Search Markers

Mobile, AL

Long before it was a branch of the modern armed forces, the U.S. Coast Guard began as scattered predecessor services — the Revenue Cutter Service, the Lighthouse Service, the Life-Saving Service — that patrolled America's coasts and rivers. This monument traces Mobile's link to that lineage back to 1819, when the revenue cutter Alabama was stationed at the young Gulf port to chase smugglers and enforce the new nation's customs laws. From that single cutter grew two centuries of unbroken service watching over one of the busiest harbors on the Gulf of Mexico.

Port Aransas, TX

To tame the treacherous Aransas Pass, the government established the first Aransas Life Saving Station on Mustang Island in 1878; when the 1919 hurricane destroyed it, successors carried on the work into the modern era. Woodrow Wilson's 1915 merger of the Revenue Cutter and Life Saving services created the U.S. Coast Guard, whose Mustang Island duties expanded from rescue to hunting enemy saboteurs with canine beach patrols in World War II and, later, to escorting military cargo and inspecting vessels in the War on Terror.

Miami, FL

Built in 1932 at Dinner Key, this seaplane hangar anchored the first permanent Coast Guard Air Station in the country. From here, seaplanes lumbered off Biscayne Bay to carry out rescues and evacuations across Florida's coasts and the Straits beyond. It stands from the pioneering days when aviation was still being folded into the nation's maritime lifesaving service.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 2006

When the great "Grand Review of the Armies" paraded through Washington in May 1865, the United States Colored Troops who had fought and bled for the Union were pointedly left out. In answer, Black regiments from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts assembled here at State and Filbert Streets on November 14, 1865, for their own triumphant review. Grand Marshal T. Morris Chester led them through Harrisburg to Senator Simon Cameron's home, where leaders including Octavius Catto and William Howard Day honored their service.

Zavalla, TX

By 1933 the Piney Woods of East Texas were largely cutover forest and worn-out farmland, exhausted by decades of unregulated logging. That year the Texas Legislature authorized national forests in the state, leading to the Angelina, Davy Crockett, Sabine, and Sam Houston forests that today cover more than 658,000 acres. Under Forest Service management, the once-depleted timberlands regrew into a renewable industry and public recreation ground.

Monroe Township, OH

In a modest one-story timber cottage in the Clermont County hamlet of Point Pleasant, the future general and eighteenth president of the United States entered the world in the spring of 1822, the first child of a tanner and his wife who had settled along the Ohio River only a year before. Named Hiram Ulysses at birth, the boy would grow up around his father's tannery trade before a clerical error at West Point permanently rechristened him with the initials that history remembers. The Ohio frontier of these years was a rising country of river commerce and small industry, and this humble house marks the starting point of one of the most consequential American lives of the nineteenth century.

Stone Harbor, NJ

Before the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Life-Saving Service manned a chain of stations along America's most dangerous coasts, where surfmen launched into the breakers to rescue the crews of wrecked ships. Built around 1895, the Tatham Life Saving Station at Stone Harbor was one such outpost on the New Jersey shore, keeping watch over a coastline long notorious for shipwrecks. The surviving building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Portsmouth, VA

Before automated buoys and GPS, lightships served as floating lighthouses, anchored at dangerous shoals and harbor entrances to guide mariners safely past hidden hazards. U.S. Lightship 101, known in her service as "Lightship Portsmouth," is one of the surviving vessels of this vanished maritime tradition. Now berthed in Portsmouth, Virginia, she was recognized in 1989 as a National Historic Landmark, preserving a tangible link to the crews who weathered storms at sea to keep coastal shipping lanes safe.

Louisville, KY

In the mid-19th century, the Ohio and Mississippi rivers were America's great commercial highways, and Louisville sat at the Falls of the Ohio, a natural break in the traffic where boats had to portage or lock through. Built between 1845 and 1852, this marine hospital was part of a federal system created to care for the boatmen, deckhands, and rivermen who powered the booming steamboat trade but who fell sick or were injured far from home. Its handsome design reflected the young government's growing sense that the men who moved the nation's commerce deserved proper medical care.

San Francisco, CA

This tree was planted in 1975 to mark a century since a U.S. Marine Hospital first opened on this San Francisco site. The Marine Hospital system was one of the nation's oldest federal health programs, created to care for sick and injured merchant seamen and eventually growing into the U.S. Public Health Service. On a busy Pacific port, such a hospital tended the sailors whose labor kept America's maritime trade moving.

Young Township, PA

In November 2010, two of Punxsutawney's oldest civic institutions — the Groundhog Club's Inner Circle and the local Elks lodge — dedicated a flag and memorial honoring everyone who has worn the nation's uniform. Set in the farm country of Jefferson County, it joins the countless community-raised tributes that dot small-town Pennsylvania. Rather than marking a single battle, it gathers the service of veterans across all of America's wars into one quiet spot.

Kingsville, TX

With war looming, the Naval Expansion Act of 1940 fueled a two-ocean navy, and Kingsville leaders won a station by touting their open skies, flat terrain, and year-round flying weather. Commissioned on July 4, 1942, the Naval Auxiliary Air Station trained cadets in carrier landings, practicing touch-and-go on strips built to mimic flight-deck length and running bombing runs over Padre Island, while a unit of Navy WAVES served in support roles. The base helped prepare aviators for both the Pacific and Atlantic before it was decommissioned in 1951 and later reborn as a full Naval Air Station in 1968.

New York, NY

For more than a century the United States Naval Hospital in Brooklyn cared for sailors and Marines who passed through the great Navy Yard on the East River, one of the oldest naval medical facilities in the country. This plaque records a gift from the Burke Foundation, a charitable endowment, offered as a lasting tribute at the hospital. Such dedications turned a working medical institution into a place of remembrance for those who served at sea.

Hyde County, NC

On this rise—still called Loop Shack Hill—the U.S. Navy ran the Advanced Amphibious Training Base at Ocracoke from December 1943 to January 1946. Here it trained the Beach Jumpers, special units that used sound, lights, and pyrotechnics to stage diversionary 'phantom' landings meant to deceive the enemy during World War II.

Lawrence, KS

Presented to the city of Lawrence by the local Navy League in 1964, this Polaris missile display honors the fleet ballistic missile submarines that formed a pillar of American nuclear deterrence at the height of the Cold War. Launched from submerged submarines, Polaris missiles gave the United States a hidden, mobile retaliatory force, and communities across the country accepted such displays as tangible emblems of national defense.

Douglas County, OR

This station on the Umpqua River was built in 1939 as a U.S. Coast Guard facility, part of the network of lifesaving posts that guarded the treacherous bars and inlets of the Oregon coast. After its Coast Guard service ended, Douglas County restored the building and rededicated it in 1980 as a public recreation and visitor center. Its handsome lines recall an age when small crews stood watch over shipping and storm-tossed sailors.

New Bern, NC

The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Pamlico was based at New Bern for four decades, from 1907 until 1947, patrolling the sounds and rivers of eastern North Carolina. In an age before highways and modern navigation aids, such cutters enforced maritime law, aided vessels in distress, and served through two world wars. Her long posting made her a fixture of the working waterfront on the Neuse and Trent rivers.

Erie, PA · est. 2023

On December 5, 1843, the U.S. Navy launched its first iron-hulled vessel near this Erie shoreline—an experiment in a new material at a moment when wooden ships still ruled the seas. Her iron components were forged in Pittsburgh and hauled overland to the lakeshore, then assembled into a 163-foot steam-powered paddle frigate. Renamed Wolverine in 1905, she patrolled and trained sailors on the Great Lakes into the twentieth century, earning the nickname "Guardian of the Great Lakes."

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1983

The frigate U.S.S. United States was the first vessel completed for the newly created United States Navy, launched near this spot on the Philadelphia waterfront in 1797 from the design of shipbuilder Joshua Humphreys. She first sailed as the flagship of Captain John Barry, a founding hero of the Navy. In the War of 1812, under Stephen Decatur, she won lasting fame by capturing the British frigate H.M.S. Macedonian before finally being scrapped at Norfolk in 1866.

Conway, AR

This plaque marks Harrin Hall, a 1930 building at the heart of the University of Central Arkansas historic district in Conway. Erected as the young teachers' college was maturing into a full university, the hall reflects the ambitious campus building of the interwar years, when Southern states invested heavily in higher education and public architecture. Its placement on the National Register of Historic Places recognizes both the building and the surrounding academic district as worthy of preservation.

Los Angeles, CA

This memorial commemorates the Holodomor, the catastrophic 1932–1933 famine in Soviet Ukraine that killed millions when state policy seized grain and sealed off starving villages. Erected by Ukrainian-American immigrants, it gives public voice to a history the Soviet government long denied. It stands as one of many diaspora memorials that carried the memory of these events into the United States.

New Braunfels, TX

This sturdy sand-brick house was raised in 1855 by George Ullrich, one of the German colonists who poured into central Texas under the Adelsverein emigration company. A decade earlier, in 1845, Ullrich had driven the first wagon of those settlers across the Guadalupe River—a small but vivid moment in the founding of New Braunfels.

Martinsburg, WV

This memorial in Martinsburg honors those from the community who died in service to their country. Its inscription speaks in the universal language of sacrifice, dedicating the site to all who paid the ultimate price — a form of remembrance common in towns across America that lost sons and daughters to the nation's wars.

San Marcos, TX

Born in San Marcos in 1884 to formerly enslaved parents, Ulysses "Boots" Cephas learned the blacksmith's trade from his father and grew into one of the county's most respected craftsmen, prized for his skill at shoeing horses and building wagons and farm tools. He owned his own shop and gave back to his community as a church member and organizer of the San Marcos Independent Band. His life traces one family's path from bondage to skilled independence in a single generation.

Columbus, OH

During the Civil War, Columbus and its Capitol Square were a hub of the Union war effort, ringed by army camps where Ohio regiments were mustered and paid. Ohio sent nearly 320,000 men to the Union army and lost more than 35,000, but its most decisive contribution may have been leadership: Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and McPherson, along with cabinet officers Stanton and Chase, were all Ohioans. Their generalship and statecraft helped steer the Union to victory.

Chicago, IL

This boulder commemorates a tree planted by Ulysses S. Grant on December 6, 1879, shortly after the Civil War hero and former president returned from his celebrated two-year tour around the world. Grant, who led the Union armies to victory and served two terms in the White House, was greeted by adoring crowds on his homecoming. The simple planting captured the public's enduring affection for one of the era's most famous Americans.

Canyon, TX

Umbarger began in 1895 as a humble wagon yard where a Civil War veteran turned farmer offered rest to travelers on the Texas plains, and it took his name when the Pecos Valley Railroad christened a switch after him in 1898. German-Catholic families gathered by Pius Friemel built St. Mary's Church in 1908, planting Old World faith in the Panhandle. Its most remarkable chapter came during World War II, when Italian prisoners of war held nearby at Hereford adorned the parish church with carved figures and painted interiors that survive to this day.

Van Alstyne, TX

Pioneer landowner, banker, and community leader James C. Umphress, a Confederate veteran, built this Victorian house in 1903 for his wife, Julia Caroline. In 1932 it passed to their daughter, Maude Umphress Taylor, a civic leader married to a local banker, who lived here into the 1970s. Its Queen Anne and classical-revival details mark it as a showpiece of small-town Texas prosperity.

Norwalk, CT

In the years after World War II, American towns embraced the young United Nations as a symbol of hope for a more peaceful world, and Norwalk joined that spirit on October 25, 1958, dedicating a living tree in the organization's honor. The gesture came just over a decade after the UN's founding in 1945 and its 1948 adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an era when "UN Day" ceremonies and plantings were a common civic ritual across the country. Choosing a tree rather than stone made the tribute a growing thing, meant to endure and flourish alongside the ideals it honored.

South Holland, IL

This memorial honors Jan Ton and his wife Aagje, Dutch immigrants who farmed near the Little Calumet River and helped found the area's First Reformed Church and Dutch settlements. Their farm became a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom seekers escaping slavery on their way toward Canada. Faith and conscience led this immigrant community to risk much for others' liberty.

Lewisburg, PA · est. 1954

This old stable served as a station on the Underground Railroad, the secret network of safe houses that helped enslaved people escape north toward freedom in the decades before the Civil War. Here freedom seekers were hidden, fed, and helped on their way to the next station in a chain that stretched, hand to hand, toward Canada. Aiding fugitives was dangerous and illegal work, carried out quietly by people who risked prosecution to defy slavery.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 2000

In the 1850s a Harrisburg neighborhood known as Tanner's Alley served as a vital link on the Underground Railroad. Freedom seekers found shelter a block apart in the homes of Joseph Bustill and William Jones, while the nearby Wesley Union AME Zion Church hosted the era's fiercest voices against slavery—Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison both spoke there. It was a hub of Black community and antislavery organizing on the road north.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 2003

In the years before the Civil War, the mountainous country around Chambersburg sheltered a network of Underground Railroad stations where people fleeing slavery could pause on their journey north. One local agent was Henry Watson, a free Black barber who helped guide fugitives past the slave-catchers and bounty hunters hunting them. His work turned an ordinary trade into a lifeline to freedom.

Maywood, IL

In the decades before the Civil War, enslaved people escaping the South followed the secret network of routes and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad toward freedom in the North. This memorial recalls a "Ten Mile Freedom House" that once stood here, offering shelter to those making the dangerous journey. The site ties the Chicago area into that clandestine web of resistance.

Lisbon, IL

Founded in 1835-36 by abolitionists who had migrated west from Oneida County, New York, the Lisbon Colony carried the fervor of the burning-over district's reform movements onto the Illinois prairie. These settlers made their community an active center of the anti-slavery cause, part of the network of sympathizers who resisted slavery in the decades before the Civil War.

Village of Mill Neck, NY

Captain John Underhill was one of the more colorful figures of early colonial America — an English-born soldier from Warwickshire who crossed the Atlantic in 1630 to the young Massachusetts Bay Colony, then spent his later years on Long Island, dying at Matinecock in 1672. This walled family burying ground marks where the Underhill line first took root in the New World and where generations of the family were laid to rest. The bronze plaque itself is comparatively modern, placed in 1953 by a prominent descendant, industrialist and diplomat Myron C. Taylor, in memory of his mother.

Houston, TX

This Georgian Revival house — the only one of its style in Houston's Courtlandt Place — was designed by the noted Fort Worth firm Sanguinet and Staats in the early 20th century. Gulf Oil vice-president Underwood Nazro and his family lived here from 1916 to 1928, followed by banker Ike McFarland and his wife, the preservationist Mae Wynn McFarland.

Hempstead, TX

During the Civil War, the rail junction near Hempstead anchored several Confederate facilities, including Camp Groce, a prisoner-of-war stockade on Leonard Waller Groce's plantation. Union prisoners who died in captivity — many during a devastating 1864 yellow fever epidemic — were buried on the neighboring McDade Plantation. Union prisoner Aaron T. Sutton recorded more than 100 fresh graves here before his escape and long journey on foot to Beaumont; by the 1940s, land-clearing erased all surface trace of the cemetery.

Somerville, MA

During the Civil War, towns across the North set up recruiting stands to enlist local men into the Union Army, and Somerville was no exception. This spot in front of the building marked one such recruiting station, where volunteers signed up to serve in the great struggle to preserve the Union. Massachusetts was an early and enthusiastic supplier of troops, and neighborhood recruiting sites like this one turned ordinary street corners into gateways to the front lines.

Carrollton, TX

Organized in a pioneer cabin on May 10, 1846 — the very year Texas joined the Union — Union Baptist Church was the earliest Baptist congregation in Dallas County. A handful of settler families gathered under the Rev. David Myers, who served until his death in 1853, and built their first meeting house on land donated by Thomas and Sarah Keenan. Over the following decades the congregation followed the growing settlements, moving through several sanctuaries before becoming today's Highland Baptist Church.

Irving, TX

Drawn by fertile land along the Elm Fork of the Trinity River, settlers reached this area by the mid-19th century, and after William and Virginia Smith arrived in 1879 the families here built what became the Union Bower Community. They hauled cotton, corn, and produce to Dallas markets, organized a Sunday school in 1885 that grew into a Methodist church, and established schools and a community cemetery. When Irving was founded on the railroad in 1903, Union Bower's rural population declined, and by the time Irving annexed it in 1956 little of its farming character remained.

West Hanover Township, PA · est. 1948

The Union Canal fulfilled a dream that reached back to William Penn, who as early as the colonial era imagined linking the Susquehanna and Schuylkill rivers. Surveyed in 1762 but not finished until 1828, the completed waterway ran from Middletown on the Susquehanna to Reading on the Schuylkill, threading boats and cargo across the Pennsylvania interior. Railroads soon outpaced it, and the canal was abandoned in 1885; its remains can still be traced near Union Deposit.

Derry Township, PA · est. 1948

First imagined by William Penn and surveyed as early as 1762, the Union Canal finally opened to traffic in 1828, connecting the Susquehanna River at Middletown with the Schuylkill at Reading. For a few decades its boats carried coal and goods across the Pennsylvania interior before the railroads rendered it obsolete. Abandoned in 1885, its overgrown remains can still be seen near Union Deposit, just to the north of the marker.

West Hanover Township, PA · est. 1948

The Union Canal grew from a vision as old as William Penn: a water link between the Susquehanna and Schuylkill rivers. Surveyed in 1762 and completed in 1828, it stretched from Middletown to Reading, carrying cargo through the heart of Pennsylvania until railroads made it unprofitable. It was abandoned in 1885, and traces of the old canal survive near Union Deposit a few miles south.

Bern Township, PA · est. 1950

Operating from 1828 to 1884, the Union Canal linked the Schuylkill River at Reading with the Susquehanna at Middletown, stitching together eastern Pennsylvania's waterways in the great canal-building era. Boats hauled coal, grain, and goods along its towpath, a stretch of which can still be traced southeast of here beside the Tulpehocken Creek.

Penn Township, PA · est. 1950

Here the Union Canal ran along the north bank of the Tulpehocken, where a dam, two locks, and a mule bridge allowed boats to cross Northkill Creek. The surrounding cluster of grist mills, a lime kiln, and a tannery shows how a canal was never just a ditch of water but the spine of a small industrial community that grew up along its banks.

Cumru Township, PA · est. 1950

For most of the 19th century, before railroads dominated, Pennsylvania moved its goods by water. The Union Canal, opened in 1828, stitched together two of the state's great river systems — linking the Schuylkill at Reading to the Susquehanna at Middletown — so boats could carry freight all the way toward Philadelphia. Near this spot, at the tip of Fritts Island, the ruins of the canal's easternmost lock still hint at the engineering that once lifted vessels across the watershed.

Middletown, PA · est. 1950

From 1828 to 1884, the Union Canal linked the Susquehanna River at Middletown to the Schuylkill at Reading, threading its way along the Swatara and Tulpehocken Creeks. Barges laden with coal and iron ore moved through its locks, feeding the furnaces and markets of a booming industrial economy. Here the old canal ran just west of the former mill race, a reminder of how water once powered both mills and commerce.

Jackson Township, PA · est. 1950

The Union Canal, in use from 1828 to 1884, linked the Susquehanna and Schuylkill watersheds across the rolling country of eastern Pennsylvania. Boats descended through a chain of locks from the canal's summit level near Lebanon down to the river at Reading. Remnants of one such lock still lie a short distance south along the Tulpehocken.

Swatara Township, PA · est. 1950

This stretch of the Union Canal reveals the engineering ingenuity that kept 19th-century canals flowing. Water gathered behind the Big Dam in Swatara Gap traveled by a branch canal to the Water Works, where wheels and steam pumps lifted it to the summit level near Lebanon. From that high point the canal fell away in both directions, east to Reading and west to Middletown.

Union Township, PA · est. 1950

A feeder branch of the Union Canal followed the Swatara Creek from Pine Grove down to the main line at the Water Works, carrying both boats and the water that fed the larger system. It operated from 1832 to 1862, its route now marked by the surviving remains of the Big Dam, a guard lock, and several lift locks across the creek. These fragments trace a working piece of Pennsylvania's canal network.

North Lebanon Township, PA · est. 1947

Beneath this ridge runs what the marker calls the first canal tunnel in America, bored in 1823 as part of the ambitious Union Canal. When the full canal opened in 1827, it linked the Schuylkill and Susquehanna watersheds, carrying boats of coal and freight across the Pennsylvania interior in the golden age before railroads. The waterway ran until 1884, and its stone-lined tunnel survives as a monument to early American engineering.

Bellefonte, PA · est. 1992

Chartered in 1856 on ground already used for burials since 1808, this Bellefonte cemetery became the resting place of an unusual concentration of political power. Three Pennsylvania governors and their wives lie here, spanning the Civil War through the Gilded Age. Chief among them is Andrew Gregg Curtin, the wartime governor who mobilized the commonwealth for the Union.

Cross Roads, TX

Around 1860 David Thompson settled this stretch of Henderson County and put Wildcat Creek to work, running a grist mill and cotton gin that anchored a small community sometimes called Thompson's Mill. His sons later gave land for a Union Church and school, and by 1885 neighbors were burying their dead on the adjoining ground. The church, school and post office faded near the turn of the century, but the cemetery endured, kept up by a local association long after the mill community itself disappeared.

Lott, TX

Early settlers Joseph Marcus Jackson and his wife Eleanor donated four acres for Union Cemetery, so named because it served all the communities around Durango. The earliest recorded burial dates to 1836, and among its more than 800 graves lie many of the area's pioneer families along with veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, and the Korean War. A local association has maintained the grounds since 1977.

Teague, TX

This two-acre plot has served as a burial ground since 1860, when Jacob W. Tacker gave the land for both a cemetery and a school, anchoring what became known as the 'Tacker School and Graveyard Community.' A log church built in 1866 doubled as the schoolhouse, replaced in 1891 by a frame 'Union Church' that lent the cemetery its present name. Cared for by neighbors and, after 1900, by a formal association, the site still holds a brick chapel raised in 1962.

Cooper, TX

Old Union Cemetery served the farm and ranch communities of Gough, Yowell, and Antioch, with its earliest recorded burial dating to W.H. Henderson in 1859. Among its more than ninety marked graves, arranged in family plots, lie many of the area's first settlers and at least three Civil War veterans — T.J. Hollon, Hiram G. Wynn, and T.J. Craig. The last burial came in 1946, and a cemetery association formed the next year to tend the grounds.

Garden Valley, TX

The earliest grave here, dated August 1873, was dug a month before pioneer settler Amplias Smith deeded three acres for a Methodist church and cemetery in Garden Valley. The congregation soon built a sanctuary, replaced in 1949, while Smith and others enlarged the burial ground over the years. Many of the area's founding families rest here, including Smith and his wife Martha.

Philipsburg, PA

In 1820, the pioneers who were carving Philipsburg out of the central Pennsylvania wilderness raised a log building that had to do double duty — a schoolhouse on weekdays and a house of worship open to every faith on Sundays. That kind of shared, all-denominations space was typical of frontier settlements too small and too new to support separate congregations. A remodeling in 1842 gave the structure the trim, simplified Gothic lines that made it a local landmark.

Mechanicsburg, PA · est. 1954

Built in 1825 on land donated by Martin Rupp, Union Church is remembered as the oldest public building in Mechanicsburg. True to its name and charter, it was shared among many different religious congregations, each welcome to worship there for a small fee in a community shaped by Pennsylvania's German settlers.