Search Markers

Screven, GA

The Blue Star Memorial program began in 1945, when the New Jersey garden clubs planted dogwoods along a highway to honor service members returning from World War II; the blue star echoed the service flags that hung in the windows of homes with someone in uniform. The idea spread nationwide, and markers like this one in Screven, Georgia, were placed by local garden clubs in cooperation with state highway departments. This tribute was sponsored by the Lily Garden Club with the Georgia DOT and the Garden Club of Georgia.

Marianna, FL

The Blue Star Memorial Highway program grew from a 1945 garden-club effort to honor World War II service members, taking its name from the blue-star service flags families displayed for loved ones in uniform. This Marianna, Florida marker was sponsored by the Florida Federation of Garden Clubs with the state road department and the Marianna Garden Club. It joins thousands of similar tributes lining American highways.

Lake City, FL

The Blue Star Memorial Highway idea started in 1945 with New Jersey garden clubs and spread across the country, drawing on the blue-star service flags of the World Wars to honor those in uniform. This Lake City, Florida marker was sponsored by District V of the Florida Federation of Garden Clubs with the Lake City Garden Club. It is one link in a highway-spanning chain of tributes.

Cleburne County, AL

The Blue Star Memorial Highway program began in 1945 and spread nationwide, honoring armed-forces members with markers drawn from the blue-star service flags of wartime homes. This Cleburne County, Alabama marker was placed by District II of the Garden Club of Alabama with the state highway department. It ties a rural Alabama highway into the national chain of tributes.

Sturgeon Lake Township, MN

Blue Star Memorial Highways originated in 1945 as a garden-club tribute to World War II service members, named for the blue-star service flags families displayed for loved ones in uniform. This marker in Sturgeon Lake Township, Minnesota was sponsored by the Federated Garden Clubs of Minnesota. It places a stretch of northern Minnesota highway within a national memorial tradition.

Humboldt County, CA

The Blue Star Memorial Highway program began in 1945 and reached across the country, honoring the armed forces with markers named for the blue-star service flags of the World Wars. This marker on California's Humboldt coast was sponsored by the Humboldt District of California Garden Clubs with the state Department of Transportation. It connects the far northern California redwood country to a nationwide tribute.

Placer County, CA

Blue Star Memorial Highways began in 1945 as a garden-club effort to honor service members, taking their name from the blue-star service flags of wartime households. This Placer County, California marker was placed by the Garden Club of the Golden Foothills District with the state Division of Highways. It brings the Sierra foothills into a national memorial tradition.

Hardeeville, SC

The Blue Star Memorial Highway program started in 1945 and spread nationwide, honoring the armed forces with markers named for the blue-star service flags of the World War era. This marker in Hardeeville, South Carolina was sponsored by the Garden Club of South Carolina with the state highway department. It ties the Lowcountry into a coast-to-coast chain of remembrance.

Clovis, NM

The Blue Star Memorial Highway program began in 1945 and spread across the nation, honoring the armed forces with markers named for the blue-star service flags of wartime homes. This Clovis, New Mexico marker was sponsored by District III of the New Mexico Garden Clubs with the local Fraternal Order of Eagles and the state highway department. It ties the eastern New Mexico plains into a national memorial network.

Lake Charles, LA

Blue Star Memorial Highways originated in 1945 as a garden-club tribute to World War II service members, named for the blue-star service flags of the era. This Lake Charles, Louisiana marker was sponsored by the Lake Charles Garden Club and the Diggers & Weeders Garden Club with the Louisiana Garden Club Federation and the state Department of Transportation. It brings southwest Louisiana into a nationwide chain of remembrance.

Oregon City, OR

The Blue Star Memorial Highway program began in 1945 and spread across the country, honoring the armed forces with markers named for the blue-star service flags of the World Wars. This Oregon City marker was placed by Clackamas District No. 15 of the Oregon State Federation of Garden Clubs with the state highway department. It ties a historic Willamette Valley town, long a landmark of the Oregon Trail's end, into a national memorial tradition.

Valparaiso, IN

Blue Star Memorial Highways began in 1945 as a garden-club tribute to armed-forces members, named for the blue-star service flags families displayed for those in uniform. This Valparaiso, Indiana marker was sponsored by the Vale of Paradise Garden Club with the commissioners of Porter County. It connects a northwest Indiana community to a coast-to-coast tradition of remembrance.

Dillon County, SC

The Blue Star Memorial Highway program started in 1945 and spread nationwide, honoring the armed forces with markers named for the blue-star service flags of the World War era. This Dillon County, South Carolina marker was sponsored by the Garden Club of South Carolina with the state highway department. It ties the Pee Dee region into a national chain of roadside tributes.

Louisville, GA

The Blue Star Memorial program was launched in 1945 by the National Garden Clubs, who planted trees and set markers along American highways to honor the men and women who served in World War II. The blue star itself came from the service flags families hung in their windows, a single blue star for each loved one away in uniform. This Georgia marker, placed by the Garden Club of Georgia with the state highway department, extends that living tribute across the roads of Jefferson County.

Ware County, GA

The Blue Star Memorial was created in 1945 by the National Garden Clubs to honor those who served in World War II, its blue star drawn from the service flags families hung for loved ones in uniform. This Ware County marker was placed by the Garden Club of Georgia with the state highway department. It names the World War II generation directly rather than service in general.

Arlington, TX

Blue Star Memorial markers began in 1945, when garden clubs planted trees and set plaques along highways to honor the men and women serving in World War II. The program endures today as a nationwide tribute to all branches of the armed forces, its blue star echoing the service flags families once hung in their windows. This plaque, placed by a Texas garden club with a veterans association, carries that tradition forward.

Houston, TX

During World War I, Houston's African American community organized to serve its youth and the Black troops stationed at Camp Logan, and in 1917 a YWCA recreation center opened in the Masonic building on Clay Street. Granted branch status in 1920, the Blue Triangle YWCA ran athletic, musical, and educational programs, a boarding house, and Depression-era job services for women and girls. In 1950 the branch built this Transitional-style center, designed by noted architects Salisbury and Briscoe, on land donated by community women.

Pass Christian, MS

Though blues and jazz are often told as separate stories, along the Gulf Coast the two grew up intertwined from the start. Pass Christian's native son Captain John Handy (1900–1971) wove blues deep into his traditional jazz and rhythm & blues, as did other local players. The town has honored this African American musical heritage with festivals such as "Jazz in the Pass," first held in 1999.

Polk County, TX

After the Civil War, families who had supported the Union — among them the Collins and Knight households — left Mississippi for the pineywoods of Polk County to escape hostile Reconstruction-era neighbors. Their settlements gave rise to the Bluewater community, whose cemetery was established in 1898, the same year a Missionary Baptist church organized nearby. More than 600 graves rest here, many marked by handmade concrete stones and shaded by old cedar trees.

Detroit, TX

In the 1870s Benjamin Weatherly, who had soldiered in both the U.S.-Mexico War and the Civil War, gave about two acres of Red River County land for a church and burying ground. A Baptist congregation organized here in 1878 and remained tied to the cemetery for three decades before relocating. Weatherly, his wife Sarah, and three of their children lie among the marble, limestone, and granite markers, with the grounds later expanded and now tended by a cemetery association.

Bluff Dale, TX

For decades travelers to Bluff Dale had to ford the Paluxy River, a crossing that grew busier once the Fort Worth & Rio Grande Railroad arrived in 1889 and quickened wagon traffic through town. Around 1891 this iron suspension bridge—locals called it the "swinging" bridge—began carrying the main road west, later signed as State Highway 10 and U.S. 377. By the 1930s highway travel had outgrown it, and in 1934 the whole span was picked up and moved a mile and a half upstream to keep serving quieter local roads.

Bluff Dale, TX

Around 1906 this open-air tabernacle rose on land donated by Andrew Jackson Glenn, who had also given the Bluff Dale townsite. It hosted the days-long camp meetings and revivals that drew every area denomination, along with plays, singings, funerals, and even a high school graduation. Those gatherings became a wellspring of shared identity for the scattered rural community, and the tabernacle still hosts an annual homecoming.

Bluff Dale, TX

Bluff Dale's Methodists trace their roots to an 1881 camp meeting on the Paluxy River, gathering regularly until they raised a church building in 1894. As the Erath County community grew, so did the congregation, which weathered the denominational mergers of the 20th century to become the Bluff Dale United Methodist Church in 1968.

Llano, TX

When the damming of the Colorado River created Lake Buchanan in the 1930s, entire cemeteries in the flood's path had to move. This site, donated in 1930, received relocated graves from the Old Bluffton Cemetery and several others, their reburials carried out in stages from 1931 to 1937. Among the first new interments was Ike Maxwell, who had named the Bluffton community in 1854 and, as a legislator, helped choose native granite for the state capitol.

Blum, TX

Blum Cemetery took shape around 1881, just as the town of Blum sprang up as a stop on the newly laid Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway. Landowner A. J. Davis is said to have donated the ground with the condition that burial lots be free. The oldest dated stone marks a nine-year-old boy who died in 1882, and the site still shelters area pioneers and local veterans.

Newton, TX

Chartered in 1880 and named for Galveston merchant Leon Blum, this East Texas college gathered pupils ranging in age from 5 to 50 under one two-story roof. Students filed in by gender, recited lessons on a bench, took oral exams that doubled as community events, and studied everything from the three R's to Latin, algebra, and rhetoric. A yard well supplied water, and children carried lunch in ventilated tin buckets before the college charter lapsed in 1905.

Klamath County, OR

In the final spring of World War II, Japan launched thousands of paper-and-silk balloons carrying incendiary and antipersonnel bombs across the Pacific on the jet stream. On May 5, 1945, a Sunday-school picnic party in the Oregon woods discovered one of these fallen devices; it exploded, killing a pregnant young woman and five children. Theirs were the only deaths caused by enemy action on the American mainland during the entire war.

Llano, TX

This burial ground served the Lone Grove community on land owned by W.A. and Sallie Templeton, taking its name from a mill once on nearby Board Branch Creek. Oral history holds that its earliest grave belongs to a settler reportedly killed in 1864, and more than eighty burials predate 1900. Among those resting here are Confederate veterans, including an Army surgeon, alongside veterans of the World Wars and other conflicts.

Boardman Township, OH

In 1798, this corner of northeastern Ohio was surveyed frontier at the edge of the Connecticut Western Reserve—the "New Connecticut" that Connecticut retained when it ceded its other western land claims to the young United States. The cryptic "Range 2, Town 1" is survey shorthand from that grid, the system by which the Reserve was carved into townships and sold to New England investors. Elijah Boardman, a Connecticut merchant and land speculator (and later U.S. senator), purchased this township and lent it his name, drawing Yankee settlers west to build farms and a town center on land only recently opened to them.

Austin, TX

Dr. George T. Boardman, a dentist who helped incorporate the American Dental College, bought this Austin lot in 1855 and built a Victorian residence around 1880. In 1925 it became home to Walter Prescott Webb, the University of Texas historian who won international fame for his studies of Texas and the American West, and his wife Jane, a leader in the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. Webb served 45 years at UT and was president of the American Historical Association in 1958.

Town of Lansing, NY

Around 1950, Cornell University food scientist Dr. Robert C. Baker perfected a tangy vinegar-and-egg barbecue sauce along with a safe method for grilling chicken in large batches. His innovation transformed the humble church-supper and firehouse fundraiser, allowing community groups across New York State to cook hundreds of birds at once. "Cornell chicken" became a beloved fixture of county fairs, picnics, and pavilions like this one near Lansing.

Pasadena, TX

As Pasadena grew into an industrial hub for the Houston Ship Channel during the Great Depression, the Federal Works Agency built a new post office here in 1939 to a design by Carl F. Guenther. Its concrete was mixed with local oyster shells, and its limestone-columned loggia, high ceilings, and roof ventilation well made it a self-cooling civic landmark that served the city until 2010.

Manchester Township, PA · est. 1998

Bob Hoffman founded the York Barbell Company in 1932 and built York, Pennsylvania, into a national center of weightlifting. Dubbed the "Father of World Weightlifting," he coached the U.S. Olympic team from 1948 to 1964 and promoted powerlifting and bodybuilding as the fitness movement grew. He even advised Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon on youth physical fitness.

Veterans Administration, CA

Entertainer Bob Hope spent more than half a century bringing comedy and comfort to American service members, from the beaches of World War II to the deserts of the Gulf War. This chapel at the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration campus was dedicated on his 99th birthday in 2002 to honor that lifelong devotion to the troops. Hope's USO tours became a fixture of American military life across generations.

Upper Macungie Township, PA

Robert "Bob" Rodale (1930–1990) turned his family's Pennsylvania publishing house, Rodale Inc., into a national voice for organic gardening, preventive health, and physical fitness through magazines like Prevention and Organic Gardening. A committed advocate of cycling, active living, and what he championed as "regenerative" agriculture, he worked from the Lehigh Valley for decades until his death in 1990. Set in the countryside near his Emmaus base of operations, this park carries both his name and his belief that shared public spaces renew the bonds of a community.

Nocona, TX

Founded in 1880 and named for the late Col. Bob Stone, this camp gave Confederate veterans of Montague County a place to gather for annual summer reunions with their families. It joined the national United Confederate Veterans in 1893 and settled permanently at Nocona in 1899 on donated land. Notably, its programs drew both Confederate and Union veterans from north Texas and Oklahoma, and the camp stayed active until the last local Civil War veterans died in the 1940s.

Matador, TX

When World War I veteran "Bob" Robertson opened a filling station in Matador in 1932, he crowned it with a wooden oil derrick—later an 84-foot steel tower ringed with lights—to lure motorists off the highway. His roadside empire grew to include a zoo of rattlesnakes, lions and a white buffalo, plus cross-country signs counting the miles to Bob's Oil Well. The derrick toppled in a windstorm just after his 1947 death, and the business faded by the 1950s.

Grapeland, TX

Bobbitt Cemetery was established in 1876 near Grapeland in Houston County, one of countless family and community burial grounds laid out as East Texas farming settlements took root after the Civil War. Recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2005, it preserves the resting place of the area's early residents. Such grounds often outlast the homesteads and churches that surrounded them, becoming the last physical trace of a vanished rural community.

San Augustine vicinity, TX

A.T.L. Bobbitt, Sr., a Tennessee native, came to Texas from Mississippi in 1846 to join his brother's household and in 1851 married Martha Hobdy, who had been born near this spot. The family cemetery began in 1873 with the burial of their son Alfonzo, and it grew to hold A.T.L., Martha, and other relatives on the old family farm. It stands as one of the few remaining reminders of early Anglo settlement in this part of San Augustine County.

San Benito, TX

Born on a cotton farm near Rangerville, Bobby Joe Morrow (1935–2020) grew up chasing jackrabbits and starring in track at San Benito High School before winning some 80 sprint titles at Abilene Christian College. At the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, the 20-year-old took three gold medals in the 100-meter, 200-meter, and 4x100 relay—the first man since his hero Jesse Owens to sweep those events. He set 14 world records and graced the covers of Life and Sports Illustrated before returning to a quiet life on the family farm.

McCamey, TX

In 1919 a University of Texas geology team mapping Upton County's resources came upon these cretaceous hills and named them for the bobcat dens they found among the rocks. The formations mark an uplift on the southern edge of the Permian Basin — the same geologic structure that cradles the county's productive oil fields. The landmark ties the region's deep natural history to the petroleum wealth that would define West Texas.

Boca Raton, FL · est. 1991

Designed by celebrated architect Addison Mizner in his Mediterranean Revival style and completed by William Alsmeyer, Boca Raton's Town Hall opened in 1927 as the young city's first municipal building, housing its government, fire department, and police. The Woman's Club opened Boca Raton's first public library on this spot the same year. Listed on the National Register as "Old City Hall" in 1980, it was restored to serve as the city's history museum.

Galveston, TX

Joseph Boddeker, son of German immigrants, came to Galveston around 1850, served in the Civil War, and worked as a riverboat pilot before buying this lot in the 1870s. After the catastrophic 1900 storm destroyed the family's first house, he relocated an 1893 house here. His son James served as county commissioner from 1912 until his death in 1940, and his widow Elizabeth completed the term to become the first woman in Galveston County to hold that office.

Seguin, TX

When Friedrich Boecker was buried in 1880 in a corner of his 203-acre farm, he began what became a neighborhood cemetery for the German farm families nearby. Over the next fourteen years eleven more were laid to rest here before his son sold two acres to trustees in 1896, formally establishing Boecker Cemetery. A cemetery association formed in 1901, charging a modest membership fee that carried burial rights, and the grounds still serve the settlers' descendants today.

Pequea Township, PA · est. 1984

Built in 1791 of local limestone, Boehm's Chapel is the oldest surviving structure designed for Methodist worship in Pennsylvania and among the oldest in the country. It rose on land once owned by Bishop Martin Boehm, a co-founder of the United Brethren in Christ, and drew visits from Bishop Francis Asbury, remembered as the father of American Methodism. The chapel dates to the very first years of the young republic, when American denominations were organizing themselves.

Muldoon, TX

In 1867 Michael and Anna Boehnke bought 430 acres where they farmed, raised livestock, and reared nine children. The family cemetery began in tragedy in 1873 with the burial of their newborn son Ernest, and the last interment came nearly a century later, in 1967, with their granddaughter Mellie Biebas. Seventeen people rest beneath headstones of granite, limestone, and concrete, the record of one immigrant family's faith and perseverance.

Boerne, TX

When Adam Vogt deeded this land to the city of Boerne in 1867, graves already dotted it—the earliest documented burial, Anton Peter Loth, dating to 1862. Its older sections hold area pioneers and German immigrants, among them Vogt himself and George Wilkins Kendall, the pioneering war correspondent and sheep rancher for whom Kendall County is named, along with a poignant row of paupers' graves. Successive land purchases enlarged the cemetery over the decades.

Boerne, TX

The Order of the Eastern Star, a Masonic-affiliated body open to women and men and devoted to truth, charity, and kindness, took root in Boerne with a chapter organized in June 1910 and chartered on October 11, 1911, with twenty founding members drawn from local pioneer families. Its first Worthy Matron was Virgil Calrow, wife of a Rough Rider and Texas Ranger. The chapter has long supported local charities, awarded scholarships, and in 1952 helped organize a local Order of Rainbow assembly for girls.

Whitney, TX

When the new town of Whitney auctioned its lots in 1879, German-born lumber wholesaler Edouard Boesch shipped in the first load of lumber, then moved to town and bought out a rival lumberyard. He became one of Whitney's leading citizens and a long-serving school trustee, and in 1885 he and his wife Emma built this two-story house. Set on heavy cypress timbers, it was deliberately engineered to ride out the storms — like the tornado that struck that very year.

Huntsville, TX

Edward "Mr. Ed" Boettcher came to Huntsville in 1928 to work the East Texas pine forests, and his own Boettcher Mill supplied the fine interior woodwork for this house, built for his family in 1933–34. A polished example of the Tudor bungalow, it mixes classical touches — a Palladian entry and broken-pedimented gables — into a modest form, and stayed in the family after Boettcher's death in 1967.

Buckingham Township, PA · est. 2003

Colonial taverns were more than watering holes — they were the meeting halls where revolution was organized in plain sight. Licensed in 1763, Bogart's Tavern became the headquarters of Bucks County's Committee of Observation and Inspection, the local engine of the resistance in 1775 and 1776. It was here that the county's first Revolutionary military companies mustered, and General Nathanael Greene made it his headquarters in 1776.

Bogata, TX

William Humphries pioneered this area as early as 1818 and returned in 1836 to settle for good. When his nine-year-old daughter died in 1840, she was buried near the line between his land and a neighbor's, and soon other families laid their dead here too, always in free plots. The families deeded the ground for a cemetery in 1878, and by the nation's bicentennial it held more than 1,200 graves.

Wadesboro, NC

Built in the late eighteenth century by Patrick Boggan, a Revolutionary War soldier and one of Wadesboro's founders, this is among the oldest surviving houses in Anson County. It has since been preserved as a local history museum, two blocks south of the marker.

Flynn, TX

The Boggy Community was founded in 1865 by Robert Bowers, a former slave, and his wife Celia North Bowers of the Keechi tribe, whose Indigenous agricultural knowledge helped the settlement thrive on cotton, corn, and garden crops. From its first year the community prized education, opening a school in a log building and later sharing structures with Bethana Baptist Church, the Masons, and the Order of the Eastern Star. The Bowers family, their descendants, veterans, and many original citizens rest in the Boggy Cemetery, and their model of church, school, and cemetery was carried to other Texas communities.

Austin, TX

Local tradition holds that this graveyard began in 1859 with the burial of young John Davis, accidentally shot after a skunk's spray sent him running through camp and he was mistaken for a Comanche intruder. His father later donated the land to the Onion Creek Masonic Lodge, and it grew into a community graveyard of more than 1,200 burials on some 6.6 acres. Among those interred are pioneer settlers, fraternal-order members, and veterans from the Civil War through the Korean Conflict.

Pflugerville, TX

Gottlieb William Bohls, eldest of ten children born on a nearby farm, raised this handsome two-story Queen Anne Free Classic house in 1913 on land once home to a country school. His brother Otto later took over and became a champion of soil conservation, using contour farming, cover crops, and stock tanks to hold the ground together through Texas droughts. With no plumbing until 1975, the household drew its drinking water from brick and tin cisterns fed by a rooftop rain-harvesting system.

Ames, IA

This stone honors Bohumil Shimek (1861–1937), a Czech-American naturalist remembered as one of Iowa's first environmental educators. A botanist and teacher, he devoted his life to studying and interpreting the natural world of the prairie state. His work helped a rising generation learn to value the land around them.

West, TX

Doc Cauble built a cabin here in 1850 near flowing springs long home to Native peoples, and after his young son's Comanche friend died and was buried on this hill, a cemetery took shape. The surrounding community of Bold Springs grew into the second-largest town in McLennan County by 1860, with the first church in the county's northeast, a stagecoach stop, and roads linking Waco to Hillsboro. When the railroad drew settlement to the new town of West in 1881, Bold Springs faded, leaving this cemetery of more than 2,400 graves as its memorial.

San Antonio, TX

On land donated by Albert F. Boldt in 1919, local builder Fritz Gembler raised this modest two-room schoolhouse for the farm families of rural Bexar County. With its pedimented porch and small cupola, it is a textbook example of the early 20th-century Texas country school, and it educated area children for more than four decades until 1960.

Boling, TX

Known as Floyd's Lane until the New York, Texas & Mexican Railway arrived in 1900, this Wharton County settlement was renamed for the Bolling family of Virginia—though a clerical error dropped a letter when residents applied for a post office. Farming and the railroad sustained the town until sulphur, oil, and gas were struck on the Boling dome in 1925, sending the population from 20 in 1920 to 450 by 1930. Mineral production dominated the local economy for the next seventy years.