Search Markers

Temple, TX

Stampede Creek draws its name from a horse stampede that struck Captain John Bird's Ranger force in June 1839, days after they had fought more than 200 Caddo, Kickapoo, and Comanche warriors at the nearby Battle of Bird's Creek. The Rangers had returned to bury their dead before pushing west in pursuit, only to have their mounts bolt while camped along this stream. Decades later, on July 4, 1876, a cattle drive from South Texas stampeded at the same spot, cementing the creek's name.

Donora, PA · est. 2022

Born in the mill town of Donora in 1920, Stan Musial grew up training at the Polish Falcons and swinging a bat for the local zinc works team before the majors called. Over a 22-season career with the St. Louis Cardinals he became one of the game's most beloved and consistent hitters, piling up thousands of hits, three MVP awards, and three championships, with a break for military service in World War II. 'Stan the Man' remained a hometown hero to the gritty industrial river towns that made him.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2018

Founded in Pittsburgh in 1913 by brothers J.J. and Joseph Flannery, the Standard Chemical Company was the first commercial producer of radium in the United States — the earliest chapter of what would become the nuclear industry. Extracting the rare element from carnotite ore was painstaking, costly work at the frontier of science. In 1921 Marie Curie herself, radium's co-discoverer, visited the laboratory and was presented with a full gram of the element to support her research.

Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 2007

From 1883 to 1931 this site was one of the world's greatest centers for making coke, the coal-derived fuel that fed the blast furnaces of American steel. H. C. Frick Coke Company fired more than 900 beehive ovens here, burning thousands of tons of coal a day, and proudly displayed a scale model of its Standard Shaft No. 2 at Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. A largely immigrant workforce, famed for its productivity, gave the region much of its enduring character.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Owned by Black entrepreneur John T. Gibson, the Standard Theatre became one of Philadelphia's premier stages for Black entertainment in the 1920s. Its bills featured luminaries like Duke Ellington and Ethel Waters, drawing multiracial audiences to hear the era's finest performers. The theater thrived through the Jazz Age before closing its doors in 1931.

Chicago, IL

On October 11, 1883, railroad managers meeting in Chicago adopted the Standard Time system, dividing the country into uniform time zones. Until then, towns kept their own local solar time, a patchwork that made railroad scheduling and safety a nightmare. The new standard, put into effect that November, replaced dozens of local times with a handful of zones and reshaped how Americans lived by the clock.

Graham, TX

The western peak of the twin Belknap Range mountains, Standpipe Mountain lay within land the Graham brothers bought in 1872 as they founded the town that bears their name and set to developing its resources. E. S. Graham even prospected the mountain for silver in the 1890s. It took its name in 1907 when the city built a water tank on its crest, and after World War I it was given to the city as Victory Park.

Snyder, TX

Mrs. W. B. Stanfield, wife of a Snyder rancher, lived in this home for more than fifty years. She sketched out the plans herself and handed them to a wandering architect passing through from Fort Worth. The result featured fine oak woodwork, pine floors, and leaded glass panels at the entry—comforts of settled prosperity on the West Texas ranching frontier.

Waco, TX

In 1862 the Reverend Thomas Stanford, a pioneer Methodist preacher, brought his family from Arkansas to this corner of central Texas and, with the Barcus family, planted the trio that anchored so many frontier settlements: a school, a church, and a cemetery. His daughter and son-in-law gave five acres for the graveyard in 1875, the year of its first recorded burial. After decades of neglect the ground was restored in the 1960s and is still tended by a cemetery association today.

Ben Wheeler, TX

Founded in 1875 with 27 charter members out of the Cumberland Presbyterian tradition, this rural church began in a simple building of pine and sweetgum planks on land owned by the Stanger family, who also hosted a nearby school. Around the turn of the century local Methodists began worshiping here too, and the two denominations shared resources so fully that many families claimed members of both for over a century. A new brick church rose in 1956, and the congregation continues today as a non-denominational community church.

Austin, TX

This colonial revival home was built in 1927–28 for University of Texas civil engineering professor Stanley Finch and his wife Emily, designed by Finch's faculty colleague, architect Raymond Everett. Over the following decades it was shaped by notable Austin designers — landscape architect C. Coatsworth Pinkney, and architects Hugo Kuehne and J. Roy White, who added bay windows and enclosed the side porch. The result is an unusually well-documented record of a house touched by the city's leading design minds.

Boone, NC

This marker in Boone, high in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina, honors Stanley Harris (1882–1976), a national leader in the Boy Scouts of America. In 1926 he helped launch the organization's Interracial Service, an early effort to extend Scouting to African American youth during the era of segregation. He lived just a short distance north of where the marker now stands.

Corpus Christi, TX

Stanislav (Stanley) Kostoryz, born in 1866 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, immigrated through New York in 1886 and became a teacher, journalist, and land developer. In 1902 he founded the Bohemian Colony Lands southwest of Corpus Christi, buying thousands of acres and advertising 80-acre tracts in Czech-language newspapers to draw settlers from Texas, Nebraska, and the Midwest. His vision turned roughly 10,000 acres of South Texas brush into a thriving Czech farming community complete with school, church, and mutual-aid societies.

Williamsburg, VA

Stanley William Abbott (1908–1975) was the visionary landscape architect who shaped some of America's most beloved scenic byways during the New Deal era and beyond. As the first resident landscape architect and superintendent of the Blue Ridge Parkway, he designed its gentle curves and carefully framed mountain vistas to make the road itself a work of art. His philosophy—that a parkway should reveal the landscape's natural beauty rather than dominate it—influenced national park design across the country.

Houston County, TX

This burial ground opened in grief in 1861, when a diphtheria epidemic took the young daughter and infant son of William and Nancy Stanton within days of each other, and they were laid to rest on family land. Their surviving son later left written instructions to protect the plot, and members of the Hill, Beavers, and Stanton families were buried here into the 1960s. A family association founded in 1975 keeps the cemetery today.

East Taylor Township, PA · est. 1947

The Staple Bend Tunnel, built as part of the Allegheny Portage Railroad, was the first railroad tunnel constructed in the United States. Its finely cut masonry, still intact, was regarded as a remarkable engineering feat in an age when boring through solid rock for a railway was nearly unheard of. Reachable a few miles east via Mineral Point, it endures as a monument to early American ingenuity.

Pershing County, NV

Founded in 1861 after rich silver ore was struck in the Star Mining District, Star City exploded during the boom of 1864–65 into a town of 1,200 with hotels, stores, a Wells Fargo office, a church, and a dozen saloons. Its biggest operation, the Sheba Mine, had produced some $5 million in silver by 1868, but that year the rich ore began to give out. Within three years only seventy-eight residents remained, and today nothing survives but crumbling foundations and rusted machinery.

Industry, TX

Bryan Daughtrey, a veteran of the War of 1812, came to Texas in 1822 as part of Stephen F. Austin's Second Colony and settled here in present Austin County. When his wife Anna died in 1847 he buried her on this spot, beginning a cemetery later used by the German Sternenberg family who bought the land. The community, its burial ground, and a school that ran until 1928 all took the name Star Hill—the English translation of Sternenberg—and descendants of those pioneer families still tend the graves.

West Chester, PA · est. 1995

Star of the West, Tent No. Six was a local chapter of the United Order of Tents, an African American women's mutual-aid and community service organization. Chartered in 1865 as the Civil War closed, it belonged to the J. R. Giddings and Jollifee Union, a benevolent society founded in 1847 and named for the abolitionist Congressman Joshua Giddings and his law partner. Groups like this provided care for the sick, burials for the dead, and support networks for Black communities in an era when few other institutions would.

Kerrville, TX

This Hill Country burial ground began as a family plot for James Monroe and Martha Adeline Starkey, whose son Jones was the first laid to rest here in 1868. J.M. Starkey, arriving in 1854, was Kerr County's first assessor-collector and later its chief justice, central to organizing the frontier county. Though only a handful of pioneer families rest here, they counted civic leaders, mill builders, ranchers, Texas Rangers, and Civil War veterans among them.

Nocona, TX

As settlers poured into north Texas after 1850, B. L. Starkey and his sons arrived from Ellis County around the Civil War. The cemetery began in the 1860s when a newly arrived Wells family, having lost a daughter over the winter, asked their nearest neighbor for a place to bury her. The Starkeys organized a Methodist church here in the 1870s and funded a community school; "Grandmother Sloss," born in 1850, later preserved much of the area's oral history.

Elkhart, TX

This hillside graveyard is the resting place of the family of Texas pioneer John Starr and his descendants. Starr, who died in 1872, lies beside his wife Susannah, with six of their eight children interred nearby — including two sons who served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. The family's ancestral home still stands on nearby Starr Hill.

Canton, TX

In 1886 James F. Starr, acting for landowner Sarah F. Clapp, deeded two acres here for a community school, and within a few years the ground was also serving as a burial place — the earliest marked grave being the infant son of B. A. and Ora Monroe, who died in 1889. A formal cemetery followed in 1911 when A. C. White and his wife sold the adjoining land. The school and cemetery knit together the scattered Starr, Todd Hill, and Wentworth communities, and among those laid to rest here is Civil War soldier Joseph Staley.

Rio Grande City, TX

Starr County was carved from Nueces County and created on February 10, 1848 — just as the Mexican-American War closed and the Rio Grande became the international boundary. It was named for Dr. James Harper Starr, a pioneer surgeon who served as Secretary of the Treasury of the Republic of Texas and later as an official of the Confederacy. Rio Grande City became and remains the county seat.

Marshall, TX

Dr. James Harper Starr served as a government official under both the Republic of Texas and the Confederacy while building a career as a physician and businessman. In 1870 he and his son James Franklin Starr moved their land and banking agency from Nacogdoches to Marshall, buying this land for their homes. Frank Starr and his wife Clara built "Maplecroft," a Greek Revival house that stayed in the family until 1976, when it was deeded to the State of Texas.

Hemphill, TX

In 1946 a Jasper county judge opened a funeral home in Hemphill and hired Tennessee-born John Byron Starr to run it. When the owner closed the branch three years later, Starr bought it outright with help from his brother, and his wife Margaret opened a flower shop in a side room. From those modest beginnings grew a family enterprise that built the first purpose-designed funeral facility in East Texas and still serves the region across three generations.

Lanesboro, PA · est. 1951

In the late 1840s the Erie Railroad was pushing its main line across the rugged uplands of northeastern Pennsylvania, and the deep valley of Starrucca Creek stood in the way. Rather than detour, engineers raised a soaring bridge of locally quarried bluestone—more than a thousand feet long and towering a hundred feet above the water—completed in 1847-48. That it still carries trains today makes it one of the oldest stone railroad viaducts in continuous use in the country.

Winona, TX

In 1852 the Rev. Joshua Starr, a Methodist minister from Alabama, bought a square mile of land on the Dallas-Shreveport Road and laid out Starrville, selling lots with covenants forbidding gambling and liquor. It grew into one of Smith County's earliest and liveliest towns, with mills, foundries, a wagon factory, and a remarkable cluster of schools — a female high school, a Baptist female academy, and a male college — all before the Civil War. Then the Tyler Tap Railroad bypassed it in the 1870s, and the town slowly emptied as post office, lodge, and schools moved away to Winona.

Winona, TX

Starrville grew up along the Dallas–Shreveport road, becoming a stop by 1849 and taking its name from Reverend Joshua Starr, who bought the land and sold town lots in 1852. During the summer of 1862 it served as the encampment of Confederate General Henry McCulloch's army before its march toward Little Rock. When townspeople blocked the railroad in the 1870s, the community drifted toward Winona, but its 1927 schoolhouse endured—hosting classes, plays, reunions, and elections—and survives today as a community center kept up by local volunteers.

Canyon Lake, TX

This crossroads community grew up around a cedar yard and store opened in 1940 and later run by Curt Startz, grandson of German immigrants who had settled the area in the 1850s. Named in 1950 for an artist's painting of the storefront, Startzville did a brisk trade in ice through the building of Canyon Dam and Lake. A café added in 1963 kept the little community's gathering place alive.

Raleigh, NC

Chartered in 1814, the State Bank of North Carolina was one of the young state's earliest financial institutions, helping to steady a cash-poor agricultural economy. Its handsome building later served a long second life as the rectory of Christ Church from 1873 to 1951 before reopening as a bank. Few structures capture so many chapters of Raleigh's growth in one place.

Austin, TX

In 1882 a group of Texas attorneys founded the volunteer Texas Bar Association in Galveston under Judge Thomas J. Devine, meeting yearly to press for uniform law and standards of professional conduct. In 1939 the legislature created the State Bar of Texas to bring everyone practicing law under common rules, and the older association merged into it the following year. Housed at this Austin site since 1953, the State Bar has for well over a century shaped the state's legal life.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1953

After fire consumed the old brick statehouse in 1897, Pennsylvania set out to build a capitol worthy of an industrial powerhouse. Architect Joseph M. Huston designed the grand Beaux-Arts building raised here between 1902 and 1906, crowned by a dome inspired by St. Peter's in Rome. Governor Samuel W. Pennypacker presided over its dedication on October 4, 1906.

Austin, TX

Founded in 1851 when Texas Revolution hero Gen. Edward Burleson was buried here, this ground became the resting place for the honored dead of Texas, including Stephen F. Austin, nine governors, and figures from every era of state history. Confederate officers were interred here beginning in the 1860s, and small white headstones now mark some 1,583 soldiers and their families. Through the efforts of state official Louis W. Kemp, the remains of more than a hundred prominent Texans were reinterred here after 1930, among statuary by sculptors Elisabet Ney and Pompeo Coppini.

Dallas, TX

Founded in 1886 by Captain W.H. Gaston and fellow Dallas civic leaders, the State Fair of Texas grew into the most heavily attended state fair in the nation. The city has owned the grounds since 1904, keeping them as a public park except during the annual two-week run, and briefly yielded them to the 1936 Texas Centennial and 1937 Pan American expositions. Its stages and midways hosted the likes of Buffalo Bill, Harry Houdini, William Jennings Bryan, and Comanche chief Quanah Parker.

Town of Islip, NY

When it opened in 1889 on the plains of central Long Island, this state hospital was part of a nationwide movement to build large, self-contained institutions for the mentally ill. Over the following decades it swelled from a few dozen patients into a small city of its own — with a nursing school, a working farm, its own power plant, and rail connections — reaching into the thousands by the 1950s. Shifting ideas about mental-health care emptied such asylums late in the 20th century, and it closed its doors in 1996.

Sterling City, TX

Directors of the First State Bank, Sterling City's earliest financial institution, put up this two-story brick building in 1910 to house both the bank and the State Hotel. Over the decades its rooms served a rotating cast of the town's life: doctors' offices, the telephone company, post office, city hall, and E. B. Butler's long-running drugstore. Many of the community's prominent early leaders had business ties to the address.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 2005

Established in 1905, the State Museum of Pennsylvania has spent more than a century collecting, preserving, and interpreting the commonwealth's cultural and natural history. First housed beside the Capitol, it joined the newly formed Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission in 1945 and moved to its present building in 1964, steadily expanding its collections and public programs for each new generation.

Groom, TX

State National Bank opened in 1904 as a private bank founded by John Walter Knorpp, of an established Missouri and Southwestern banking family, together with regional oil and grain developer Eugene S. Blasdel. Chartered by the state in 1908 and nationally from 1926, it drew its strength from the thrifty settlers and pioneer families of the Panhandle. The bank weathered the Panic of 1907, the Dust Bowl, and two world wars while backing the region's cattle, grain, and oil economy.

Corsicana, TX

Organized in 1917 by a group of local businessmen with B. B. Munsey as its first president, the State National Bank served the growing city of Corsicana from a downtown corner before moving to this site in 1926. Isaac N. Cerf, a well-known Corsicana civic leader, took over its leadership that same year. In 1933, amid the Depression, it absorbed the accounts of the First State Bank of Corsicana.

Cumberland Township, PA

At Gettysburg in July 1863, soldiers from across the Confederacy fought in the largest battle ever waged in North America. This memorial, raised by the State of Alabama, honors the Alabamians who served on that field, its call to "Alabamians!" paired with the promise that their names are "inscribed on Fame's immortal scroll." It stands among the many state monuments that turn the sweeping battlefield into an open-air record of the war.

Greeneville, TN

In the years just after the American Revolution, settlers in what is now upper East Tennessee tried to form their own state — the short-lived 'State of Franklin,' declared in 1784 with Greeneville as its seat and John Sevier as its governor. Never admitted to the Union and dissolved by 1788, Franklin was one of the boldest experiments of the frontier's early statehood movements. This replica of its rustic log capitol lets visitors stand where an unrecognized American state once tried to govern itself.

Cumberland Township, PA

Georgia's memorial on the Gettysburg battlefield honors the state's Confederate soldiers who fought here in July 1863. Its spare, elegiac inscription — men who came when duty called and died when their country called — is among the most quoted lines of any monument on the field. It stands amid the Confederate positions of the great three-day battle in Pennsylvania.

Harford County, MD

This monument gathers up Maryland's outsized place in the nation's founding, when the little capital at Annapolis briefly held the eyes of a new country. There, in December 1783, George Washington laid down his military commission and returned power to civilian hands — one of the young republic's defining acts — and the Confederation Congress, meeting in the same statehouse, closed the books on the Revolution. In the years that followed Maryland ceded the land that became the District of Columbia, and a Maryland lawyer named Francis Scott Key would give the country the words of its national anthem.

Cumberland Township, PA

This is the State of Mississippi's memorial on the Gettysburg battlefield, one of the many state monuments raised across the field to honor the soldiers who fought and died here in July 1863. Its inscription speaks in the elegiac language of sacrifice and honor common to Confederate commemoration, marking ground where Mississippi troops made their stand. Such state memorials were dedicated long after the war as former combatants and their descendants sought to enshrine the memory of the men who fell.

Cumberland Township, PA

This is South Carolina's state memorial on the Gettysburg battlefield, where in July 1863 the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia met the Union in the war's largest and bloodiest battle. Its inscription frames the state's soldiers through the Lost Cause language of states' rights and heritage that shaped Southern remembrance in the decades after the war. It marks ground where South Carolina troops fought and died during the three-day engagement.

Cumberland Township, PA

Texas sent several regiments to Gettysburg as part of Hood's Division, and on July 2–3, 1863 they joined some of the battle's fiercest fighting on the Confederate right. Erected by the State of Texas in 1964, this memorial remembers "the valor and devotion of her sons" who served the Confederacy on this ground. It is one of the many monuments added decade after decade to the Gettysburg battlefield.

Huntsville, TX

During the Civil War, the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville ran a textile factory where inmates, enslaved people, and free men together wove millions of yards of cloth and yarn. Its osnaburgs and uniforms became a main source of cloth for the Confederate Southwest, clothing state troops, the Confederate army, and needy soldiers' families as the Union blockade tightened. Worn machinery and financial strain eventually slowed the plant's wartime output.

Newville, PA · est. 1970

In 1920, at the old Big Spring Hotel near Newville, Pennsylvania opened what this marker calls the first state police training academy in the nation—a milestone in the professionalization of American law enforcement in the Progressive era. Recruits drilled in a paramilitary style that would become a model for other states. Just three years later the school moved east to Hershey in Dauphin County, and the pioneering Cumberland County site passed into history.

Carson City, NV

Completed in 1886, the State Printing Building is the second oldest structure the State of Nevada raised within its Capitol Complex. Architects Morrill J. Curtis and Seymore Pixley designed the Italianate building to complement the 1870 State Capitol, using sandstone ashlar quarried at the nearby state prison—a signature material of Carson City's public buildings. For nearly eighty years, until 1964, it housed the offices and presses of the State Printer.

Exeter, NH

During the Revolution, Exeter served as New Hampshire's wartime capital after royal authority collapsed in Portsmouth, and the colony-turned-state ran its affairs from this inland town. The marker fixes the years the State Treasury operated here, from 1775 as independence took hold through 1789, when the new federal Constitution took effect and a national government began to take shape. In that span the treasury helped fund New Hampshire's militia, war debts, and the machinery of a brand-new state government.

Washington, DC

This ornate French Second Empire building beside the White House rose between 1871 and 1888 to house the State, War, and Navy departments under one roof. For decades it was the command center of American diplomacy and defense, its granite halls witnessing generations of national decisions.

San Antonio, TX

As World War II strained the Allies' ability to keep American-built aircraft flying, more than a thousand civilian specialists from the San Antonio Air Depot volunteered in 1942 for a secret overseas assignment they knew only as Station "X." Crossing the U-boat-infested Atlantic in four groups, these mostly Texan mechanics reached the Burtonwood Repair Depot near Warrington, England, where they worked alongside British and American crews. By war's end the depot had overhauled thousands of engines and aircraft, including B-17s, P-47s, and P-38s, under the motto "Keep 'Em Flying!"

Oglesby, TX

Established in 1856 beside a Methodist Episcopal church, Station Creek Cemetery opened with the burial of 28-year-old Robert Morris, whose mother would join him twenty years later. Most of its forty headstones predate 1890, and among the graves are numerous Confederate soldiers and two brothers, W.R. and J.M. Green, hanged by a vigilante mob as accused horse thieves. When the congregation moved to McGregor in the 1880s, the cemetery was left to the wider community.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1964

When WQED went on the air in April 1954, it became the first community-supported educational television station in the United States, funded by its Pittsburgh viewers rather than by advertisers. The following year it pioneered broadcasting lessons directly into elementary school classrooms. The station would go on to nurture landmark public programming, most famously nurturing the career of Fred Rogers.

Columbus, OH

This bronze statue of the German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller was cast in Germany in 1891—a second casting of Widnmann's 1863 original in Munich—and carried across the Atlantic to be erected by Columbus's thriving German-American community. Standing in the park and neighborhood that took Schiller's name, it made a European literary hero into a civic symbol of German heritage in the American Midwest.

Middle Paxton Township, PA

In the middle of the Susquehanna River near Dauphin, a 25-foot Statue of Liberty stands atop an old bridge pier, one of Pennsylvania's most beloved roadside surprises. The first version went up in 1986 for the centennial of the real Lady Liberty in New York Harbor, a local labor of love built from scrap; when weather wore it down, a sturdier replica of wood, metal, and fiberglass rose in its place in the 1990s. Motorists on Route 322 have been doing a double-take ever since.

New York, NY

The Statue of Liberty's famous copper skin was mined an ocean away, at a copper works on the Norwegian island of Karmøy. In 1986, to mark the statue's centennial, the people of Karmøy chose a stone from that very mine and sent it across the Atlantic aboard the tall ship Sørlandet as a gift to the United States. Set near the harbor that frames Lady Liberty, the stone turns an abstract fact — where the metal came from — into something you can stand beside and touch.

Detroit, MI

This statue honors Robert Burns, the beloved national poet of Scotland, whose verses in Scots dialect are quoted around its base. Erected by Detroit's Scottish community, it reflects the deep pride immigrants carried for their homeland's culture even as they built new lives in America. Burns societies and Highland traditions flourished in many American cities during this era.

Freeport, TX

This statue honors Stephen F. Austin, remembered as the "Father of Texas" for leading the first organized Anglo-American colonization of the region in the 1820s under Mexican authority. When tensions boiled over into revolution in 1835, Austin briefly commanded Texian forces before turning to diplomacy, seeking support for the fledgling republic. The monument stands near the Gulf coast in Brazoria County, close to where his colonists first settled.