Search Markers

Greensboro, GA

George Foster Pierce, born near Greensboro in 1811, followed his father into the Methodist ministry and became one of the South's most celebrated pulpit orators—by tradition preaching some ten thousand times. He served as the first president of Wesleyan College and later president of Emory, and in 1845 he helped organize the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, after the denomination split over slavery. Elected bishop in 1854, he shared his people's Civil War hardships until his death in 1884.

West Mead Township, PA

James Mills Thoburn belonged to the great nineteenth-century wave of American Methodist missionaries who fanned out across the globe, and few traveled farther or stayed longer than he did. From 1859 he spent nearly half a century in India, South Asia, and the Philippines, an era when Western churches poured people and money into overseas missions that founded schools, presses, and congregations abroad. When his working life ended in 1908 he came home to the quiet college town of Meadville, in the hills of northwestern Pennsylvania, where he lived out his final years until his death in 1922. He rests nearby in Greendale Cemetery.

Lebanon, KY

John Lancaster Spalding was born in this Marion County community in 1840 and rose to become one of the most influential Catholic thinkers of 19th-century America. A precocious scholar who finished college at sixteen and was ordained in Belgium, he served in Louisville before being named the first Bishop of Peoria in 1877. He is remembered above all as a champion of Catholic higher education and a founder of the movement that led to The Catholic University of America.

Laredo, TX

Born in Catalonia and educated in the United States, Peter Verdaguer was ordained in San Francisco in 1862 and served Catholic Indian missions in California before being named to lead the Vicariate of Brownsville. Consecrated a bishop in Barcelona in 1890, he settled in Laredo in 1891 to shepherd some 42,500 Catholics amid deep poverty and the great drought of the 1890s. Traveling by horseback across South Texas to baptize, marry, and confirm ranch families, he oversaw new churches and schools until his death, by which time the flock had grown to 82,000.

Huntsville, TX

When federal support for Black education dried up after Reconstruction, African-American churches stepped in—and in 1883 leaders of the AME Church, backed by prominent Black citizens including Sam Houston's former slave Joshua Houston, opened Bishop Ward Normal and Collegiate Institute in Huntsville. Housed in a two-story brick building, it taught a classical curriculum of Latin, Greek, and mathematics alongside domestic and manual arts, drawing 164 students within a year. Though short-lived, the school left a deep mark on the community.

Amarillo, TX

Cattleman Lee Bivins built this classically styled brick-and-stone town house in 1905 at the height of his Panhandle ranching empire. Beyond his vast cattle interests, Bivins helped open the region's oil and gas fields and served as mayor of Amarillo until his death in 1929. His widow, Mary Elizabeth Gilbert Bivins, later gave the home to the city.

Saint Louis County, MO

The line "On Fame's eternal camping ground their silent tents are spread" comes from "The Bivouac of the Dead," a poem carved on memorial gates in national cemeteries across the country. Standing amid the military burial grounds of the St. Louis area, it turns a soldier's final resting place into a permanent encampment of honor.

New York, NY

On September 12, 1924, the young cornetist Leon 'Bix' Beiderbecke made his New York debut with the Wolverine Orchestra at the Cinderella Dance Palace, then housed in this building. In a jazz age dominated by showmanship, Beiderbecke's lyrical, inventive playing set him apart, and he went on to star with the celebrated Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman orchestras. His brilliant, brief career ended with his death at just twenty-eight.

New York, NY · est. 2003

Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke, the pioneering jazz cornetist and composer born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1903, died at this Sunnyside, Queens, address in 1931 at just 28. In his short life he became one of the most admired and imitated horn players of the Jazz Age, celebrated for his lyrical, bell-clear tone. He was, as the marker puts it, "the original young man with a horn."

Monterey County, CA

This marker commemorates the designation of Route One through Monterey County — from the Carmel River south to the county line — as California's first officially recognized scenic highway. Winding along dramatic Big Sur cliffs and spanning the iconic Bixby Creek Bridge, this stretch of coast road was deliberately preserved for its beauty by county and state action. It set a precedent for protecting scenic corridors as public treasures.

Oxford Township, OH · est. 2001

Spanning Four Mile Creek in Butler County, the Black (Pugh's Mill) Covered Bridge was raised in 1868–69 by master builders who joined two different truss systems—Childs and Long—inside one roof, a rare engineering marriage. Originally a single arched span of more than 200 feet, it was cleverly re-engineered the next year by slackening iron rods to lower the deck onto a new central pier, splitting one span into two. It remains among the longest and most ambitious of Ohio's surviving covered bridges.

Peters Township, PA · est. 2013

In 1765, on the frontier west of here, a band of settlers known as "The Black Boys"—led by James Smith—clashed with British troops from Fort Loudon over the reopening of trade with Native peoples. Still raw from recent frontier attacks, the settlers disguised themselves and repeatedly disrupted British supply trains bound for the western forts; in one skirmish colonist James Brown was wounded. Many consider this defiance the first armed resistance to British authority in the colonies.

Albany, TX

This pioneer burial ground near old Fort Griffin holds more than a dozen graves of African Americans who lived and worked on the West Texas frontier. Two surviving markers name Elijah Earls, a barber the Fort Griffin Echo called a "tonsorial artist," and Marriah McKay Williams (1781–1891), who came to Texas as a free Black woman before the Civil War. When the fort disbanded, many African Americans stayed to homestead, ranch, and farm the surrounding land.

Hooks, TX

This towering black cherry once stood as the largest of its kind in Texas, so recognized in 1965. In the region's early days such trees were prized for their fine lumber and shingles, and settlers turned the bark to medicinal use. The marker honors a natural landmark that served the practical needs of an earlier frontier community.

Bryan, TX

In 1885 the City of Bryan bought seven lots here for the "Bryan Public School for Colored," the first educational institution for Black children in Brazos County, opened under the 1876 Texas constitution's "separate but equal" mandate. Its first principal, A. H. Colwell, later became a prominent Black Republican and a Texas presidential elector, and its early teachers included Lenora Green, a classmate of W. E. B. Du Bois. The school rebuilt in brick after an 1914 fire, became Washington Elementary in 1930, and after a 1971 fire its students were integrated into the Bryan schools.

Anahuac, TX

When the 1869 Texas Constitution called for public schools open to Black and white children, the Freedmen's Bureau helped build a one-room schoolhouse for African Americans at Wallisville, one of the county's first. Over the following decades Black schools spread to Double Bayou, Turtle Bayou, and other communities, their sessions lasting only as long as families could pay a teacher, and children in Anahuac attended classes at St. James Methodist Church. Segregated high schools like George Washington Carver served older students until desegregation was completed in 1966.

Orange, TX

African American education in Orange County began in the 1870s in private homes and churches, then took root in schoolhouses like Duncan Woods No. 3 and the Orange Colored School after the county organized its districts in 1887. Under a succession of dedicated teachers and principals, the city school grew into Moton Elementary and High School, renamed for Tuskegee's Robert Russa Moton and later for local educator Emma Henderson Wallace, and celebrated for its campus, sports, and band. The system served hundreds of students and kept building new facilities right up to integration in 1966.

Orange, TX

As early as the 1870s, Orange County's Black families held school in churches and private homes, and by 1887 dedicated schools appeared in the Duncan Woods community and in Orange itself. The Orange Colored School was later renamed to honor educator Robert Russa Moton and again for longtime principal Emma H. Wallace. By 1960 the community supported additional schools including Franklin Elementary and North Junior High.

Seguin, TX

In 1871, in the hopeful early years of Reconstruction, Seguin's Second Baptist Church sponsored the first public school for Black children in the town, and two ministers — Leonard Ilsley and William Baton Ball — saw a frame schoolhouse raised on this site and named it the Abraham Lincoln School, with Ball as its first principal. It joined the public system in 1892 and was renamed Ball High School in 1925, serving Seguin's Black community until integration in 1966. Its long life traces the whole arc from freedom to full inclusion.

Marathon, TX

Established in 1948 in the rugged Big Bend country near the Sierra del Carmen, the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area covers roughly 100,000 acres of arid Southwest terrain owned by the people of Texas. State wildlife officials used it as a living laboratory to manage mule deer, javelina, pronghorn, and quail, and to work toward restoring bighorn sheep that had nearly vanished from Texas by the 1960s. Water impoundments, scientific land-use practices, and public education programs made it a model of mid-century conservation.

York, PA · est. 1949

When York was surveyed and laid out in 1741 under the proprietorship of William Penn's sons, Baltzer Spengler was rewarded for his work on the town plan with this very lot. In time an old tavern rose on the spot, one of the gathering places that gave the young town its social and civic life. Taverns like this were the crossroads of colonial Pennsylvania, where travelers rested and townsfolk traded news.

Caldwell, TX

Sponsored by the nearby Liberty Baptist Church, this congregation organized in May 1885 with seventeen charter members and called James G. Cooper as its first pastor. Members met in the community schoolhouse until a sanctuary was built here in 1894, and a Sunday School began in 1909. Though its membership disbanded during World War II and again in the late 1960s, the church remains part of Burleson County's religious heritage.

Murchison, TX

Settlers were drawn to the Black Jack community of eastern Henderson County by its rich soil, water, and timber beginning in the mid-1800s, and this burial ground has served the area ever since. Pioneer William A. Burns donated land for a church, school, and the cemetery already in use, whose earliest dated grave belongs to Susan Adelaide Page in 1869. Farmers, teachers, Confederate veterans, and community leaders lie here beneath grave slabs, Woodmen of the World markers, and iron fencing still tended by their descendants.

Walker County, TX

Settlement of this part of Walker County began in the 1830s, and Black Jack Methodist Church was organized in 1871, moving to this site in 1886 on land donated by Sophronia Jane Warren. A cemetery opened here in 1887, and the building doubled as the community's school until 1916. Regular services ended during the Great Depression, leaving the church and its graves as the settlement's memorial.

La Grange, TX

By 1840, Anglo and German families had settled near the headwaters of Black Jack Branch, and when pioneer Charles Luck buried his brother-in-law Thomas Oeding in 1867, this graveyard was born. Among its early burials is Wil Loessin, who with his three brothers volunteered as U.S. cavalrymen during the Civil War and died of illness after being held as a prisoner of war at Camp Groce. Adjoining Trinitatis Lutheran Church rose in 1871, and the cemetery gathered homesteaders, craftsmen, and the renowned German-Texas poet Johannes Romberg.

Sulphur Springs, TX

Named for the black oaks around it, this Northeast Texas community took root in the 1850s among families holding government land grants, and by 1854 had a post office and a log building that served as both church and school. In 1856 elders organized a Baptist congregation of eight charter members, which grew alongside the community's gin, sawmill, and store, replacing its log meeting house with a frame sanctuary in 1909.

Oakland, CA

On August 1, 1967, a traffic signal went up in Oakland, California — not by ordinary city routine, but as the result of a community campaign led by the Black Panther Party. Founded in Oakland the year before, the Panthers paired their national profile with local organizing on issues as concrete as a dangerous intersection. The stoplight became a small, tangible monument to grassroots power.

Boise, ID

As tensions over slavery pushed emigrants west in the 1840s and 1850s, laws in the Oregon Country sought to bar both enslaved people and free Black settlers — yet a determined few came anyway. Among them was Elvina Moulton, who walked the trail and settled in Boise in the 1860s, declaring she would walk no farther. She built a life taking in laundry and became a charter member of the city's First Presbyterian Church.

Oran, TX

Founded before the Civil War around a reliable spring, Black Springs grew into the leading town of Palo Pinto County on the strength of the North Texas cattle country around it. Its story brushes against legends of the range — trail drivers Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight and the frontier veteran J. J. "Jack" Cureton all figure in the area's early days. Renamed Oran in 1886 to honor Governor Oran M. Roberts, the town supported stores, churches, a school, and a railroad before fading in the 1930s and 1940s.

Oran, TX

Established for the pioneers of the Keechi Valley and the settlement of Black Springs, this burial ground holds the earliest marked grave of Mary A. Lasater (1841–1871). The land was given by Silas Adam Sheek, stepfather of the great Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight, and among those buried here is Goodnight's mother, Charlotte Sheek, alongside Civil War veterans and early community leaders. It was renamed Oran Cemetery when the town took its new name in 1886.

Durham, NC

In the early twentieth century, Durham's Parrish Street earned a national nickname: Black Wall Street. Along it clustered African American enterprises including the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, led by John Merrick, Dr. Aaron Moore, and C. C. Spaulding, and the Mechanics and Farmers Bank, led by R. B. Fitzgerald and W. G. Pearson. Together they made Durham a byword for Black entrepreneurship.

Bertram, TX

In 1851 William Black raised a cedar-log stockade on his own land as a refuge against Indian raids, where guns and ammunition were stored for public use and sentries kept watch on moonlit nights. The fort served the scattered frontier settlers until it was abandoned in 1868.

Abbeville, LA

This Abbeville building dates to around 1890, the Gilded-Age decades when south Louisiana's small towns were knitting themselves together with brick storefronts and a growing commercial life along the bayous. Its listing on the National Register of Historic Places recognizes the survival of that era's everyday architecture. In time the structure became home to a seafood restaurant and oyster bar, part of the Gulf Coast's deep culinary tradition.

Plantersville vicinity, TX

Settled by families from the Lower South along John's Creek, Blackberry had become a largely African American community by the late nineteenth century. Residents raised livestock, cotton, and corn, and at its height the settlement supported a cotton gin, grist mill, and stores. Macedonia Baptist Church, dating from 1870, anchored the community and doubled as the local African American school. Though population has thinned since the Great Depression, descendants still return each year for the church's homecoming.

Killeen, TX

This small cemetery is the last remnant of the Blackburn family estate, land that now lies within Fort Hood. John Porter Blackburn, a veteran of the War of 1812, moved his family from Tennessee to Bell County in 1853 and was the first buried here after his death in 1855. His sons and descendants served in conflicts from the Civil War through World War II, the last laid to rest in 2001.

Fate, TX

In 1882 William and Cassandra Harvey gave land to the Blackland farming community for a school, church, and cemetery, which absorbed the older Bost family plot and its 1879 graves. The burial ground holds veterans reaching back to the Civil War, along with fraternal emblems, a zinc obelisk, and weathered upright stones. Today it stands as one of the few tangible reminders of the vanished Blackland settlement.

Temple, TX

Authorized by the Texas Legislature in 1909 and opened in 1911, this experiment station near Temple was part of a national system of federally supported research farms created by the 1887 Hatch Act. Staffed by Texas A&M scientists, it tackled the region's soil and crop problems—especially the dreaded cotton root rot—from a site poised between the Grand Prairie's hills and the rich Blackland soils. As farming mechanized it expanded, drew in USDA scientists, and evolved into today's Blackland Research and Extension Center.

Austin, TX

Opened in 1891 in the community then called Gregory Town, this school provided free public education to African-American children under a succession of names — School No. 3, Gregory Town School, Gregory School — before being renamed in 1936 for Edward L. Blackshear, a teacher and principal who left Austin in 1895 to head Prairie View College. A school library arrived in 1934, and facilities expanded as enrollment grew. The school now serves an ethnically diverse student body from pre-K through sixth grade.

Fort Worth, TX

When it rose in 1929, the Blackstone Hotel gave Fort Worth its first Art Deco skyscraper, built for cattleman C. A. "Gus" O'Keefe, who named it after a Chicago hotel he admired. The St. Louis firm Mauran, Russell & Crowell dressed it in irregular setbacks and ornamental terra cotta, and the city's first radio station, WBAP, once broadcast from its 22nd floor. The Hilton chain ran the hotel in the 1950s and added an annex, but the Blackstone remains Fort Worth's tallest pre-World War II building.

Sussex County, DE

Many early settlers of this corner of what was then Maryland were Presbyterians who had fled religious persecution, long forced to travel great distances to worship. In 1763 the charismatic Reverend Charles Tennent — son of William Tennent, whose Log College seeded Princeton — organized a congregation here, and the church was built in 1767. Services faded by the late 19th century, and the congregation was formally dissolved in 1921.

Canton, TX

Reputed to be the oldest house in Canton, this residence was built in 1886 for Henry F. Blackwell II — an early merchant who also served as county sheriff — and his wife Nannie Jane, who raised eight children here. Altered and expanded over the decades, it stayed in Blackwell hands until 1975 and was given to the city by the family's descendants in 1988. It survives as a rare link to the town's earliest days.

Marfa, TX

From 1889, children of Mexican descent in Marfa were schooled apart from their Anglo peers, first in a former Methodist church and later in this thick-walled adobe building named for principal Jesse Blackwell. Generations of Hispanic students learned here under an English-only rule so strict that Spanish words were symbolically 'buried' in a mock funeral. The school closed in 1965 when Marfa's schools integrated, and preservationists have since worked to save it.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1949

This site held the home of General Ephraim Blaine, who as Commissary General kept the Continental Army fed through some of the Revolution's hardest campaigns — a thankless logistical task on which victory quietly depended. Years later, in October 1794, Blaine hosted President George Washington for a week here while Washington gathered a militia army at Carlisle to march against the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. It is a rare double witness to the war for independence and the young republic's first great test of federal authority.

Esmeralda County, NV

When the Pittsburgh-Silver Peak Gold Mining Company bought up the major mines in 1906 and found land speculators had cornered nearby Silver Peak, it simply surveyed its own townsite to the north and named it Blair. The company built a 100-stamp mill in 1907 and ran a 17½-mile railroad from Blair Junction to the Tonopah & Goldfield main line. Yet the boom was brief: by 1920 Blair was all but deserted, leaving stone-building remnants and mill foundations as its only survivors.

Hollidaysburg, PA · est. 1982

Formed in 1846 and named for the prominent citizen John Blair, this county sits in the Allegheny highlands with Hollidaysburg as its seat. Its fortunes were transformed by the coming of the railroad: the city of Altoona, founded in 1849, grew into one of the great railroad centers of America. There the Pennsylvania Railroad built vast shops that employed generations of workers.

Allegheny Township, PA · est. 1947

Thomas Blair built his stone house here in 1785, in the years just after the Revolution when settlers were pressing into the ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania. The homestead passed to his son John Blair, who became a leading citizen of the area. When a new county was carved out in 1846, it was named Blair in the family's honor.

Coleman, TX

Georgia native J. T. Blair came to Coleman County in 1897, married into a pioneer local family, and made his living as foreman of the Overall Ranch while running his own spread. In 1914 he built this Classical Revival house in town—designed by architect J. P. Caldwell—so his five children could attend Coleman's schools. The Blair family kept the home for sixty years.

May, TX

As settlers poured into Brown County in the late 1800s, the Hog Valley community formed and organized a Baptist church by 1894, holding services in the schoolhouse until permanent churches were built. When a post office opened, its postmaster asked that it be named Blake in honor of his son, and the whole community gradually took that name. The first burial in Blake Cemetery came in 1901, and the grounds—filled with everything from marble monuments to hand-welded steel crosses marking once-unmarked graves—still receive the care of a cemetery association determined to preserve local memory.

Grand Ledge, MI

In the 1880s, small Michigan towns like Grand Ledge built their own halls of entertainment, and this brick building on the Grand River began life in 1884 as a roller skating rink before Peter Blake bought it and reopened it in 1886 as Blake's Opera House. For decades it was the town's cultural heart, where locals crowded in for talent shows, vaudeville acts, traveling silent-movie programs, and even athletic contests. Buildings like this doubled as theater, cinema, and gymnasium in an era when a single hall had to serve every civic need.

Kyle, TX

Built of limestone and hand-split cypress in 1865 by Ezekiel Nance, this modest chapel did double duty on the Hays County frontier, serving the community as both a house of worship and a schoolhouse into the 1880s. Small rural buildings like this often carried every civic function a young settlement could muster.

Johnson City, TX

Blanco County was carved from the neighboring counties of Burnet, Hays, Gillespie, and Comal, created and organized in the spring of 1858 in the Texas Hill Country. It took its name from the Blanco River that winds through the region. Blanco City served as county seat until 1890, when the honor passed to Johnson City, where it remains.

Johnson City, TX

Built in 1916 to a design by San Antonio architect Henry T. Phelps, the Blanco County Courthouse was the first permanent courthouse raised after the county seat moved from Blanco to Johnson City in 1890. Its Classical Revival limestone form, with Doric columns and a domed cupola, was contracted by stonemason James Waterston, a Scottish immigrant who had helped build the Texas Capitol. The building anchored the small Hill Country seat that would later become known as Lyndon Johnson's hometown.

Johnson City, TX

From this Blanco County headquarters in the 1870s, brothers J. T. and Sam Ealy Johnson launched thousands of cattle up the trails to Kansas railheads, gathering and processing herds at pens on Williamson's and Deer creeks. Theirs was the largest trail-driving outfit across Blanco and six neighboring counties, sending north herds of 2,500 to 3,000 head each season. Younger brother Sam Ealy Johnson would become grandfather to President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Blanco, TX

Chartered in 1883, Blanco High School opened its white limestone schoolhouse to students in October 1884, blending a shorter public term with a longer private one. Over the decades it grew through consolidation and new buildings, always serving the ranching country of the Texas Hill Country. A Texas Historic Landmark since 1984, it marks generations of rural education.

Blanco, TX

Organized in 1854 by a Methodist circuit rider, this Hill Country congregation worshipped in a log cabin and frame building before raising its enduring limestone sanctuary in 1883. The native stone was hauled ten miles from the quarry by ox cart, and the tower bell installed that year still rings. Its cornerstone, unusually set above the east doorway arch, marks the pioneer craftsmanship of a young Blanco County.

Beeville, TX

Refugio County's first Baptist congregation organized in 1855, meeting first in the Doughty Schoolhouse before raising a sanctuary in 1865 named for benefactor N. R. McDaniel's "N2" cattle brand. The Blanco Baptist Association formed at that church in 1873, and in 1888 the fellowship moved to Blanconia, building on this site in 1891. One of the oldest Baptist churches in South Texas, it seeded many area congregations.

Orange, TX

John Horace Bland and his wife Edna built this home in 1902, part of a wave of turn-of-the-century residences that gave Orange its Victorian character. After passing through the Dullahan family, it was bought in 1919 by local cobbler Louis Phillip Bazzano and his wife Annie, leaders in the community and the First Baptist Church, who later conveyed it to their daughter. Its Queen Anne detailing typifies the era's domestic architecture.

San Augustine, TX

James Jefferson Bland built this one-story galleried home of local pine about 1912 as the heart of the Bland Lake community. Around it clustered his general store, sawmill, cotton gin, grist mill, a school, a railroad depot, post office, and popular lakeside swimming grounds. Bland and his wife Mattie later sold the widow's-walk-topped house to their daughter Lula and her husband Guy Fisher.

Blanket, TX

Local tradition says Blanket Creek got its name in 1852, when surveyors found a band of Tonkawa hunters drying their rain-soaked blankets on the sumac bushes. Permanent settlement followed in the 1870s around a general store and post office, and Blanket became a stop on the Brownwood-to-Fort Worth stagecoach line before the Fort Worth and Rio Grande Railway arrived in 1891 and prompted a whole new townsite. Sustained by cotton gins and a doctor who served for more than sixty years, the town incorporated in 1912 and has endured droughts and downturns ever since.

Kittanning Township, PA

During the French and Indian War, Pennsylvania's frontier was raided repeatedly by warriors based at Kittanning, a Delaware (Lenape) town on the Allegheny River. In September 1756, Lt. Col. John Armstrong led a force of provincial soldiers on a bold overland strike against the town, and this rise marked one of their stopping points on the march. The expedition destroyed Kittanning, and tradition holds the hill took its name from the blankets the men discarded here as they moved fast toward their objective.