Search Markers

Saint Jo, TX

Built of native stone in 1873, the Stonewall Saloon was Saint Jo's first permanent building and a welcome rest stop for cowboys driving cattle up the trail through North Texas. After county prohibition arrived in 1897 it traded whiskey for ledgers, housing offices and a bank, and it was named for Confederate general "Stonewall" Jackson. Stuccoed in the 1930s and given a wooden facade in 1964, it still anchors the town square.

Mt. Pleasant, TX

Instruction at Stonewall began in a Methodist chapel around 1867, and tradition holds that a young teacher urged the community to "stand together like a stone wall" — giving the school its name when a proper building went up about 1884. A larger schoolhouse followed in 1898 and was enlarged around 1916, then replaced by a two-room structure in 1953. Falling enrollment led Stonewall to join the Mount Pleasant district and close in 1957.

Melissa, TX

In the 1870s and 1880s Stony Point was a bustling farm community with a cotton gin, gristmill, molasses mill, store, and school. Residents organized the Stony Point Baptist Church in 1878, and it grew into a spiritual hub—ordaining ministers and helping plant congregations in neighboring settlements—before declining population closed its doors in the late 1950s. Its cemetery, older than the church itself, still hosts funerals and an annual decoration day.

Silver Spring Township, PA · est. 2017

At James Bell's tavern on this ground, Anti-Federalists from the Cumberland frontier gathered in 1788 under the leadership of Robert Whitehill to voice their opposition to the newly drafted U.S. Constitution. They objected that it lacked protections for individual liberties and the rights of the states, and they pressed for amendments. Their demands are tied to the eventual adoption of the Bill of Rights and to the rise of the Democratic-Republican Party.

Rocksprings, TX

This route was one of many military roads built to link the frontier cavalry posts of Texas, running south to Fort Clark and north to Fort McKavett, both established in 1852. Paint Rock Springs, at the head of the South Llano River, made a natural midway rest stop, and in 1877 Major John B. Jones gathered his Texas Rangers here to launch a campaign against frontier outlaws. Beyond its military purpose, the road carried immigrants, cattle drovers, ranchers, mail riders, and freighters into the open country.

Burbank, CA

In 1915 Thomas Story and his sons Henry and Walter opened a family hardware store on this Burbank corner, in the years when the young San Fernando Valley town was shifting from farmland to a real Main Street commercial district. A neighborhood hardware store was the practical heart of such a community — supplying the nails, tools, and paint that built the surrounding homes and shops as Burbank grew.

Honesdale, PA · est. 1947

On August 8, 1829, at Honesdale, the Stourbridge Lion made the first run of a steam locomotive on rails in the United States. English-built for the level stretches of the Delaware & Hudson's gravity railroad, the engine was piloted by Horatio Allen, who took it out despite doubts that the wooden trestlework could bear its weight. The trial proved that steam power could move on iron rails on American soil — a glimpse of the railroad age to come.

Honesdale, PA · est. 1947

Honesdale honors its place in railroad history with a replica of the Stourbridge Lion, the English-built engine that in 1829 became the first locomotive to run on rails in the United States. Displayed beside it is the Eclipse, an original passenger coach from the Delaware & Hudson's gravity railroad. Together they recall the town's role at the very dawn of American railroading.

Robstown, TX

Born in North Texas in 1890, Thomas Jefferson "Stout" Jackson toured the Americas as a professional strongman before noticing how little Spanish-language entertainment reached South Texas's large Tejano population. In 1935 he and his wife Beatrice opened the Teatros Carpas—tent theaters—in Robstown, drawing crowds with Spanish-language films and touring Mexican performers across Robstown, Kingsville, Falfurrias, and Alice. As segregation ended, the last Carpa closed in 1963.

Stow, MA

In the decades after the Revolution, New England towns like Stow invested heavily in schooling, and in 1824 Stow Academy opened on this ground to give local youth an education beyond the common district schools. The academy served until 1850, and a generation later the site again became a place of learning as Hale High School, which taught the town's students from 1871 to 1908. Together the two schools mark this spot as Stow's center of education for the better part of a century.

Spring, TX

The Strack brothers emigrated from Feudingen, Germany, beginning with Herman and Heinrich in 1848 and followed by their kin over the next decade. In 1863 Herman bought land here that already held a burial ground, and the plot came to be known as Strack Cemetery, with veterans' graves reaching back to the Civil War. Today the family's descendants care for the site through an association.

Marlin, TX

Settled as Blue Ridge before 1850, this community reorganized on land donated by David Barclay and grandsons of Thomas Garrett after Garrett's estate closed the original site. A visiting Frenchman suggested the name Stranger around 1870, and by 1869 a Methodist-Presbyterian Union Church and a Baptist church were holding services that doubled as the first schools. Once home to a cotton gin, stores, a stagecoach inn, and mills, Stranger today keeps only its cemetery and churches, used for biannual homecomings.

Lufkin, TX

Trustees of an Angelina County African American cemetery group bought this acre in 1905, though recorded burials reach back to 1901. First called Frost Cemetery, it became known as Stranger's Rest around 1915 for the many drifters laid to rest here, with the last recorded burial in 1946. After falling into neglect, it was reclaimed by community members and county volunteers in 1991–92.

Strasburg Township, PA · est. 2011

Chartered in 1832 after the state's main line bypassed the town, the Strasburg Rail Road refused to fade away — it is the oldest American railroad still running under its original charter. Rescued from abandonment by local enthusiasts in 1958, it was reborn as one of the country's most beloved tourist lines. Its fleet of working steam locomotives and vintage cars, among the largest anywhere, keeps Pennsylvania's rail heritage alive and in motion.

Norwich Township, MI

This marker recalls Stratford, a vanished logging village in Missaukee County during Michigan's great lumber era. Towns like Stratford sprang up around sawmills and rail spurs as crews cut the state's vast white-pine forests, then faded once the timber ran out. Little remains today but the name and the memory of a once-busy community.

Stratton, TX

Established before the Civil War as the hub of a large farming district, Stratton took its name from John Stratton, a Cuero saddler with land interests nearby. At its height it had a post office (1887–1905), general store, school, cotton gin, drugstore, and blacksmith shops, and in 1914 the Primitive Baptist congregation relocated there. Pioneer settlers and two Civil War veterans rest in the community's Alexander Cemetery.

Philadelphia, PA

This marker recalls two grand Philadelphia buildings that once stood on this ground before fire swept them away. The Harrison Stratton Mansion belonged to the era when the city's prosperous families raised stately residences reflecting the wealth of a booming industrial metropolis, while the Sunderland was one of the early apartment buildings that reshaped how urban Americans lived as cities densified around the turn of the twentieth century. Their loss to fire was a common fate in an age when timber framing, coal heat, and open flame made conflagration a constant threat to city blocks.

Waco, TX

In 1922 partners Golladay Stratton, Sr. and Henry J. Stricker bought this Waco lot for their growing furniture company, and the following year architect Henry L. Spencer designed a five-story neoclassical revival building of red brick over riveted steel. That sturdy frame carried it through the devastating 1953 tornado, and inside it kept a grand staircase, pressed-tin ceilings, and a winged mezzanine. Stratton's three sons ran the business here until the 1980s.

New York, NY

Tucked into Central Park just across from the Dakota apartments, this teardrop-shaped garden honors John Lennon, the Beatle and peace activist who was shot outside that building in December 1980. Yoko Ono funded the landscaped 'Garden of Peace,' dedicated in 1985 and named for the Beatles song 'Strawberry Fields Forever,' and nations around the world contributed to its planting. At its heart lies the black-and-white 'Imagine' mosaic, a gift from the city of Naples, where visitors still leave flowers and gather each year on the anniversary of Lennon's death.

Strawn, TX

When Strawn incorporated in 1917, this stretch of Palo Pinto County was riding a fossil-fuel boom—oil, gas, and coal all pulling workers into North Texas—and by 1920 the town's population had swelled to around 5,000. Flush with confidence, the young city issued bonds in 1921 for a proper seat of government, and in 1923 it got one: a handsome, classically inspired hall by Abilene architect David S. Castle. Its cast-stone quoins, arched entry, and decorative brick cornice gave a rough-and-tumble boomtown a touch of civic dignity that still stands today.

Calvert, TX

Jeweler Herman Stricker and his wife Katy—daughter of Confederate General William H. Hamman—built this Victorian house in 1900 and stood among Calvert's business, civic, and social leaders. Katy Stricker helped lead the drive to erect a women's meeting house, now the Calvert Library. In 1913 banker H. Marvin Sneed and his wife Cara bought the home, which passed through their heirs before its sale in 1970.

Waxahachie, TX

This turreted Victorian in Waxahachie began in 1888 as a widow's cottage and was rebuilt around it in 1897 for J.F. Strickland, a cofounder of Texas Power and Light and a builder of the interurban electric rail lines that once knit North Texas towns together. A druggist, J.W. Sawyer, bought the home in 1914, and his family lived here into the mid-1940s. Its three-story turret hides the interior staircase, a flourish typical of the confident cotton-boom architecture of the era.

Hitchcock, TX

In 1883, horticulturist Henry Martyn Stringfellow established an experimental garden and orchard here on the Texas coastal plain. His 1890 treatise on innovative organic growing methods drew a wide following among fruit and vegetable growers in Japan, Germany, and the United States. Silver medals at two world's fairs and further publications cemented his standing as one of his era's leading experimental horticulturists.

Freeport, TX

Robert Edward Lee Stringfellow started on a Brazoria County cattle ranch at fourteen and soon had a herd of his own, opening a Velasco meat market in 1890 that fed the crews building jetties at the mouth of the Brazos. His holdings grew to 20,000 acres and he became an early investor in the new town of Freeport. After a 1932 hurricane injured him, his wife Nannie ran the ranch and the family's Freeport interests for decades more.

McMullen County, TX

On September 28, 1870, the Thomas Stringfield family was overtaken in their wagon by raiders striking north from Mexico. Thomas and his wife Sarah Jane were killed, as was young Adolphus, while four-year-old Thomas vanished without a trace. Eight-year-old Ida Alice fought her captors, was speared and trampled and left for dead — yet she survived, rescued and living on until 1937.

San Marcos, TX

John Drayton Pitts, a civil engineer and Georgia legislator, visited Texas in 1842 and later bought 640 acres near San Marcos from General Edward Burleson, land the general had gained after the Battle of San Jacinto. The colony Pitts founded in 1847 drew family and friends who built farmhouses strung at half-mile intervals along the Austin–San Antonio Road, earning the settlement the name Stringtown. Its "model farms" survived early drought, and after emancipation crops were shared with former slaves given land, while Mexican farmers arrived to work the fields and enrich the area's culture.

Newton vicinity, TX

Built in 1908, this one-room wood-frame schoolhouse served the Stringtown community for nearly 40 years, funded when resident Joe S. Griggs hired John Pepper to construct it out of his own pocket. A small addition once housed the teacher overnight, and until 1940 the building doubled as a Primitive Baptist meeting place. After Stringtown consolidated with Newton schools in 1943, the schoolhouse became a gathering spot for community reunions.

Crockett, TX

This log cabin was raised in the 1850s on the Jeremiah Strode League, most likely by his son-in-law B. R. Wallace, a Texas legislator, or by a Wallace cousin. Over the years later additions swallowed the original structure until, by 1950, no trace of the logs was visible and the building served merely as hay storage. Rediscovered in 1973, the cabin was donated, moved, and restored as part of the American Bicentennial and Houston County's birthday celebrations.

Henderson, TX

Set in the rolling farmland of East Texas, this burial ground grew out of the family and community of John Strong, a Georgia-born pioneer who helped lead the nearby Church Hill settlement in the decades before the Civil War. The earliest graves date to the early 1850s, and in 1877 Strong's widow Mary formally set aside three acres for a cemetery. Tellingly, its north section was first used to bury enslaved people, a quiet record of the plantation-era society that shaped the region.

Strongsville, OH

Strongsville sits in Ohio's Western Reserve, the tract of northeastern Ohio that Connecticut sold off to settlers pushing west in the early 1800s. The Historical Village gathers a cluster of preserved period buildings — the kind of early meetinghouse, school, and homestead that a young farming township left behind — into one open-air site tended by the local historical society. Walking it is a way to see how a Western Reserve community assembled itself out of timber, faith, and hard winters.

Tolar, TX

The Stroud Creek community grew up in western Hood County during the late 1870s and early 1880s, drawn by land grants, a nearby stagecoach line, and the end of Native American raids that had long deterred settlement. Burials began on Benjamin Irby's land in 1883 and the ground later served the town of Tolar, gathering community leaders, merchants, educators, farmers, and veterans beneath curbed plots, fraternal emblems, and upright stones.

Devine, TX

In 1903 Joe Stroud arrived in Devine from nearby Bigfoot and set up a blacksmith shop, plying the trade he had learned from his father. He earned a wide reputation across the Southwest for his branding irons and his skill as a farrier, and he kept working the forge until shortly before his death in 1966. Remarkably, the craft carried on at the same anvil under a later member of the Stroud family.

Oakland, TX

Built around 1875, this house is an example of the early Texas open-hall or breezeway style, with a central passage designed to catch the breeze in the days before mechanical cooling. It was the home of John Monroe Woolsey while he served in the 20th Legislature representing Colorado County. The dogtrot form ties it to the practical building traditions settlers carried into the state.

Abernathy, TX

Fritz W. Struve arrived in the young town of Abernathy in 1912, just three years after its founding, and opened a grocery; his brother Ben joined him in 1918. Over the following decades the Struves ran an interlocking web of enterprises—grocery, hardware, implements, dry goods, a tin shop, and a cheese factory that turned out some 1,800 pounds a day, an unusual venture for the region. Fritz also served as Abernathy's first mayor, elected in 1924.

Marble Falls, TX

Amand von Struve came to Texas in 1848 with his father, a former Imperial Russian officer, and set about building a vast ranch that eventually spread over 8,000 acres of horses, cattle, and sheep. In 1869 he added this stone spring house and kitchen to his wooden dwelling, its thick walls meant to guard food and water from raids and wild animals alike. He married in 1871 and raised eight children; long after the main house was razed, this stone annex was restored to survive.

Austin, TX

After 23 years leading Live Oak Female Seminary, educator Rebecca K. Stuart Red founded her own school here in 1875, opening the Stuart Female Seminary in a two-story stone building in early 1876 with a distinguished board that included Ashbel Smith. Her daughter 'Miss Lel' Red carried on after Rebecca's death in 1886, running the school until 1899, when the family deeded the site to the Presbyterian Synod of Texas. In 1902 it became the birthplace of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Concord, NH

Raised between 1816 and 1819 from granite quarried right in Concord, New Hampshire's State House rose in the first decades of the young republic. Its original chambers, occupied in 1819, still house the state legislature today. That unbroken use makes it the oldest state capitol in the nation where lawmakers meet in their original rooms.

Berwick, PA · est. 2015

During World War II, more than nine thousand workers at Berwick's American Car & Foundry plant built over 15,000 Stuart tanks for American and Allied forces. Light, fast, and nimble, the Stuart was the first U.S. tank produced on a moving assembly line and saw combat on battlefronts around the globe. A.C.F. grew into the nation's largest maker of armor plate, with its own ballistics testing range.

Liberty Hill, TX

Raised in 1871 from hand-cut native limestone, this is perhaps the oldest surviving building in Liberty Hill. It was built by S.P. Stubblefield, an Alabama native and Mexican War veteran, and stayed in his family until 1907, its ground floor holding shops and its upper floor serving as living quarters. Sculptor Mel Fowler bought and restored the structure in 1973.

Kennard, TX

Civil War veteran Wyatt M. Stubblefield bought land here in 1872, and the community took his name. Around the same time the New Ivie Missionary Baptist Church—rooted in the older Ivie Board congregation—began meeting in the local schoolhouse before building its own sanctuary, which twice burned before a third rose in 1926. Through Depression-era hardship, members grew cotton and saved butter-and-egg money to fund their preacher and missions, and though regular services ended in the 1950s, descendants still gather each May for the Stubblefield homecoming.

East Berlin, PA · est. 1970

Built around 1790 by David Studebaker—a carpenter, farmer, and minister—this early Pennsylvania home stands connected to one of America's great manufacturing dynasties. The Studebaker family to which he was related would go on to build the wagons that carried settlers west and, later, automobiles. Today the house is privately kept as a museum.

Sturbridge, MA

Six years after Appomattox, the town of Sturbridge joined a wave of New England communities in raising a permanent monument to its Civil War soldiers. Memorials like this one, dedicated in 1871, went up on greens and in cemeteries across the North as the generation that had lived through the war sought to honor its dead and fix their sacrifice in the town's collective memory. That the monument was formally rededicated in 2002 shows how a small community kept faith with that memory across three centuries, tending and renewing the marker long after the last veteran had passed.

Rockland, TX

When brothers John and William Sturrock left Scotland in 1830 with their siblings, they carried old-country burial customs to the banks of the Neches River in East Texas. William built a mill complex—gristmill, sawmill, and cotton gin—and set aside land for the family cemetery, where his first wife Cynthia was laid to rest in 1853, the earliest documented grave. Distinctive Scottish house tombs and false crypts mark generations of Sturrocks and their neighbors, among them children, Civil War and World War I veterans, and an enslaved man who died in 1864. Descendants still maintain the graves in their traditional east-west alignment.

Hallettsville, TX

Sublime Baptist Church traces its worship to 1853 at a spot called "tick hill" near Geiger Cemetery, where a traveling circuit rider preached whenever he could reach the area and lodged with deacon J.R. Brooks. The congregation formally organized in 1878, and in 1887 town founder Robert Miller donated land for a frame church raised by 1905. Summer brush-arbor and tent revivals gave way to a new auditorium in 1954, and the buildings still host reunions, weddings, and community gatherings.

Anne Arundel County, MD

This monument marks one hundred years of the United States Navy's submarine service, a force that began at the dawn of the twentieth century when the Navy acquired its first commissioned submarine and grew into one of the most demanding and secretive branches of American sea power. From primitive early boats to the nuclear fleet of the Cold War and after, submariners have carried out their duty largely unseen, enduring cramped quarters, crushing depths, and long silent patrols. Standing in Maryland near the heart of Navy tradition, the memorial deliberately widens its dedication beyond the sailors themselves to the families who wait ashore and the support personnel who keep the boats at sea.

Gibsonburg, OH

This memorial in Gibsonburg honors the men and women of the U.S. Navy's "Silent Service" — the submariners whose work unfolds unseen beneath the waves. It takes its name from the USS Toledo (SSN-769), a nuclear-powered Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine named for the nearby Ohio city and commissioned in the mid-1990s. Boats like the Toledo carried on a demanding tradition of undersea patrol that stretches back through both World Wars and the long decades of the Cold War, when American submarines became some of the Navy's most vital and secretive assets.

Georgetown, OH

Before Ulysses S. Grant commanded armies, he was a schoolboy in Georgetown, Ohio, where his parents paid two dollars for a thirteen-week term at a subscription school built in the early 1820s. In an era before free public education, families literally bought their children's lessons by the term. These modest, fee-supported schoolrooms were how a young frontier republic taught its next generation.

Rocksprings, TX

When a severe drought and poisonous plants ravaged Edwards Plateau flocks in 1914, ranchers and the new Texas Sheep and Goat Raisers Association pushed for a scientific solution. The Texas Legislature funded Substation No. 14 under Texas A&M, and local citizens raised money to buy more than 3,400 acres between Rocksprings and Sonora. Opening in 1916, the station tackled everything from plant research and animal vaccines to range conservation and prescribed fire.

London, KY

Opened in 1897 and named for a Madison County promoter, the Sue Bennett Memorial School was founded by local people and the Methodist church to educate the children of the Kentucky mountains. It taught all grades and evolved through a commercial department, a normal school, and by 1922 a junior college. Over a full century it educated more than 11,000 students before closing in 1997.

Midway, KY

After John Hunt Morgan's death in September 1864, Jerome Clarke—notorious under the name 'Sue Mundy'—formed his own guerrilla band and raided Midway that November, killing a resident named Adam Harper. Union forces executed four Confederate prisoners in reprisal. In February 1865, Clarke returned alongside the infamous William Quantrill, burning the depot and stealing fifteen horses, a reminder that Kentucky's guerrilla war raged on to the conflict's very end.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 1969

This Federal-era house, built around 1807, later served as the home of Dr. Jacob Suesserott, a well-regarded physician and surgeon. Its place in history was sealed on July 30, 1864, when Confederate cavalry under orders to extract a ransom set fire to Chambersburg; the flames that consumed much of the town were halted at this point. The burning of Chambersburg remains the only major Northern town destroyed by Confederate forces during the Civil War.

City of Glen Cove, NY

Near this spot lived Helen Sherman Pratt and Florence Gibb Pratt, sisters-in-law who worked for women's right to vote around 1917. Their advocacy came during the final, decisive push of the American suffrage movement, only a few years before the Nineteenth Amendment secured women the ballot in 1920. Well-connected Long Island families like the Pratts lent significant resources and standing to the cause.

Beckville, TX

Settlement here reaches back to Elijah Wyatt, who came to Texas in 1838 and is thought to lie in this ground, though the earliest marked grave belongs to a man who died in 1861. Set aside alongside a meeting house in the 1850s, the plot grew into a community cemetery holding scores of marked and unmarked graves. Its rows include veterans of both the Civil War and World War II, spanning a century of local life.

Salt Lake City, UT

The Sugar House district takes its name from an ambitious early Mormon effort to manufacture sugar from locally grown beets, one of the pioneer community's many attempts to become self-sufficient in an isolated desert valley. The machinery, hauled across the plains at great cost, never produced refined sugar as hoped, but the enterprise gave the neighborhood its lasting identity. This monument honors the boldness of that venture and the settlers who attempted it.

New York, NY

This preserved window comes from the Sugar House, a five-story sugar-refining warehouse built in 1763 near Duane and Rose Streets in lower Manhattan. During the Revolutionary War, British forces turned New York's sugar houses into overcrowded prisons where captured American patriots suffered terribly. Mounted as a relic, the window survives as a tangible fragment of that grim episode.

Sugar Land, TX

Founded in 1853 and named for the sugar mill and plantation that B. F. Terry and W. J. Kyle bought with fortunes made in the California Gold Rush, Sugar Land grew into the home of Texas's only cane sugar refinery. Its founders raised Terry's Texas Rangers, one of the Confederacy's famed cavalry units, at the start of the Civil War. In later years the surrounding land became known for its prison farms.

Sugar Land, TX

Built in 1917 and designed in the Mission Revival style by Imperial Sugar Company engineer M. R. Wood, this auditorium anchored a crescent-shaped, eleven-building school complex and is the oldest public building still in use in Sugar Land. Over the decades it hosted films, stage shows, rooftop socials, and graduations, and once held the school superintendent's office and a janitor's apartment. It became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1992.

Sugar Land, TX

Methodist worship began informally in Sugar Land around 1910, and in 1918 the Imperial Sugar Company donated Church Park so the town's Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Catholic congregations could each build a house of worship. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was formally organized here in 1919, its first frame sanctuary graced by a stained-glass "Jesus Praying in the Garden" window that has been carried into every sanctuary since. As membership grew, the congregation moved and rebuilt across the decades, culminating in a 936-seat brick sanctuary in 1999. The church's long life mirrors the growth of a sugar company town into a modern Houston-area city.

Sugar Land, TX

A public school opened as early as 1912 for families drawn to the company town of Sugar Land, and in 1918 the State Legislature chartered Sugar Land Independent School District No. 17—notably requiring that at least two of its seven board members be women. Mary Anna Collins Woods became the first superintendent, and company engineer M.R. Wood designed the school and led the board. In 1959 the district merged with Missouri City and Stafford to form the Fort Bend ISD.

Sugarloaf Township, PA · est. 1947

In the autumn of 1780 a party of Native warriors and Loyalist Tories, turned back from an attempt on Fort Augusta, fell upon a detachment of Northumberland County militia near here. The surprise attack on September 11 left the small company overwhelmed, one of many such bloody clashes that made the Pennsylvania frontier a war zone long after the fighting had shifted elsewhere.