Search Markers

Sanger, TX

Dr. Hiram Daily laid out the town of Bolivar in 1852 with a burial ground on high ground nearby, and by the 1870s local Masonic and Odd Fellows lodges had set aside acreage for community burials. The graves read like a ledger of frontier life and death: infants and adults lost to the influenza epidemics of 1892 and 1918, farmers and ranchers, teachers, physicians, and ministers. Among them rest veterans of conflicts from the Mexican War through Vietnam, generations of one small Texas community.

Port Bolivar, TX

Bolivar Point was a stage for the tangled struggles over Spanish Texas in the early 1800s: Colonel Henry Perry camped here in 1815 planning an invasion, and the privateer Louis-Michel de Aury — who named the point for South American liberator Simón Bolívar — marched captive Africans from this shore toward New Orleans in 1816. James Long built Fort Las Casas here in 1820–21, where his wife Jane gave birth to a daughter often called the first Anglo child born in Texas. A federal lighthouse rose in 1852, was dismantled by Confederate troops, and rebuilt after the Civil War, later sheltering residents through the deadly storms of 1900 and 1915.

Denton, TX

Founded in 1852 and named — after a rum-fueled election settled the dispute — for a settler's Tennessee hometown (itself honoring Simón Bolívar), Bolivar grew into the westernmost fort and busiest crossroads of early Denton County. Two stagecoach lines swapped horses here, and the town where the Texas cattle trail met the Chisholm Trail bustled with hotels, mills, a gin, and a saloon. It also drew a rougher crowd: cattle baron John Chisum ran herds nearby, and outlaw Sam Bass and his gang found shelter in the surrounding country.

Pittsburg, TX

In the 1850s Ebenezer "Ebb" and Martha Bolton built a large East Texas plantation worked by enslaved people. After emancipation and Ebb's death in 1877, Martha set aside land for their former slaves, and a Freedmen's community called Bolton grew up around it. The cemetery, begun in 1861, holds the Boltons alongside generations of the freed families and their descendants who made new lives here.

Bolton, MA

In colonial and early New England, neighboring towns marked their shared borders with plain lettered stones exactly like this one — a "B" facing Bolton on one face, an "S" facing Stow on the other. Such markers fixed where one town's authority ended and the next began, a line that governed tax rolls, road upkeep, and militia musters. Bolton and Stow are both old central-Massachusetts towns, and under long-standing Massachusetts law their shared bounds were walked and re-marked every few years by town "perambulators" charged with keeping the border honest.

Whitley County, KY

A half-mile northwest lay Bon Jellico, a coal camp that operated from 1912 to 1937 mining the prized Blue Gem seam. Working a coal band just 24 to 40 inches thick, 350 miners knelt or sat to dig with picks and shovels, sending nearly 100,000 tons a year down an L&N spur line. The camp housed some 1,500 people in 75 homes with a three-room schoolhouse that doubled as a church and a company store—all without plumbing—until the coal ran out.

Bon Wier, TX

Bon Wier grew up where the Sabine River met the railroad. From an 1836 ferry and steamboat landing that rafted timber to downriver sawmills, the settlement boomed after a company logging town took root in 1898 and the Jasper and Eastern Railroad arrived in 1905. Platted in 1906 and named for Kirby Lumber Company officials, it thrived on a cluster of sawmills, a general store, and a school system until the mills faded in the 1950s.

Hillsboro, TX

This narrow Hillsboro passage, named for Bond's Drug Store that opened here in 1881, was the town's informal stage for politics, peddlers, whittling, and the occasional cockfight or fistfight. Its neighbors ranged over the years from a Chinese laundry to an early auto assembly shop. In fair weather people sunned in the alley; in foul, they crowded into the drugstore.

Bonham, TX

In 1900 nine Bonham businessmen pooled their capital to build a cotton mill on the northern edge of the blackland prairie, where cotton grew abundantly. Opening in 1901 as the town's first major industrial plant, it built company homes and offered free day care for workers' children—an early gesture toward industrial welfare. It weathered a 1920 merger, the Great Depression, and a peak of wartime production in the 1940s before finally closing in the 1970s.

Bonham, TX

Dr. J. M. Terry traded medicine for journalism, founding the Weekly Fannin Favorite in 1887 and expanding in 1892 into what became the oldest daily paper in Fannin County. For decades its presses ran from the 500 block of North Main before the paper moved to this site in 1953. Through many changes of ownership it chronicled local life—including the long career of native son Sam Rayburn, the legendary Speaker of the U.S. House.

Bonham, TX

Built with Federal Public Works Administration funds and local tax dollars, this auditorium and gymnasium gave Bonham a shared space for school and community life. Architects Voelcker and Dixon of Wichita Falls gave it Romanesque touches — arched openings and decorative brickwork. Its debut event was the 1937 junior-senior prom, followed by that year's commencement, and it remains in community use.

Hattiesburg, MS

These weathered buildings are all that remain of Bonhomie, a company-owned sawmill town that the Tatum Lumber Company built here in 1915. For four decades laborers and their families lived in the shadow of the mill, part of the vast Southern pine industry that stripped and reshaped Mississippi's forests. When the timber and the mill's fortunes ran out, the town faded by 1956.

Hattiesburg, MS

Bonhomie was a company town conjured out of the Mississippi pine woods, born in 1915 when the Tatum Lumber Company built its mill and drew workers and their families to the site. At its peak it had a doctor's office, church, school, and train station—a self-contained world that lived and died by the timber. When the virgin forests were logged out, the jobs vanished and Bonhomie faded into an extinct town, its remnants later tended during a timberland restoration begun in 2000.

Houston, TX

In 1852 Paul Norval Bonin, born in Louisiana in 1814, led his family and some fifty other French families from the bayou country to North Harris County, buying more than 1,200 acres at the heart of what became the area's French settlement. Neighbors bore names like Leleux, Melancon, and Pevateaux, and the earliest grave here marks a Bonin child who died in 1865. After the deaths of Norval and his wife Coralie, the land passed to their surviving sons, and in 1987 descendants formed an association that still gathers each April to honor their ancestors.

Fairfield, TX

Established in 1867, this cemetery holds five generations of the Bonner family, South Carolina brothers who came to Freestone County in the early 1850s and built vast cotton plantations. Patriarch William Bonner, a War of 1812 veteran, rose from a waggoner with little schooling to a fortune in Texas land, while his brother Dr. John Bonner was one of several physicians in the family. Teachers, doctors, lawyers, and farmers among their descendants rest here, a family long central to the county's growth.

Burkeville, TX

Thomas Bonner moved from Mississippi to Texas in the early 1850s, married Eliza Jane Rutledge in 1855, and settled his large family on the banks of the Sabine River. The family graveyard's first recorded burial came in 1861, that of the infant Lenora J. Bonner, and eight graves rest here in all. Though the surrounding land was sold to a timber company in 1926, Bonner descendants have continued to tend the little cemetery.

Napier Township, PA · est. 1992

Standing where the Forbes and Burd Roads met, Bonnet Tavern welcomed travelers on the rough frontier routes west from 1779 under Jean Bonnet and his heirs. In mid-1794 it became a flashpoint of the Whiskey Rebellion, as angry farmers gathered here and raised a liberty pole to defy the new federal excise tax on whiskey. That October, the troops President Washington summoned to put down the uprising camped at the tavern on their march westward.

San Antonio, TX

In the 1850s this San Antonio corner held stone and adobe buildings used by the U.S. Army. Civil engineer Dwight Dana Book bought the property in 1904 and raised this red brick commercial block in 1906, leasing offices to attorneys, realtors, architects, and physicians. A basement club called the "Night Spot" gave the building a livelier side after hours.

Booker, TX

Booker owes its existence to the Santa Fe Railway's push across the Texas Panhandle in the years around World War I. Platted in 1917 and named for a railroad locating engineer, the town literally absorbed a neighbor: the community of La Kemp, Oklahoma, six miles north, picked up and moved to the rails in 1919. When the first train pulled in on July 4, 1919, residents marked it as the town's true birthday.

Glen Rose, TX

This limestone home was built in the early 1870s by William G. McCamant, an early Texan who had helped bring Somervell County into being and served as one of its first commissioners. In 1896 it passed to Civil War veteran George L. Booker during his long 36-year run as county surveyor. Its eighteen-inch stone walls and end chimneys are hallmarks of frontier-era construction.

Houston, TX

Founded in 1893 as Colored High School in Houston's Fourth Ward, this was the first high school open to African Americans in the city, teaching Latin, science, mathematics and more at a time when Black secondary education was scarce across the South. It produced its first graduate by 1896, housed Houston's first library accessible to African Americans in 1909, and became a seedbed for higher education that ultimately grew into Texas Southern University. Renamed in 1927 for Booker T. Washington, the school later relocated to Independence Heights and pioneered Houston's first magnet program in 1974.

Mexia, TX

Set aside by deed in 1898, this park was dedicated to celebrating June 19th — Juneteenth — the day in 1865 when enslaved Texans learned of their freedom, first announced just a few miles south of here. Limestone County's Black community produced notable Reconstruction-era leaders, including constitutional convention delegate Ralph Long and legislators Giles Cotton, Dave Medlock, and Sheppard Mullins. Crowds of up to 20,000 once gathered for the annual observance, chartered under the 19th of June Organization in 1912.

Arlington, TX

Rooted in Arlington's first Black school of the 1890s, this institution educated generations of African American children in the neighborhood known as The Hill, with the Church of God in Christ lending classroom space as needed. Teachers George Stevens and Gloria Echols lived among their students, and Stevens served as principal for decades; graduates continued on to I.M. Terrell High School in Fort Worth. A modern facility opened in 1954, named for educator Booker T. Washington, until Arlington's 1965 desegregation closed the school.

Borger, TX

When the oil-boom town of Borger counted just five African American students in 1928, their first classes met under the roof of Bethel Baptist Church with Tallie Anderson Smith as teacher. By 1931 the district had opened a one-room school named for educator Booker T. Washington, and under principal R. G. Cofield after 1946 it grew into a twelve-grade campus with new buildings, a proud faculty, and championship Dragons and Dragonettes teams. Desegregation after Brown v. Board reshaped it into an elementary school and finally closed it in 1964.

Elysian Fields, TX

After emancipation, the Black community of Elysian Fields built its own church, cemetery, and school, opening a two-room Colored School in 1870 that offered both elementary and high-school grades for four decades. The school moved with the town toward the railroad in 1911 and, in 1954, was renamed for Booker T. Washington, the famed educator and founder of Tuskegee. It became the town's integrated elementary school in 1970.

Texas City, TX

Public schooling for Black children in Texas City began in 1915 in borrowed churches and lodge halls, until the district finally provided a building on this site in 1937. For years students could go only through the seventh — later the tenth — grade, forcing families to send their children to Galveston, until a high school building completed the campus in 1953. Named for Booker T. Washington, the school anchored African American community life until integration closed it in 1969.

Gainesville, TX

Two years before Gainesville created a public school system, a young man named Island Sparks began teaching the city's Black children in 1880, and in 1886 the city built a frame schoolhouse for them on this site. Known first as the Gainesville Colored School, it took the name Booker T. Washington by the 1920s, and its original building was replaced by a WPA-built brick structure in 1939. Desegregation in 1965–66 brought its era as a Black school to a close.

Lexington, KY

Organized in November 1785 by elders John Taylor and John Tanner with eighteen members, this congregation stands on the same land as its first log meetinghouse. Among its founders were Daniel Boone's brother Samuel and his wife, Sarah, tying the church to Kentucky's most famous pioneer family. It later helped form the Boone's Creek Association of Baptist churches.

Lexington, KY

Daniel Boone surveyed this site in 1774 and by December 1779 was living here with other families in crude shelters, building cabins and a stockade the next year. By 1783 the fortified station sheltered fifteen to twenty families on the Kentucky frontier—but at a cost: Boone's brother Edward, his son Israel, and his nephew Thomas were all killed in the closing violence of the Revolutionary War. Boone remained until 1784, and in the 20th century the land was willed to the state, opening as Boone's Station State Park in 1992.

Trinity County, TX

Founded around the time of the Civil War by Whitney Alston Boone, the Boontown community established this burial ground in the 1880s on land granted to Edward Thomas "Buck" Smith. Boone himself lies among the interred, alongside pioneers and veterans of the nation's wars, with the earliest marked graves dating to 1887. A local paper mill deeded an additional acre in 1963, and descendants still maintain the site. Today the cemetery is the last physical trace of the vanished Boontown settlement.

Boys Ranch, TX

On the high plains of the Texas Panhandle, this burial ground took its nickname from the famous Boot Hill of Dodge City, Kansas — a place where men "died with their boots on" in the rough world of buffalo hunters and trail drivers. Alongside those violent ends rest law-abiding settlers, laid here in the 1870s and 1880s when the region was a hard frontier crossroads. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936.

McMullen County, TX

This lonely South Texas graveyard earned its grim frontier nickname the hard way. Its occupants, chronicled on the marker, include men killed in gunfights at Fort Ewell and outside the old Rock Store, cholera victims from an 1869 outbreak, a boy thrown from a horse, and a suspected member of an outlaw gang — a roll call of violent and untimely deaths from the 1860s and 1870s. The very first grave belonged to a suicide.

Booth, TX

F. I. Booth arrived at Richmond in 1885, married Mildred Ryon Wheat, and built a home on land here. In the 1890s he brought thirty families from South Carolina to farm cotton, corn, and rice, and their houses and Mt. Zion Church grew into a town with a post office, sawmill, and cane-syrup mill served by the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad. After Booth's death in 1931 the community's economy gradually shifted, but its farming roots are still remembered.

Taylor, TX

Built around 1880 for rancher and banker Crawford Henry Booth, this Taylor landmark is an unusual local take on the L-plan vernacular house, dressed in exuberant Queen Anne details. An octagonal turret with an onion-dome roof, polygonal bays, keyhole windows, and spindlework porch trim mark it as the home of a prosperous frontier businessman. The Booth family kept the house until 1958.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2017

Opened in Philadelphia in 1971, the Booth Maternity Center reimagined how American women gave birth, offering natural, family-centered childbirth at a time when hospital delivery was usually clinical and impersonal. It became a national model for training midwives and for pairing them with physicians, and it helped pioneer the now-common practice of letting family members support a woman through labor and delivery. Booth also pushed for the accreditation of birth centers before closing in 1989.

Boothbay Harbor, ME

Erected in 1953 and re-dedicated on July 4, 1991, this memorial in the Maine coastal village of Boothbay Harbor honors the men and women who served their country in all wars and conflicts. Set in a seafaring town, it gathers generations of local service under a single tribute rather than naming one war.

Gail, TX

Carved from the vast old Bexar District, Borden County was created in 1876 and organized in 1891, with Gail as its seat. Both the county and its town honor Gail Borden—surveyor, newspaper editor, and the restless inventor who perfected the process of condensing milk. His name thus marks a stretch of West Texas rangeland far from the industry that made him famous.

Gail, TX

Built in 1896 of hand-hewn stone quarried from Gail Mountain, the Borden County Jail was engineered for maximum security on the West Texas frontier. Diebold Safe and Lock Co. won the $4,500 contract, lining the cells behind two-foot outer walls with third-inch case-hardened steel plates said to defy hacksaws. Its huge hasps and padlocks opened with a six-inch key.

Monongalia County, WV

In 1779 the western Virginia backcountry—today's West Virginia—was a raw and violent borderland, caught up in the frontier fighting that raged alongside the Revolutionary War. Isolated cabins at settlements like Dunkard Creek stood exposed to sudden raids, and defense often fell to whoever was home when trouble arrived. This marker preserves one such account: a settler woman, Mrs. Bozarth, who by tradition seized an axe and fought off attackers in a desperate hand-to-hand struggle at her own door. Whether burnished by retelling or not, the story captures the peril that defined daily life on the far edge of American settlement.

Waxahachie, TX

Kentucky-born Michael Boren moved to this part of Texas with his family in 1847, and his second wife Mary Ann, who died in 1857, is thought to lie among the cemetery's earliest graves. Boren and his son George donated the land for the use of the Reagor Springs and Bethel communities, and its stones now mark numerous military veterans and pioneer Ellis County families. The oldest legible date, 1868, belongs to a five-year-old grandchild.

Weatherford, TX

Born into slavery in Mississippi in 1834, Bose Ikard came to Texas as a child and stayed on as an employee after emancipation. In 1866 he joined Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving's famous cattle drives, becoming one of Goodnight's most trusted cowboys and closest friends. He later settled in Weatherford, raised six children, and at his death in 1929 was honored with a granite headstone that Goodnight himself erected.

Meridian, TX

Named for the wooded Bosque ("woods") River, this county was crossed by the Texan-Santa Fe Expedition in 1841 and surveyed by soldier George B. Erath before its first colonists arrived in 1850-51. English settlers at Kent, Norwegians at Norse, and Germans in the east gave the county an unusually international frontier character. Organized in 1854 as a farming-and-ranching country, it later saw the Chisholm Trail's cattle herds pass through in the 1870s.

Meridian, TX

Built of limestone quarried from the surrounding hills and dressed in Gothic styling, this is Bosque County's fourth courthouse — successor to a one-room log cabin that served in 1854. Its clock tower was modified in 1935 to strengthen the roof, but its distinctive iron stairs and railing remain. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

China Spring, TX

In 1841 Republic of Texas president Mirabeau B. Lamar dispatched an expedition to open trade with Santa Fe and press Texas' claims to New Mexico. Struggling with steep banks, the party crossed the Bosque River near here on July 6, 1841, early in a journey plagued by hunger and Indian attacks. When they finally reached New Mexico that September, Mexican troops captured them and marched them off to prison in Mexico City.

Waco, TX

Organized in 1854 in a log schoolhouse, this Baptist congregation has gathered without a break for well over a century and a half, first sharing quarters with a Masonic lodge, then raising its own sanctuaries after fire took an early building. Rural churches like this anchored scattered antebellum farm communities, doubling as school, meeting hall, and social center. Its unbroken life makes it one of the oldest country congregations in McLennan County.

Waco, TX

Burials began here as early as 1850 on ten acres given for a school and cemetery, where a log schoolhouse once served both Methodists and Baptists. The ground holds a striking cross-section of early Texas: veterans of the 1836 San Jacinto campaign, dozens of Confederate soldiers, pioneer families, and the unmarked graves of enslaved people. Each row of stones speaks to a different chapter of the state's contested past.

Waco, TX

This Methodist congregation took root in the Bosqueville community outside Waco in 1853, when frontier worshippers gathered in homes, then a schoolhouse, then the local college before building a church of their own. Traveling circuit riders such as Mordecai Yell served the scattered settlers, a hallmark of Methodism's reach across the Texas frontier. The present sanctuary dates to 1911–12, with educational wings added in the 1950s.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1992

Completed in early 1892, the Bost Building became the nerve center of one of the most consequential labor battles in American history. That summer it housed the strike committee of the Amalgamated Association of Iron & Steel Workers, and the telegraph wires strung into it carried dispatches from journalists covering the Homestead Strike to newspapers nationwide. From this address, the workers' cause was argued to the wider public even as the confrontation with Carnegie Steel turned violent.

Boston, MA

On April 15, 2013, two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Boylston Street, killing three people and wounding hundreds on what should have been a day of celebration. This marker is one of a pair set at the blast sites, its words chosen to offer consolation and resolve. In the days that followed, the rallying cry 'Boston Strong' came to embody the city's grief and its defiance.

Boston, MA

This marker is one of a pair set into the sidewalk on Boylston Street to remember the April 15, 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon, which killed three and injured hundreds near the finish line. Its inscription speaks not of the violence but of what endures, part of a quiet memorial worked into the very ground where the tragedy unfolded. Together the two markers turn a site of terror into a place of reflection.

Framingham, MA

This weathered stone is a colonial milestone, one of the road markers set along New England's post roads in 1768 to tell travelers exactly how far they had to go — here, 21 miles to Boston. In an era before numbered highways or reliable maps, such milestones guided riders, stagecoaches, and the post as they made their way between towns, and they helped standardize the routes that knit the Massachusetts countryside to its busy port capital. Cut just a few years before the Revolution, this marker stood along a road that would soon carry news, militia, and rebellion.

Boston, MA · est. 2009

At Dover and Fay Streets stood the Boston Social Club, chartered by the American Federation of Labor in August 1919 as a union for the city's police patrolmen. When the commissioner suspended the union's newly elected leaders, 1,117 officers walked off the job on September 9, 1919, touching off three days of rioting that ended only with a call-up of the National Guard. In a harsh coda, none of the striking officers were ever rehired.

New Waverly, TX

On November 26, 1881, nine residents of the rural Boswell community met in a log schoolhouse to organize this Baptist church, with the Rev. T. E. King as its first pastor. A frame chapel followed in 1883 on land given by Phillip J. Ellisor, and for decades the church was the center of community life. It declined after World War II and the congregation disbanded in 1950, though the site still hosts an annual homecoming.

Burke County, GA

Constituted in 1773 by the English-born missionary Rev. Edmund Botsford, this congregation was the second Baptist church founded in Georgia. First established as New Savannah Church some twenty-five miles below Augusta, it moved about ten miles to this spot after the Revolution; the present building dates to around 1875, replacing an earlier church lost to fire. Botsford's own words survive in the record of a single 1773 month spent riding 650 miles, preaching dozens of sermons, and baptizing new members across the Georgia backcountry.

Hamshire, TX

Built in 1859 by A. Mobray for Sevan Broussard, this house has been occupied continuously by the same family. Its "dog-trot" plan—two rooms joined by an open central breezeway—was a hallmark of period construction well suited to the humid Southeast Texas climate.

Shelbyville, TX

Tucked on a wooded bluff above a creek between Shelbyville and Center, this burial ground served the family and neighbors of Francis Bird Bounds, Jr., who moved from Tennessee in 1845. The first grave was that of William Echols in 1855 and the last a Bounds descendant in 1900, making it a compact record of one pioneer clan's half-century in East Texas. A cemetery association formed in 2010 to restore its fences and stones.

Penn Hills, PA · est. 1946

In 1758, British and colonial forces under General John Forbes cut a road across Pennsylvania to strike at French-held Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio. Bouquet Camp served as a supply base along that campaign, named for Colonel Henry Bouquet, Forbes's able second-in-command and the builder of the Forbes Road. The French abandoned and burned Fort Duquesne rather than face the advancing army, opening the gateway to the Ohio Country.

Keller, TX

Aurelius Delphus Bourland, a North Carolina native and Civil War veteran who was also a Primitive Baptist preacher, bought land here in 1873 and began a family cemetery, its earliest marked grave that of his grandson in 1886. In 1899 he sold the burial ground to the residents of Keller for use as a public cemetery, and later families added more land. The Works Progress Administration built its gateway in 1935.

Greenville, TX

Built in 1883 by Virginia B. Stevens, daughter of Col. James Bourland, this Southern Colonial home rose on land tied to the very founding of Greenville, incorporating part of an earlier house. It passed down through her daughter before being sold in 1912, its successive owners drawn from the town's leading families. The house stands as a record of the founding generation who shaped Hunt County.

Bourne, MA

Built in 1897, the Bourne Village School served this Cape Cod community at the turn of the century, when small towns took pride in raising sturdy, purpose-built schoolhouses to replace one-room predecessors. Bourne had only recently separated from Sandwich to become its own town in 1884, and a proper village school was part of establishing that new civic identity. Such buildings often anchored village life well beyond the classroom.