Search Markers

Kingston, GA

On April 12, 1862, a Union raiding party led by civilian scout James J. Andrews commandeered the locomotive "General" at Big Shanty in a daring bid to cripple the Western & Atlantic Railroad and sever the Confederacy's supply line to Chattanooga. Forced to lose time waiting out southbound traffic on the single-track line, the raiders pressed north—while conductor William A. Fuller and his crew gave relentless chase, first on foot and a push-car, then aboard the engines "Yonah" and "Wm. R. Smith." Kingston was a critical bottleneck in what became known as the Great Locomotive Chase.

College Park, GA

This memorial arch carries a spare dedication — 'In Memory, Sgt Johnson, Class 1935' — the kind of institutional tribute placed to honor a member of a school or unit who was lost. Such commemorative arches and plaques became common in the early twentieth century as communities and campuses marked the service and sacrifice of their own. The inscription names the man and his class year but leaves the fuller story to memory.

Marietta, GA

In the spring of 1865, as the Confederacy collapsed, Union Gen. Henry M. Judah made his headquarters at the Archibald Howell Home in Marietta. Surveying a countryside stripped of crops by the 1864 fighting and an economy paralyzed by surrender, Judah proposed issuing corn and bacon to destitute local families until they could plant again. The approved rations helped stave off hunger and steady the region through the first hard months of peace.

Austin, TX

In 1842, with Mexican armies threatening Austin, President Sam Houston ordered the Republic of Texas's national archives moved to safety, but Austin residents were determined to keep the records—and their claim to the capital. When Houston's men came before dawn to haul the papers away, innkeeper Angelina Eberly spotted them and fired the town cannon to raise the alarm. Citizens gave chase and retrieved the archives without bloodshed, and the records' return helped ensure Austin remained the capital.

Alamo Heights, TX

Charles Anderson raised this mansion in 1859 as the headquarters of a 1,400-acre ranch, but sold out and left San Antonio on the eve of the Civil War, passing it to the poet Hiram McLane, who lived here three decades. When Alamo Heights was laid out in 1890, a developer named the house for his native Argyllshire in Scotland, and after 1893 the O'Grady family made the Argyle famous for its hospitality and cooking, immortalized in the 1940 "Argyle Cook Book."

New York, NY

Unveiled at United Nations headquarters in 2015, The Ark of Return is the permanent memorial to the victims of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade — the forced passage of roughly fifteen million African men, women, and children across four centuries. Designed by architect Rodney Leon, its marble form evokes a vessel and the Middle Passage, turning a place of world diplomacy into a space of remembrance. Its three-part charge — acknowledge the tragedy, consider the legacy, and remember — asks visitors to reckon with a crime whose consequences still echo through the Americas.

Waco, TX

On the Baylor University campus stands the world's largest collection of materials devoted to the Victorian poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It grew from the passion of English professor Andrew Joseph Armstrong and his wife Mary, who donated Armstrong's personal Browning library to Baylor in 1918 and spent four decades gathering more from around the globe. By 1925 the Times of London called it the most important collection of Browningiana in the world, and in 1951 it moved into the purpose-built library that bears the professor's and the poet's names.

Sarita, TX

This land, part of the Spanish "La Barreta" grant, was purchased in 1852 and became home to famed Texas Ranger John Barkley Armstrong after his 1878 marriage to Mollie Durst. Armstrong had ridden with Captain McNelly to bring order to South Texas and won national fame for capturing the outlaw John Wesley Hardin. On this ground—once a camp for Zachary Taylor's army and a stage stop between Corpus Christi and Brownsville—he built one of the legendary cattle ranches of Texas, still run by his descendants.

Sarita, TX

When Texas Ranger John B. Armstrong moved his ranch headquarters to this site in 1897, he began a residence that grew in stages until about 1900. Built first of plastered adobe and later expanded with a frame wing, the house was altered again after the devastating 1919 hurricane reshaped its front porch. Its layered construction traces the evolution of a South Texas ranch headquarters.

Big Sandy, TX

Built around 1905 by a Big Sandy merchant and sold in 1909 to dry-goods owners Ashley and Ruth Phelps, this Queen Anne and Colonial Revival home became a hub of local social life. After Ashley's death in 1922, Ruth kept the house alive for decades as a boardinghouse for area schoolteachers, living there until her own death in 1961.

Athens, GA

Designed by Athens gunsmith John Gilleland, a member of a home-guard unit of men too old or infirm for regular Confederate service, this double-barrelled cannon was meant to fire two chain-linked balls at once to "mow down" advancing enemies. Cast in a local foundry, it failed in testing because the barrels could not be discharged at precisely the same instant, sending the balls on wild, erratic paths. The gun survives in Athens as a beloved curiosity—one of a kind and famously ineffective.

Athens, TX

Founded in 1885 by editors J. B. Bishop and George M. Johnson, "The Athens Review" grew out of the printing equipment of earlier short-lived Henderson County papers reaching back to the 1870s. Passing through a string of owners—including a 19-year-old Waco printer and, later, a Van Zandt County colonel who launched the daily edition in 1901—the paper became a durable community institution. For well over a century it chronicled and championed the growth of Athens and the surrounding county.

Upper Dublin Township, PA · est. 2014

On a farm beside the Upper Dublin Friends Meeting, Quaker abolitionists Thomas and Hannah Atkinson and their neighbors ran a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom-seekers—some of whom now rest in the meetinghouse cemetery. The family's antislavery conviction was matched by a gift for enterprise: son Wilmer Atkinson founded the influential Farm Journal in 1877. Circulated nationally, the magazine became a trusted source of practical knowledge and advocacy for American farm families.

Fredericksburg, TX

August and Johanne Hennersdorf left Prussia for Fredericksburg in 1855 and, in the early 1900s, built this frame-and-limestone home for their family. Local tradition holds that the floor joists beneath the frame section are the octagonal wooden columns salvaged from the town's original Vereins Kirche, dismantled in 1896. If so, the house quietly carries a piece of the community's founding meeting-house within its bones.

Austin, TX

In the bruising years after the Civil War, Texas Democrats founded this newspaper in 1871 to push back against the state's Reconstruction government. It soon passed into private hands, found an early champion in attorney-editor John Cardwell, and began publishing daily in 1873. In 1924 it merged with the Austin American, forming a lineage behind one of the capital's enduring papers.

Lynchburg, VA

In the booming early years of the twentieth century, Lynchburg gained a distinctive landmark: a rare 18-sided building designed by the local architectural firm of Frye and Chesterman. Opened in 1902 as the gift of Randolph Guggenheimer, it was christened "The Aviary" because it originally housed exotic birds and wildlife. Its unusual polygonal form made it a curiosity in the city's park landscape during the Gilded Age era of civic gift-giving.

Cameron, TX

Benajah Jefferson "B.J." Baskin moved to Cameron from Alabama in 1883 and, with his brothers-in-law, bought a mercantile while prospering in farming and ranching. After his first wife died, he remarried in 1895 and around 1899 completed this home, where he and Sue reared nine sons. Originally built in the Queen Anne style, the house was remodeled in the 1930s to a Craftsman look and stayed in the family until 1983.

Hinesville, GA

Built in 1839 by Mary Jane Bacon, widow of Major John Bacon, this Hinesville home is a fine example of the "plantation plain" style, its two-story front section still much as it was raised by the region's best craftsmen. Kept in the same family for generations, it survived a harsh visit from Sherman's troops in December 1864, who pillaged and burned the barn and outbuildings but spared the house itself. Careful later restoration returned the rear rooms to their 1839 character.

Burnet, TX

Completed around 1883, this two-story limestone building on the Burnet courthouse square was raised for a local financier and Captain Brandt Badger, a Georgia native and Confederate veteran who ran a drugstore on the ground floor while renting offices above. Over the following century it housed a hardware store, a national bank that failed in the Depression, telephone and loan companies, and from 1948 to 1959 the town post office. Few buildings have worn so many hats.

Lower Merion Township, PA · est. 2000

This grand French Chateau-style structure began life in 1890 as the Bryn Mawr Hotel, a summer resort built for the Pennsylvania Railroad and designed by the celebrated architect Frank Furness — his last surviving building of its kind. In 1896 the Baldwin School, a girls' preparatory academy founded in 1888, leased the building, and by 1922 it owned the property outright. The transformation from railroad resort to respected school mirrored the rise of serious academic education for young women.

Latrobe, PA · est. 2013

By the turn of the twentieth century, steamships and railroads had made the once-exotic banana a cheap, everyday fruit in American cities and towns. In 1904, a young apprentice pharmacist named David Strickler put that abundance to delicious use at the Tassell Pharmacy soda fountain here in Latrobe, splitting a banana lengthwise and dressing it with ice cream. He is even credited with designing the boat-shaped dish that still holds the treat today.

Sonoma County, CA

The Sea Ranch, a planned community begun on the Sonoma coast in the 1960s, became a legal flashpoint after California voters passed the 1972 Coastal Zone Conservation Act (Proposition 20). The new North Central Coast Regional Commission's authority over shoreline building clashed with the development's build-out, and the disputes this marker recalls helped define how the state balances private coastal property against public access to the shore.

Tredyffrin Township, PA · est. 1951

In 1711, Welsh families who had crossed the Atlantic seeking room to worship freely gathered in the fertile Chester County countryside known as the Great Valley and organized a Baptist congregation. It became the second oldest Baptist church in Pennsylvania and, over time, the "mother" from which eight neighboring congregations grew. The present stone meetinghouse, the second on the site, was raised in 1805.

Dallas, TX

This influential Baptist newspaper traces its roots to 1888, when Lewis Holland and John H. Boyet founded The Baptist News in Fannin County. Relocated to Dallas and renamed The Baptist Standard in 1892 under J. B. Cranfill, it moved between Dallas and Waco before settling permanently and, in 1914, coming under the Baptist General Convention of Texas. Guided by editors like J. B. Gambrell, it grew into the largest state paper in the Southern Baptist Convention.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1996

Philadelphia gave the American stage its most celebrated dynasty: Lionel, Ethel, and John Barrymore, the dazzling third generation of a theatrical family often called the "Royal Family of the American Stage." Their grandparents, the Drews, ran the storied Arch Street Theatre here, steeping the children in footlights from birth. The three siblings carried the family gift from live theater into the new worlds of film and radio across the first half of the 20th century.

Washoe County, NV

This monument near Reno honors the Basque sheepherders who tended flocks across the Great Basin, carrying a poem, "Solitude," by the Basque artist Nestor Basterretxea. Drawn from the Pyrenees to the American West beginning in the nineteenth century, Basque immigrants became the backbone of open-range sheepherding, enduring months of isolation in the high desert. The work evokes the loneliness and endurance at the heart of their frontier labor.

Bastrop, TX

After Bastrop's short-lived Colorado Reveille folded in mid-1852, young Mississippi printer William J. Cain bought its press and launched the Bastrop Advertiser as a weekly from a Main Street shop in March 1853. The paper stayed in the Cain family for generations — passing from William to his brother Thomas and then to Thomas's son — before its 1920 sale to the Smith family of Elgin. Apart from an interruption during the Civil War, it has served Bastrop continuously ever since.

Cuero, TX

When a hurricane leveled the Gulf port of Indianola in 1886, the seafaring Sheppard family did not simply mourn a lost home — they salvaged its lumber, loaded it onto railcars, and rebuilt inland at Cuero. Reassembled that same fall, the Victorian house sheltered three generations of the Bates and Sheppard families, including a hardware merchant and city alderman and a Southern Pacific railroad agent. It stayed in the family until 1968 and was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1978.

Floydada, TX

By the 18th century the Comanche had made the canyons and plains of what became Floyd County their stronghold, dominating trade and warfare across Texas after pushing rival tribes south. In October 1871, Colonel Ranald Mackenzie led U.S. cavalry, guided by Tonkawa scouts, against the Kotsoteka and Quahadi bands who refused reservation life. In Blanco Canyon, Quanah Parker's warriors struck first and drove off the soldiers' horses; the fighting wounded both Mackenzie and Lieutenant Carter, and though the campaign frustrated the army, it began the destruction of Comanche power on the Southern Plains.

Chatham, MA

For most of the Revolution the fighting passed Cape Cod by, but on a June day in 1782 the war reached Chatham's own waters. In a brief clash in the harbor near this spot, local men confronted the maritime raiding that troubled the New England coast in the conflict's final year. It was the town's single episode of active hostilities in the long war for independence.

Port Lavaca, TX

Late in 1863 the Union Army pushed into Calhoun County, a rare thing in Texas, aiming to seize Fort Esperanza and control the mouth of Matagorda Bay. On December 26, some forty Texas Rangers tried to burn the Norris Bridge over Chocolate Bayou as roughly three thousand Union troops advanced. The Rangers scattered on horseback after their captain ordered a retreat, and the only death came when nervous Union gunners mistook a distant herd of cattle for the enemy and killed the cows instead.

Brownsville, TX

On May 8, 1846, the opening battle of the Mexican-American War was fought on this coastal prairie, where General Zachary Taylor's outnumbered U.S. army used its "flying artillery" to defeat Mexican forces. The victory helped launch a conflict that would redraw the map of North America.

Canyon, TX

At dawn on September 28, 1874, Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie's 4th Cavalry descended a treacherous path into Palo Duro Canyon and surprised a large Native encampment sheltering there. Though the warriors fought from the canyon walls to cover their families' escape, Mackenzie burned the camp and supplies and captured some 1,400 horses — destroying a thousand of them — leaving the tribes without shelter or mounts and forcing their return to the reservations.

Wayside, TX

In 1874 the U.S. Army launched a sweeping campaign to force the Southern Plains tribes onto reservations, and it opened here with a grinding five-hour running fight. Colonel Nelson Miles's column of 744 men pursued Cheyenne, Comanche and Kiowa bands across the Panhandle, in a clash that saw the Army's first use of the Gatling gun west of the Mississippi. Though warriors slipped away, the destruction of their villages helped end free Native life on the southern plains.

Brownsville, TX

On May 9, 1846, U.S. forces under General Zachary Taylor defeated the Mexican army of General Mariano Arista in the Battle of Resaca de la Palma. Coming at the very outset of the Mexican-American War, the victory drove Mexican troops back across the Rio Grande and secured the American claim to the contested land between the Nueces and the river.

Losoya, TX

On August 18, 1813, Spanish royalist General José Joaquín Arredondo crushed the Republican Army of the North—a mixed force of Anglo-Americans, Mexicans, and Native fighters under José Álvarez de Toledo—in a battle remembered for its ferocity. The defeat ended an early bid to wrest Texas and Mexico from Spanish rule. It remains among the bloodiest battles ever fought on Texas soil.

San Antonio, TX

On September 18, 1842, Texas volunteers under Mathew Caldwell and John Coffee Hays met General Adrián Woll's Mexican force outside San Antonio, which the Mexican army had just seized. Fighting from a shaded creek bank, the outnumbered Texans held their ground and turned back what proved to be the last Mexican invasion to reach that far into the young Republic of Texas. Their stand shielded the capital at Austin and helped steady a nation still only six years removed from independence.

Atlanta, GA

Between July and September 1864, Union and Confederate armies fought for control of Atlanta, the Deep South's great manufacturing and railroad hub. Four inconclusive battles—Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Ezra Church, and Utoy Creek—raged around the city before Union forces swept south and, at Jonesboro, cut the last railroad supplying it. Atlanta fell on September 2, 1864.

Town of Oyster Bay, NY

For centuries, the shallow waters of Oyster Bay supported "baymen" — independent watermen who tonged for clams and oysters and hauled in fish, passing the trade from father to son. By the late twentieth century, pollution, development, and shrinking harvests had pushed that hard, weather-beaten livelihood toward the brink, and this monument stands as a tribute to it. Its inscription borrows the words of Oyster Bay native Billy Joel, whose 1989 song "The Downeaster 'Alexa'" gave voice to a bayman watching his way of life slip away.

Baytown, TX

The Baytown Sun grew from the Goose Creek Gasser, a weekly launched in 1919 just as an oil refinery began transforming the tri-cities of Goose Creek, Pelly, and Baytown. Through a chain of mergers and renamings—driven partly by the Great Depression—rival papers combined into a single daily, which took the name The Baytown Sun after the three towns consolidated in 1948. Expanding presses and rising circulation tracked the community's growth from oil-boom camps into a permanent city.

Decatur, GA

For decades the Beacon neighborhood was the heart of Decatur's African-American life — a tight-knit community of homes, churches, schools, and Black-owned businesses clustered along Atlanta Avenue. Its schools served the community until the Decatur system integrated in 1967, and the neighborhood was leveled by urban renewal in the mid-1960s, leaving only a handful of buildings and one surviving business.

Schellsburg, PA · est. 2012

In 1910, as the Progressive Era's faith in applied science reached into rural life, Bedford County opened one of the country's first cooperative extension offices in the small town of Schellsburg, with A. B. Ross serving as its county agent. The idea was radical in its simplicity: send a trained expert to teach working farmers the new agricultural science and lift their yields. The model spread until nearly every county in America had an extension office, carrying practical knowledge on crops, 4-H, and home economics to millions.

Marshall, TX

Built in 1875 for the newly married merchant John R. Stinson and his wife Sallie, this Marshall residence is best remembered for a distinctive touch of frontier craft: the wood framing around its entryway was carved to mimic cut stone. Stinson prospered enough to serve a term as the town's mayor. Decades later, the widowed Belle Fry Gaines ran a beloved antique shop from inside the house for many years, lending it the name it carries today.

Rankin, TX

The Texas Railroad Commission named this field in 1950 for Michael Late "Mike" Benedum, the legendary "great wildcatter" who spent nearly seventy years finding oil from West Virginia and Louisiana to Mexico, Colombia, and across Texas. With partner Joe C. Trees he opened field after field, and the discovery of the Big Lake field in 1923 on University of Texas land helped unlock the vast wealth of the Permian Basin. The Benedum field's first well was completed in 1948 at more than 12,000 feet, adding to the oil revenues that built Texas's public university and school endowments.

Sprigg Township, OH

Formed in March 1853 by local landowners, the Bentonville Anti-Horse Thief Society began as a vigilante band organized to chase down stolen horses and mules and bring thieves to justice. In the antebellum countryside, where a working animal was a family's livelihood and formal law enforcement was thin, such mutual-protection societies filled the gap between neighbors and the courts.

Cranfills Gap, TX

The stone portion of this house was raised in the 1880s for Norwegian settler Andres Johnson, likely by builder Andrew Mickelson, who worked on other structures in the community. In 1894 Bertel and Christena Bertelsen bought the property, enlarged the stone house, and around 1910 added a frame wing to hold their family of eighteen children. The home stayed with the Bertelsen family until 1977.

San Antonio, TX

On the south side of San Antonio's Main Plaza — the old "Plaza de las Islas" laid out by Canary Islander settlers in 1731 — this Romanesque courthouse rose between 1891 and 1896, financed by $621,000 in citizen-approved bonds. Architect James Riely Gordon gave it massive walls of native Texas granite and red sandstone, green- and red-tiled towers, and richly carved arches. It was the fourth seat of Bexar County government since Texas statehood and remains the judicial heart of the county.

Shelbyville, TX

Frederick Lee Bickham, a prominent landowner and rancher, built this East Texas home between 1885 and 1888 on the site of his stepfather's earlier house, which had burned. The timber—cedar, cypress, and heart pine—was cut from the surrounding property, and here Bickham raised his family alongside his stepsiblings. Restored in 1972 and renamed "Welcome Hall," the house survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Washington, DC

Towering nearly twenty feet over Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, the Big Chair has anchored the heart of Anacostia since the late 1950s, when the Curtis Brothers furniture company commissioned it as a giant advertisement and neighborhood curiosity. Once billed as the world's largest chair, it became a beloved meeting spot and an unofficial symbol of the Southeast Washington community. The 2006 re-dedication marked the chair's restoration and its enduring place in local identity long after the furniture store had closed.

Brady Township, PA · est. 1950

Where two great Indian paths met — the Great Shamokin running toward Kittanning and the trail to Venango, now Franklin — travelers found a reliable spring and a natural camping ground. Generations used this junction as a resting place in the deep forests of central Pennsylvania. During the War of 1812, Major McClelland's militia force also camped at this spot, following the same well-worn crossroads that Native peoples had long relied upon.

Green Bay, WI

This modest Green Bay house, built in 1868, is remembered as the birthplace of Earl "Curly" Lambeau, the hometown athlete who in 1919 helped found — and then coached — the Green Bay Packers, one of professional football's most enduring franchises. Standing on its original foundation with its original exterior, it is one of the oldest surviving homes in the city, a rare mid-19th-century survivor from Green Bay's early decades as a Great Lakes port and lumber town. From these ordinary streets came a figure who would tie a small Wisconsin city to the national game for a century.

McKinney, TX

This McKinney site was home to Joseph Wilson Baines, a teacher, lawyer, newspaper editor, and Texas Secretary of State, when his daughter Rebekah was born in 1881. Rebekah studied at Baylor, became a teacher and journalist, and in 1907 married rancher and legislator Sam Early Johnson, Jr. Their eldest child, Lyndon Baines Johnson, rose through Congress to become the 36th president of the United States.

Corsicana, TX

In 1894 a crew drilling a water well for the city of Corsicana struck something unexpected at 1,035 feet: oil, in commercial quantities. It was the first such strike in the entire mid-continent region west of the Mississippi. What began as an accident became the seed of a Texas oil boom that would remake the state's economy.

Galveston, TX

Built between 1886 and 1893 for Colonel Walter Gresham, a Galveston civic leader and U.S. congressman, the Bishop's Palace is one of the most lavish Victorian homes in America, designed by architect Nicholas J. Clayton in an ornate Renaissance style. Its treasures include a prize-winning silver-and-onyx mantel and murals painted by Mrs. Gresham. The Catholic Diocese bought the mansion in 1923 — giving it its familiar name — and converted a room into a stained-glass chapel.

Town of Lewisboro, NY

These ruins are the remains of a grand mansion raised around the turn of the 20th century, when prosperous families built large country houses in the hills of Westchester County within reach of New York City. Constructed over roughly a decade between 1890 and 1901, the estate has since fallen to ruin, leaving stone walls and foundations as traces of its former grandeur.

Burlington, VT

In August 1808, amid Thomas Jefferson's unpopular trade embargo, the smuggling boat Black Snake lay in the Winooski River loading potash bound illegally for Canada. When the revenue cutter Fly moved to seize her, the confrontation turned deadly and three men were killed. The captured smugglers were tried for murder in one of Vermont's most notorious early criminal cases.

Eastman, GA

This stretch of highway follows the old Blackshear Road, planned and cut through the wilderness in 1815 by Major Elijah Blackshear and a company of Georgia Volunteer Militia. It gained its fame as the alternate route General David Blackshear used while defending Georgia's threatened southern frontier during the War of 1812. The road later served as a route of settlement and travel.

Lewes, DE

The Blizzard of March 1888, remembered as the "Great White Hurricane," buried the northeastern United States under enormous drifts and paralyzed cities, railroads, and shipping for days. Along the Delaware coast at Lewes, the storm's fury drove vessels aground and battered the harbor. It stands among the most destructive weather events in the region's recorded history.

Snyder, TX

The Block 97 dispute grew out of Texas's practice of paying railroads in public land for the track they laid. In 1873 the Houston & Texas Central mistakenly claimed some 300,000 acres reserved for the Texas & Pacific; when the error surfaced in 1882 it voided countless deeds, and much of the land was unscrupulously resold, sparking a decade of tangled claims until the legislature declared it state school land in 1899.

Shelby County, KY

During the Civil War, the border state of Kentucky was plagued by guerrilla bands and marauders who preyed on divided communities. In 1858 the townspeople built a small log blockhouse in the middle of the intersection, pierced with loopholes and manned whenever an alarm sounded. In August 1864 the guerrilla captain David "Black Dave" Martin tried to raid the courthouse for its stored guns, but townsmen drove him off, killing three raiders.