Search Markers

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2009

Thomas Ustick Walter was among the most celebrated American architects of the nineteenth century, and he lived near here in the late 1830s. He designed the towering cast-iron dome and expanded wings of the United States Capitol and the imposing Girard College, and advised on Philadelphia's City Hall. A founder of the American Institute of Architects, he also served as its president.

Denison, TX

Thomas Volney Munson settled in Denison in 1876 and built extensive nurseries, becoming one of the world's foremost authorities on grapes. When a root disease devastated France's vineyards, Munson's work with hardy American rootstock helped save them—an achievement that brought a French agriculture minister to his door and made him only the second American named to the French Legion of Honor. He built this brick Victorian home in 1887.

City of Niagara Falls, NY

In the booming Gilded Age city of Niagara Falls, Thomas V. Welch was remembered as a "public spirited citizen" — a phrase that pointed to his role in one of the era's signature civic achievements. Welch was a leading advocate for the Free Niagara movement, which fought to protect the falls and their surrounding land from unchecked industrial and commercial exploitation. He became the first superintendent of the New York State Reservation at Niagara, established in 1885 as one of America's earliest state parks. This bronze tribute was placed by the local Board of Trade in 1909 to honor a man whose vision helped preserve a natural wonder for the public.

Alamo, TX

After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War in 1848 and set the Rio Grande as the international boundary, Major William Emory led a survey to map that new border. Thomas W. Jones, a young surveyor from Washington, D.C., joined the effort at El Paso in 1850 and worked as an assistant surveyor on the Lower Rio Grande. In July 1853 he drowned nearby and was buried on a local ranch, one of many who gave their lives to the exacting work of charting the frontier.

Houston, TX

An English baker's son from Somersetshire, T. W. House emigrated in 1835 and by 1838 had opened a bakery and confectionery in the young city of Houston. From that modest start he built one of Texas's great 19th-century business empires—general merchandise, cotton brokerage, banking, gas works, street railways, and railroads—served as a city alderman and, in 1862, as mayor of Houston, and held property in at least 63 counties plus a sugar plantation in Fort Bend County. His son Edward Mandell House would become the closest advisor to President Woodrow Wilson during World War I.

Houston, TX

T. W. House, Jr. (1846–1923) was the son of an English immigrant who founded the T.W. House Bank in 1838 and served as Houston's mayor. The younger House sat on the city council, ran three utility companies, and became sole proprietor of the family bank—until it collapsed in the national banking panic of 1907, forcing him into bankruptcy. President Woodrow Wilson named him Houston postmaster in 1913, an office he held here until 1922.

Lake Creek, TX

Thomas Wilson Stegall was born in North Carolina in 1832, served as a Confederate private late in the Civil War, and moved his large family through Tennessee and Mississippi before settling in Delta County, Texas, in 1873. A Baptist preacher remembered for his kindness—he once cut a gap in his prized rose hedge just to give a neighbor a shortcut—he built a blacksmith shop that became the gathering place at the heart of the new town of Lake Creek. From that community nucleus a town grew.

New York, NY

The sprawling, autobiographical novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900–1936) spent the last years of his short life at the Chelsea Hotel, the Manhattan haven for writers and artists. Author of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, he poured out prose of enormous ambition and emotional force before dying at just thirty-seven. His American publishers, Scribner's and Harper, placed this plaque to honor him where he had lived and worked.

Asheville, NC

This Asheville house is the boyhood home immortalized as the boardinghouse in Thomas Wolfe's autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel. So closely did Wolfe draw on the people and rooms of his real Blue Ridge upbringing that the book caused a local uproar upon publication. Recognized as a National Historic Landmark, the house preserves the world that shaped one of America's most distinctive literary voices.

Nacogdoches, TX

A South Carolina native who came to Texas in its revolutionary days, Thomas Young Buford fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the clash that secured Texas independence. He died young, in 1839, only a few years after the victory. The State of Texas honored his service with a marker in 1936.

Era, TX

When Dr. Benjamin Richard Thomason built this frame house in 1894, the little community of Era in Cooke County was still finding its footing on the North Texas prairie, and a country doctor doubled as one of the settlement's essential institutions. Lumber for the home and office was hauled overland from Gainesville by his son Robert Ewing Thomason, who went on to a long public life as a U.S. Congressman and federal judge. Its Victorian porch detailing and fine interior woodwork mark it as a place of standing in a young frontier town.

Thomaston, TX

Thomaston sprang up in 1872 as DeWitt County's first railroad town, absorbing the older 1848 settlement of Republic-era judge David Murphree. Named for legislator Nathan Thomas, who sold part of the townsite to the Gulf, Western Texas and Pacific Railroad, it drew a schoolteacher's cotton gin and grist mill, a first postmaster-merchant, and, at its peak, some 500 residents.

Thomaston, TX

When Thomaston became DeWitt County's first railroad town in 1872, John P. Wright donated much of the townsite—and, in 1886, land for its cemetery. Some 283 graves lie here, the earliest marked with wooden boards later replaced by concrete blocks, including that of an infant who died in 1871. Wright, his two wives, and veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars rest among them.

Beeville, TX

Grocer J.C. Thompson raised Beeville's first brick building on the courthouse square in 1892, using brick from the Calaveras kiln near Elmendorf. Its upstairs did remarkable duty over the years — the law office of Lon C. Hill, who would go on to found Harlingen, then the armory of the "Beeville Light Guard" militia. From 1912 it became the community's telephone exchange, serving as communications headquarters through the Bell era until 1957.

Bald Prairie, TX

Benjamin Rush Thompson left North Carolina for Milam County in 1841, when Texas was still an independent republic, and by the 1850s the census listed him as a Methodist clergyman and Mason. After moving his family to Robertson County, he set aside this ground as a family burial plot in 1873, following the death of his young son William. Of the thirteen graves here, only five bear inscribed stones; Thompson and his wife Margaret both lie among them.

Copeville, TX

Collin County pioneer Abner Thompson arrived about 1850 and set aside part of his land for a burial ground; fittingly, his own 1852 death brought its first grave, still marked by two weathered square stones. Nearby, bois d'arc posts have guarded an employee's grave for more than a century. As the Mount Pleasant Baptist congregation divided in the 1880s, its land passed to the cemetery, which grew to more than 800 graves and still draws neighbors from Lavon and Copeville to an annual Memorial Day service.

Forest, TX

Wiley and Cynthia Ann Thompson brought their children and a number of enslaved people from Alabama in 1847, buying a 636-acre tract along Larrison Creek and building a log home overlooking the bottomland. The community that grew nearby, called Forest, included a family-owned store, saloon, mills, and cotton gin. The cemetery began around 1850 with the burial of two of their children and holds more than thirty unmarked graves as well as veterans of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

Austin, TX

Painting contractor John W. Thompson and his wife Jennie built this Victorian home in the fashionable Robertson Hill neighborhood after their 1877 marriage, and their daughter Willie Mae lived in it until her death in 1966. The house then took on a new life: the Alpha Kappa Zeta Chapter of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, a graduate chapter founded in 1940, acquired and restored it in 1967 as a meeting place. It became Austin's first Black Greek-letter house.

Durham, NH

This monument in Durham marks the memory of Benjamin Thompson (1806–1890), a New Hampshire farmer whose bequest of his land and fortune brought the state's agricultural college to Durham, laying the foundation for the University of New Hampshire. A lifelong bachelor devoted to his farm, he directed his estate toward the education of future generations. The college opened on his former lands after his death.

Westworth Village, TX

The cemetery began in 1870 when Captain Henry J. Thompson let his neighbor bury a young wife on his land, near the Allen log cabin. From that first grave it grew into the resting place of the pioneer families who built White Settlement, River Oaks and Westworth Village — among them James Ventioner, founder of River Oaks, and the Farmer brothers, first to raise homes in White Settlement. Confederate veterans, a wagon-train child whose name was spelled in pebbles, and generations of settlers lie together beneath its many names.

Sweet Home, TX

Rural schools were the main source of learning for Lavaca County children beyond the larger towns, and Thompson School owed its very existence to the railroad that drew a gin and store to the community once called Needmore. F. M. Thompson deeded land for the school, which opened in 1895 with Ruby Lay teaching children who walked across fields and helped maintain the building themselves. Through land reversions and rebuildings, the school carried on across three successive buildings until it consolidated with the Hallettsville district in 1959.

Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1947

During Colonel Daniel Brodhead's 1779 expedition against the Seneca, an advance party clashed here with thirty or forty Native warriors in a brief but sharp skirmish. It was the only fighting of the entire campaign and, by the marker's reckoning, the sole Revolutionary War engagement in northwestern Pennsylvania. The rest of Brodhead's march met little resistance as it moved through the Allegheny country.

San Marcos, TX

In 1850 Dr. William Alexander Thompson struck an agreement with his neighbors to harness the San Marcos River, and he and his sons used enslaved laborers to build a gristmill, sawmill, and cotton gin. The channels dug for the waterwheel created the parcels known as "Thompson Islands." The family ran the mills until 1911, and the arrival of electricity in 1942 finally ended the site's dependence on water power.

San Marcos, TX

William A. Thompson moved his family and the people he enslaved from Louisiana to Texas in 1850, establishing plantations in Caldwell and Hays counties. Enslaved laborers built a mill on the San Marcos River whose construction reshaped the channel into three small islands still called Thompson's Islands. The mill powered local lumbering and a cotton gin, anchoring the area's antebellum economy for generations.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1986

When Congress moved to build a Continental force in June 1775, it authorized its very first battalion — nine companies of riflemen raised here in the Pennsylvania backcountry under Col. William Thompson of Carlisle. These frontier marksmen marched to join the siege of Boston, and the unit later became the First Pennsylvania Continental Regiment. Their muster placed Carlisle at the founding of the American army.

Reading, PA · est. 1989

In June 1775, with war just underway around Boston, the Continental Congress took a momentous step: it authorized its first troops raised directly under national authority—rifle companies drawn from the frontier. Captain George Nagel's company, filled with Berks County marksmen, mustered at Reading that July and then set off on a grueling march of roughly 350 miles to reinforce the American siege of Boston. These backwoods riflemen, prized for their accuracy, were among the first soldiers to serve the united colonies rather than a single province.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 1991

In June 1775, as war with Britain flared, Congress authorized the colonies' first battalion, and Capt. James Chambers raised a company here in what was then Cumberland County. These frontier riflemen marched roughly 450 miles to help besiege the British in Boston, among the earliest Pennsylvanians to answer the call to arms. The battalion evolved into the 1st Pennsylvania Regiment, with Chambers commanding as colonel from 1777 to 1781.

Sunbury, PA · est. 1987

In June 1775, as war with Britain began, men recruited around Sunbury joined Captain John Lowdon's Company—part of Thompson's Rifle Battalion, the first battalion Congress authorized in all the colonies. Among its riflemen was Timothy Murphy, whose extraordinary marksmanship would later make him a legend of the Revolution.

Louisville, KY

Thornton and Lucie Blackburn were enslaved in Louisville in the early 1830s, and when Lucie was sold away the couple escaped north by steamboat. Reclaimed by their owners in Detroit two years later, they were freed in the dramatic "Blackburn Riots of 1833" and fled across the border to Canada, where two extradition attempts failed. In Toronto they founded Upper Canada's first taxi service while continuing to aid other freedom seekers.

Groveton, TX

In 1858 James D. Thornton brought his family by wagon train from Mississippi to join friends and relatives already settled in Trinity County. The farming community they built centered on the Thornton Church and School, raised on land Thornton donated. Farming sustained the settlement until its population began to fade after World War II, and many of its pioneers rest in the church cemetery.

Thornton, TX

Founded by the Texas Central Railroad in 1871, Thornton quickly gained churches, businesses, and schools—most notably the Thornton Male and Female Institute, or Thornton College, opened in 1877 by physician-teacher Edward Coke Chambers. The school changed hands and merged before passing to the new Thornton Independent School District in 1891, and its buildings were repeatedly rebuilt after a storm and a fire, culminating in a brick schoolhouse in 1921. As rural districts consolidated and enrollment fell, Thornton merged with Groesbeck in 1965, deeding its campus to the city as a community center.

South River, NJ

This monument was raised in 1974 by Belarusian émigrés to honor those who fought and died for the freedom and independence of their homeland. Its bilingual inscription — 'Glory to those who fought for freedom and independence of Byelorussia' — speaks for a community driven from Eastern Europe by war and Soviet rule, keeping the memory of that struggle alive in America. South River, New Jersey became home to one such Belarusian diaspora community.

Town of Haverstraw, NY

The Hudson River town of Haverstraw rose on clay — by the late nineteenth century it was one of the greatest brickmaking centers in America, and the laborers who dug, molded, and fired those bricks rarely left much of a paper trail. This marker gathers the names of people laid to rest in humble, half-forgotten ground "on the mountain" and along Call Hollow Road, graves that long went unmarked. It is a deliberate act of remembrance, reaching back to reclaim the working people whom the record nearly let slip away.

Granbury, TX

North Carolina native Patrick H. Thrash brought his family to the Granbury area in 1872 and became the town's first mayor, building a modest one-story frame home here around 1880. Over the following decades the house passed through the hands of a saloon owner, a district attorney, and the county sheriff, and was enlarged into the Queen Anne–style residence seen today. Its changing ownership reads like a roster of Granbury's early civic and business life.

Granville Township, PA · est. 1947

Preserved here are three locks of the Juniata Division of the state-built Pennsylvania Canal, notable because three locks and their levels sat side by side—an unusual concentration on the line. Opened in the canal-building era of the 1830s, this waterway carried boats over the ridges between the Susquehanna and the west. The old stonework and the traced bed of the canal still mark the route.

Londonderry Township, PA

On March 28, 1979, a combination of equipment failures and human error at Three Mile Island's Unit 2 reactor triggered the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history. Over several tense days radiation escaped, part of the reactor core melted down, and thousands of nearby residents fled their homes. The crisis gripped the nation and became a defining moment in the debate over atomic energy.

Plainview, TX

Erected in 1906-07, this school opened in 1907 as Central Plains College and Conservatory of Music under the Nazarene Church, then passed to the Methodists, who renamed it Seth Ward College for Texas' first native-born Methodist bishop. Its 35-acre campus centered on a four-story, 27-room main building, but fires that consumed both dormitories and the main building forced the college to close in 1916.

Granbury vicinity, TX

This roadside marker points travelers three miles south to the grave of Elizabeth Crockett, widow of the frontiersman and Alamo martyr David Crockett. Left behind in Tennessee when David went to Texas, Elizabeth later claimed the land granted for his sacrifice and lived out her years in Texas, dying in 1860 at seventy-four. The marker keeps her memory, and her famous husband's, on the map of the Texas landscape.

McDade, TX

This burial ground began as a family plot—marked first by the graves of two young Goerlitz children—before Peter Kellermier deeded an acre for wider community use in 1893. Long tied to a neighboring Catholic church, it was known as the Catholic Cemetery until the congregation faded in the 1930s. Renamed Three Oaks in 1975 to honor all who rest here, including veterans of both World Wars, it still serves the McDade community.

Three Rivers, TX

Founded in March 1913 by Charles R. Tips, this South Texas townsite was first chartered as Hamiltonburg for a local family, with lots going on sale that Fourth of July. The following year the Post Office renamed it Three Rivers to mark the nearby meeting of the Nueces, Atascosa, and Frio rivers. Ranching and farming gave way, over time, to an economy also built on gas, oil, and recreation.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2007

Opened in 1970 at the point where Pittsburgh's three rivers meet, Three Rivers Stadium became the shared home of the Pirates and the Steelers during a golden run of championships that earned the city its "City of Champions" nickname. Its turf saw Roberto Clemente's 3,000th career hit in 1972 and, that same year, Franco Harris's "Immaculate Reception," one of the most famous plays in football history. The multipurpose stadium was demolished in 2001.

Burkburnett vicinity, TX

Springing up around 1919 amid the northwestern reaches of the Burkburnett oil boom, the tent town of "Newtown" or "Thrift" briefly boasted the area's only bank. Fire plagued the flimsy settlement — a 1920 blaze sparked by lightning striking an oil tank killed two and destroyed much of the town — and as the boom faded its population dwindled until, today, every building is gone.

Brownwood vicinity, TX

The community of Thrifty sprang up after the Army established Camp Colorado, a frontier defense post on Jim Ned Creek, in 1857. When troops withdrew as Texas seceded in 1861, settlers like the Mullins family faced the dangers of the frontier alone, but the area flourished after the Civil War with a hotel, gins, mills, and a mercantile store serving nearby farmers and ranchers. The railroad's bypass in 1886, paired with a hard drought, drained the town of its people and its purpose.

Throckmorton, TX

When Texas carved Throckmorton County out of the frontier in 1858, it borrowed the name of Dr. William Edward Throckmorton, a soldier of the American Revolution who had died in 1843. The honor carried a second weight: his son, James Webb Throckmorton, would sit in the governor's chair in 1866, during the fraught early days of Reconstruction. Formally organized only in 1879, the county reflects how slowly settlement and government followed the surveyor's line across West Texas.

Throckmorton, TX

Throckmorton County, named for pioneer physician William E. Throckmorton, was created in 1858 but not organized until 1879 as settlement finally reached this stretch of West Texas. Landowner F. E. Conrad donated the town square and built the first frame courthouse, replaced between 1890 and 1893 by a striking two-story Italianate building of quarried, polychrome sandstone. Topped by a mansard roof and square cupola, it gained a matching annex in 1938.

Thurber, TX

Thurber was Texas' most important coal town for three decades. After coal was 'discovered' here in 1886, the Texas and Pacific Coal Company built a bustling company town of 10,000 people whose mines fueled the state's railroads. Engineer William K. Gordon pushed daily output to 3,000 tons — and in 1917 helped discover the nearby Ranger oil field, an irony that helped doom coal as railroads switched to oil. The last mine closed in 1921 and Thurber emptied, though millions of tons of coal still lie underground.

Thurber, TX

The nine-acre Thurber Cemetery is a quiet ledger of the vanished coal-mining company town it served, laid out in separate Catholic, Protestant, and African American sections that mirror the community's many peoples. More than a thousand graves lie here, some seven hundred of them unmarked, the oldest an infant who died in 1890. That more than half the burials are children speaks to the epidemics—scarlet fever, typhoid, diphtheria, whooping cough—that stalked crowded industrial towns.

Annapolis, MD

This memorial in Maryland's capital honors Thurgood Marshall, the Baltimore-born lawyer who became the twentieth century's foremost architect of civil-rights law. As lead counsel for the NAACP he argued and won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, dismantling the legal basis for segregated schools, and in 1967 he became the first African American to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Placing his likeness in Annapolis roots that national story in the state that shaped him.

Rocksprings, TX

Joseph and Mary Jane Thurman came to this part of Edwards County in 1882, and in 1885 Mary Jane became the first person laid to rest in what grew into the family cemetery. Its 29 graves record the hard toll of pioneer life, including infant deaths and victims of typhoid and other diseases. Members of the Thurman and more than a dozen allied families rest here, and their descendants still tend the grounds, last used for burial in 1958.

Victoria, TX

C.L. Thurmond, Jr. put up this building in 1898 to hold both a general mercantile store and his residence, in an era when Bridge Street was a thriving commercial heart of Victoria. Distinguished by a three-story central section, it went on to house stores, a grain mill, and the Farmers' Cooperative. The district's fortunes faded once nearby rail lines and roads were rerouted away from it.

Rhome, TX

Early families who called their Wise County home the "Illinois Settlement," later Fairview, put down roots here in the 1880s. When J. F. Thurmond's infant daughter died in 1883, neighbors chose a burial tract beside land he had already given for a church and school—part of six acres he donated to the community. Over the decades a cemetery association formed, the school consolidated and became a community center, and the graveyard, still in use, grew to more than 400 graves sustained by endowments and a gas well.

Pine Creek Township, PA · est. 1947

According to local tradition, settlers of the West Branch frontier gathered beneath the Tiadaghton Elm on July 4, 1776, and drew up their own resolves declaring independence — reportedly before word of the Continental Congress's action had reached them. These pioneers, governed by the self-organized "Fair Play men," lived beyond the formal reach of the colony and made their own rules. Their bold declaration became a cherished symbol of frontier self-government.

Pine Creek Township, PA · est. 1947

This marker honors the Tiadaghton Elm, where tradition holds that pioneer settlers of the Susquehanna's West Branch resolved their independence from Britain on July 4, 1776. Living on the far frontier beyond the colony's official authority, these settlers governed themselves and acted on their own convictions. The famous tree associated with the event long stood near the junction of the Susquehanna and Pine Creek.

Keating Township, PA · est. 1949

In 1879, at the height of the northwestern Pennsylvania oil boom, the Tidewater Pipe Company achieved something engineers had doubted was possible: pumping crude oil over the Allegheny Mountains through a long-distance pipeline. Beginning May 28 of that year, its line pushed oil 109 miles east to Williamsport, deliberately breaking the transport stranglehold that John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil held through the railroads. Station No. 1 stood opposite this spot, the first pumping point in a bold experiment that proved oil could flow uphill and across a continent.

Martins Mill, TX

Pioneer L. H. Hobbs settled this part of Van Zandt County around 1850 and let a grieving family bury their two-year-old daughter on his land, quietly founding a cemetery. The graveyard took the Tidmore name after John Tidmore—who died in 1866 of afflictions carried home from the Civil War—and his family came to own the ground and were laid to rest there in turn. Around the Tidmore and Hobbs graves gathered generations of a farming community, including a dozen Confederate veterans and later soldiers of both World Wars.

Thornton vicinity, TX

Settlement along Steele Creek began in the 1850s around a Methodist church named for the Rev. David J. Tidwell, who arrived with his family in 1853 and served as the first postmaster. The little community — known variously as Steele Creek, Tidwell, Shady Grove, and Pleasant Grove — gathered two stores, a school, and homes. Its cemetery of some 175 marked graves, deeded to residents by Mary Chisum in 1886, records the harsh toll of frontier life, with many infant deaths and apparent epidemics.

Seguin, TX

Named for Theodore Tiemann, who sold the county an acre of land for five dollars, this Guadalupe County school opened in 1903 as a single room with one teacher. Growing enrollment soon required a second teacher, and the building doubled as a gathering place for community events until it closed in 1943. Along with neighboring schools, it was absorbed into the Seguin district in 1949.

Bernalillo County, NM

Tijeras Canyon slices between the Sandía and Manzano Mountains, and travelers have followed it for thousands of years as the natural gateway between the Rio Grande Valley and the plains to the east. Native peoples used the pass long before Spanish colonists arrived and named it Cañon de Carnué. Successive generations of foot, horse, wagon, rail, and highway traffic have all funneled through this same corridor.

Brownsville, TX

Tomás Tijerina, descended from an 18th-century Spanish settler of the Rio Grande, moved to this Brownsville site in 1904 and built the present brick home in 1912. A longtime deputy sheriff, he designed the house himself while his neighbor Teodoro Perez handled the carpentry. Its brick buttresses were raised deliberately to brace the walls against the hurricanes that regularly menace the Gulf coast.

McMullen County, TX

Settled in 1858 as Rio Frio, this ranching outpost earned the nickname "Dog Town" for the packs of dogs its cowmen used to round up wild cattle. A townsite was platted as Colfax in 1871, made county seat in 1877, and finally renamed for Samuel J. Tilden, who won the popular vote in the disputed 1876 presidential election. It grew into a center of ranching and, later, petroleum.