S. Burk Burnett. The house links the worlds of finance and the open range that together built early-twentieth-century Fort Worth.

Gilmer County, WV

This marker designates the Smith-Bush Farm as a West Virginia Century Farm — land worked by the same family for at least a hundred years. The state's Century Farm program honors the endurance of family agriculture in the Appalachian hills, where clearing and holding a farm across generations was hard-won. It speaks to a rural way of life that shaped West Virginia long before and after its 1863 statehood.

Fort Davis, TX

In 1873, a former Buffalo Soldier of the 24th U.S. Infantry named Archie Smith claimed 160 acres near Dolores Mountain in the Trans-Pecos country and raised an adobe home with native oak beams. Its vaulted room served as a family chapel open to neighbors of every denomination before the town's first Catholic church was built. Later owners, the Carltons, preserved and eventually restored the structure, which survives as the oldest home still lived in at Fort Davis.

Austin, TX

After the Texas State Capitol burned in 1881, Scottish-born James Baird Smith cleared the site and built a temporary statehouse nearby, then used salvaged bricks and stone to construct this rent house around 1886. Its first tenant was banker John G. Palm, and later owner Lucille Clark, of a prominent Austin family, occupied it before it was sold and restored in 1959. It became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1975.

Azle, TX

In 1886, Fort Worth businessman and philanthropist J. J. Jarvis — a benefactor of the area's Black institutions — deeded this ground to Charles Young and Allen Prince as a burial place for Azle's Black community, though several graves already lay here. Over time it passed to descendants of the pioneer Smith and Frazier families and still serves as an active cemetery. This quiet plot preserves the memory of African American settlers on the Tarrant County frontier.

Corsicana, TX

Built in 1880, this house was first home to Dr. John R. Smith, mayor of Corsicana in the mid-1880s, who organized the town's volunteer fire department and set up a county poor farm where the fineless could work off their debts. In 1898 the widowed Mrs. A. W. McCrery bought the home and filled it with her ten daughters and her mother-in-law. The McCrery family kept the house until 1967.

Amarillo, TX

Built around 1904 for early Amarillo settlers James Bynum and Marie Lowery Smith, this house first stood on South Taylor Street. In 1945 auto dealer Jesse A. Rogers bought it and, rather than raze it for his dealership, moved it to a new site as his family home. In the relocation, architect C.W. Brott reworked the design, so the Classical Revival house today blends 1900s leaded glass, roof cresting, and woodwork with 1940s brick veneer, balustrades, and full-height columns.

Granbury, TX

Hood County tax assessor Samuel Hancock Smith built this Granbury home soon after taking office in 1883, adding much of its decorative trim during an 1892 expansion. From 1920 to 1956 it belonged to the Savage family, local merchants, and it still shows off its Eastlake porch and Italianate bay window.

Ozona, TX

A Louisiana-born Confederate cavalry veteran, Samuel Theodore Smith came to Texas in 1872 and settled in Ozona in 1891, where he became a builder of the young town's institutions — its first school, first courthouse, and Baptist church among them. He married Alice Crimm in 1876 and raised three children. His hammer and saw quite literally framed the civic life of frontier Crockett County.