Search Markers

Riverside, CA

On July 1, 1929, Auxiliary No. 4 to the Sons of Union Veterans planted these trees in memory of the Union soldiers of the Civil War. Six decades after Appomattox, the descendants and heirs of the Grand Army of the Republic sought a living tribute to the men who had fought to preserve the Union. The grove is an act of remembrance rooted in the culture of Civil War commemoration that shaped early-20th-century America.

Barbourville, KY

Incorporated in October 1879 in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky, Union College conferred its first degrees in 1893. Several of its buildings — Centennial Hall, Speed Hall, and the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Gymnasium — have since been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The college became a lasting center of learning for the Appalachian region.

Sulphur Springs, TX

The rich sandy soil here drew farmers before the Civil War, and the settlement they built took its name from the Union Church, a shared meetinghouse open to members of many denominations founded around 1850. Over the decades Union gathered the usual anchors of rural Texas life — a church, a school, a store, and a post office recorded as "Yesner" — around which families lived and worshipped. Its pioneer cemetery, in use by 1861, still holds many of the area's first settlers.

Lewisburg, PA · est. 1982

Established in 1813 from Northumberland County, Union County took its name as a tribute to the Federal Union at a time when the young nation's cohesion was still being tested. Its seat shifted from Mifflinburg to New Berlin and finally, in 1855, to Lewisburg. That town became home to Bucknell University, founded in the 1840s.

Plymouth, NC

The main line of Union defenses during the Battle of Plymouth ran across the road at this point from April 17 to 20, 1864. Dug earthworks like these, bristling with artillery, were meant to hold the river town against any land approach. They were ultimately overrun when Confederate forces pressed the assault on all sides.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2011

In 1736, decades before American independence, a group of Philadelphians led by Benjamin Franklin organized the Union Fire Company — the first genuinely volunteer firefighting brigade in the colonies. Members stored their leather buckets, ladders, and tools here in Grindstone Alley and pledged mutual aid against the constant danger of fire in a crowded colonial city. Their example spread nationwide and helped give rise to the very idea of fire insurance.

Union Township, PA · est. 1947

About 1782 Curtis Grubb, owner of the great Cornwall Iron Furnace, established Union Forge here to refine the pig iron his furnace produced. Charcoal-fired forges like this one hammered brittle pig iron into tough, workable wrought iron, and Union Forge grew into a small industrial village of a thousand acres with shops, a grist mill, and workers' houses. It ran under successive owners until 1868, when newer rolling mills finally rendered such hand-forging obsolete.

White Hall, TX

Organized around 1865 in the Sawyer community with just 27 members, this Baptist congregation received a three-acre site from Dougald McAlpine in 1870 and built its first sanctuary in 1880. Over the following decades it helped found several regional Baptist associations and hosted their conventions, peaking at 134 members in 1918. After a lapse in the late 1960s, regular services resumed in 1971.

Wills Point, TX

The Union Grove community grew from the 1844 arrival of settlers who built the county's first corn mill and, in time, a Baptist church and school. A local landowner donated this hilltop of oak and cedar for a burial ground in 1880. Generations later it holds the graves of veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam, tended since the 1940s by a community association.

Troup, TX

In 1887, residents of this corner of rural Smith County gathered in the Old Stone Schoolhouse to found Union Grove Missionary Baptist Church, and by 1905 donated land gave the congregation a permanent home and burial ground. The graves here trace the arc of a farming community across generations—among them a Confederate veteran and men who served in both World Wars and the Korean Conflict. A cemetery association formed in 1972 still tends the grounds and hosts a Memorial Day homecoming, keeping the old rhythm of remembrance alive.

Gladewater, TX

This East Texas burial ground began on land Haden Harrison Edwards bought from the Republic of Mexico in 1835 and later sold to James Riley Phillips, whose family homesteaded it from 1857. The graveyard opened with the burial of young Florence Phillips and grew alongside the Union Grove community, taking that name to serve neighbors beyond the founding family. Edwards himself was a soldier, legislator, and delegate to the 1861 Secession Convention, and veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam rest here.

Jacksonville, TX

This East Texas burial ground began in 1868 with the grave of Mary Ann Patton, first wife of John F. Patton—a Jacksonville postmaster and Confederate officer of the recent Civil War. In 1871 Patton deeded the surrounding land to a combined Union School and Church, and the cemetery has remained in continuous use ever since, sustained by community gifts. It endures as a record of the pioneer families who settled Cherokee County in the Reconstruction years.

Union Grove, TX

Education in this corner of Upshur County began in the home of pioneer settler John O'Byrne before a public school opened in 1888. The first half of the 20th century brought steady growth, with a formal school district in 1907, new buildings across the 1900s, 1920s, and 1930s, and an oil boom that swelled the district's population and tax base. The expanding campus eventually held elementary, junior, and senior high schools before becoming an independent district in 1965.

Burton, TX

Begun with the Kerr family's arrival from Tennessee in 1831 and expanded by W. B. McClellan's settlement in the 1840s, Union Hill grew into a town of some 800 souls with an academy, post office, church, Masonic lodge, hotel, and stores. Its fortunes reversed after 1870, when the railroad's facilities in nearby Burton pulled its businesses away and the town slowly emptied.

Huntsville, TX

In 1872 W.L. Holloway donated land to the Bath community, where a small building served at once as school and sanctuary for the newly formed Union Hill Church. Its early trustees and pastors — among them the Rev. Elisha Day and his son the Rev. Robert E. Day — guided a congregation open to several denominations. Legend holds that a possum once wandered into one of Robert Day's sermons, giving the settlement its enduring nickname, Possum Walk.

Bastrop, TX

Local tradition holds that enslaved people gathered at this site even before freedom, and in 1864 — as the Civil War drew to its close — a small group organized this Baptist church with the help of Rev. Joshua Brice, baptizing new members in the Colorado River. By 1900 the congregation numbered about twenty, and a family deeded it nine acres in the early 1900s. New buildings in 1976 and 1988 carried its worship and schooling into the present.

Joshua, TX

Settlement around Union Hill began in the early 1850s, and by the 1870s a small community of cotton-farming families had taken hold. The Rev. J. S. Davenport organized a Presbyterian congregation here in 1879, and a one-room church rose the next year; in 1882 the Johnsons deeded five acres for the church and cemetery, where the first burial came in 1883. Among those laid to rest are area pioneers and several Civil War veterans, and the community still keeps its Christmas Eve and June picnic gatherings begun in the 1890s.

Morgan, TX

Founded before 1879, the Union Hill School was one of several rural schoolhouses serving the early settlers of Bosque County. A two-room 1888 building gave way in 1914 to a two-story schoolhouse on this site, complete with a nearby stable where students boarded their horses through the school day. Enlarged by a 1926 merger with the Auburn Hill district, Union Hill was folded into the Kopperl district in 1939, and its former pupils — many of them area leaders — still gather for a reunion every two years.

Lyon County, NV

The Union Hotel was rebuilt on this spot in 1870 after fire destroyed the original across the street, its new quarters also housing a dining room and barber shop. Most telling is the free-standing rock wall here—the original wall of an overland stage station and Pony Express stop. Together they mark a waypoint on the great transportation routes that knit together the mid-nineteenth-century West.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2004

Founded in 1862 amid the Civil War, the Union League of Philadelphia began as a patriotic society rallying support behind President Lincoln and the cause of preserving the Union. Its members recruited and financed regiments for the war effort, including some of the first Black troops raised in the North. In the decades after the war its prominent membership turned to political reform and a wide range of civic and philanthropic work.

Manor, TX

Oral tradition traces this congregation to outdoor worship services begun in 1874, with the church formally organized in 1884 after Leonard Eck donated land and the B. J. Lee family gave a building. The congregation moved to its present property in 1916, and in 1928–1929 a Rosenwald school was built on the church's land to serve students in rural Travis County. Through education and community assistance, Union Lee Missionary Baptist Church has remained a cornerstone of the area.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1993

Chartered in 1935 after African-American musicians were shut out of Philadelphia's white musicians' union, Local 274 became a home and advocate for Black performers. Its rolls included giants of modern jazz such as John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie, whose innovations reshaped American music. When it dissolved in 1971, it was the last predominantly Black local of the American Federation of Musicians in the country.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2012

Organized in 1908, Local 471 of the American Federation of Musicians was one of Pennsylvania's first African American musicians' unions, giving Black performers a foothold in an industry that often shut them out. As Pittsburgh became a powerhouse of the mid-century jazz world, the local counted greats like Mary Lou Williams, Art Blakey, Ray Brown, and George Benson among its members. A contentious merger with the white local in the 1960s ended one of the oldest Black union organizations in the country.

Fort Davis, TX

Founded in 1873 in an adobe building at Fort Davis, the Union Mercantile grew under army baker turned merchant W. Keesey into a frontier emporium selling everything from groceries and guns to cradles, coffins, and wagonwheels, while also doing private banking. The county's first telephone ran out of the store over a barbed-wire line to surrounding ranches. In 1906 Keesey replaced the adobe with the stone building that still stands.

Westbrook, TX

Organized in March 1891 by the Rev. J. W. Montgomery, this West Texas congregation raised its first building with the labor of neighbors, and worshippers of all faiths gathered there. The plain frame structure doubled as a schoolhouse and community meeting hall, its earliest pews nothing more than planks laid across nail kegs. A new church went up in 1905 and was renamed Dorn Chapel.

Fannin, TX

Union Missionary Baptist Church traces its beginnings to the 1880s among Baptists in Cologne, a freedmen's colony whose members are believed to have built their first church, St. John, along Perdido Creek in 1884. Known for a time as Mt. Carmel, the congregation split and then reunited in Fannin under the name Union Missionary after a storm damaged their building in the 1930s. Since restoring the Fannin church in 1950, members have worshiped in the same building, sustaining a community of faith for well over a century.

Jefferson, TX

In 1842 Captain William Perry deeded land to local enslaved people to establish a place of worship, and a sanctuary raised here in 1847 stands among the earliest Black churches in Texas. After the Civil War the congregation became a center of Loyal League, Radical Republican, and Freedmen's Bureau activity, and during the violent Reconstruction occupation of Jefferson the church was burned and members, including Albert Browning, were killed. Rebuilt in 1883 and rescued from demolition by restorers in 2003, it remains a cherished emblem of the community.

Hastings, MI

Echoing Lincoln's words at Gettysburg, this monument in Hastings honors the Union soldiers of 1861–1865 and names three of the war's decisive turning points — Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Missionary Ridge. Michigan sent tens of thousands of men to the front, and after the war communities across the state erected such memorials, often through Grand Army of the Republic veterans, to bind local sacrifice to the cause of preserving the nation.

Albemarle County, VA

In the closing months of the Civil War, Union cavalry under General Philip Sheridan swept through central Virginia, and in early March 1865 his troopers entered Charlottesville. Local officials reportedly surrendered the town to spare it from destruction, and Union forces occupied the area for several days while wrecking railroads and supply lines that had sustained the Confederacy. The University of Virginia and the town itself were largely spared the burning that befell other Virginia communities. Within weeks, Lee's surrender at Appomattox would end the war.

Baltimore County, MD

In 1872, African American residents of the Loreley area of Baltimore County organized the Union of Brothers and Sisters of Ford's Asbury Lodge, a benevolent society whose members pooled their dues to care for the sick and bury the dead. Two years later, in 1874, the community raised this building to serve both as the society's home and as a school for its children. It stands as a testament to the self-reliance of Black Marylanders in the first decade after emancipation.

Boston, MA

Raised in Boston in 1716–1717, this rare brick survivor of the city's Georgian architecture has served oysters longer than any other restaurant in the country. Generations of Bostonians and travelers have crowded its bar since the young republic was still finding its feet. Its designation as a National Historic Landmark recognizes both its architecture and its unbroken life as a working eatery.

Caliente, NV

Built in 1923 to replace a depot lost to fire two years earlier, this imposing Mission Revival station was designed by the noted Los Angeles architects John and Donald Parkinson. Its interior was finished largely in solid oak, and the roughly $80,000 complex once included a restaurant and a fifty-room hotel. Long a hub of railroad-town life, the building later became Caliente's civic center and the seat of city government.

Brady, TX

When the Fort Worth and Rio Grande Railway reached Brady in 1903, and the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe followed eight years later, the town needed a depot that could serve both lines. This 1911 station did the job, later handling freight as well as passengers after 1946. Its corbeled brickwork, segmented arches, red tile roof, and observation-bay parapet mark it as a proud piece of early-20th-century railroad architecture.

Lamkin, TX

Union Primitive Baptist Church was organized in 1892 by a group of elders, deacons, and charter members in the rural Comanche County community of Lamkin. Its early records preserve the names of the farm families who built the congregation, and note that Elder Len Dalton served as pastor almost continuously from 1915. The church reflects the tight-knit religious life of a settlement-era Texas farming district.

Lincoln Center, KS

This monument honors the Union soldiers and sailors who served between 1861 and 1865, the years of the Civil War. Kansas entered the Union as a free state on the eve of the conflict and sent a high share of its men into federal service. Memorials like this one rose across the Midwest as veterans aged and communities sought to fix their sacrifice in stone.

Corrigan, TX

Union Springs Baptist Church was organized in the 1860s by the first seven families to settle this corner of Polk County, with Brother Jimmy Knox as its first pastor. The original church was a pegged log cabin warmed by a fireplace, with a hand-riven board roof, split-log floors, and split-log seats. More modern buildings followed in 1885 and 1955 as the congregation grew.

Paris, TX

After decades of effort, competing railroads finally met at Paris in 1887, and by 1912 five lines converged on the growing Lamar County town. The present Union Station, opened that year in a Prairie and Italianate style crowned by a 77-foot campanile-like tower, served Frisco, Santa Fe, and Texas Midland passengers through segregated waiting rooms. Rail travel peaked during World War II with nearby Camp Maxey, then faded after the 1950s until the depot was donated for restoration in 1997.

Dallas, TX

By the early 1900s Dallas was served by a tangle of competing railroads, and in 1912 seven lines joined forces as the Union Terminal Company to build a single grand station. Chicago architect Jarvis Hunt designed this neo-classical terminal with an elegant second-floor grand hall, and it opened on October 14, 1916, timed to the State Fair. For decades it was a hub of civic life during the golden age of American rail travel.

Yorktown, TX

Adolph Strieber, born in Zellerfeld, Germany, came to Texas as a boy through the port of Old Indianola in 1846. Like many Texas Germans who believed the Union should be preserved, he crossed Confederate lines on foot, by stagecoach, and by steamboat to enlist as a private in Springfield, Illinois, serving in Company G of the 16th Illinois Cavalry from 1863 to 1865. After the war he returned to Texas as a merchant and prominent citizen of Yorktown.

Union, CT

In 1984 the Union Historical Society marked the town's 250th birthday by burying a time capsule beneath this plaque, sealing away a snapshot of local life to be reopened in 2034. The spot holds an older memory too: it preserves the stepping stone that once led into the town's Center School, built around 1844, where children in this quiet corner of northeastern Connecticut learned their letters. Small rural towns like Union have long anchored their identity in such shared landmarks — the village schoolhouse and the historical society that keeps its story alive.

Uniontown, PA · est. 1946

Uniontown traces its founding to Henry Beeson, who raised a blockhouse here in 1774 on the very ground where the county jail would later stand. For decades it was a modest frontier settlement, but its fortunes turned when the National Road pushed through after 1811. As the great highway threaded the mountains, Uniontown became a busy waystation on the route west.

South Union Township, PA · est. 1946

Uniontown traces its founding to Henry Beeson, who raised a blockhouse here in 1774 on the very ground where the county jail would later stand. For decades it was a modest frontier settlement, but its fortunes turned when the National Road pushed through after 1811. As the great highway threaded the mountains, Uniontown became a busy waystation on the route west.

Pershing County, NV

Silver drew settlers into Buena Vista Canyon in 1861, and Southern sympathizers first named their camp Dixie. The following year, as the Civil War divided the nation, the town's neutral and Northern factions won out and rechristened it Unionville. It became the seat of Humboldt County until losing that honor to Winnemucca in 1873, and though the ores thinned by the late 1870s, Unionville kept a reputation as a calmer, more comfortable place than most raucous mining camps.

New York, NY

This 140-foot stainless-steel globe rose over Flushing Meadows as the theme symbol of the 1964–65 New York World's Fair, an exposition themed "Peace Through Understanding" that drew millions to Queens at the height of the Space Age. Donated and engineered by U.S. Steel, its open latticework of continents and orbiting rings captured a moment when Americans looked hopefully toward space exploration and a shrinking, more connected world. After the fair closed it remained in the park, and today it endures as one of the most recognizable landmarks of the New York City skyline's borough of Queens.

Meadville, PA

In the 1830s the young town of Meadville, one of northwestern Pennsylvania's earliest settlements, raised this temple-fronted meeting house in the Greek Revival style then sweeping the nation—its columns and clean lines meant to echo the democratic ideals of ancient Athens. The roughly $3,500 cost was underwritten largely by two of the region's leading families, the Shippens and the Huidekopers, whose fortunes were tied to the settlement and land business of the frontier era. Its design is credited to George W. Cullum, a West Point–trained Army engineer who worked on the nation's coastal fortifications—among them Fort Sumter—before rising to Union general during the Civil War.

Albany County, WY

This plaque memorializes the 66 people killed when a United Airlines airliner struck Medicine Bow Peak in Wyoming's Snowy Range on October 6, 1955. At the time it was among the deadliest commercial aviation disasters in United States history, and it helped spur scrutiny of air-safety practices in the booming postwar airline era. The rugged high-country crash site remains a place of remembrance for the victims.

San Saba, TX

The United Confederate Veterans formed in 1889 and swelled after Jefferson Davis's death, as camps across the South held reunions to honor the Civil War dead. San Saba County veterans organized the William P. Rogers Camp No. 322 in 1893, named for a hero of the Battle of Corinth whose daughter and son-in-law had settled in San Saba. Alongside a Daughters of the Confederacy chapter, the camp ran school programs and backed Confederate monuments until dwindling numbers ended it in the early 1930s.

Schulenburg, TX

The Swiss Alp community took shape around 1865, and within two years the Philadelphia Evangelical Lutheran Church was meeting on land given by John and Christina Knippa. The first burial, in 1867, was of Emma Gertraut Ritter, soon followed by the pastor's wife, and a decade of church interments preceded the site's formal establishment as a cemetery in 1877. A 1967 merger of small area churches gave the ground its present name.

Shiner, TX

German immigrants settled Lavaca County in the late 1800s, and the Lutheran church anchored their new lives, holding services in German and serving as a focal point of education and social life. Missionary pastor Wilhelm Dziewas, a native of East Prussia, founded this "free" congregation in Shiner in 1896 and planted Lutheran churches across the surrounding towns before dying in the 1919 influenza epidemic. Through a series of mergers it grew into today's United Evangelical Lutheran Dr. Martin Luther Church.

Kress, TX

This congregation organized in 1906 at Wright, but when the Santa Fe Railway bypassed that town in 1907 and founded Kress instead, the church picked up and moved to the new rail town. Members built the first section of the sanctuary with their own hands in 1908 and shared it with other faiths. The old steeple bell now sits on the lawn, and memorial windows and additions have made the enlarged building a local landmark.

Hamilton, TX

Settlers organized this Methodist congregation in the 1850s on the still-dangerous central Texas frontier, where circuit-riding ministers of the Waco circuit braved Indian raids to reach their scattered flocks. One 1871 raid stole a member's horse at Indian Creek, forcing him to walk twelve miles to Brownwood. After worshipping in various places, the congregation built a frame church here around 1887, replaced by the present structure in 1924.

Atlanta, TX

Methodists in Atlanta, Texas, first gathered under a brush arbor in 1873, then built a modest frame church with an "amen corner" and belfry in 1875. Successive sanctuaries—stained-glass in 1890, brick in 1917, and a 600-seat building in 1953—charted the congregation's growth alongside the town. Each new structure reflected the deepening roots of this East Texas community.

Coolidge, TX

This Methodist congregation began in the thinly settled Armour community in 1873, its handful of charter members raising a one-room frame church with a spire and belfry the following year. When the Trinity & Brazos Valley Railroad bypassed Armour, the congregation simply moved its building to the new town of Coolidge in 1904, and in 1922 replaced it with the present edifice. The story traces how rail lines redrew the map of rural Texas, drawing settlement to the tracks.

Fairy, TX

The first church organized in Fairy was chartered as the "Martin's Gap Methodist Mission" on July 3, 1886, under the Rev. J. S. Moore, with a handful of charter families. Local settler Capt. Battle Fort donated land for both the church and a parsonage, and a building went up that first year; by 1888 membership had reached 122. The original structure was replaced by the present building in 1920, and services have continued without interruption since the founding.

Lexington, TX

Methodist worship in Lexington reaches back to at least 1850, when the East Texas Conference assigned a circuit pastor to the settlement. Over the following century the congregation became a gathering point, absorbing members from a scattering of smaller Lee County churches—Liberty, Tanglewood, Early Chapel, and a German-language Methodist church founded in 1882—as each dwindled and folded in. The 1939 merger of Lexington's two Methodist bodies knit these strands into the single congregation that endures today.

Lott, TX

This Methodist congregation was organized in January 1890, the same year the town of Lott was incorporated, first gathering in the local Masonic lodge. After buying land in 1892, the members saw their first sanctuary destroyed by a storm before completion, then built the enduring core of the present building in 1895. Known over the years as Lott Methodist Church, South and Grace Methodist, it grew with the young Falls County town.

Montague, TX

Methodist circuit-riding missionaries carried the faith into the raw North Texas frontier of the 1870s, and in 1873 a handful of believers in Montague formed a fellowship under the Rev. Joseph Clinton Weaver. Land donations, a parsonage, and a meetinghouse followed as the town grew along the old Nocona-Montague road. The sanctuary weathered a devastating 1905 tornado and was rebuilt, a testament to the congregation's staying power.

Rhome, TX

Organized in the 1880s under the Reverend F. V. Evans, this Methodist congregation first met in a schoolhouse, under brush arbors, and in a tent before completing its first building in 1903 on land given by the donors of the Rhome townsite. In 1940 it moved into a remodeled former Cumberland Presbyterian chapel, and its members long helped shape the town's growth.

Wortham, TX

Organized in 1867 by the Rev. J. Hill Bounds, a Mississippi minister who had brought his family to Texas by ox-wagon two years earlier, this Methodist congregation first shared a two-story building with the local Masonic Lodge. His son T. A. Bounds later donated the central site where the present sanctuary rose in 1925. The church nurtured future bishop Kenneth Copeland, who led a revival here at seventeen.

Russellville, KY

Methodism took root in Russellville in 1808, when ten charter members gathered in a private home on the Kentucky frontier. The congregation raised its first church around 1819 and completed the present sanctuary in 1854, later earning the name "temple" when a 1917 renovation's stained-glass windows drew public praise. The building even gained a pipe organ funded in part by Andrew Carnegie, and in 1872 the community also saw the formation of an A.M.E. Zion congregation.