Search Markers

Wheeling, WV

This Wheeling landmark — now a National Historic Landmark — is where the movement to create West Virginia took shape during the Civil War. In conventions held here in the early 1860s, delegates from Virginia's western counties rejected secession, formed a loyal 'Restored Government,' and set in motion the birth of a new state, admitted to the Union in 1863. Originally built as a federal custom house, the building became the cradle of the only state formed by breaking away from the Confederacy.

Austin, TX

This modest "shotgun" cottage was built around 1872 as servants' quarters near the home of Charles S. West, a lawyer and Texas Supreme Court justice. Over the decades it passed through notable Austin hands—banker Eugene Bremond, the widowed Emma Grant West who moved it here as rental property, and a schoolteacher, Katie Gannaway—before an attorney restored it in 1973. Its survival owes much to the succession of owners, several of them women, who kept it standing.

Hallettsville, TX

Washington West moved his family from Tennessee to Lavaca County in 1854, and their home grew into a stagecoach stop and the community of Old Sweet Home. Their sons drove longhorns up the trails to Kansas and beyond, and in 1875 George West built the Greek Revival house that anchors this homestead before founding the town of George West on his vast South Texas ranch. In 1891 the place passed to Frank and Anna Wagner, Czech immigrants who had worked the land and whose family holds it still.

Fort Worth, TX

Perched on a bluff overlooking the Fort Worth Zoo, this 2½-story Tudor Revival home was built in 1928 for oilman Roy A. Westbrook and his wife Gladys, in a Park Hill neighborhood laid out by the celebrated Hare and Hare landscape firm. Prominent Fort Worth architect Joseph L. Pelich designed it with pegged half-timbering, slate gables, marble fireplaces, and leaded glass. Westbrook's fortune came from the Hendrick Oilfield in Winkler County, and he helped found the Fort Worth Petroleum Club.

Milano, TX

Ervin Westbrook and his wife Rachel, joined by her brother John Walker, left the Deep South in 1858 to build new farms on the Texas prairie near present-day Milano. Their family graveyard opened in 1864 with the burial of John Walker's wife and served the two clans and their neighbors into the 1920s. Among the two to three dozen laid to rest here are three Civil War veterans of the founding families.

Albany, TX

After the Civil War, Texas cattlemen sought new routes to northern railheads, and in 1874 John T. Lytle blazed what became the Western (or Dodge City) Trail, driving 3,500 longhorns from South Texas toward Nebraska. Fort Griffin became a vital watering and supply point as herds crossed the Clear Fork of the Brazos here and at nearby fords. Within a few years the Western Trail carried the bulk of Texas cattle north—three to five million head in all—until the last drive in 1893.

New Waverly, TX

Founded in 1885, Western Grove Baptist Church is the oldest African-American congregation in New Waverly, begun as Eastern Grove Baptist Church before moving to the west side of town. Organized by ministers and deacons in the years after emancipation, it survived being blown down by high winds in 1936 and relocated again in 1958 when Interstate 45 cut through the county. Through each move it rebuilt, remaining a spiritual anchor for its community.

Dallas, TX

Burials on this Dallas ground reach back to the 1850s, and in 1881 pioneers Z.E. Coombes and W.R. Fisher formally set the land aside as a 'graveyard forever.' Early settlers, along with veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars, rest here. So do Clyde and Buck Barrow, the Depression-era outlaws of Bonnie-and-Clyde infamy.

Dallas, TX

In 1872, former Confederate brigadier general Richard M. Gano preached at the request of a Civil War comrade and won some fifty converts among settlers from the scattered communities around Dallas. The new Church of Christ met for years in homes and the Mt. Airy Schoolhouse before members raised lumber and land to build a white clapboard meetinghouse in 1890. That early structure survived to serve later congregations.

Union Township, PA · est. 1948

Completed in 1834, this spot marked the northern terminus of the Beaver Division of Pennsylvania's state-built canal system. For a few years it served as a bustling head of navigation and shipping point, transferring goods where the waterway ended. Its heyday was brief: the opening of the 'Cross-Cut Canal' into Ohio in 1838 and the Erie Extension to Greenville in 1840 pushed the network onward, and this once-important harbor faded as the lines reached farther north and west.

Brady vicinity, TX

Through this gap in the Brady Mountains ran the Western Trail—also called the Dodge City or Fort Griffin Trail—the last of the great Texas cattle routes after farmers fenced off the eastern trails. From about 1876 to 1886 enormous herds moved north along it, more than 200,000 head in 1881 alone. Starting near Brownsville, the trail wound through San Antonio and the Hill Country, forded the San Saba and Colorado rivers, and pushed on through Doan's Crossing to Dodge City, Kansas, and eventually Wyoming and Montana.

Coleman, TX

This tablet, placed by a local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter, honors the Western Trail that funneled vast herds of longhorns north through Coleman in the decades after the Civil War. For nearly thirty years, cowboys drove cattle "up the trail" along this route, part of the great open-range cattle drives that defined the postwar Texas economy.

Town of Oyster Bay, NY

On the morning of September 11, 2001, hijacked airliners struck the World Trade Center, and Long Island — within sight of the Manhattan skyline — lost scores of commuters and first responders. This waterfront memorial in the Town of Oyster Bay marks the exact minute of the first impact, fixing a shared moment of shock in stone. Communities all along the North Shore built such places so neighbors would have somewhere to gather and grieve.

Austin, TX

Designed in 1962 by internationally acclaimed architect Edward Durell Stone with the Austin firm Fehr & Granger, the Westgate Tower rose beside the State Capitol grounds as the city's tallest building of the 1960s. Opened in 1965 as Austin's first residential high-rise, the 26-story concrete tower mixed apartments, parking, a restaurant, and a social club, its decorative masonry solar screens a signature of Stone's mid-century Modern style. For decades it housed legislators, lobbyists, and civic leaders drawn to its Capitol views.

Westhoff, TX

This DeWitt County town began in 1906 as "Bello"—Beautiful View—a tent city for crews building the Texas and New Orleans Railroad. Renamed in 1909 for local merchant and political leader William Westhoff, the town at its height supported three cotton gins and thirteen stores. It endures as a farming, ranching, and uranium-leasing center home to many ethnic groups.

Forest Hills, PA · est. 2010

In 1937, on the eve of the atomic age, Westinghouse Research Labs raised a five-story, pear-shaped tower here to house the world's first industrial Van de Graaff generator—an early machine for accelerating particles and probing the atom. Built by one of America's great electrical companies, it marked private industry's entry into what would become nuclear science. Westinghouse went on to play a central role in establishing American leadership in nuclear power.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1986

In the 1880s a fierce rivalry raged over how to deliver electric power, and George Westinghouse bet on alternating current. Founding his company in Pittsburgh in 1886, he built the motors, generators, and transformers that let electricity travel over long distances rather than only a few blocks. That gamble on AC would light cities and power factories far from any generating plant.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2016

In 1884, inventor George Westinghouse drilled a natural gas well on the grounds of his Pittsburgh estate, Solitude, and struck a geyser that roared uncontrolled for a week. Rather than a mishap, it became a laboratory: within two years Westinghouse secured more than thirty patents for safely distributing and using natural gas in homes and factories. His inventive genius and business skill helped transform a dangerous curiosity into a practical new source of energy.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2011

In 1869 a young inventor named George Westinghouse solved one of railroading's deadliest problems: how to stop a long train quickly and safely. His compressed-air brake let an engineer halt every car at once instead of relying on brakemen scrambling car to car. From this building his company grew into an industrial giant, and the technology he pioneered still slows trains around the world today.

New Wilmington, PA · est. 1949

Chartered in 1852 by the Associate Presbyterian Church—later the United Presbyterian Church—Westminster College took root in the Lawrence County town of New Wilmington. Like its Greene County contemporary, it broke sharply with academic custom by granting degrees to women, and it went further still: in 1857 it became the first college in Pennsylvania to award women the Bachelor of Arts degree. For a mid-century American college, this was a genuinely radical commitment to equal education.

Westminster, TX

Founded in 1887 by Rev. J.M. Harder as Seven Points College, this Collin County school passed through a string of names and owners—private proprietors, the Methodist Protestant Church, and Westminster Baptists—while serving as a preparatory academy, college, and theological seminary. In 1907 a three-story, forty-room concrete building replaced the old wooden schoolhouse, but financial troubles closed the doors in 1918. The grand structure stood until its demolition in 1972.

Nacogdoches, TX

Presbyterians shaped Nacogdoches from the 1830s onward, and in 1893 Rev. B. A. Hodges and twelve members founded what became Westminster Presbyterian Church under the Cumberland denomination. An early wood-frame sanctuary by noted architect D. A. W. Rulfs gave way to a 1930 sanctuary and manse, and the congregation grew into a hub of community service, from a World War I savings-stamp drive to helping launch the local Head Start program.

Corsicana, TX

In 1853 the Rev. John Patton and about twenty Cumberland Presbyterians organized Corsicana's first church, in the years when the town was still a young frontier settlement. Over the following decades several distinct Presbyterian bodies took root, split, and realigned, until in 1949 they merged into Westminster Presbyterian Church. The Bethel Mexican congregation joined in 1968, adding another strand to the church's history.

Beaumont, TX

Presbyterian worship in Beaumont began with circuit-riding preachers before the First Presbyterian Church was organized in 1880 by seven charter members meeting in the county courthouse. The congregation built a frame church, grew, and spawned a second congregation, Central Presbyterian; the two reunited in 1921 as Westminster Presbyterian Church with 484 members. Over the decades the fellowship seeded a dozen mission churches across the Beaumont area and sent fourteen ministers into ordained service.

Paducah, KY

This congregation traces its roots to March 1851, when it was incorporated by an act of the Kentucky General Assembly as a Cumberland Presbyterian Church. After the Cumberland body merged with the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. in 1906, it became Kentucky Avenue Presbyterian Church. In 1951 the congregation moved to a modified Gothic building at this location and adopted the Westminster name.

Greensburg, PA · est. 1981

Carved from Bedford County in 1773, Westmoreland was for a time the sprawling frontier of southwestern Pennsylvania and the first place English law reached beyond the Allegheny Mountains. At its early seat of Hanna's Town, backcountry settlers gathered in 1775 to adopt the "Hanna's Town Resolves," a defiant pledge of resistance drafted as revolution stirred in the colonies. Greensburg later rose as the county seat, incorporated in 1799 as the region settled into peacetime governance.

Charleston, SC

In a cramped three-room house on a Charleston back lot, two brothers born into slavery began lives that would carry them to the front ranks of the fight for Black equality. Archibald and Francis Grimké were the sons of an enslaved woman, Nancy Weston, and grew up amid the hard aftermath of the Civil War before finding their way to Northern educations and national influence. Archibald became a lawyer, writer, and civil-rights leader, while Francis grew into one of the era's most respected ministers and moral voices. From this modest Charleston lot rose careers that shaped African American advocacy well into the 20th century.

Seymour, TX

Platted in 1910 along the Gulf, Texas and Western Railroad, Westover sprang up as a market center for area farmers and ranchers, taking the maiden name of rancher J. W. Stevens's mother-in-law. A post office, bank, gins, shops, churches, and a school quickly followed. But a 1921 fire and the 1942 abandonment of the rail line drained the town, and many settlers and businesses moved to Seymour.

Fort Worth, TX

Built in 1929–30 as the showpiece of the new Westover Hills development, this Norman-Jacobethan revival mansion by architect Victor Marr Curtis blends brick and rough-cut limestone under a bell-cast tower roof and Tudor chimneys. It was home to John E. Farrell, first mayor of Westover Hills and a co-discoverer of the vast East Texas oil field in 1931, until his death in 1946.

Seymour, TX

Westover School served this corner of Baylor County from 1910 to 1950, beginning in the Church of Christ building before trustees put up a frame schoolhouse in 1911. A two-story brick building with seven classrooms, a library, and an auditorium replaced it in 1917, and enrollment reached 400 by the 1930s. The 1942 loss of the rail line and postwar rural flight thinned the student body until the school closed in 1950.

Westphalia, TX

Soon after German Catholic settlers reached this Falls County community in 1879, they set about founding a school that would serve both parochial and public needs. The Westphalia Little School opened in 1884 in a remodeled former church building, staffed by a succession of early teachers and, from 1899, by the Sisters of Divine Providence from San Antonio. Though the parochial program ended in 1935, the sisters continued teaching in the public school for decades.

Oldham County, KY

First called Liberty and laid out on an Elijah Craig land grant of 1780, this Ohio River town found its purpose in the water. A ferry run by Levi Boyer around 1800 linked travelers toward the Illinois country, and in the steamboat era the renamed Westport became a busy port shipping farm produce and receiving merchandise. It even served as Oldham County's first seat from 1823 to 1838.

Edgecombe County, NC

Westray Battle Boyce Long led the Women's Army Corps in the immediate aftermath of World War II, directing the branch from 1945 to 1947 as the military demobilized and reckoned with the permanent place of women in its ranks. Her Legion of Merit recognized service in the North African theater in 1943–1944, when the WAC first proved itself close to the front. This roadside marker points to her grave a short distance south.

San Antonio, TX

San Antonio's Black history reaches back to its earliest days, from presidial soldiers of African ancestry to the North African Berber heritage of the Canary Islanders. By 1885 the city's Second Ward, west of the San Antonio River, was home to a substantial Black community anchored by institutions like St. James AME Church—begun in 1868 in a former soap factory—and the West End Baptist Church. Community leaders such as Ella Austin, who opened an orphans' home nearby in 1890, and gathering places for literary societies and glee clubs gave the neighborhood civic and cultural life before it later transformed into a Latino cultural center.

Center, TX

In the hills of Shelby County, Westview Cemetery became the resting place for African Americans freed after the Civil War, many of whom stayed on as tenant farmers and sharecroppers while building their own businesses, churches, and a school. Long known as the Union Grave Yard and later Center Colored Cemetery, its earliest recorded burial is thought to be Jane Chumley Miller, a former slave, and its oldest surviving marker dates to 1909. Educators, preachers, and business people lie here, including a man said to have cooked for Gen. John J. Pershing during World War I.

Palestine, TX

In November 1883, Harriet McClanahan Holmes gave an acre of land and William M. Holmes donated funds for the Holmes Community School, where area residents organized the Holmes Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, South, that same year. The congregation outgrew its schoolhouse in 1899 and built successive sanctuaries as the Palestine area grew through new industry and postwar population increases. When local districts consolidated into Westwood ISD in the 1960s, the church took the community's new name, Westwood United Methodist.

Boerne, TX

Charles (Carl) Weyrich bought this Boerne lot in 1877 after moving from Gillespie County, working as a tinsmith and commissioning this rubble-limestone building around the time of his 1878 marriage. After he sold it in 1883, a run of grocery stores and later a residence, office, and art studio occupied it. With its stone parapet and hooded lintels, it is among the oldest commercial structures in town.

Stonington, CT

Launched from New Bedford in the summer of 1841, the Charles W. Morgan set out at the height of America's whaling era, when New England ports sent hundreds of ships chasing the whale oil that lit the nation's lamps. Built by the Hillman family, she worked the world's oceans across an extraordinarily long career of dozens of voyages. Today she survives as the last of the wooden whaleships, a rare and tangible link to a vanished industry.

Frankel City, TX

Two miles south of this spot, one of Andrews County's first schools opened in 1907 on land donated by Mrs. M. B. Dillard, near the edge of Whalen Lake. Built by Joe and Jake Mathis, the one-room school taught the children of homesteaders who were "proving up" their claims by living on the land for three years. It closed in 1910 and the building was moved once most settlers had fulfilled their claims and departed.

San Francisco, CA

By the late nineteenth century, San Francisco had become a major whaling port even as the industry grew ever more perilous. With whale populations dwindling, crews had to sail farther into the frigid Arctic and stay at sea longer, risking ice and isolation in pursuit of oil and baleen. The city's wharves outfitted and sheltered this hard, fading trade.

Center Point, TX

William Watson Wharton was among the first settlers of Kerr County, arriving in 1857 with his wife Thankful, their three sons, and a claim to 640 acres in the Texas Hill Country. The family cabin stood near this plot, where Wharton's is the oldest marked grave. Among those resting here is his son William G'Laspie Wharton, who served as a county deputy sheriff for more than half a century, alongside members of other pioneer families.

Wharton, TX

When Wharton County was organized in 1846, its seat was laid out on the Mexican land grant of 'Old 300' colonist William Kincheloe, and in 1866 the commissioners formalized a cemetery already in use just blocks from the courthouse. Its oldest marked grave dates to 1843, and among those buried here is Amanda Armstrong Watts, Wharton's first public schoolteacher and its postmistress in 1881. More than 140 veterans of conflicts from the Civil War through Vietnam rest amid the obelisks, cairns, and decorated ironwork that make the grounds a study in cemetery design.

Wharton, TX

Wharton County was created in 1846 from Matagorda and Jackson counties and organized the same year, in the first months of Texas statehood. It honors the brothers William H. and John A. Wharton, both prominent figures of the Texas Revolution and the Republic. William served as Texas minister to the United States, while John was an adjutant at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto and a member of the Republic's Congress.

Wharton, TX

Attorney William S. "Billie" Brooks founded this abstract firm in 1890, with Daisy Speed penning the original tract-book entries by hand. Over the decades the company drew a roster of notable associates, including members of the Cline family and L. Z. Moreland, who worked here for a half-century. Its secretary Ruth Brazzil went on to serve as a special justice of the Texas Supreme Court in a celebrated Woodmen of the World case.

Wharton, TX

Wharton County was carved in 1846 from Stephen F. Austin's original Mexican land grant, and the Kincheloe family donated a courthouse square on the Colorado River. After early frame and brick courthouses, a contentious fight—Judge Croom for a new building, rancher "Shanghai" Pierce and others against—delayed construction until Houston architect Eugene T. Heiner's Second Empire and Italianate design rose in 1889, its salmon brick fired from local river clay. Mid-20th-century remodelings buried its ornament in Moderne stucco before a sweeping 21st-century restoration brought it back.

Tredyffrin Township, PA · est. 2018

Wharton Esherick was an internationally admired artist who worked chiefly in wood, and a leader of the American Studio Craft Movement. He is best known for organic, sculptural furniture that blurred the line between useful object and fine art. From 1926 until his death in 1970 he lived and worked in a handcrafted hilltop studio near here — a building he shaped over the years and called his "autobiography."

Wharton, TX

Across Grove Street from the Wharton Cemetery lies this historic burial ground, the resting place of many of Wharton's early Hispanic families. The site was already in use before D.A. Dickson formally deeded 1.5 acres to the Mexican Cemetery Association in 1925, and from the 1920s to 1973 it was the city's only designated Hispanic cemetery—reflecting the era's segregated burial grounds for Hispanic, African American, and white residents. With more than 500 graves, some marked with Spanish inscriptions and some descended from the Canary Islanders who helped settle San Antonio, it stands as a rich chronicle of family and community.

Wharton, TX

Founded in 1896 as the Wharton Colored School, this institution served as the heart of African American education in Wharton County for nearly eighty years. In 1927 the county won a Rosenwald Fund grant to build a larger school, part of the philanthropic program that helped construct thousands of Black schools across the segregated South. Renamed the Wharton County Training School and steadily expanded with new buildings, science labs, and a full curriculum, it educated generations—many of whom returned as teachers—until it closed with integration in 1968.

Lenoir County, NC

This congregation traces its roots to about 1760, when it was organized as a Free Will Baptist church on the eastern North Carolina frontier, and it has been affiliated with the Disciples of Christ since 1843. Part of the present church building dates to 1858. It stands about a mile northwest of the marker, a witness to more than two and a half centuries of rural worship.

Lancaster Township, PA · est. 1947

Wheatland was the gracious country home of James Buchanan, the only U.S. president from Pennsylvania, who lived here from 1849 until his death. Before reaching the White House in 1856, Buchanan had built a long career as congressman, senator, secretary of state, and minister to England — a seasoned diplomat whose single term nonetheless foundered on the sectional crisis that led to civil war.

Manheim Township, PA · est. 1971

Wheatland was the beloved country home of James Buchanan, the Lancaster lawyer and diplomat who became the fifteenth President of the United States. He bought the estate in 1848 and made it his base through a long career—minister to Russia and Britain, secretary of state, and finally president from 1857 to 1861, presiding over the nation as it slid toward disunion. He returned here after leaving office and died at Wheatland in 1868.

Dallas, TX

Wheatland Cemetery grew out of land donated in the mid-1800s by Ohio-born farmers Tom Branson and H.K. Brotherton, and it became intertwined with the local Methodist congregation of Wesley Chapel, which moved to the renamed community of Wheatland in 1864. Formally established in 1872, the grounds hold earlier burials, some reinterred from the chapel's original yard, along with pioneers, community leaders, and veterans reaching back to the Mexican-American War. Its fraternal gravestones and curbing, and graves of victims of flu, malaria, and diphtheria epidemics, record the joys and hardships of an early Dallas-area farming community.

Dallas, TX

Founded in 1847, just a year after Texas joined the United States, Wheatland Methodist Church claims to be the oldest Methodist congregation west of the Trinity River. The congregation built on this site in 1859 and later enlarged the building in 1912, adding a steeple and stained glass windows. Its long life spans the transformation of the surrounding country from open frontier to greater Dallas.

Naples, TX

Wheatville began in the 1840s as a rest stop and general store on the road to Jefferson, named for pioneer settler William Wheat, and grew through the 1850s to include a cotton gin, grist mill, school, and church. The town faded in the 1880s as businesses moved to the new railroad town of Naples, but its cemetery, first used in 1863, still serves the area and holds the roots of U.S. Senator Morris Sheppard, born there in 1875.

Flatonia, TX

Raised in 1907 for W. H. and Emma Wheeler from locally made brick, this commercial building gave the small town of Flatonia a touch of Romanesque Revival ambition, with corbelled brickwork, paired arched windows, and a recessed corner entry. Over the decades its rooms sheltered a dentist, shops, a nursing home, and even a Boy Scout troop. It stands as a well-preserved example of early-twentieth-century small-town commercial architecture.

Corrigan, TX

This rural graveyard began in 1875 with a family's grief: Alabama-born Jefferson Wheeler and his wife Hannah buried their daughter Vina here after a hunting accident. The Wheelers later gave an acre around her grave to the community as a "neighborhood burying ground," and it remains active today. Among those interred are pioneer families and veterans of conflicts stretching from the Civil War to Korea.

Stockdale, TX

The Wheeler family graveyard was first used in 1863, when David Wheeler's second wife Maniza died in childbirth, soon followed by her infant. David and his brother John ran a grist mill on nearby Cibolo Creek and built a brick-making kiln, small industries on what was then a raw frontier. Neighboring families such as the Butlers, who married into the Wheelers, were also buried here, and in 2008 an association formed to reclaim the long-neglected ground.

Wheeler, TX

Deeded to the community in 1907, Wheeler Cemetery holds more than 2,700 graves, the earliest stone dating to 1904. Its rows include veterans of every American war from the Civil War to Iraq, a Fort Elliott soldier of the 1880s, civic founders, and even local characters remembered by legend.

Wheeler, TX

Carved from earlier territories and created in 1876 as the Panhandle opened to settlement, Wheeler County honors Royal T. Wheeler, a long-serving justice and chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. Its early seat at Mobeetie was one of the first towns in the region, born in the rough world of buffalo hunters and cattlemen before the county seat shifted to Wheeler in 1906. The marker distills a young county's founding into a few crisp lines of civic record.

Wheeler, TX

Wheeler County was created in 1876 and named for early Texas jurist Royal T. Wheeler, with Mobeetie serving as the first county seat on the newly opened Panhandle plains. As settlement shifted, the town of Wheeler became the seat in 1908, and after a bond election the present Classical Revival courthouse — with its Palladian windows and Corinthian columns — rose in 1925. Designed by E.H. Eads, it still stands at the center of local government.