Search Markers

Paducah, KY

This was the Paducah home of Gen. Lloyd Tilghman (1816–1863), a Maryland-born West Point graduate who served in the Mexican War and helped build the New Orleans and Jackson Railroad, the first to reach Paducah. Living here from 1852 to 1861, he left to join the Confederate Army at the Civil War's outbreak and was killed by a shell at the Battle of Champion Hill near Vicksburg in May 1863. The marker was sponsored by the Tilghman High School Class of 1929.

Austin, TX

Founded in 1875 with the backing of the American Missionary Association, Tillotson Collegiate and Normal Institute was chartered in 1877 to train teachers and educate African Americans in Austin. Under president Mary Elizabeth Branch, who arrived in 1930, it grew into a full four-year, co-educational college. In 1952 it merged with Samuel Huston College to form Huston-Tillotson, which endures today.

Northfield, NH

Modeled on the triumphal arches of ancient Rome, this granite memorial arch was raised in 1882 by Charles E. Tilton, the wealthy merchant and financier for whose family the neighboring town of Tilton takes its name. A product of Gilded Age ambition and fortune, it stands on a rise above the Winnipesaukee River, part of a suite of statuary Tilton placed around his native region. It remains one of New Hampshire's most striking private monuments.

Baytown, TX

Family tradition holds that Charles Nathan Tilton served as a cabin boy for the pirate Jean Laffite before settling in Texas around 1829 and marrying Anna Barber in 1831. He fought in the Texas Revolution, received a large headright land grant, and traded in cattle and shipping—even lending his brand to the famed rancher Samuel Maverick. The family cemetery he established in the 1850s holds veterans of conflicts from the Texas Revolution through Vietnam, chronicling generations of early Texas pioneers.

Fort Worth, TX

Timothy Brian Cole, an Army veteran and Texas Tech student, was wrongly convicted of assault in 1986 and sentenced to 25 years, refusing every offer of freedom that required a false confession. He died in prison in 1999, still maintaining his innocence, and only years later did DNA evidence and another man's confession clear his name. In 2009 a Texas court declared him innocent, the state enacted the Tim Cole Act to compensate the wrongly convicted, and in 2010 the governor issued Texas's first posthumous pardon.

Wichita Falls, TX

When Ed Howard acquired a Wichita Falls newspaper in 1898, the North Texas town was on the cusp of a boom that railroads, cattle, and the discovery of oil would soon fuel. His weekly grew into a daily afternoon paper in 1907, backed by local businessmen who formed the Times Publishing Company, and the paper chronicled the young city's rise. Under Howard, his son Rhea, and the Donnell family, the firm also came to publish the morning Record News and became a fixture of civic life for generations.

Pender County, NC

A self-made patriot from North Carolina's Cape Fear region, Timothy Bloodworth rose to serve in the first U.S. Congress and later in the U.S. Senate from 1795 to 1801. He is best remembered as a leading Antifederalist who fought against ratifying the new U.S. Constitution in 1788 and 1789, fearing it handed too much power to a distant central government. His stance placed him at the heart of the great debate over how the young nation should be governed.

Lower Providence Township, PA · est. 1969

Timothy Matlack was a firebrand of the Revolution who helped shape Pennsylvania's new government while taking up arms for independence. He sat in the Continental Congress, served as a colonel of Philadelphia Associators at the Battle of Princeton, and helped found the Society of Free (or "Fighting") Quakers for those expelled from the pacifist Meeting for supporting the war. Long a fixture of Pennsylvania's revolutionary government, he was reinterred near this spot in 1905, decades after his death.

Seguin, TX

Timothy Pickering Jones entered Texas on his twenty-first birthday in 1835 and promptly took up arms as an officer in the Texas War for Independence. His long soldiering life spanned three conflicts: he captained a company in the Mexican War and later commanded the Sixth Tennessee Regiment as a Confederate colonel in 1861. He died in Texas in 1904, and the state erected this Confederate-style marker over his grave in 1962.

Palestine, TX

Born in 1902 to a father who had escaped slavery, Timothy Stephen Smith earned a degree from Prairie View A&M and taught school for forty-two years. Convinced that Anderson County's voting boundaries diluted Black political strength, he and others sued in 1973; Judge William Wayne Justice agreed, striking down a "racially motivated gerrymander" and forcing a switch to single-member districts. Similar success against the City of Palestine soon followed, opening the way for the county's first Black officeholders.

Timpson, TX

Timpson was born of the railroad in 1885, laid out along the new Houston, East and West Texas narrow-gauge line and named for the official who platted it. The first passenger train arrived that August, and within a year two stores separated by a pine thicket had grown into a town of a thousand, complete with a school, churches, a newspaper, banks, and factories. It thrived as an East Texas lumber, cotton, and rail hub until state highways eroded the railroads' dominance in the 1940s.

Naples, FL

Tin City traces its roots to 1920s Naples, when property leased near the Gordon River drew pioneering commercial fishing families to the waterfront. They raised docks and tin-roofed sheds to clam, fish, and process their catch, giving the humble district both its livelihood and its name. Those weathered buildings later found new life as one of Naples' distinctive shopping and dining destinations.

Tinicum Township, PA · est. 1947

In 1643 Colonel Johan Printz, the imposing governor of New Sweden, established his seat at Tinicum, founding what is recognized as the first permanent European settlement in present-day Pennsylvania. For a dozen years the Swedish colony held this ground along the Delaware, until the wider contest for the river swept it away — first to the Dutch in 1655, then to the English in 1664. Tinicum's brief Swedish chapter left a lasting mark on the region's earliest colonial identity.

Tioga, TX

Settlers founded Tioga on the edge of the East Cross Timbers in 1881, and after years of burying their dead in scattered family plots, the community got a formal cemetery in 1906 when W.R. and Sally Gillespie deeded five acres to the local Woodmen of the World camp — whose distinctive tree-stump headstones still mark many early graves. The burial ground holds Civil War veterans from both sides, Texas Senator Olin R. Van Zandt, and the Rev. H.G. Ball, who preached the funeral of U.S. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. An association keeps the grounds for future generations.

Wellsboro, PA · est. 1982

Organized in 1804 from Lycoming County, Tioga County drew its name from an Indigenous word meaning the forks of a stream, carried by the Tioga River. Wellsboro, laid out in 1806, became the county seat. Along Pine Creek the land drops into a deep gorge known as Pennsylvania's Grand Canyon.

Tioga, TX

This congregation began with services in the homes of the Shiloh community, two miles east, and organized as the Shiloh Methodist Church in 1887 under the Rev. Mr. Allen. After the town of Tioga was founded, the worshipers moved and built their sanctuary on this site in 1893, expanding it over the years. Among its members was Olan R. Van Zandt, who served sixteen years in the Texas Legislature as both representative and senator from 1926 to 1942.

Boston, MA

This plaque honors Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, Jr., the Cambridge-born son of Boston's Irish Catholic community who rose to become one of the most powerful figures in 20th-century American politics. A New Deal Democrat, he served for decades in the U.S. House of Representatives and held the Speaker's gavel from 1977 to 1987, sparring famously with the Reagan White House while defending Great Society social programs. He is perhaps best remembered for the maxim that came to define his craft: "all politics is local."

New York, NY

When the steamship Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912, roughly 1,500 passengers and crew were lost in one of history's most infamous maritime disasters. This lighthouse memorial, raised in New York the following year, honored the dead and once served the city's sailors from atop the Seamen's Church Institute. Its light kept the tragedy before the harbor city that so many of the victims had been bound for.

Washington, DC

When the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912, more than 1,500 people died in the frigid North Atlantic, many of them men who stepped back so women and children could reach the lifeboats. In the years after the disaster, women across the United States raised funds dime by dime to honor that sacrifice. The resulting granite memorial, designed by sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, depicts a robed figure with outstretched arms and now stands along Washington's Southwest waterfront.

Freeport vicinity, TX

During the Civil War, the tangled willow-lined waterways around this coastal island gave Confederate blockade-runners a place to hide. Captains like the shipbuilder H. C. Wedemeyer slipped cotton-laden vessels out on dark or stormy nights, sometimes towed to open water by men working from shore, evading the Federal ships watching from offshore. The cotton they carried overseas bought guns, powder, medicine, and cloth for a Confederacy short on manufacturing of its own.

Mt. Pleasant, TX

Titus County was carved from Red River and Bowie counties and organized in 1846, the same year Texas joined the Union. It was named for Andrew J. Titus, a pioneer of northwest Texas, a soldier in the Mexican War, and a member of the state legislature. Mount Pleasant became the county seat.

Mt. Pleasant, TX

Organized in 1846 and named for pioneer road-builder Andrew Jackson Titus, this Northeast Texas county threw itself into the Confederate cause, voting 411 to 275 for secession and sending ten military companies to war. Its farms and mills supplied the Confederate commissary with beef, corn, leather, and lumber, while a transportation depot at Mount Pleasant kept blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and harness makers busy outfitting wagons and teams. The county's home front fed both its own tables of wild game and the armies in the field.

Titusville, PA · est. 1999

As Pennsylvania's oil boom matured, producers, refiners, dealers, and brokers organized the industry's first permanent oil exchange in Titusville in 1871, beginning in the American Hotel on this spot. The exchange gave the young petroleum trade a formal marketplace, moving among sites before returning to a new three-story brick building here in 1881. It was dissolved in 1897, and the building was torn down in 1956.

Liberty, TX

In the spring of 1818, French generals Charles Lallemand and Antoine Rigaud led a band of Napoleonic veterans and other exiles to the banks of the Trinity River to found the Champ d'Asile—the "Field of Asylum"—a colony meant to be a refuge for peace and liberty. The settlers, defeated soldiers of a fallen empire, hoped to build new lives free of the political turmoil of Restoration Europe. The venture was short-lived, but its idealistic motto endured: "We want to live as free men through our labor, and in peace."

Austin, TX

This marker remembers rangers killed in the dangerous early years of the Republic. John Williams and Howell Haggett died in a May 1836 encounter with Indians while detailed from Captain John J. Tumlinson's company to protect the Hornsby settlement's families returning from the panicked flight known as the "Runaway Scrape." Pioneer ranger William Atkinson fell in a similar clash in 1845. The State of Texas placed the monument in 1936.

Austin, TX

Josephus Hornsby, son of pioneer Reuben Hornsby, grew up on the exposed Colorado River frontier east of Austin, settling in 1832. As a young Ranger he fought in the Indian and Mexican clashes of the Republic era — the Flores and Brush fights, Plum Creek in 1840, and the Vasquez and Woll campaigns — and in 1842 rescued two captives from an Indian raid in Austin.

Atlanta, GA

In 1910 the Burns Club of Atlanta built a faithful replica of the humble cottage near Alloway in Ayrshire, Scotland, where the poet Robert Burns was born in 1759. Scottish immigrants and admirers of Burns across America formed clubs to celebrate his poetry and heritage, and Atlanta's cottage became a distinctive gathering place devoted to his memory. It reflects the deep affection Americans held for the beloved 'Bard of Scotland' and the cultural ties immigrants kept with the old country.

Saint Louis County, MO

This tender inscription imagines fallen soldiers reunited after death in their old army quarters — a note of longing and comradeship raised to the Confederate dead. Erected in the St. Louis region, it belongs to the wave of memorials that sought to honor those who died in the nation's costliest war.

Fort Mill, SC

Erected in the 1890s in Fort Mill's Confederate Park, this is one of the earliest and most striking monuments in the South to commemorate enslaved African Americans — though it does so through the lens of the 'Lost Cause,' framing the enslaved as loyal servants of the Confederate war effort. In reality, the roughly four million people held in bondage experienced slavery as coerced labor, family separation, and violence, and many thousands escaped to Union lines or took up arms for their own freedom. The monument's language of 'faithful' devotion reflects the memory its white patrons wished to preserve in the decades after Reconstruction, not the lived experience of the people it claims to honor.

Marshall, TX

Walter Paye Lane's long fighting life spanned nearly every armed struggle of nineteenth-century Texas. He won distinction as a young man at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, later rode as a commander of Texas Rangers during the Mexican War, and served as a Confederate brigadier general in the Civil War. Born in 1817 and dying in 1892, he was honored with this state marker in Marshall in 1936.

Multnomah County, OR

This monument honors the Oregon pioneers of 1836 to 1859 — the era when thousands of emigrants followed the Oregon Trail across the continent to the Willamette Valley. Their overland migration transformed the Pacific Northwest and helped bring Oregon into the Union in 1859.

Houston, TX

John Grant Tod, a Kentuckian who went to sea at seventeen, came to Texas in 1837 and served the Republic's second navy as naval agent, Galveston yard commander, and commodore; in January 1846 he carried the official notice of annexation to President Anson Jones. He later served in the U.S. Navy during the Mexican War and helped organize Texas's first railroad, the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado. He bought a cottage here in 1866, and his son-in-law C.H. Milby's additions turned it into the brick "Milby House," a landmark until its 1959 demolition.

Elkton, KY

Todd County, formed in 1819, remembers a Virginia-born frontier soldier who helped wrest the Illinois country from British control. John Todd fought at Point Pleasant in 1774, came to Kentucky in 1775, and rode with George Rogers Clark's daring 1778 campaign, afterward serving as civil commandant of the new Illinois County. A champion of setting aside land for public schools, he was killed at the disastrous Battle of Blue Licks in 1782.

Mason vicinity, TX

In late December 1864, the family of George W. Todd, Mason County's first clerk, was attacked here while traveling to Mason. A twelve-year-old Black servant girl was killed, thirteen-year-old Alice Todd was carried off, and Todd's wife Dizenia was gravely wounded, dying about three weeks later. Alice's half-brother James Smith returned from the Civil War and searched for months, but she was never found.

Marshall, TX

This Marshall house grew in layers from before the Civil War through the early 20th century. Mary Britt bought the land in 1856 and married Judge William S. Todd, a signer of Texas's 1861 secession ordinance; a later owner, Gilchrist McKay, also signed the ordinance and died fighting for the Confederacy at the 1864 Battle of Mansfield. Victorian-era owners added the ornate two-story porch in the 1880s, and a railroad engineer expanded the house again in 1909.

Jefferson, TX

Built in the late 1850s in the Greek Revival style with a broad central hallway, this house was soon sold to District Judge William S. Todd, who took part in the 1861 Secession Convention. From 1869 to 1912 it was home to the family of Dr. Archibald A. Terhune, a popular local physician who added a small room for his office, while his wife Mary Frances earned a reputation as a noted gardener. The dwelling reflects the prosperity and social standing of Jefferson's leading families in the Civil War era.

Brownfield, TX

Schooling in the Tokio area began around the turn of the century in the ranch house of the J Cross Ranch, before a dedicated schoolhouse went up near the town center in 1911. Larger buildings followed — one to replace a fire, others to meet growing needs — and the school served not only as a classroom but as a hub for the community's religious and civic life. In 1941 it consolidated with the Brownfield Independent School District.

Nacogdoches, TX

Built by the founder of nearby Melrose and later home to the Hardeman family, this East Texas farmhouse passed in the 1860s to Lyne Taliaferro "Tol" Barret and his wife Angelina. In 1866 Barret drilled the first producing oil well in Texas, near Oil Springs, decades before the great Spindletop gusher. His descendants occupied the house until 1956, and it was moved to its present site in 1975.

Woodville, TX

Robert Tolar built this log dwelling south of Woodville in 1866, its timbers cut, squared, and notched on the spot and topped with hand-rived shakes above a mud-and-stick chimney. Over the years it became the family's "cook house," where three meals a day were prepared over the open fireplace, with pots kept full for any traveler who happened to drop in — a routine that continued until 1960.

Tolar, TX

Before air conditioning, open-air tabernacles gave Texas communities a shaded place to gather through the brutal summer heat, hosting revivals, weddings, reunions, fairs, and picnics. Built about 1897 with contributions from Tolar's churches, this tabernacle was community-owned and managed by trustees drawn from local congregations, who bought its ground outright in 1904 for $75. A sturdy improvement on the temporary brush arbor, its timber frame and corrugated-metal hip roof still shelter fish fries and the annual Tolar School homecoming held there since 1954.

Toledo, OH

On May 17, 2000, commemorative trees were planted in Toledo to honor its sister-city bond with Toyohashi, Japan. The sister-cities movement grew out of the postwar 'People-to-People' program, forging friendships between American and foreign towns to encourage cultural exchange and goodwill. This living grove marks that long-standing international friendship.

Burkeville, TX

For centuries the great curve of the Sabine River known as Toledo Bend was a crossroads of the East Texas borderlands—a landmark for Spanish explorers and missionaries, and later a contested edge of the Neutral Territory disputed by the United States and Spain in the early 1800s. Just off El Camino Real, the King's Highway, it drew steamboat landings, ferries, and Anglo-American settlers who knew it as Bevil's Crossing and then Hadden's Ferry. In time it even became a cradle of the region's pecan industry before its modern life as a resort lake.

Lamkin vicinity, TX

This cemetery holds some of the earliest settlers of what became Comanche County, among them James H. Neel, one of the first seven men to bring their families to the area in 1852—four years before the county was even organized. Neel later served as postmaster of the nearby Resley's Creek village during the Civil War years. The graves mark the toehold of Anglo settlement on the central Texas frontier.

Waco, TX

This congregation grew from a Sunday school class led by the Rev. I. Toliver, a respected Baptist minister and civic leader in Waco's African American community, who organized the church in his own name in 1895. After buying land in east Waco, the congregation built a sanctuary near the interurban rail line and grew to more than 1,100 members by the early 1940s. A new church rose on this site in 1948, and the congregation continues its outreach and youth work today.

Columbus, TX

Native Texan and Civil War veteran James A. Toliver, a civic and political leader in Columbus, is said to have built this house around 1870 using the finest pine and cypress from his own lumber yard. Its two-story wrap-around porch and jig-sawn woodwork mark it as a showpiece of the era; Sallie Cone bought it in 1916, and it stayed in her family until 1974.

Bridgeport, TX

When Butterfield's Overland Mail crossed this stretch of the West Fork of the Trinity around 1860, a reliable river crossing was essential, and Colonel W. H. Hunt built a chartered toll bridge just to the west. The mail line collapsed with the coming of the Civil War, but a settlement had taken root; a Decatur merchant spanned the river again with an iron bridge in 1873, and the town shifted when the railroad arrived in 1893.

Dearborn, MI

This monument marks the site of an 1864 toll gate on the old Detroit–Chicago road, a vital overland route threading travelers and freight across early Michigan. Nearby stood the Ten Eyck Tavern, a waystation for those journeying the corridor, associated with figures like Dr. Samuel Pierce Duffield. Dearborn's Historical Commission placed the marker in 1971 to recall this crossroads of frontier travel.

Menallen Township, PA · est. 1947

This toll house is one of six original gatehouses built along the Cumberland Road — the great National Road that was the first federally funded highway in the United States, pushing west across the Appalachians toward the Ohio country. The roadway was completed through this section of Fayette County in 1817–18, and when the federal government handed the road over to Pennsylvania in 1835, the state built these toll houses to collect the fees that would maintain it. Travelers, freight wagons, and Conestoga teams once paused here to pay their way west.

Addison Township, PA · est. 1947

When the federal government handed the National Road over to the states in 1835, tolls became the means of paying for its upkeep, and small toll houses sprang up to collect from passing traffic. The one recalled here was among just six original toll houses on the Cumberland Road, standing on the hill opposite to gather fees from the wagons and stagecoaches rolling west. Preserved and restored by the Daughters of the American Revolution, it survives as a reminder of the road's toll-keeping days.

Greensburg, PA · est. 1955

Before public highways, long-distance roads were built and maintained by private turnpike companies that recouped their costs at tollgates. This spot held the toll house of the Stoyestown-Greensburg Turnpike, part of the vital Philadelphia-to-Pittsburgh road completed in 1819 at the then-steep price of roughly $6,000 a mile. Travelers, drovers, and freight wagons paid their way west here for nearly a century, until the state finally took the road over in 1911.

Hempfield Township, PA · est. 1955

Crossing the mountains between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh once meant passing through a series of tollgates run by private turnpike companies. Just northeast of here stood one of five gates on the Greensburg-Pittsburgh Turnpike, completed in 1817 as a link in that great east-west road. Over its surface rolled the wagons of goods exchanged between the seaboard and the growing settlements of the Ohio Valley.

San Antonio, TX

Rising three stories of concrete and masonry in 1913, the Toltec was built for Dr. Augustus Maverick, who was murdered before it was finished. The Maverick family, long central to San Antonio's downtown growth, retained ownership until 1996. With its U-shaped plan, white stone detailing over red brick, and a cast-iron staircase climbing from basement to top floor, the building preserves its early twentieth-century classical revival design almost intact.

San Angelo, TX

Carved from the old Miller and Fisher land grant, Tom Green County was created in 1874 and organized the following year, taking its name from General Thomas Green, a San Jacinto veteran and Confederate officer killed in 1864. The first transcontinental mail routes had already converged nearby in 1858. The county seat began at Ben Ficklin in 1875 before shifting to San Angelo in 1882.

San Angelo, TX

Thomas Green came to Texas from Tennessee in 1833 and fought at San Jacinto in 1836, helping man the celebrated "Twin Sisters" cannons that won Texas independence. He built a long public career as a court clerk and legislator, served in frontier Indian campaigns and the Mexican War, then rose to prominence as a Confederate cavalry commander. Leading the 5th Texas Cavalry and later his own division, he fought at Val Verde and in the campaigns to hold Louisiana before he was killed in 1864 at Blair's Landing during the Red River Campaign. The West Texas county where this marker stands bears his name.

Cleveland, TX

Completed in 1923, this front-gabled Craftsman bungalow was the home of Thomas Coleman Hill (1883–1976) and his wife Aileene. Tom Hill was a respected Cleveland businessman who ran a general store and insurance agency, served three terms on the city council, directed the Farmers State Bank, and led his Methodist congregation. Its deep overhanging porch, triangular and curved brackets, and tongue-and-groove siding are hallmarks of the Craftsman style popular in the era.

San Mateo County, CA

This memorial honors Congressman Tom Lantos (1928–2008), the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to the U.S. Congress. Born in Hungary, Lantos survived Nazi persecution as a teenager before emigrating to the United States, and he represented this San Francisco Bay Area district for 28 years. As chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he became one of Washington's most forceful voices for human rights around the world.

Iowa Park, TX

Son of the noted rancher Burk Burnett, Tom L. Burnett was raised on the famous 6666 Ranch and became a leading cattleman in his own right, running the Triangle Ranch and range land across several North Texas counties. A civic leader and philanthropist, he was known for his friendship with Native people, including the celebrated Comanche chief Quanah Parker, and for his backing of area rodeos, which earned him the nickname the "Rodeo King." He died at his residence on this site in 1938.

Iowa Park, TX

Cattleman and civic leader Tom Lloyd Burnett, heir to one of North Texas's great ranching names, built this stately Colonial Revival home in 1924, hiring the Wichita Falls firm of Voelcker and Dixon to design it. Its Dutch gambrel roof and clipped gable made it a landmark in Iowa Park. After Burnett's death in 1938 it passed to his cousin Will Burnett, another rancher and civic figure, keeping the house within the family that helped shape the region's cattle economy.

San Juan, TX

Tom Mayfield's life reads like the closing chapter of the Texas frontier turning into the modern Rio Grande Valley. Leaving his parents' Gonzales County farm in 1898, he helped buy horses for Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, then spent decades as a city marshal, Texas Ranger, and deputy sheriff along the border. His role in exposing a wartime German-Mexican intrigue and a legendary escape from a Mexican firing squad in 1921 made him a beloved local figure right through his final years in the San Juan Hotel.

Gibson Township, PA · est. 1955

Tom Mix, born in this corner of Pennsylvania on January 6, 1880, became one of Hollywood's first great Western stars. After service as a soldier during the Spanish-American War, he rode to fame in hundreds of silent and sound films between 1910 and 1935, defining the movie cowboy for a generation. He died in an Arizona auto accident in 1940.