Search Markers

Whitewright, TX

Chartered in 1856 as the Kentucky Town Masonic Lodge, this fraternal order followed its members east in the 1880s after the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad bypassed Kentucky Town and drew residents to the new depot town of Whitewright. Renamed in 1893 but keeping its original charter, the lodge counted several Texas grand masters and elected officials among its ranks.

Brenham, TX

This burial ground is the resting place of Godfrey Whiting and Martha Richardson, both born into slavery early in the 19th century and held by Georgia planter Daniel Long Richardson, who brought his enslaved people to Texas. After emancipation, part of the Richardson land passed to Godfrey Whiting, and in 1872 he and Martha bought neighboring acreage to build a homestead. Family tradition holds that the cemetery sits on the site of their old slave cabin, where Godfrey was first buried in 1897 and Martha beside him in 1922.

San Saba, TX

In 1905 Austin banker John H. Whitis arrived in San Saba to help found the First National Bank and commissioned builder A.T. McLellan to raise this Queen Anne house, finished that October. When the Whitis family returned to Austin, the home passed to Irene Clark and then to her daughter Cornelia and son-in-law Alex Enoch Moore, a family active in civic life and the Presbyterian Church who kept the house until 1973. Its spindlework, turned posts, and cross-gabled hipped roof preserve the exuberant residential taste of turn-of-the-century central Texas.

Columbia City, IN

This memorial honors the men of Whitley County who died in the Korean War (1950–1953), the hard-fought conflict on the divided peninsula that Americans often called the "Korean Conflict." Four local names are inscribed here, each a young life given in a war fought far from the Indiana farm country they called home.

Williamsburg, KY

Whitley County was formed in 1818 and named, like its seat of Williamsburg, for Colonel William Whitley—a famed Indian fighter credited with leading more than seventeen battles and helping drive Native peoples from southeastern Kentucky by 1794. He joined the Kentucky militia in the War of 1812 and was killed at the Battle of the Thames in 1813. The county's first court met in 1818 in the home of Samuel Cox, Williamsburg's first citizen.

Whitney, TX

Whitney became the first railroad town in Hill County when it was founded in 1879 along the Houston and Texas Central line and named for railroad investor Charles A. Whitney. Town lots went up for sale at a "Grand Picnic" that November, where an eager crowd bid hundreds of dollars each while merchants opened "tent stores" and carpenters worked around the clock to finish wooden storefronts. The town soon boasted a bank, school, churches, a newspaper, and an opera house, and it rebuilt again and again after fires swept the business district.

Whitney, TX

When Whitney Dam impounded the Brazos River in 1950, the rising waters of Lake Whitney threatened to submerge six pioneer graveyards scattered across Hill and Bosque counties. To save them, workers carefully relocated some 1,260 graves and their monuments to nearly 24 acres of higher ground here. Among the reinterred were settlers dating back to the 1850s and 1860s, including a Civil War veteran and legislator, several early officeholders, and whole families like the Dyers and Basyes whose descendants shaped the region.

Whitney, TX

Founded in 1883, just four years after the railroad created the town of Whitney, this newspaper passed to Dan S. Mayes — who had begun as a printer's apprentice in 1888 and won full ownership by 1893. Under his hand the Messenger grew from a four-page sheet reaching some 400 readers into a twelve-page paper circulating to roughly 1,700 by 1903.

Whitt, TX

Permanent settlers arrived here in the mid-1850s, and the town of Whitt was formally established in 1877 as a farming community and stagecoach stop between Weatherford and Jacksboro. It grew into a regional education center, home to Whitt Seminary and Parker Institute. The community cemetery, in use since at least 1879, now spreads over eight acres with more than 1,000 graves, including pioneers and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Whitt, TX

In 1880 the elders of Whitt's Christian Church bought five acres to found a community school, and the two-story rock Whitt Seminary opened its doors in 1881. At a time when frontier Texas towns were fighting for permanence, this ambitious little school drew 175 to 200 students—some traveling from as far as Oklahoma Territory—for a curriculum that ranged from Latin, chemistry, and astronomy to piano, violin, and bookkeeping. It served the community until about 1900, then lived on as a church and gathering place for reunions and homecomings.

Kildare, TX

This African American cemetery began as a six-acre burial ground on the sprawling plantation of Willis Whitaker, a South Carolinian who reached Texas in 1840 with his family and more than fifty enslaved people. Those laid to rest here were the enslaved, freed people, and their descendants—among the earliest perhaps seven Freemen killed on the plantation in 1868, and many lost to the malaria epidemic of 1896 and later storms. With more than 350 documented burials, including educators, businessmen, and veterans, the cemetery remains in use today.

Coatesville, PA · est. 2007

A 1924 Howard University graduate, Dr. Whittier C. Atkinson opened his practice in Coatesville in 1927 and in 1936 founded the Clement Atkinson Memorial Hospital, offering care to everyone regardless of their ability to pay. He broke barriers as the first African American president of the Chester County Medical Society and was named Pennsylvania Practitioner of the Year in 1960. His hospital stood as a rare place of open access in an era of segregated medicine.

Whittier, CA

The Whittier Depot marks the arrival of the railroad in this Southern California town, whose growth was bound up with the interurban and steam lines that carried passengers, citrus, and freight across the Los Angeles basin in the early 20th century. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the depot recalls the days when a train station was the front door of a community. Its preservation keeps a piece of the rail age at the center of town.

Mason, TX

This well takes its name from John Whorlie, a deputy sheriff caught up in the 1875 "Hoodoo War," a bloody feud sparked by cattle rustling in Mason County. After a prisoner in his charge was seized by a lynch mob, Whorlie was killed and scalped while working here, reportedly by Scott Cooley, a friend of the lynched man. No one was ever convicted in the vendetta, though order was said to return to the county after 1876.

Wichita Falls, TX

Carved from the Young Land District in 1858 and formally organized in 1882, Wichita County took its name from the Wichita people who had long lived along these rivers of North Texas. The gap between its creation and organization reflects how sparsely settled the region remained until railroads and settlers pressed westward after the Civil War. Wichita Falls became its seat, anchoring the county's growth.

Wichita Falls, TX

Around 1900, Wichita Falls booster Joseph Kemp began dreaming of turning the dry country around the city into irrigated farmland, and by 1914 he and brother-in-law Frank Kell had platted irrigation subdivisions. Water Improvement Districts formed in 1919 and 1920, and between 1921 and 1924 Lake Kemp and Lake Diversion rose to supply a gravity irrigation system, municipal water, and flood control on the Wichita River. Though the hoped-for farm economy never eclipsed oil, District No. 2 still delivers water and tames floods today.

Wichita Falls, TX

On a February afternoon in 1896, cowboys Foster Crawford and Elmer "Kid" Lewis robbed the City National Bank in Wichita Falls, killing cashier Frank Dorsey and fleeing with about $410. A posse of citizens and Texas Rangers ran them down that night, but the law's work was undone the next evening when a mob dragged the pair from jail and lynched them before the bank. The episode captured the raw and volatile justice of the frontier town.

Wichita Falls, TX

Public education in Wichita Falls began humbly in an 1880 log cabin, growing out of three private schools founded the year before. A relocated former courthouse served as an early schoolhouse, and the first true high school opened in 1890, graduating a class of just five in 1892. After the district was chartered by the Texas Legislature in 1908, the school expanded steadily, moving into a new building on Avenue H in the 1920s and shaping generations of the city's leaders.

Wichita Falls, TX

When Wichita Falls Junior College opened in 1922, it was the first public junior college in Texas — founded seven years before the state even passed enabling legislation. Begun within the city school system under Superintendent Randolph Lee Clark, it started with fifty-five students and ten teachers meeting in the high school. Philanthropists John G. and Mary Hardin funded a new campus, and the renamed Hardin Junior College grew into a state four-year school, becoming Midwestern University in 1950.

Wichita Falls, TX

Founded in 1885 by Masons who had grown tired of riding 18 miles to Henrietta for meetings, this lodge first gathered in a hayloft above a livery stable in frontier Wichita Falls. Over the decades its members met in banks and rented rooms while ceremonially laying the cornerstones of the city's key public buildings, from the courthouse to churches and city hall.

Wichita Falls, TX

Funded by public subscription and completed in 1908, the Wichita Falls Opera House brought big-city culture to North Texas, opening with the play "His Honor, The Mayor." Its stage hosted drama, ballet, and concerts—and celebrated visitors like William Jennings Bryan, ballerina Anna Pavlova, and singer Lillian Russell—before the building declined into a movie house and later a wrestling arena.

Wichita Falls, TX

When Frank Kell and J. A. Kemp founded the Wichita Falls Traction Company in 1909, they were as much land developers as transit operators. After buying up undeveloped land toward Lake Wichita, they built an electric streetcar line to it — instantly turning the remote outskirts into a convenient place to live and driving up the value of their own property. The city grew rapidly along the route until buses replaced the streetcars in 1933.

Wichita Falls, TX

Organized in 1925, the Wichita Falls Woman's Forum was part of the great wave of women's clubs that reshaped American civic life in the early 20th century, giving women a platform for education, culture, and community reform. In 1927 the group built this clubhouse, designed by architect T. L. Sorey in a Mediterranean style of light brick, arches, and multicolored tile roofing. The building grew with a major eastern addition in 1960, a sign of the club's enduring vitality.

Wichita Falls, TX

Wichita Falls' citizens had called for a county hospital since the 1880s, but construction of the 40-bed Wichita General finally began in 1915, its three-story red-brick design by local architects Field & Clarkson. A school of nursing opened that December, and within three years the flu epidemic and oil-boom population forced a fourth story; decades of additions followed before the hospital merged into United Regional in 1997 and the original building was razed in 2013.

Franklin Township, OH

Built in 1800–01 by Revolutionary War veteran Peter Wickerham, this sturdy inn stood as a stagecoach stop on Zane's Trace, the pioneering road that opened the Ohio country. Over the decades it sheltered a remarkable range of travelers, from freedom seekers escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad to Confederate cavalry under Gen. John Hunt Morgan, who lodged here during his daring 1863 raid across Ohio.

Kent County, MD

Lambert Wickes was a Kent County mariner who became one of the earliest captains of the fledgling Continental Navy during the Revolution. Commanding the sloop-of-war Reprisal, he carried Benjamin Franklin across the Atlantic to France in 1776 and then boldly cruised European waters, taking British prizes almost within sight of England and helping press the case for a French alliance. In 1777 the Reprisal foundered in a storm off the Newfoundland banks, and Wickes was lost with nearly all his crew — a death this memorial in his home county still marks.

White Deer Township, PA · est. 1967

In 1774 Catherine Smith, a widow, established a stone house and a complex of saw and grist mills along this stretch of the West Branch frontier. When the Revolution came, she built a boring mill in 1776 that finished gun barrels for the Continental Army, turning a backwoods industrial site into a small arsenal for the war effort. Running such works alone in a contested wilderness was a formidable undertaking for anyone, and remarkable for a woman of her day.

Cameron, TX

Albert J. Matocha, born in Austria-Hungary in 1876 and brought to Texas as a boy, opened his own hardware store in 1898 in Cameron's "Dutchtown." After a 1920 fire, he rebuilt with a repurposed dance hall and ran the store until his death in 1945. Erwin Lee Wied bought the business in 1946, and its false-front building—known for a vast inventory and a tin shop of ornate metalwork—stayed in operation until 1990.

Hallettsville, TX

Opened in 1895, Wied School served a rural community settled by German and Czech immigrants, including the Wied brothers who gave it its name. Classes ran from a modest three-room schoolhouse, teaching grades that later reached the tenth, with a curriculum that reflected local life—Czech-language instruction and agriculture—since cotton farming set the school calendar. Declining population led to consolidation in 1966.

Wiergate, TX

A 1917 deal between Houston lumberman Robert W. Wier and the Lutcher and Moore Lumber Company set off the construction of one of East Texas' largest sawmill complexes, cutting into vast stands of virgin longleaf pine. By 1922 a full company town of some 550 homes, churches, schools, a hotel, and shops had risen around the mill, its neighborhoods segregated by race and ethnicity in the manner of the era. The mill ran continuously for a quarter-century until 1942, but unlike most East Texas lumber towns, Wiergate survived its mill's closing.

Evadale, TX

On the Neches River in the piney woods of Southeast Texas, Wiess Bluff marked the head of tidewater navigation — the farthest point riverboats could reach from the coast. Laid out as Grant's Bluff in 1840, it grew when Simon Wiess built wharves and warehouses to float local goods downriver, and boomed in the 1880s as lumber companies laid tram roads into the surrounding forest. When the best timber gave out after 1900 the population thinned, and the post office finally closed in 1908.

Marshall, TX

The oldest part of this Marshall house went up around 1856 and soon sheltered the family of Louis Trezevant Wigfall, one of the era's most flamboyant fire-eating politicians. A relentless champion of secession and states' rights, Wigfall served as a Texas legislator, a United States senator, and a Confederate senator. During the Civil War, Confederate officers were frequent guests here.

Vernon, TX

Carved from Bexar County in 1858 and organized in 1881, this county honors the Wilbarger brothers, who came to Texas in 1829 during its earliest Anglo-American settlement. Josiah Wilbarger's survival for eleven years after being scalped in 1833 became one of the frontier's most famous tales. In its cattle-driving heyday, millions of head of livestock passed north through the county on the great trail drives.

Galveston, TX

A New York-born young man who came of age with the Texas Republic, Wilbur Cherry served in the Texas army during the revolutionary year of 1836 before turning to the printed word. In 1843 he purchased the Galveston News, joining the ranks of the frontier newspapermen who knit together public life in a scattered new nation. His Irish-born wife, Catherine, outlived him by decades, their intertwined lives marking Galveston's growth from Republic-era port to Gilded Age city.

Covington Township, PA

On a November day in 1946, a Conemaugh man named George A. Oswald is said to have shot three wildcats from this very rock in the wooded ridges of Clearfield County, and he marked the spot so the feat wouldn't be forgotten. In the mid-20th century the forests of the Pennsylvania Alleghenies still harbored bobcats and other wild game, and hunting was woven into the rhythm of rural life. Small, homemade commemorations like this one turned an ordinary outcrop into a local landmark, preserving a hunter's tall-but-true story in stone.

Amarillo, TX

This shallow playa lake on the high plains long drew buffalo, wild horses, and nomadic Native peoples, and later explorers, traders, and cattle drivers who needed reliable water in a dry country. In 1887 the lakeside became the original townsite of Amarillo, but repeated flooding pushed the town a mile east to higher ground by 1890, where it grew into the great cattle- and grain-shipping hub of the Texas Panhandle. Modern drainage has since shrunk the lake that started it all.

Fort Davis, TX

Long before wagons rolled through, an Indian trail wound through these mountains along the floor of Limpia Canyon. To escape flash floods, travelers on the San Antonio–El Paso Road — emigrants, U.S. troops, and supply and mail trains — climbed instead to this higher gap, which they named for the wild roses that grew there. It became a landmark of the mid-19th-century overland route across far West Texas.

Shoshone County, ID

Dedicated by the U.S. Forest Service in 1984, this memorial honors the wildland firefighters who have risked and given their lives battling forest fires. It stands in Idaho's Shoshone County, deep in the mountain country of the Northern Rockies where catastrophic fires — most famously the Great Fire of 1910 — reshaped both the land and the young Forest Service's mission.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 2005

Once known as Wetzel's Swamp, Wildwood Park was reimagined in the City Beautiful spirit championed by advocates Horace McFarland and Mira Lloyd Dock. Designed in 1901 as part of a plan by leading horticulturist Warren Manning, it opened its first trails in 1907 as the largest of Harrisburg's new parks. The project reflected a nationwide push to weave recreation, nature preservation, and flood control into the fabric of growing cities.

Chicago, IL

In Chicago's Edgebrook neighborhood, community groups — a Boy Scout troop, an American Legion post, and the neighborhood association — came together to honor local veterans and their families. Dedicated in gratitude rather than to any single war, the memorial reflects a distinctly American tradition of neighborhood remembrance. It marks the countless residents who served across many generations of conflict.

Marshall, TX

Established in 1873 by the Freedmen's Aid Society of the Methodist Church, Wiley College opened its doors to Black men and women freed by the Civil War, one of the earliest such institutions west of the Mississippi. Named for Bishop Isaac W. Wiley, the school moved to Marshall in 1878 and graduated its first college student, Henry B. Pemberton, in 1888; in 1893 the Rev. Isaiah Scott, a former slave preacher, became its first Black president. Under Dr. Matthew W. Dogan's 46-year tenure, Wiley earned a top rating and pioneered the influential combined academic-technical curriculum known as the "Wiley Method," widely copied among Black colleges.

Marshall, TX

The Methodist Episcopal Church's Freedmen's Aid Society founded Wiley College in Marshall in 1873 to educate former slaves and their descendants, and set aside four acres of its grounds as a burial place for the Black community. The earliest documented graves date to 1894, and those laid to rest include longtime college president Matthew Dogan, respected teachers, and veterans of the Civil War through the Korean War. Many graves remain unmarked, and a cemetery club has tended the grounds since 1959.

Port Lavaca, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1797, Wiley George enlisted in the Georgia militia at seventeen and fought in the War of 1812. After years in Georgia and Alabama he came to Texas in 1840, settling first in San Antonio and then moving to Port Lavaca in 1848, where he speculated in horses and built a fine home. He died in 1862 and lies in an unmarked grave in the Port Lavaca Cemetery.

Grand Saline, TX

Wiley Hardeman Post was born in 1898 in the Van Zandt County community of Corinth before his family moved to Oklahoma. Despite losing an eye in an oil-field accident, he became a barnstormer and record-setting aviator, circling the globe with Harold Gatty in 1931 and again solo in 1933. Post pioneered the pressurized flight suit, high-altitude stratospheric flight, and early autopilot and radio navigation—until he and humorist Will Rogers died in a 1935 Alaska crash.

Richmond, VA

Wilfred Emory Cutshaw rose from a Virginia Military Institute graduate (1858) to a Confederate artillery officer during the Civil War, then turned his energies to rebuilding and modernizing the defeated capital of the Confederacy. As Richmond's long-serving city engineer from 1873 until his death in 1907, he shaped the postwar city through an ambitious program of civic planning—paving streets, laying out parks, and improving public infrastructure during the Reconstruction and Gilded Age decades.

City of Glens Falls, NY · est. 2013

Wilhelmina Weber Furlong (1878–1962) was among the earliest American champions of modern art, working when the movement still met deep resistance in the United States. She spent her final years in Glens Falls, living and teaching at her Ridge Street studio until her death. The marker was placed for Warren County's bicentennial to honor her influence.

Albert, TX

This burial ground served Albert—first called Martinsburg—a rural community renamed for Albert Luckenbach, who opened its post office in 1892. German-born blacksmith and rancher Friedrich August Wilke, Sr. deeded the land for a cemetery in 1907, its first burial a reinterred child who had died in 1894. With its interior fencing, Masonic stones, and extensive curbing, the cemetery endures as a vestige of the vanished Albert community.

Bryan, TX

Built in 1912 by noted Bryan architect and contractor Charlie Jenkins, this home stood in a neighborhood favored by the town's business leaders during the 1910s and 1920s. First owned by banker A. W. Wilkerson and later by businessman John Parker, it is a variation on the American Four-Square style, with a hipped roof, eave brackets, and a wraparound porch.

Wilkes-Barre Township, PA · est. 1949

Wilkes-Barre was laid out in 1770 by settlers from Connecticut, who claimed this Susquehanna valley land under their colony's sea-to-sea charter—a claim Pennsylvania hotly disputed. The rival claims erupted into the Pennamite Wars of 1769–72 and again in 1784, while the Revolution brought the brutal Wyoming Massacre of 1778 nearby. Organized as the seat of Connecticut's "County of Westmoreland" in 1776, the town sat at the center of one of early America's fiercest boundary struggles.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1949

Wilkes-Barre was laid out in 1770 by settlers from Connecticut, who claimed this stretch of the Susquehanna under their colony's charter in defiance of Pennsylvania. The dispute boiled over into the Pennamite Wars of 1769–72 and 1784, and in 1778 the surrounding Wyoming Valley suffered the infamous Wyoming Massacre during the Revolution. Made the seat of the Connecticut-created "County of Westmoreland" in 1776, the settlement stood at the heart of a bitter contest over who owned the land itself.

Swoyersville, PA · est. 1947

Finished in 1778, this fort enclosed the courthouse of Westmoreland—the county Connecticut had carved out of the disputed Wyoming Valley. It stood only briefly: with the valley overrun by British and Loyalist forces that same summer, it surrendered alongside nearby Forty Fort, another casualty of the campaign that broke the Yankee settlement.

Smithland, TX

This family burial ground served the people of the old Wilkinson Plantation and takes its name from Seaborn Jones Wilkinson and his wife, Elizabeth Ann. The earliest grave, from 1854, is an infant daughter of Confederate veteran Abner Pulaski Moseley. Also interred are the Confederate minister William Hilary Moseley and Samuel Fountain Moseley — a U.S.-Mexico War veteran, lawyer, and owner of the Jefferson Herald newspaper. A cemetery association formed in 1994 to maintain the site.

Grandview, TX

In November 1866 Henry and Sarah Ann Wilkinson set out from Mississippi with their seven children, enduring a 62-day journey by two ox-drawn wagons before settling here in January 1867. They rented land at first, then bought 762 acres in 1869 to build a farm and a small log home, becoming leaders of a rural community first called Hugh and later Antioch. When Henry died in an 1879 farming accident he was buried in a grove near his home, beginning the family cemetery still tended by his descendants.

Higgins, TX

One of America's most beloved humorists first sharpened the rope tricks that made him famous as a young cowboy on the Little Robe Ranch near Higgins. Will Rogers had left school in 1898 after some pranks and drifted into Texas, forming a lifelong friendship with his employer's son before joining a wild west show in 1902 and rising to national fame. His life ended in 1935 in a plane crash alongside aviator Wiley Post during a pioneering flight around the globe.

Oklahoma City, OK

Will Rogers, the Oklahoma-raised humorist, newspaper columnist, and film star of the 1920s and '30s, was among the most beloved public figures of his day — a cowboy philosopher whose folksy wit needled politicians and reassured a Depression-weary nation. This bronze "life study" was modeled by the noted American portrait sculptor Jo Davidson and presented to Oklahoma City in 1951, honoring the state's favorite son.

Felicity, OH

Felicity sits in Clermont County in southwestern Ohio, only a short distance from the Ohio River — the line that separated the free state of Ohio from slaveholding Kentucky. In the tense decades before the Civil War, this borderland became a frontline of the Underground Railroad, where freedom seekers who crossed the river depended on a hidden network of conductors and safe houses to guide them northward. Will Sleet's home stood as one node in that clandestine web, and the fact that his role is remembered here points to the courage such work demanded in a community close enough to slavery's reach to make sheltering the escaping dangerous.

Houston, TX

This marker recalls that at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, the Texan army advanced to the popular tune "Will You Come to the Bower," crying "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!" The furious assault—fought with cannon, gunshot, clubs, and Bowie knives—routed Santa Anna's army completely.

Glasgow, KY

A Glasgow native, Willa Brown Chappell became the first African American woman to earn a U.S. pilot's license in 1937 and, within a few years, the first American woman to hold both mechanic's and commercial pilot's licenses. She co-founded the Coffey School of Aeronautics, which trained Black pilots—some of whom joined the Tuskegee Airmen—and the National Airmen's Association, which pressed to open the Air Force to African Americans. As the first Black officer in the Civil Air Patrol, she became a leading voice for integrating the U.S. military.

New York, NY

Two towering American authors worked within these walls a generation apart. Here in 1912 Willa Cather, later famed for My Antonia, wrote her first novel, Alexander's Bridge. And here in 1945 Richard Wright, author of the searing Native Son, wrote his autobiography, Black Boy. The address quietly joins the prairie realism of one writer to the unflinching testimony of another.

Raymondville, TX

Carved from Cameron and Hidalgo counties in 1911 and reorganized a decade later, Willacy County honors John G. Willacy, a state legislator and tax commissioner. Its seat shifted from Sarita to Raymondville as the county settled into its modern shape in the 1920s.