Search Markers

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2026

Traced to legislation passed by Pennsylvania's colonial assembly in 1684, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania stands as the oldest appellate court in the nation. Over the centuries it handed down influential rulings touching the abolition of slavery, the rights of labor, and the rights of women. Its structure and reasoning became a model that federal and other state courts would follow.

Washington, DC

In the winter of 1864–65, as the Civil War ground toward its end, this three-story brick house on H Street was run as a boarding house by Mary Surratt. Here John Wilkes Booth and a small circle of Confederate sympathizers gathered to scheme first the kidnapping of President Lincoln—hoping to ransom him for Confederate prisoners—before the plot hardened into the April 1865 assassination. The house's connection to the conspiracy made Surratt one of four people hanged that July, the first woman executed by the United States government. The building still stands, its ground floor long since given over to shops.

San Antonio, TX

After Texas seceded in early 1861, the state moved to expel some 2,600 federal troops. Frontier fighter Ben McCulloch led 400 volunteers into San Antonio, and on the night of February 15 slipped men into Alamo Plaza to train guns on the federal garrison while hundreds more entered the city. Under mounting pressure, aging Gen. David E. Twiggs surrendered on February 18, handing over more than $3 million in ordnance, wagons, supplies, and a chain of frontier forts—an act that brought him dismissal for treachery, even as he had repeatedly and vainly begged Washington for orders.

San Diego, CA

This building was named in honor of Susan A. Davis by an Act of Congress in December 2022. Davis represented the San Diego area in the U.S. House of Representatives for two decades (2001–2021), serving on the Armed Services and Education committees. The dedication marks the career of a long-serving California congresswoman.

Town of Greenwich, NY

The hamlet of Battenville was an early home of Susan B. Anthony, who lived here from 1832 to 1839 during her girlhood. Her Quaker family's years in this Washington County community shaped the young woman who would become the towering figure of American woman suffrage. Long before Seneca Falls or her famous arrest for voting, the values of equality and conscience she absorbed in places like this set her on her lifelong path.

Columbus, NM

This marker honors Susan Parks, the telephone operator on duty in Columbus, New Mexico, during Pancho Villa's raid on March 9, 1916, when several hundred of Villa's men crossed the border and attacked the town. Operators like Parks were vital in sounding the alarm and summoning help during the chaotic pre-dawn assault, which left civilians and soldiers dead and prompted the U.S. Punitive Expedition into Mexico. Her quiet courage placed an ordinary civilian at the center of a defining border-era crisis.

Lockhart, TX

On this Lockhart lot once stood the home of Susanna Dickinson, one of the few survivors of the Battle of the Alamo on March 6, 1836. Sent out from the fallen mission with her infant daughter Angelina, she carried the news of the garrison's destruction to Gen. Sam Houston — a warning that helped steel the Texian army for San Jacinto. Widowed at the Alamo, she later settled here, married cabinetmaker Joseph Hannig, and eventually moved to Austin.

Argonia, KS · est. 1933

In 1887 the town of Argonia elected Susanna Madora Salter as mayor—making the 27-year-old the first woman to hold that office anywhere in the United States. Her election came just as Kansas women had gained the right to vote in municipal contests, and it drew national attention to the place of women in public life.

Austin, TX

Susanna Dickinson and her family settled in Gonzales as members of DeWitt's Colony around 1835. She was inside the Alamo with her infant daughter Angelina when it fell in March 1836, witnessing the deaths of her husband Almaron and the other defenders. Spared by Santa Anna, she carried word of the disaster to Sam Houston, then lived out her years in Austin until her death in 1883.

Wrightsville, PA · est. 1948

Chartered by Pennsylvania in 1835, the Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal ran for forty-five miles along the river below Columbia, carrying coal, lumber, and produce toward Chesapeake tidewater. The canal company operated the waterway from 1840 until 1872, after which the Reading Railroad ran it until 1894, when rail had all but eclipsed the towpath. This stretch at Wrightsville stood near the canal's northern reaches along the lower Susquehanna.

Lower Chanceford Township, PA · est. 1948

Chartered by Pennsylvania in 1835, the Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal followed the river for forty-five miles below Columbia, moving freight between the Pennsylvania interior and Chesapeake tidewater. Run by the canal company from 1840 to 1872 and then by the Reading Railroad until 1894, it embodied a transportation technology already being surpassed by the iron horse. This marker in Lower Chanceford Township traces the canal's southward course toward Maryland.

Lower Windsor Township, PA · est. 1948

The Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal, chartered by Pennsylvania in 1835, carried coal and goods forty-five miles along the river below Columbia toward the Chesapeake. Operated by the canal company from 1840 to 1872 and afterward by the Reading Railroad until 1894, it served the valley through the middle decades of the nineteenth century before rail transport prevailed. This marker in Lower Windsor Township lies along the old route beside the lower Susquehanna.

Lower Windsor Township, PA · est. 1948

In the canal-building decades of the early 1800s, engineers threaded slackwater channels alongside the rocky lower Susquehanna, where the river itself was too swift and shallow to boat. The stone lockwork surviving beside the water here belonged to that system, floating coal, grain, lumber, and iron down from Columbia toward tidewater and the markets of Baltimore. Each mortared lock stepped loaded boats down the valley's fall, a quiet piece of engineering that once hummed with mule teams and boat traffic.

Wrightsville, PA · est. 1948

At Wrightsville the towpath canal reached its northern end and joined the state's own canal works across the river at Columbia, making this a busy transfer point in the mid-19th century. The inscription preserves a vivid detail of how goods crossed the wide Susquehanna: mules once towed boats over a towpath built onto the river bridge, and after 1863 tugboats hauled the canal craft across instead. It was a working seam between two arteries of a growing trade network.

Lower Chanceford Township, PA · est. 1948

The stone building near this marker, later home to the Tucquan Club, began life as a canal warehouse where cargo was deposited and loaded for shipment along the Susquehanna. Traces of the old canal bed and scattered masonry still mark where boats once tied up to take on goods. Such warehouses were the loading docks of their age, the points where a farm's harvest or a mill's output entered the long float to market.

Montrose, PA · est. 1982

Split from Luzerne County in 1810 and named for its great river, Susquehanna County became an early hotbed of antislavery activity, with Montrose serving as an Underground Railroad stop. It was also home to Galusha A. Grow, the congressman who championed the 1862 Homestead Act. That law opened millions of acres of western land to ordinary settlers.

South Williamsport, PA · est. 1962

Beginning with a company incorporated in 1846, a six-mile line of cribbed piers was strung across the West Branch of the Susquehanna to catch and hold the timber floated down during the spring log drives. This boom fed the sawmills that made Williamsport, for a time, the lumber capital of the world. A devastating flood in 1889 broke the boom, and it declined as the great pineries were cut out.

Selinsgrove, PA · est. 1948

Founded in 1858 by the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the school began as a pairing of the Missionary Institute with the Susquehanna Female College—an unusual early commitment to educating women alongside training clergy. It grew steadily through the nineteenth century and took its present name, Susquehanna University, in 1895. It remains a fixture of Selinsgrove.

Lemoyne, PA · est. 2021

Excavations near Lemoyne in the early 2000s revealed a palisaded Susquehannock village from the early 1600s, its ground scattered with iron, brass, and glass trade beads. Those artifacts trace early contact with Dutch traders and the fledgling English colony at Jamestown between 1610 and 1624, when goods moved along Native networks long before Europeans settled the region. The findings deepened understanding of how the Susquehannock organized their villages and their world on the eve of sustained colonial pressure.

Sutherland Spring, TX

Founded in 1848 by Dr. John Sutherland — the Alamo courier whom William B. Travis sent out for reinforcements in 1836 — Sutherland Springs became one of southwest Texas's premier health resorts, drawing visitors to more than 100 hot and cold mineral springs long used for their curative waters. A stagecoach stop on the Old San Antonio Road, it served as the first seat of Wilson County in 1860 before politics moved the county seat away. A later resort boom at "New Sutherland Springs" collapsed after devastating floods in 1913 left it a ghost town.

Sutherland Springs, TX

Dr. John Sutherland, a Virginia-born physician, came to Texas in 1835 and was helping ready the Alamo's defense when a horse accident left him unable to fight; Col. Travis instead sent him riding to Gonzales for help, and the Mexican army stormed the fort before aid could come. Sutherland later settled near the sulphur springs on the Cibolo, boarding health-seekers in his home, which became a stop on the San Antonio–to–coast stage line. He set aside about five acres as a community cemetery in 1860, and the ground now holds Texas Rangers, veterans, officials, and residents of every background who built Wilson County.

Sutherland Springs, TX

Founded in the 1850s by Dr. John Sutherland and Joseph H. Polley, the Sutherland Springs community soon needed a school in an era when Texas public education was sparse and unevenly funded. Sutherland built a rock schoolhouse on the Cibolo in 1857, and by 1877 a male and female academy was operating there; the district incorporated in 1934 and raised new buildings before a 1947 fire destroyed the school just before Christmas. After the fire students finished the year in the Baptist church, and the district consolidated with Floresville in 1948.

Lyon County, NV

Sutro was at once a town, a tunnel, and a man. German-born Adolph Sutro arrived on the Comstock in 1860 convinced that a long drainage tunnel could unlock its deep ores; after winning legislative approval and, eventually, financing from miners and international bankers, work began in 1869 and the main bore was completed in 1878. The project spawned a town of 600–800 with a church, post office, newspaper, and Sutro's own Victorian mansion, before Sutro sold out and returned to San Francisco, where he later served as mayor.

Coloma, CA · est. 1949

Marshall's discovery drew some 300,000 'forty-niners' to California within a few years, reshaping the West, accelerating statehood, and devastating Native communities.

La Vernia, TX

After the Civil War, brothers Isaac and George Washington Suttles left Zanesville, Ohio—a noted pottery region—for Texas, where they turned the sandy clay near La Vernia into bricks and salt-glazed stoneware. An 1877 newspaper praised their craftsmanship and the strong local demand for their wares, and around 1882 they moved their kiln into town near this site. Isaac was killed in Abilene in 1884, but George kept the pottery running for years, and archaeology of the kiln, waster piles, and glazing techniques still illuminates the trade.

Sonora, TX

The land that became Sutton County holds signs of human presence stretching back many thousands of years and was home to Apache people up to the founding of Fort Terrett in 1852. Anglo-Texan settlement began at Sonora in 1879 around a trading post on the San Antonio–El Paso road, and the county was created in 1887 and organized in 1890. It honors John S. Sutton, a Santa Fe Expedition member, Texas Ranger, and soldier who died of wounds from the Battle of Val Verde.

Sonora, TX

The site of the Sutton County Courthouse began as something more elemental than government: the first water well in the area, where sheepmen brought their flocks to drink and decided to settle. That same scarce water bred violence — a deadly quarrel over watering rights left one West Texas family patriarch dead on the very ground where the courthouse would rise. The story compresses the ranching frontier's hard bargains into a single contested spot.

Sonora, TX

Soon after Sutton County organized in 1890, its commissioners hired a St. Louis firm to erect this jail, completed in September 1891 as a two-story native-stone building that combined cells with a jailer's residence. Its first inmate was gambler and gunman John Denson, a cousin of the notorious outlaw John Wesley Hardin — a fitting christening for a frontier lockup. The sturdy stone structure embodies the arrival of formal law in a raw ranching county.

Jefferson County, WA

This memorial recalls the 1808 voyage of the Sv. Nikolai, a Russian-American Company vessel that sailed south from the colonial capital of Sitka toward the coast the Spanish called New Albion. The ship wrecked on the Olympic Peninsula's shore, stranding its crew among the Quileute and Hoh peoples in one of the earliest documented Russian encounters on the future Washington coast. It marks a moment when Pacific Northwest waters were contested ground among Russian, Spanish, British, and American interests.

Beaver Dam, WI

Built in 1934 in Swan City Park and modeled on the Ford Band Shell from the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, this venue became the beating heart of Beaver Dam's summers. Its interior glowed with 780 colored lights, and a local engineer's 'dancing waters' fountain shot illuminated jets in time to the music. Weekly concerts, movie nights, and headline events drew crowds in the thousands to a Depression-era community that built joy out of modest means.

Palestine, TX

This burial ground began around 1847 with the grave of brickmaker Samuel Warden—reportedly marked only with bricks of his own making—on land granted to Illinois-born Micam Main in 1835. After Virginia native "Colonel" Henry Clay Swanson bought the surrounding land in 1854, he, his brother, and the enslaved and later freed African Americans of their farms were buried here, along with Black residents from across Anderson County. Descendants of the enslaved held funerals on the site from 1872 into the early 1950s, leaving some thirty-six marked and roughly twenty-three unmarked graves.

Jonesville, TX

Founded by civil engineer and planter Peter Swanson, Swanson's Landing was a bustling Caddo Lake port from the 1830s to the 1860s, shipping cotton and pelts toward New Orleans and receiving settlers' goods in return. In the 1850s it anchored the first railroad in East Texas, a line built to Marshall and rerouted during the Civil War to move Confederate troops toward Louisiana. The port's story darkened in 1869 when the steamer Mittie Stephens burned nearby with the loss of 69 lives.

Austin, TX

Swante Palm left the Swedish province of Småland for Texas in 1844, drawn by his nephew Swen Magnus Swenson, and became a leader of Swedish immigration to the state. Settling in Austin by 1850, he held offices from justice of the peace to postmaster and, as vice consul for Sweden and Norway, helped bring thousands of Swedish immigrants to Texas. Knighted by King Oscar II in 1884, this devoted bibliophile donated a library to the University of Texas in 1897 that grew its holdings by more than sixty percent.

Exeter, NH

Swasey Parkway runs along the tidal Squamscott River in Exeter, the gift of native son Ambrose Swasey, an inventor and machine-tool maker who was born here in 1846 before making his fortune building precision instruments and astronomical telescope mounts. Dedicated in 1930, the riverside promenade was his way of giving something lasting back to the New Hampshire town of his childhood. More than ninety years on, it endures as a green civic space where residents still stroll, gather, and watch the river slip past.

Exeter, NH

This riverside parkway along the Squamscott River was a 1931 gift to the town of Exeter from Ambrose Swasey, a New Hampshire-born mechanical engineer and industrialist who rose from a Northfield farm to co-found the Warner & Swasey Company of Cleveland. That firm became famous for precision machine tools and for building some of the era's great astronomical telescopes, and Swasey channeled the fortune he earned into philanthropy for his native state. In dedicating the parkway he gave Exeter a lasting stretch of public green space where the town could gather along the water.

Union Township, PA · est. 1947

Swatara Gap is a natural break in the Blue Mountain, and in the 1750s it became a dangerous doorway. During the French and Indian War, war parties allied with the French slipped through the gap to strike the scattered farms of the Pennsylvania frontier, and colonial authorities answered by raising Fort Swatara nearby to guard the pass. The steep, wooded notch that had long served as a travel route became a frontline in a brutal borderland conflict.

Bethlehem Township, NJ

From 1868 into the 1930s, the Swayze Mine worked a vein of magnetite — a rich iron ore — in the New Jersey Highlands, a district whose mines helped feed the young nation's hunger for iron. This was modest work by the standards of the great ranges, its deepest shaft reaching about seventy-five feet, but such small mines dotted these hills and sustained local livelihoods for generations. Today only ruins mark where miners once brought ore to the surface.

Austin, TX

Swedish immigration to Texas began in 1838 with the arrival of Swen Magnus, who settled on the gulf coast before moving to Austin and establishing a ranch he named Govalle, or "good grazing land." With his uncle Svante Palm, he actively promoted Swedish immigration, and by 1910 some 7,000 Swedes had built farms, businesses, and churches, concentrated in eastern Travis and Williamson counties. They founded colleges, a mutual aid society, a Swedish-language newspaper, and carried on festivals like St. Lucia and Midsummer.

Austin, TX

Organized in 1873 by the Rev. Carl Charnquist, Austin's Swedish Methodist congregation first built a sanctuary near Red River and 15th Street, then moved in 1898 into buildings left by the disbanded Central Methodist Church, adopting 'Central' into its own name. Sitting across from the Capitol grounds, its property was sold in 1956 for state office expansion, and the renamed Memorial Methodist Church relocated to northeast Austin.

Austin, TX

Swante Palm, a Swedish immigrant who served as vice consul to Texas for Sweden and Norway from 1866 until his death, built a small house in Austin in the 1850s that doubled as consulate and library. From here he aided arriving Swedish immigrants while amassing an enormous personal book collection, enlarging the house to hold it. In 1897 he gave his 10,000 volumes to the University of Texas, expanding its holdings by more than sixty percent.

Melvin, TX

Swedish immigrants settled western McCulloch County beginning in 1907, gathering first in homes for Sunday school and worship before formally organizing a congregation in 1910 with fifteen charter members. A Ladies Aid Society followed in 1911, and a church building was finished by 1913. Services were held in Swedish until the 1940s, when the congregation adopted English and the name Evangelical Free Church.

Austin, TX

Beginning in the 1870s, Swedish immigrants built homes near their downtown Austin businesses on a rise that became known as Svenska Kullen, or Swedish Hill. A Swedish Methodist congregation and other Swedish churches took root in the neighborhood, which was later cut through by the interstate highway. Historic houses still stand in the section east of the freeway, and the neighborhood was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.

Union Township, PA · est. 1949

In the first years of the 1700s, Swedish settlers took up land granted by William Penn and became the first Europeans to live in what is now Berks County. The stone home of Mounce and Ingeborg Jones, raised in 1716, still stands by the river bridge as the oldest house in the county. These pioneers were heirs to the earlier colony of New Sweden, carrying its people and building traditions up the Schuylkill into fresh country.

Galveston, TX

Galveston was Texas's wealthiest port in the 1880s, and its leading families built ornate residences to match. This Victorian cottage was a wedding gift from Ashton Villa builder James Moreau Brown to his daughter Matilda, and is attributed to Nicholas J. Clayton, the island's celebrated architect. Its angular dormers and nautical mariner's-wheel porch detail nod to the seafaring city around it.

Houston, TX

Rising on a Houston corner with a three-story turret and ornate Eastlake trim, this late-Victorian commercial block was designed by architect George E. Dickey in 1889, possibly reworking an 1861 building on the site. It housed the jewelry firm of John Jasper Sweeney and Edward L. Coombs, who had bought the property in 1882, with Gus Fredericks joining before the decade was out. The exuberant brickwork captures the confidence of Gilded Age Houston as it grew into a regional commercial hub.

Sweeny, TX

This burial ground began in 1833 when John Sweeny, an early landowner and member of Stephen F. Austin's colony, chose the site to bury his young daughter Freedonia. The neighborhood has used it ever since, and it holds the graves of veterans of every American war since the Texas Revolution. It stands as a quiet record of the families who settled this stretch of Brazoria County.

Angleton, TX

Tennessee native Rees P. Sweeny built this raised Victorian house in 1896, the very year Angleton became the seat of Brazoria County. As the county's tax collector, Sweeny relocated here as part of the transition from the older county seat at Brazoria. Set sturdily on high ground with a central-hall plan, his home has repeatedly sheltered neighbors during the floods and hurricanes that sweep the Gulf coast.

Old Ocean, TX

After fighting in the Texas Revolution, John Sweeny, Jr. received this land from his father, one of the region's large landholders, and in 1837 enslaved workers built the plantation house entirely from brick, nails, and lumber produced on the property. The plantation raised molasses, cotton, and sugar, the cash crops of the antebellum Gulf Coast. The land has remained in the family's hands for generations.

East Columbia, TX

John Sweeny, Sr. moved his family from Tennessee to Brazoria County around 1833 and, with enslaved labor, cleared his land and built a large plantation. This log cabin housed an enslaved family that included Mark and Larkin Waddy, who continued to live in it as free people after emancipation at the close of the Civil War. Their enduring presence gave the cabin the joined name it carries today.

Runnels County, TX

In 1902 the growing farm families of this rural corner of Runnels County built a two-room schoolhouse on Emil Helm's farm to meet the pressing need for education. Trustee Henry Kriegel gave it the fond name "Sweet Home," and by 1922 the school had moved to a better-equipped site. It was one of countless small country schools that dotted Texas before rural consolidation.

Seguin, TX

From 1924 to 1962 the Sweet Home Vocational and Agricultural School educated Black students across southwest Guadalupe County, one of six local schools built with help from the Rosenwald Fund — the philanthropy of Sears president Julius Rosenwald that raised modern schoolhouses for rural African Americans. Completed in 1925 by master carpenter Henry Singletary for $5,500, the four-teacher school grew to include dormitories and industrial buildings and served as a regional county training school offering education beyond the eighth grade. Accredited as a high school by 1935, its students won wide agricultural, athletic, and academic honors before it closed with integration in 1962.

Jacksonville, TX

Not long after the town of Jacksonville took shape, a group of formerly enslaved people led by the Rev. T.B. Johnson organized Sweet Union Baptist Church in 1887. They first met in a schoolhouse, raised their own building in 1894, and soon relocated to this site. Over the generations the congregation reached well beyond Sunday worship, running educational programs and scholarships, aiding the needy, and opening its doors for meetings on the community's social, economic and political concerns.

Sweetwater, TX

The oldest marked grave here belongs to an infant, Purl Ray Scott, who died in 1880—a year before the Texas and Pacific Railroad founded the town of Sweetwater. Handcrafted tombstones and wrought-iron fences mark the resting places of pioneers, immigrants, community leaders, and Civil War veterans. The graveyard reflects the hardships of pioneer life on the West Texas plains.

Sweetwater, TX

When West Texas towns were still finding their footing in the 1920s, Sweetwater invested in a grand civic stage. Built in 1926-27 by Austin's Page Brothers firm, its Spanish Colonial Revival arches and ornate balconies announced a growing regional center. For decades the hall drew everything from touring celebrities to political rallies and church gatherings, becoming the heart of the community's public life.

Sweetwater, TX

The paper that became the Sweetwater Reporter began in 1881 as the Sweetwater Advance, founded the same year Nolan County was organized by C.E. Gilbert, who had also started the Abilene Reporter. After John Millsapps bought and modernized it in 1906, he and his partners launched daily editions under the Reporter name in 1911. A later owner, Houston Harte, went on to help build the national Harte-Hanks publishing firm.

Stamford, TX

Swen Magnus Swenson, the first Swedish settler in Texas and an ally of Sam Houston, began buying vast West Texas tracts here in 1854. His sons built the operation into the SMS Ranches, running shorthorn and Hereford cattle under a distinctive reversed-S brand that is still used today. Incorporated in 1926 and headquartered here from 1927, the company grew to more than 500,000 acres and pioneered innovations like a mail-order cattle system before splitting into four family corporations in 1978.

Stamford, TX

Around 1900, the Texas Central Railroad and the SMS Ranch teamed up to create the town of Stamford, and this stout Lueders-stone building rose beside the tracks to serve it. It was the central supply depot for the four sprawling Swenson ranches of west Texas — Tongue River, Spur, Throckmorton and Flat Top. Goods came off the trains and waited here until ranch foremen rode into town to collect provisions and swap news.

Fort Worth, TX

By the 1880s Swift & Company was a national meatpacking giant, and its strategy of building plants near the herds drew it to Texas and its vast livestock. Recruited by the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company, Swift opened this plant in 1903, quickly reshaping the city's economy and spawning a railway, a publishing firm, and other support businesses. The operation ran until 1971.

Bleakwood, TX

The trading village of Salem was founded in 1835 by Seth Swift, a Quaker and former whaling merchant who moved his family from Massachusetts to the East Texas woods. When his wife Lydia died around 1852, Swift set aside an acre for a cemetery, and upon his own death in 1869 he was buried beside her in a pink marble casket he had shipped from New England. Lost for years to forest overgrowth, the graveyard has since been restored.

Van, TX

In the 1880s the scattered farms around present-day Van had no school within reach, so farmer George W. Swindall donated an acre for a community school around 1880, and both the school and settlement took his name. Beginning with a single teacher, T.W. Staton, it grew to two and then three instructors and became part of the Van school district organized in 1903. By 1916 the aging, crowded building was closed and consolidated with Spring Hill into the new Van Common School.