Search Markers

Wheeler, TX

Raised in 1909 of concrete and steel after the county seat moved from historic old Mobeetie, this sturdy jail served the Panhandle county for two decades with only a single prisoner ever escaping. Its first sheriff and jailer are named on the marker, a reminder of how small frontier counties organized law and order. Repurposed as a library, museum, and county offices, the building outlived its original grim function.

Honey Grove, TX

Built between 1852 and 1854 with slave labor, the Wheeler House was the area's first Classic Revival dwelling, its lumber and chimney stones hand-hewn and its joists pegged rather than nailed — the fifth house along the Bonham-to-Paris stagecoach road. Builder Wiley Hulsey sold it in 1884 to Confederate veteran Peyton Wheeler and his wife Martha Jane Hamil, whose descendants later placed this marker.

Taos County, NM

Wheeler Peak, rising 13,161 feet as the highest point in New Mexico, honors Major George Montague Wheeler, who for a decade led federal survey expeditions mapping the American West. His parties of surveyors and naturalists gathered geologic, biological, and topographic data across enormous stretches of little-charted territory in the years after the Civil War. The scientific surveys of Wheeler and his contemporaries turned blank spaces on the map into detailed knowledge.

Richardson, TX

'Uncle Billy' Wheeler helped found Richardson itself, deeding land for the railroad townsite after the Civil War and, in 1880, providing a school for area children. The schoolhouse rebuilt and grew with the town—from a two-story frame building after an 1900 fire, to a red-brick structure in 1914, to added wings for consolidations in the 1920s and 30s—before becoming the district's administration building in 1960.

Crockett, TX

Settlement here began in 1835 when Joshua J. Hall founded a community along the Trinity River. After the Civil War, formerly enslaved people from the Hall family and other freed African Americans put down roots in this area, building a community around springs on land donated by French Taylor. A Baptist church and schoolhouse rose near the springs in 1905, followed by a new school and a cannery in the 1920s; though the school closed in 1959, the church and civic life endured.

Wheelock, TX

Surveyor Eleazar Louis Ripley Wheelock came to Texas from Illinois in 1830 and founded a town on his land along the Old San Antonio Road, named Wheelock in 1837. By the 1840s it boasted some twenty businesses and became a Central Texas transportation hub, serving as Robertson County seat from 1850 to 1856. When the railroad bypassed it in the 1860s, the town declined and many residents drifted to nearby Hearne.

Wheelock, TX

Founded in 1833 by Colonel E. L. R. Wheelock, this settlement bears the name of a man who wore many hats in early Texas: soldier, lawyer, educator, Texas Ranger captain, and one of the organizers of Robertson's colony. Wheelock helped bring Anglo-American settlers into the region during the turbulent years surrounding Texas independence. He died in 1846 in Illinois, in the town where he had been born, having left his name on the Texas map.

Wheelock, TX

Formal schooling in this Robertson County community reached back to the Wheelock Academy of the 1840s, but the landmark building came in 1908, when the Hedrick family set aside a few acres for an unusually large two-story frame schoolhouse. With four classrooms below and a full stage and auditorium above, it served up to 200 pupils and five teachers in the 1930s. Classes ran until 1949-50, after which students transferred to Franklin and the building became a community center.

El Centro, CA

The Barbara Worth Hotel — named for the heroine of Harold Bell Wright's popular novel about the reclamation of the Imperial Valley desert — was for decades the social heart of El Centro. Civic clubs like the Rotary, organized here in 1921, met in its rooms, and countless community gatherings filled its calendar until fire destroyed it in January 1962. This spot marks where that landmark once stood.

Marshall, TX

Peter and Dicey Whetstone were among the earliest settlers of Harrison County when Texas was still an independent republic. Peter's headright, granted by the Republic of Texas in 1838, gave him the land from which, in 1843, he and Dicey donated the site for the new town of Marshall. That gift seated a community that would become one of East Texas's most important nineteenth-century towns.

Morris Township, NJ

In the decades after the Civil War, Morristown, New Jersey blossomed into one of America's wealthiest enclaves, its rolling hills dotted with the grand summer estates of the Gilded Age. In 1891 George Frelinghuysen — of one of New Jersey's most prominent political families — raised this Georgian-style mansion as just such a retreat. Generations later his daughter Matilda gave the property to Morris County in 1969, turning a private pleasure ground into the public Frelinghuysen Arboretum.

Monongahela, PA · est. 1949

On this bluff above the Monongahela in August 1794, hundreds of angry frontier farmers gathered at the height of the Whiskey Rebellion, furious over the new federal excise tax on the whiskey they distilled from surplus grain. Albert Gallatin, a rising western Pennsylvania statesman, used his persuasive gifts to steer the crowd away from armed defiance and toward a peaceful path. The moment helped defuse a crisis that had threatened to become open civil conflict against the young national government.

Gunter, TX

This Grayson County burial ground began in 1866 on J. W. Whitaker's farm with the interment of Joseph McLean, serving the Clayton schoolhouse community. Its settlers — farmers and ranchers who had come from Mississippi and other southern states — formally bought the cemetery in 1880 and kept burying their dead there. In 1967 their descendants founded an association that still tends the graves and holds a memorial service each May.

Texarkana, TX

Built before 1891 by Benjamin F. Whitaker — a Texas state senator, lumberman, and railroad partner in what became the Kansas City Southern line — this residence was crafted with materials he handpicked for his own family. By 1904 it had passed to an ex-sheriff's family and was celebrated in a souvenir book as a Texarkana showplace. The home reflects the wealth and civic prominence of the Gilded Age men who built the region's timber and rail fortunes.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2006

When Henry Whitaker raised a waterwheel-powered textile mill on this spot in 1813, he was joining the young republic's first great industrial wave, when running water was the engine of American manufacturing. Whitaker's mill proved remarkably long-lived, operating for 157 years and turning out canvas and wool blankets for Union soldiers during the Civil War, the nation's first mill-made bed ticking, and patented chenille processes. Production ended in 1970, and arson claimed the buildings in 1975, though several originals still stand nearby.

Tyler, TX

Built about 1880 for attorney Harrison Moores Whitaker and his wife Mattie—daughter of Texas Supreme Court Justice Micajah H. Bonner—this is one of Tyler's few surviving high Victorian residences. In 1907 it passed to Mattie's sister Annie and her husband Sidney Smith McClendon, remaining in that family until 1979. Its asymmetrical plan and Italianate and Eastlake detailing mark it as a showpiece of the era's domestic architecture.

Halifax County, NC

Whitaker's Chapel began as an Anglican congregation in 1740, planted in the colonial backcountry before American independence, and later became Methodist. In 1828 it hosted the first annual conference of the Methodist Protestant Church, a reform-minded body that broke away in pursuit of more democratic, lay-inclusive church governance. The structure standing today is the third to occupy the site.

Bastrop, TX

John W. and Martha L. White built this ornate Victorian home in Bastrop in 1890, in the flush of the late Gilded Age when Eastlake "gingerbread" trim was the height of fashion. After several owners, Nash Turner bought the house in 1901 for his mother, Kate. Turner, an internationally recognized race-horse trainer, lived here with her in the early 1920s, and the house stayed in his family until 1937.

Highlands, TX

Reuben White was one of Stephen F. Austin's original "Old 300" colonists, taking a Mexican land grant here in 1824 as part of a large family that settled the area later called White Settlement. Though his 1848 burial is the earliest recorded, older graves are thought to exist nearby. Formally set aside as a family cemetery in 1850, it grew into a community burial ground holding pioneers and veterans of conflicts from the Texas Revolution to Vietnam.

Coleman, TX

After Coleman County was organized in 1867, pioneer families pushed past the county seat to settle this grassy, game-filled locality and founded the village of White Chapel. When land was deeded for a school in 1884, a cemetery took root on the same ground, and school, church, and burial place all shared the community's name. Consolidation eventually drew the schoolchildren away, but the cemetery still records the families who first broke this land.

New Brighton, PA · est. 1969

This cottage was the home of Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott (1823–1904), who wrote under the pen name Grace Greenwood and became one of the first women to earn a living as a newspaper correspondent in America. From here in the mid-19th century she produced poetry, essays, and the popular children's stories that made her a household name. She later broke ground as a Washington correspondent, reporting from the halls of national power when few women did.

White Deer, TX

White Deer took its name from a creek and an Indian legend of white deer that fed there. The county's first water well was drilled at the N Bar N Ranch in 1887, and the site served as headquarters for the White Deer Land Co., successor to a British syndicate that held 630,000 Panhandle acres before selling them off for farms in 1902. The arrival of the railroad and, later, a 1920s oil boom turned it into a shipping town for grain and cattle.

White Deer, TX

On the Texas Panhandle plains, where the International & Great Northern Railroad had laid out its survey blocks, a burial ground took shape in the early 1900s—perhaps beginning with a railroad worker killed in an accident around 1905. A cemetery association formed in 1923, buying its five acres for a single dollar, and after years of neglect was revived by local citizens in 1991. Those interred here include early pioneers and veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam.

White Deer, TX

In 1909 Henry Czerner and Ben Urbanczyk, both from the Polish colony of Panna Maria, came north to secure land near White Deer, and by 1913 a dozen Polish families had settled the area. Lacking a church, they prayed in one another's homes until they raised Sacred Heart, completed in May 1913 while women and children worked the fields. The parish weathered oil booms, a 1951 tornado, and the world wars — even reviving its Polish Sausage Festival — before building the present church in 1962.

White Deer, TX

A Methodist congregation formed in White Deer in 1911 when the Rev. W.B. McKeown gathered seven charter members, worshipping first in the shared town school and a Presbyterian building before buying lots for its own sanctuary, completed in 1922. When a 1951 tornado destroyed the town's schools, the church opened its doors as a temporary classroom, and by 1960 the growing congregation built a new debt-free building. Community outreach—from a women's missionary society founded in 1916 to a food pantry begun in 2004—has marked its ministry throughout.

Albany, TX

On a corner of frontier Albany's original town plat, Alabama businessman Max Blach—who helped bring running water to the town—built this native-stone building in 1884. Leased to J.R. Davis, it opened that May as the raucous White Elephant Saloon, complete with a rooftop white elephant that disapproving citizens soon tore down. After the saloon closed in 1886, the building housed furniture stores, a newspaper, and even a pipe-organ maker's workshop across nearly a century.

Woodway, TX

White Hall Cemetery is all that remains of a once-thriving farming community in McLennan County. Its earliest marked graves date to 1877 on land deeded by Civil War veteran Capt. Burl Jones Kendrick, who owned 320 acres nearby and in 1899 gave an additional acre to the graveyard's trustees for a single dollar. As the first Baptist cemetery in the area, it holds the pioneers who built and buried a vanished community.

Mabank, TX

Built in 1888 on land donated by the Albert T. Rice family, the first White Hall School was a single-room building first called Caney Creek School, renamed in 1910. Growth brought a four-room building in 1928 and a faculty of four, until the school was consolidated into the Mabank district around 1949. The building lived on afterward as a church and community center, and many former students' descendants remain in the area.

Navasota vicinity, TX

White Hall School opened in 1913 after three earlier rural schools — East Academy, West Academy, and Retreat — consolidated, its first building a two-story frame structure that doubled as a community hall. Serving farm families, it brought together the children of pioneer Anglo and German immigrant households, even amid the tensions of World War I. It carried the community through the Depression and two world wars before closing in 1949.

Camp Hill, PA

In the years after the Civil War, Pennsylvania established a network of Soldiers' Orphan Schools to shelter and educate the children of Union soldiers who had died or been disabled in the conflict. White Hall was one of these institutions, blending classroom learning with vocational training. Decades later its former students — who called themselves the 'Sixteeners' — returned to honor the school that raised them, erecting this marker in 1926.

White Haven, PA · est. 1985

This town took its name from Josiah White, the engineer whose Lehigh Navigation system moved coal and lumber out of the mountains. From 1837 to 1862 White Haven marked the northern end of the two-way canal navigation reaching down to Easton. Here the waterway met White's twenty-mile railroad to Wilkes-Barre, whose steep inclined "Ashley Planes" hauled cars up and over the ridge.

Floresville, TX

Built in downtown Floresville sometime between 1902 and 1907, this Victorian commercial building housed the White House Restaurant by 1909 and gained a second story by 1912. Around 1910 the Teltschik brothers, sons of German immigrants, partnered to run the café and lodging; Fritz eventually ran it alone and bought the property in 1921, welcoming community meetings and high-school students for the next fifty years. Its arched windows and brick corbelling survive as a rare example of the Victorian commercial storefronts that once lined Texas main streets.

Mound, TX

Organized in 1874 at the foot of White Mound Hill, this Baptist congregation began by sharing a rough log building with the local school—split logs served as desks, benches, and pews. From a brush arbor built in 1898 to a 14-foot-ceilinged sanctuary raised in 1914 by contractor Aaron Fellers, the church grew alongside its community. From 1920 on, Baylor and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary sent young preachers to train here before moving on to city pulpits.

White Oak, TX

White Oak Baptist Church was formally organized in 1910, tracing its roots to an earlier congregation founded in this East Texas sawmill town in 1889. Led first by Pastor Robert Marsh, the church found lasting benefactors in M. C. and Ada Satterwhite, who joined in 1913 and donated land for a church building in 1935. Its brotherhood, ladies' auxiliary, and expanding facilities kept it at the center of White Oak life through the 20th century.

White Oak, TX

White Oak began as a one-room schoolhouse raised by East Texas farm families in the 1880s, rebuilt by neighbors after an 1885 fire and doubling as a place of worship. When oil gushed from the East Texas field in the 1930s, wildcatting families flooded the district and burst the little school at its seams, prompting a modern brick campus in 1933 and the first graduating class in 1937. The district grew alongside the boomtown it served.

Odem, TX

Long home to Native American peoples and later claimed by 18th-century Spanish explorers, this coastal area near Nueces Bay drew Anglo settlers in the 1830s and, in 1856, the White brothers, who founded a cattle ranch known as White Point. Confederate veteran Darius C. Rachal, hired to drive their herd from East Texas, stayed to build his own ranch and became the community's leading figure after the Whites died in a yellow fever epidemic. When the post office denied the name White Point, it opened in 1892 as Rosita, with Rachal as postmaster; the little community faded after his death in 1918.

Hunt County, TX

In 1872, in the unsettled years after the Civil War, a minister and thirteen charter members gathered to form what they first called Pleasant View Baptist Church. Their 1883 meetinghouse served until 1901, when it was taken down and rebuilt at White Rock — congregations often literally moved their churches to follow their people. Such churches were the social anchor of rural Texas settlements, hosting worship, schooling, and community life under one roof.

Ross, TX

Local lore says this graveyard began with a drifter's burial in 1855, but the first recorded interment was Elizabeth A. Bennett in 1856. For generations it gathered the dead of a cluster of small McLennan County communities, and among its more than 1,600 graves lie many of the area's first settlers alongside veterans of every American conflict from the Texas Revolution to Vietnam.

Addison, TX

After emancipation, freed people from the Coit, Caruth, and Obier plantations built the community of Upper White Rock, and in 1884 they organized a Methodist congregation and raised a log church beside a small African American burial ground. Repeated flooding tormented the worshippers — oral history recalls the congregation trapped inside for days waiting for waters to fall, and a 1918 flood that drowned a family after services drove them to higher ground. Renamed over the decades and tested by fire, the church later fought a years-long court battle, finally won in 1979, to keep the very graveyard where it began.

Hunt County, TX

First known as Tidwell Creek, this Hunt County settlement grew up along the Sherman-Jefferson Trail, one of the wagon roads that knit together the young towns of northeast Texas. The Havens family is remembered as among its first settlers, and a post office opened in 1857 to serve the crossroads community. Like many trail-stop hamlets, White Rock lived and died by the routes of travel and commerce passing through it.

Dallas, TX

As Dallas outgrew its springs, wells, and the Trinity River in the early 1900s, the city acquired thousands of acres and built a dam on White Rock Creek, completing the reservoir and pump house by 1911 though drought delayed a full lake until 1914. Over the following decades the shoreline became a beloved city park with an Art Deco bathhouse, a swimming beach, and facilities built by the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. During World War II the former CCC camp served as an Army Air Corps center and a camp for German prisoners of war.

Greenville, TX

Organized in 1880 with just eleven charter members and the Rev. J.T. Stanley, this rural congregation first met in the White Rock Schoolhouse before building its own church in 1898. When a 1907 storm destroyed that wood-frame structure, members promptly rebuilt. The church stayed active in missionary work, forming a society in 1924, and has quietly served its community for over a century.

Dallas, TX

As Dallas's population surged and droughts strained its water supply in the early 1900s, the city engineering department designed and built this pump station in 1911 to draw on additional water. Its Renaissance Revival dress—corbelled brick and terra cotta—gave a utilitarian waterworks the dignity of a public building. Though its machinery has changed over the decades, the structure endures as a landmark of the city's water system.

Wills Point, TX

Wills Point grew up in the early 1870s along the Texas and Pacific Railroad, taking its name from William Wills, who kept a log-cabin trading post on the old Dallas–Shreveport Road. The cemetery began with Wills's own burial on family land in 1864; his widow, Mary Ann, later platted eight acres in a grid and sold lots for community graves. Organized as the White Rose Cemetery Association in 1874 and formally chartered under that name in 1909, the grounds grew to some 45 acres holding roughly 31,500 burials — pioneer settlers, their descendants, and veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Colfax, LA

This monument commemorates the white participants in the Colfax Massacre of 1873, when a white militia attacked and killed a large number of Black freedmen defending the Grant Parish courthouse during a disputed Reconstruction election. It was among the deadliest acts of racial violence in the Reconstruction era, and the Supreme Court case that grew from it, United States v. Cruikshank, gutted federal power to protect Black citizens' rights. The marker's own language — honoring men who fell 'fighting for white supremacy' — makes plain the Lost Cause worldview that later erected it.

Odessa, TX

Charles White came west from Indiana in the 1880s chasing opportunity and a drier climate, and in 1887—four years before Ector County even organized—he and his sons built this two-story brick house on the open plains near Odessa. Modeled on their Indiana home but adapted to local materials, it stood on a 640-acre tract alongside White's mercantile store. Decades later, WWI veteran Oso Pool bought the place, and during the frantic housing shortage of the 1927 oil boom turned it to new uses before the family finally donated it to the county.

Southlake, TX

Tucked into a corner of what was once rural Tarrant County, this pioneer burying ground took root around 1851, when—by local memory—a child who died on a passing wagon train was laid to rest in the raw prairie soil. Its oldest documented grave dates to 1872, and many of the earliest are marked only by native red sandstone or unlettered fieldstones. Among the dead are Civil War veterans and a former state legislator, silent witnesses to the settlement of this stretch of North Texas.

Southlake, TX

In 1871, a band of settlers rolled into north Texas by wagon train from Dade County, Georgia, and gathered to worship in S. B. Austin's home. Austin donated land for a cemetery and church, and by February 1872 a log meetinghouse stood as the first Methodist congregation in the vicinity. Circuit-riding preachers drew worshippers from as far as twenty miles away, and the building doubled as the community school until 1916. First called "Oak Hill" for the settlers' home church, it was soon renamed for the Rev. Mr. White.

Nazareth, PA · est. 1966

The Whitefield House was begun in 1740 at the urging of the famed revivalist preacher George Whitefield, who envisioned it as a school for Black children. When his plans faltered, the Moravians completed the building in 1743 and put it to communal use—most memorably as a shared home for 32 newly married German couples brought to Pennsylvania in 1744. Its stout walls have watched over Nazareth ever since.

Nazareth, PA · est. 1931

The Whitefield House traces its origins to 1740, when the famed revivalist George Whitefield acquired land in the Pennsylvania backcountry with the intention of founding a school for Black children. Moravian Brethren began the sturdy stone building, and after the Moravians purchased the tract in 1741 it served in turn as a family dwelling, a girls' boarding school, and a nursery for missionaries' children. Since the 19th century it has housed the Moravian Historical Society and Museum, preserving the memory of these early ventures.

Whitefish Township, MI

First lit in 1849, Whitefish Point Light is the oldest active lighthouse on Lake Superior, guarding the approach to the treacherous stretch of shoreline mariners came to call the 'Graveyard of the Great Lakes.' Long before its beam swept the water, the point was a landing and stopping place for Native peoples, French-Canadian voyageurs, and Jesuit missionaries traveling the inland sea.

Whiteflat, TX

Named for the tall white needlegrass that covered its prairie, Whiteflat grew up around a post office established in 1890 for the scattered farms of Motley County. At its height it supported grocery stores, garages, cafes, cotton gins, churches, and a school that grew from a one-room building to a two-story brick structure. Tied to small family farming, the town withered through the Depression and Dust Bowl, its school consolidated away in 1946 and its last store shuttered in 1968.

Sutherland Springs, TX

Whitehall was the home of Joseph Polley, one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" colonists and the first sheriff of the Austin colony. After settling here with cattle herds said to be among the largest in Texas, he built this stone mansion between 1847 and 1851, framing it with Bandera cypress and importing cabinetwork by sea from New York. A social center of its day, it hosted Robert E. Lee, who wrote his last Texas letter from beneath its roof.

Mingus, TX

The Whitehead Cemetery recalls the African American community that lived in the company town of Thurber in the early 20th century. When the Texas and Pacific Coal and Oil Company moved its offices to Fort Worth in 1933, several Black families stayed on in their company-owned homes. Albert Whitehead and fellow residents established this burial plot south of the old town square as a convenient alternative to the Thurber Cemetery, with the first documented burial—Sarah Grant—in 1943. Tarleton State University now maintains it as part of its industrial-history center grounds.

Houston County, TX

The Henry Whitehead family left Mississippi in the 1850s and put down roots in Houston County around 1862, in the midst of the Civil War in which Henry served the Confederacy. He founded this burial ground in 1870 with the grave of his first wife, Mary Ann "Polly." Their descendants, beginning with their son Aaron, have tended the two-acre cemetery ever since, where more than sixty graves now rest.

Livingston, TX

Built in 1856 for schoolteacher John S. Whitehead, this home of native, hand-hewn pine has remained in the same family ever since. Its simple, sturdy construction reflects the resourcefulness of settlers in the Polk County woods, who raised their houses from the timber at hand. That an early teacher built and kept it hints at the value frontier communities placed on learning.

Whitehouse, TX

Whitehouse Cemetery is said to take its name from a whitewashed 19th-century Cole family home that stood out among the area's log houses, along a road that once linked the old county seats of Homer and Crockett. Its oldest marked grave dates to 1893, though earlier burials exist, and its tombstones carry the names of settlers who helped shape Lufkin and Angelina County. A cemetery association formed in 1934 to tend the grounds, long kept in the traditional "scraped-earth" manner.

Springfield Township, PA · est. 1947

In the autumn of 1777, with Philadelphia fallen to the British, George Washington made the Emlen House his headquarters from early November into December. From this ground his army fought its last engagement of the year, repulsing a British probe on December 5–6 in what became known as the Battle of White Marsh. Days later Washington marched his weary troops to the winter encampment that would test them: Valley Forge.

Whitesboro, TX

Whitesboro sprang up after Ambrose B. White camped here in 1848 on his way west from Illinois and decided to stay. His inn sat on the Butterfield Overland Stage route after 1858, a post office bearing his name opened in 1860, and he surveyed the townsite with Dr. W. H. Trolinger in 1869. When the town incorporated in 1873, White was elected its first mayor, and the arrival of two railroads in 1879 and 1881 secured its future.

Whitewright, TX

When the Missouri, Kansas & Texas railroad pushed a line southeast from Denison in 1878, it created a brand-new town on the empty prairie and named it for William Whitewright, a New York railroad official and financier. Residents of nearby Orangeville, Pilot Grove, and Kentucky Town promptly abandoned their settlements and moved to the tracks. Within sixteen years Whitewright boasted schools, churches, a college, a newspaper, cotton gins, and a full range of businesses, rebuilding briskly after major fires in 1904 and 1911.