Search Markers

Bovina, TX

Bovina began as the Hay Hook Line Camp of the legendary XIT Ranch, the three-million-acre spread Texas granted in payment for building its state capitol. When the Pecos & Northern Texas Railroad reached the site in 1898, cattle poured onto rail cars bound for eastern markets, and for a time this was one of the largest shipping points in the nation — cowhands called it "Bull Town" before the town chose the name Bovina in 1899. From a frontier line camp it grew into the market center of a rich irrigated-farming county.

Bovina, TX

Before the town of Bovina existed, the sprawling XIT Ranch ran its southern headquarters near here, and when the railway arrived in 1898 a settlement grew up around the railhead — first nicknamed "Bull Town" for the cattle wandering the tracks. The XIT first used this ground to bury its cowboys, some marked only with names like "Dusty" and "Big Jim," now lost; the earliest surviving marker dates to 1907. A Historic Texas Cemetery, it holds generations of residents and veterans reaching back to World War I.

Bovina, TX

Bovina grew up in the early twentieth century in the heart of the vast XIT Ranch, strung along the Pecos Valley Railway on the Texas High Plains. Soon after the town's founding, a Methodist congregation of nine charter members took shape, meeting in a one-room schoolhouse and building its first sanctuary in 1910 with money raised largely from area cowboys. As the oldest Methodist church in Parmer County, it grew alongside the surrounding farming and ranching community.

Granbury, TX

Built between 1908 and 1914 with leaded-glass windows and steeply pitched, flare-eaved gables, this home was raised for Granbury merchant Ralph W. Bowden, a city councilman who set up an early telephone system for the area. In 1914 it passed to Perry H. Kennon, who served a decade as Hood County tax assessor.

Brunswick, ME

On the Bowdoin College campus in Brunswick, this memorial honors the generations of Bowdoin students and graduates who left the classroom to serve their country, and remembers those who never returned. From the Civil War through the wars of the twentieth century, the small Maine college sent its sons into national service far out of proportion to its size.

San Antonio, TX

This peninsula in the San Antonio River, once bounded by water on three sides and the Concepcion Acequia on the fourth, was bought in 1845 by Philadelphia native John Bowen. He and his family built a seven-room home, planted orchards and vineyards, and ran a waterwheel-irrigated truck farm; Bowen served as city postmaster and treasurer and, a staunch Unionist, reportedly sheltered fugitive slaves. The island became a beloved gathering spot, hosting the first Volksfest and the German Turnverein before the river was diverted in the 1920s and joined it to the mainland.

Scott Township, PA · est. 1996

In the summer of 1794, the hills southwest of Pittsburgh became a flashpoint in the young republic's first great test of federal authority. Angry over Alexander Hamilton's excise tax on distilled spirits — a hardship for cash-poor frontier farmers who turned grain into whiskey — armed settlers besieged the home of tax inspector General John Neville. Over two days of fighting, Neville's mansion was put to the torch and men fell on both sides, forcing President Washington to eventually lead troops west to restore order.

Shamrock, TX

Since the 1920s, Bowers Cemetery has been the burial ground for Shamrock's African American community, its oldest marked grave dating to 1926. Also called West Shamrock Cemetery and known locally as Boot Hill, it took its name from a Black addition to the town developed by David Laughlin Bowers, with land reportedly given by Manse Lisles. Many of those buried here came to Shamrock with a road-paving crew in 1926 and stayed to build a full community—complete with its own gas station, café, school, and church.

Washoe County, NV

Bowers Mansion, built in 1864, stands as a monument to the sudden riches of the Comstock Lode. Lemuel "Sandy" Bowers and Eilley Orrum, whose adjoining Gold Canyon claims struck a rich vein, married and became likely the first millionaires the great find produced, raising this house on their new fortune. But misfortune chased fortune: the vein gave out, a mill was destroyed, Sandy died in 1868, and Eilley finally lost the property to foreclosure in 1878, dying in poverty even as the mansion lived on as a popular resort.

New Boston, TX

Carved from Red River County land in December 1840 and organized the next year, Bowie County honors James Bowie, the Long Expedition veteran who died defending the Alamo. The country had been home to agricultural Indians before 1800 and was charted for Anglo-American settlement in 1819, back when it was still frontier of the fledgling Texas Republic. Its county seat wandered among DeKalb, Old Boston, Texarkana, and Boston as railroads and farming, lumber, and manufacturing took hold.

Bethany Beach, DE

In the summer of 1930, Thomas Granville Walston and his wife Minnie Ann opened a bowling alley on the Bethany Beach boardwalk, between First and Second Streets, in what was then a quiet Methodist-founded seaside resort on Delaware's Atlantic coast. For decades it was a fixture of boardwalk life, later carried on by their daughter Zada and her husband Bill Wildus. Like so much of America's early-20th-century beach-resort culture, it eventually gave way to changing times, remembered now only by this marker's promise that it is "gone but not forgotten."

New York, NY · est. 1964

Erected by the Common Council in 1771, this iron fence surrounds Bowling Green, New York's oldest park, leased back in 1733 for use as a bowling lawn at a token rent of one peppercorn a year. In 1776, patriots toppled the nearby equestrian statue of King George III and, by tradition, sheared the royal crowns from the fence posts. The fence itself has survived for more than two centuries.

Bowling Green, OH

For 84 years a school building stood in Bowling Green, a college town on the flat, fertile plain of northwestern Ohio, gathering the ordinary drama of American public education—first bells, graduations, hallways worn smooth by generations of students. When the old building came down in the spring of 2012, eight bricks were gathered from different corners of the structure and set into this small sculpture, so that a piece of the walls that held all those years would remain on the ground where it stood.

Plano, TX

This medallion marks Bowman Cemetery, established in 1868 and later designated a Historic Texas Cemetery. Founded just after the Civil War, it served the farming families settling the Blackland Prairie of what is now the Plano area of Collin County.

Lakeside City, TX

W. A. Bacon donated this ground to a German missionary society in 1885, and the first grave—that of Christina Schmith—was dug the same year. Many who rest here were German immigrants, and a striking sandstone mausoleum built around 1900 by A. F. Decker for his parents still marks the cemetery's south side. Descendants formed an association in 1940 to keep the graveyard tended.

Williamsport, PA · est. 2000

When Bowman Field opened in 1926 as Memorial Field, minor league baseball was a fixture of nearly every American town, and Williamsport's new park quickly earned its place in the game's lore. Its very first professional contest pitted the Williamsport Grays against the Harrisburg Giants of the Negro leagues — a reminder that Black professional baseball drew crowds and talent in an era of segregation. Renamed in 1929 for J. Walton Bowman, the ballpark went on to host home teams and major league exhibition clubs for generations.

Stephenville vicinity, TX

This Erath County burial ground began in 1885 when A. B. Keith deeded an acre to the Primitive Baptist Church, and its earliest known grave belongs to an infant who lived only months in 1886. The area later took the name Bowman Ridge for pioneer Benjamin Bowman, who gave land for a schoolhouse, and a Confederate veteran was among those laid to rest here. The many graves of children speak to the hardships of pioneer life.

Richland Springs, TX

Around 1858 the Abel Bowser family settled at a bend of the Colorado River, and the village of Bowser Bend grew up with a school, cemetery, cotton gin, and store by the late 1880s. Recurring floods pushed the town to relocate after Paul Varga donated higher land for a chapel and cemetery in 1890, but the loss of its post office, gin, and school sent Bowser into decline by the 1940s.

Alto, TX

The Box families came from Alabama to Texas in 1834, and Roland W. Box and his wife Mary built a log fort on a hill on part of the Stephen Burnham grant, enclosing a house and dugout. Box's Fort became the nucleus of a settlement as the extended family raised homes nearby, and Box men fought in the Texas Revolution of 1836. A post office called Box's Creek operated from 1851 to 1866, but by 1900 the fort had vanished from area maps.

Washington, DC

Standing near the Ellipse just south of the White House, the Boy Scout Memorial honors the founding and enduring mission of the Boy Scouts of America, which was chartered in 1910. Dedicated in 1964, the bronze grouping depicts a uniformed scout flanked by allegorical figures representing the ideals and traditions that guide him. The inscription reproduces the Scout Oath, the pledge every scout recites as a promise of duty, service, and personal character.

Van Alstyne, TX

Only two years after Congress chartered the Boy Scouts of America, three Van Alstyne boys got hold of a Scout storybook, and in March 1913 their troop received one of the first charters in Texas, with school superintendent W.F. Barnett as scoutmaster. The troop soon helped seed others in nearby towns and threw itself into community work, from a citywide cleanup in the 1920s to carrying the Pan American Games torch in 1959. It also became the first integrated troop in its regional council, and one founding-era member, Rae Nunnallee, stayed active for seventy years.

Paducah, KY

Within the very first year after the Boy Scouts of America incorporated in February 1910, the Reverend Clinton S. Quin of Grace Episcopal Church organized Troop 1 in Paducah. The church chartered the troop continuously for more than a century, providing meeting space and volunteer leaders. Documented as the seventh-oldest troop in the nation, it belongs to the Lincoln Heritage Council, one of the country's oldest scouting councils.

Claude, TX

In May 1912, only two years after the Boy Scouts of America was founded, the frontier town of Claude organized Troop No. 17—one of the oldest Scout troops west of the Mississippi. Pioneer physician Dr. W. A. Warner gathered about thirty boys in a room above his drugstore and served as their first scoutmaster, launching a program that shaped generations of the town's civic leaders. Nicknamed the "Lone Star Pioneers," the troop passed through a line of dedicated scoutmasters over the decades.

Manor, TX

Aaron Boyce moved his family to Texas in 1837, during the young Republic, settling a 1,280-acre tract in the rolling hills near present-day Manor. The cemetery holds only five graves, but they carry hard history: the first burial was fifteen-year-old James Boyce, killed by a Lipan Apache raiding party. The Boyces went on to help found the town of Manor in Republic days, and their family plot survives as one of the settlement's oldest.

Anson, TX

Settlement came to Jones County in the late 1800s, first near the abandoned Fort Phantom Hill and then around ranches and farms, and in 1895 Reese Davis, Joe Swent, and Alex Boyd built the school that gave Boyd Chapel its name. Shaped by landowning families like the Youngs, who deeded ground for churches, a school, and a tabernacle, the cotton-farming community thrived until World War II drew its young people into the armed forces and city jobs. After its school consolidated with Anson in 1947, Boyd Chapel faded, and today only graves in the Neinda Cemetery mark where it stood.

Douglas County, NV

In December 1861 William H. Boyd received a Utah Territory franchise to build a road linking Genoa to the Cradlebaugh toll road, the main trunk line toward the Esmeralda mines. When the Placerville-to-Genoa telegraph line was strung along it in 1863, the route picked up a second name—"Telegraph Road." Douglas County bought the road in 1876 for $2,650, and its trace is still visible across the valley.

Clarendon vicinity, TX

Illinois native Henry S. Boydstun brought his family to the Texas Panhandle in 1890, and after his infant son Eddie died that year, he buried the child in a corner of the family farm. In 1898 he deeded two acres for a public burial ground, around which a small farming community with a school and post office grew up. Ironically, Boydstun and his wife were themselves buried in the nearby town of Groom.

Boyertown, PA · est. 2009

Founded in Boyertown in 1893 by C. A. Mory and associates, the Boyertown Burial Casket Company grew into one of the largest casket makers in the world and among the first in its trade listed on the New York and Philadelphia stock exchanges. Renowned for craftsmanship, it patented numerous design innovations and used progressive marketing to build an international market. The firm was sold in 1987, closed in 1988, and its factory was later demolished.

Jasper, TX

Tucked into the piney woods of deep East Texas near Jasper, this family burial ground took shape around 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, as settler families put down roots in the region. Family cemeteries like this one were often the first permanent institutions on the frontier, marking the land a family claimed as home long before towns and churches arrived. Its recognition as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2016 formally preserves that early footprint.

Meridian, TX

On this Bosque County homesite—now marked only by a surviving log kitchen—grew up John A. Lomax, who would become one of America's greatest collectors of folk music. Sitting astride the Chisholm Trail, young Lomax absorbed the ballads of trail-driving cowboys and the jig tunes, chants, and work songs of Black servants, jotting the music down while still a boy. When he left home at twenty he carried a roll of cowboy ballads that became the seed of a lifetime's work preserving the nation's vernacular song.

Augusta, GA

This manse of Augusta's First Presbyterian Church was the boyhood home of Woodrow Wilson, who lived here from 1858 to 1870 while his father, Dr. Joseph R. Wilson, served as pastor. A Virginia-born son of the manse, Wilson would rise from Princeton scholar to university president, governor of New Jersey, and, in 1912, 28th President of the United States, leading the nation through World War I and championing the League of Nations. His boyhood neighbor here, Joseph Rucker Lamar, went on to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Glynn County, GA

A half-mile west lies Boys Estate, a home for boys set on part of the old Elizafield Plantation, once among the rich rice and sugar estates of the Georgia coast. In the early 19th century Elizafield was the domain of Dr. Robert Grant and later his son Hugh Fraser Grant, cultivated intensively in rice and cane; the tabby ruins of a great sugar mill still stand. Given to the state as a park by Cator Woolford in 1935, the tract was set aside in 1945 for the boys' home.

Logan, OH

In the courthouse town of Logan, this monument keeps faith with the men of Hocking County who marched off to war between 1861 and 1865. "The Boys in Blue" was the affectionate name a grateful North gave its Union soldiers, and small Appalachian-Ohio counties like this one sent a remarkable share of their young men into regiments that fought from the Ohio hills to the killing fields of the Deep South. Ohio raised more than 300,000 soldiers for the Union, most of them in companies of friends and neighbors organized county by county.

Kempner, TX

Between 1934 and 1949, more than a hundred boys — orphans and children of broken homes and juvenile courts — found refuge at this ranch, founded by Roy and Viola Dawson as a sanctuary for the Great Depression's 'lost boys.' The boys worked a self-sufficient ranch with its own dairy, gardens, and grist mill while attending school and church, and the operation later drew Hollywood support through the Variety Club.

Midway, TX

Bozeman Cemetery was established in 1852 near Midway in Madison County, when this part of Texas was still a young frontier of scattered farms and settlements. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery, it preserves the resting place of some of the area's earliest pioneer families. Its weathered stones are among the few remaining records of the community that settled here before the Civil War.

Gonzales County, TX

Bartlett McClure and his wife Sarah Ann built a log cabin here in 1831 in Green DeWitt's colony; McClure went on to become Gonzales County's first chief justice and a delegate to the 1833 Texas convention. The present house, a vernacular take on the Greek Revival style, went up in 1842–43. After McClure's death, Sarah Ann married Charles Braches of the Republic of Texas Congress, and the home witnessed many events of early Texas history.

Minden, TX

This crossroads in Rusk County has worn a remarkable string of names—Gibsontown, Murval, Needmore, and finally Brachfield. The last honored Charles Louis Brachfield, a judge and 23-year state senator who once gave a stump speech here and who in 1926 became the first Jewish candidate for statewide office in Texas when he ran for attorney general. A hotel, school and post office came and went as sawmills, cotton, dairy, cattle, poultry and later oil and gas took turns sustaining the little farming community.

Rockport, TX

Rockport native Adolph L. Bracht opened his own wholesale and retail grocery in 1899 and spent decades shipping vegetables from local growers and the Rio Grande Valley to wider markets. A charter member of the Intracoastal Canal Association, he was active in his church and chamber of commerce until retiring in 1947. He and his wife Gertrude raised nine children in their Prairie-style house, built around the turn of the century with a wraparound porch and Doric columns.

DeBerry, TX

Pioneer settlers Thomas and Mary Bracken brought their family to this corner of East Texas in the 1830s and set aside part of their land as a burial ground for their family and neighbors. The oldest marked grave belongs to the infant Clarence Liston, who died in 1876, and the cemetery holds pioneers from a scattering of early settlements—Grand Bluff, Elysian Fields, DeBerry, and others. Their son-in-law Dan Briggs formally deeded the site as a cemetery in 1891.

Augusta, KY

In the 1870s this Ohio River county was the nation's leading wine producer, pressing more than 30,000 gallons a year—roughly half of all American wine. German immigrants, finding soil like that of France and Spain, carried grape growing and winemaking to the hills around Augusta. This limestone cellar, its walls three feet thick, is the last survivor of that vanished industry.

Augusta, KY

Bracken County, formed in 1796, was named for the frontier hunter and Indian fighter William Bracken, who ranged this country as early as 1773. For its size the county produced an outsized share of firsts: it cradled John Gregg Fee, founder of Berea College; the noted surgeon Joshua Taylor Bradford; and Augusta College, chartered in 1822 as the world's first Methodist college. In 1867 the first White Burley tobacco was grown from Bracken County seed, transforming Kentucky agriculture.

Edna, TX

Brackenridge Cemetery holds a family whose reach ran from a young Abraham Lincoln to the University of Texas. John A. Brackenridge, an Indiana neighbor who lent law books to Lincoln, later founded a Texas Presbyterian church; his son George became a banker, philanthropist, and long-serving UT regent who gave San Antonio its Brackenridge Park; and daughter Mary Eleanor helped found what became Texas Woman's University and sat on its first board. Together they shaped Texas banking, education, and civic life.

Austin, TX

When Edwin Waller laid out Austin in 1839 he set this block aside for a hospital, though it stood empty until 1884, when the city and county jointly opened a 20-bed facility here. Retired physician Dr. Robert John Brackenridge championed the 1912 bond that funded a larger building, and the hospital was renamed in his honor in 1929. Over the generations its staff met the 1918 influenza epidemic, the mid-century polio outbreak, and the 1966 University of Texas tower shooting, while pioneering Central Texas's first open-heart surgery and kidney transplant.

Palo Pinto, TX

Local tradition traces this cemetery to the 1870s, when a young girl died as her family passed through Thomas Lindsey's land and was buried on the spot, soon joined by Lindsey's own sister. The earliest marked grave, that of infant Tump Mapes, dates to 1877, and the ground passed through several owners and names—Lindsey, Ioni, and finally Brad—before a cemetery association incorporated in 1973. With more than 400 graves, it still serves the surrounding rural community.

Shippensburg, PA · est. 1961

In 1755, as General Edward Braddock's army marched toward the French at Fort Duquesne, supplies for the expedition were stockpiled in Edward Shippen's stout stone house at Shippensburg. His son-in-law James Burd cut a road westward to move those provisions toward the front. After Braddock's crushing defeat, the goods that remained were handed out to settlers fleeing Indian raids along the exposed Pennsylvania frontier.

Wharton Township, PA · est. 1946

In July 1755, British General Edward Braddock led a large expedition toward the French-held forks of the Ohio and met catastrophe near the Monongahela, where he was mortally wounded. His men buried him in the roadbed here so passing wagons would hide the grave from pursuing enemies. His remains were reinterred nearby in 1804, and a trace of the military road he cut through the wilderness can still be seen.

North Union Township, PA · est. 1952

In the summer of 1755, General Edward Braddock cut a military road westward through the Pennsylvania mountains toward the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne, and Colonel Thomas Dunbar's detachment made its last camp near this point while hauling the army's heavy baggage. When Braddock's main column was shattered in ambush near the Monongahela, the survivors streamed back to Dunbar's position. Rather than regroup, Dunbar destroyed his supplies and retreated, abandoning the frontier to the French and their allies.

North Union Township, PA · est. 1952

On June 26, 1755, General Braddock's army pitched its tenth camp near a landmark called the Half King's Rock as it pushed toward Fort Duquesne. The rock honored Tanacharisson, the Iroquois "half king" who spoke for the Ohio nations and had allied himself with the British. A young George Washington had met Tanacharisson at this very spot in 1754, on the eve of the frontier clashes that helped ignite the French and Indian War.

Dunbar Township, PA · est. 1952

By late June 1755, General Braddock's army had reached its twelfth camp near the Youghiogheny River as it labored toward the French position at Fort Duquesne. On June 30 the troops forded the river at Stewart's Crossing, a well-known frontier fording place near present-day Connellsville. The crossing was one more grueling stage in an expedition that had to carve a wagon road through the wilderness as it advanced.

Henry Clay Township, PA · est. 1952

On June 24, 1755, General Braddock's army made its eighth camp here as it struggled toward Fort Duquesne, with Chestnut Ridge — the last mountain barrier before the descent toward the Ohio — looming on the western horizon. To move supply wagons and artillery over the ridge, Braddock's axemen widened an existing Indian path into a rough military road. It was slow, backbreaking work that set the army's crawling pace.

Alexandria, VA

In the spring of 1755, at the opening of the French and Indian War, British General Edward Braddock assembled his expedition at Alexandria and marched west on April 20 toward the French-held Ohio Country. His goal was Fort Duquesne, at the forks of the Ohio, but the campaign ended in disaster that July at the Battle of the Monongahela, where Braddock was mortally wounded and a young aide named George Washington helped rally the survivors. This monument marks the point where that ill-fated army set out, and notes a cannon left behind at the town as the troops moved out.

West Mifflin, PA · est. 1964

About midday on July 9, 1755, General Edward Braddock's British army of some 1,300 men forded the Monongahela here on its march to drive the French from Fort Duquesne. Hours later that expedition was shattered in the woods beyond, Braddock mortally wounded and his troops routed by a smaller force of French and their Native allies. The battered survivors—among them a young officer named George Washington—recrossed the river in retreat.

North Braddock, PA · est. 1948

On July 9, 1755, a British column under General Edward Braddock marched through this ground toward the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio. A smaller force of French soldiers and their Native allies caught the redcoats in the woods and shattered them, killing Braddock and sending the survivors reeling in retreat. The disaster was one of the worst British defeats of the French and Indian War — and a young colonial aide named George Washington helped rally the broken army.

North Braddock, PA · est. 1994

In the summer of 1794, farmers across western Pennsylvania rose up against a federal excise tax on whiskey — the cash crop of the frontier — in what became the young republic's gravest test of federal authority. Here at Braddock's Field, thousands of armed militiamen from the four western counties massed on August 1–2 in a show of force that stopped just short of open war. Their gathering, the largest armed defiance of the national government before the Civil War, pushed President Washington to raise a militia army and march west to restore order.

Bradford, VT

Bradford, Vermont, remembers James Wilson, an early American who taught himself geography and engraving to become the first commercial globe maker in the United States around the start of the nineteenth century. Working from a rural New England farm in the early republic, Wilson produced terrestrial and celestial globes that had previously been imported from Europe. His story is a quintessential tale of Yankee ingenuity and self-education.

Towanda, PA · est. 1982

Formed in 1810 and first called Ontario County, this region was renamed in 1812 for William Bradford, the second U.S. Attorney General. Its seat, Towanda, was incorporated in 1828 along the Susquehanna. The county remembers Sullivan's March—the 1779 Revolutionary campaign against the Iroquois that passed through the valley—and native son David Wilmot, whose 1846 Proviso to bar slavery from new territories helped ignite the national crisis over slavery.

Houston County, TX

In 1838, as the young Republic of Texas drew settlers west, Bradford Davis left Mississippi to farm the Houston County frontier — and, in a detail that captures how raw that frontier was, met his death while checking bee bait. His sons carried the family into the next generation as farmers, a gin operator, a river merchant shipping goods down the Trinity, and a schoolteacher. Family members and the enslaved people they held are buried together on this ground.

Washington, PA · est. 1953

David Bradford built this fine stone house in 1788, and six years later he emerged as a leading figure in the Whiskey Rebellion, the armed uprising of western Pennsylvania farmers against the federal excise tax on distilled spirits. When President Washington sent a militia army to enforce the law, the rebellion collapsed and Bradford fled to Spanish West Florida to escape prosecution. His abandoned home stands as a monument to one of the young republic's first great tests of federal authority.

Lubbock, TX

Bradford Knapp (1870–1938) became a national leader in agricultural education, serving as the first director of the U.S. Cooperative Extension Service and helping organize overseas food production for the Agriculture Department during World War I. He went on to lead as dean of agriculture at Arkansas and as president of the institutions now known as Oklahoma State, Auburn, and — from 1932 until his death in 1938 — Texas Tech. His career carried the practical gospel of scientific farming from Washington to campuses across the country.

Bradford, PA · est. 2006

Northwestern Pennsylvania was the cradle of the world's oil industry, and in 1881 independent oilmen Robert Childs, Eli Loomis, and William Willis founded a refinery near here to process the region's prized Pennsylvania Grade crude. It began modestly at ten barrels a day; more than a century later it was refining thousands of barrels daily, drawing from wells across the surrounding hills. It remains among the oldest continuously operating refineries in the United States.