Search Markers

McKinney, TX

Edward Bradley brought his family from Kentucky in the 1840s as members of the Peters Colony, building a log home on a branch of Wilson's Creek in what is now McKinney. A nearby hillside became the family graveyard and then a community cemetery, holding eleven marked headstones and many unmarked graves — including, in a wooded plot to the south, an enslaved people's cemetery marked with bois d'arc wood. The oldest documented burial is Edward Bradley himself, who died in 1855.

Fairfield, TX

Merchant W. L. Moody built this Greek Revival house in 1860 for his bride, Elizabeth Bradley, complete with a well at the rear once used to cool milk and butter. After Moody moved to Galveston—where he became a Civil War veteran and a leading businessman—he sold the home to his father-in-law, F. M. Bradley, for $2,800 in gold. The house passed between two of Freestone County's most influential families on the eve of the Civil War.

La Grange, TX

Built in 1886 for La Grange merchant Amzi T. Bradshaw and his wife Sarah, this frame house passed in 1908 to their daughter Nellie and her husband John Killough. In 1924 the Killoughs gave the Victorian home a fashionable makeover, adding a crenelated Tudor Revival entry portico and a side porte cochère. Its two-story bay window and corbelled chimneys still hint at the residence's original nineteenth-century lines.

Hinesville, GA

Bradwell Institute traces to 1841, when the newly settled town of Hinesville established an academy under headmaster Colonel James Sharpe Bradwell, its first building raised on the courthouse square for the precise sum of $349.12½. Closed during the Civil War, the school was reopened in 1871 by his son, Captain Samuel Dowse Bradwell, and renamed in the elder Bradwell's honor. A classical boarding and college-preparatory school teaching Latin, Greek, and the sciences, it later became the only high school serving this stretch of coastal Georgia.

Hinesville, GA

In 1871, during the years of rebuilding after the Civil War, Bradwell Institute was founded on this site — one of many local academies that carried formal schooling into communities across the postwar South. The park here remembers Samuel Dowse Bradwell, the institute's founder, whose name the school still carries in Liberty County today. A century later the memorial park itself was built with federal assistance, layering a modern civic project over the town's educational roots.

Van, TX

Born on a nearby farm in 1895, Brady P. Gentry rose from Smith County attorney and judge to chairman of the Texas Highway Commission from 1939 to 1945, personally driving nearly every state highway to gauge its needs. As a national highway leader and later a U.S. congressman from 1953 to 1957, he helped shape the legislation behind farm-to-market roads and the interstate highway system. He also helped found Tyler Junior College before his death in 1966.

Brady Township, PA

This great bend of the Allegheny River bears the name of Captain Samuel Brady (1756–1795), a frontier scout whose exploits grew into legend. In June 1779, in what was then Seneca country, Brady led a party to answer the killing of a settler and her four children and the capture of two more. His force surrounded a small band of Seneca and Munsee, killed their Munsee leader, and freed the two captive children.

Bradys Bend Township, PA

For a third of the nineteenth century, the bend of the Allegheny River at Brady's Bend roared with the work of one of America's great early ironworks. Founded in 1839 as the Great Western and later reorganized as the Brady's Bend Iron Company, it grew into one of the largest iron operations of its era, drawing on the coal and iron ore of western Pennsylvania. Most remarkably, it became the first works to roll iron rails on the western side of the Allegheny Mountains — feeding the very railroads that were then stitching the growing nation together. When it closed in 1873, it left behind a company town and the memory of a place where American heavy industry came of age beyond the eastern seaboard.

Laurel County, KY

After the bloody Battle of Perryville in October 1862, Confederate General Braxton Bragg gathered his forces and began withdrawing southward, ending the Confederacy's bid to hold Kentucky. Union General Don Carlos Buell pursued as far as this point in Laurel County before deciding further pursuit was not worthwhile. Bragg's army continued on, passing through the Cumberland Gap in late October.

La Vernia, TX

Brahan Lodge began meeting under dispensation in 1858 and was chartered in 1859, named for Dr. Robert W. Brahan and led by first master John Rhodes King. Its members had fought in the Texas War for Independence, the Mier Expedition, the Mexican War, and Indian campaigns, and they quarried and ox-carted the stone for a hall completed in 1871 that also served as church and school. The marker is dedicated above all to the lodge's Civil War veterans, who served in famed Confederate units from Hood's Texas Brigade to Terry's Texas Rangers, fighting from Chickamauga to Appomattox.

Junction, TX

Brambletye was built between 1895 and 1900 by English immigrant William Hall, who came to Texas in 1888 and raised a stone house on a hill overlooking Bear Creek in the Hill Country. Its hand-cut walls two feet thick and hand-hewn walnut ceiling beams make it a rare example of late 19th-century English vernacular architecture in the region. After Hall's death in 1900 the house and its ranchland passed through several early ranching families.

Edna, TX

Raised in 1861 by Sarah Wiseman on the Texas coastal plain, this house became a fixture of the lower bay country. From 1867 onward the family of E. G. Branch and the Bonnot heirs kept it as a place of open hospitality for the surrounding community. It was formally recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Eatonton, GA

This marker records the site of a branch of the Bank of the State of Georgia at Eatonton, part of the network of state-chartered banks that financed commerce across the antebellum South. Chartered institutions like it issued their own paper currency and extended credit to planters and merchants in cotton-country towns, tying a rural county seat into the wider financial world of the early republic. Such branch banks were vital, and often fragile, engines of frontier and plantation economies.

Hillsborough County, FL

This quiet family burial ground in Hillsborough County holds the graves of soldiers from the Civil War era, when Florida had joined the Confederacy and sent its sons to fight far from home. Small private cemeteries like this one dot the rural South, marking where families laid veterans to rest on their own land rather than in distant national cemeteries. The plain fieldstones and family plots tell a story of loss absorbed at the household level.

Marble Falls, TX

Brandt Badger, a Confederate veteran who came to Burnet County in 1885, helped found Marble Falls two years later and in 1888 built this substantial home. Its walls were cut from quarry rubble left over after shaping the great blocks of pink granite that built the Texas State Capitol at nearby Granite Mountain. The eight-room, six-fireplace house stayed in the Badger family until 1943.

Spearman, TX

Built in 1918 with decorative sheet-metal siding, this frame commercial building first stood in the town of Hansford, then the county seat, before being moved six miles to Spearman in 1920. It housed the mercantile partnership of P. M. Maize and his brother-in-law Fred Brandt, who became sole owner in the late 1920s and ran the store into the 1950s. It is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

La Grange, TX

Eilert and Wilhelmine Brandt arrived from Oldenburg, Germany, in April 1888 and bought nearly 400 acres near the Fayette County community of Pecan (Holman). Within months they opened this cemetery with the burial of Meta Wienken, who had cared for two of their sons before the family reunited in Texas. Passed down through the Brandt family and organized as an association in 1952, the cemetery still holds annual decoration days and preserves its curbed plots and slab grave covers.

Haverhill, MA

This 1890 stone is a boundary monument standing at Brandy Brow, the point on the Massachusetts–New Hampshire state line where several towns converge. Its two faces name the communities meeting on either side of the border — the Massachusetts side abbreviated 'H & M' and the New Hampshire side 'N & P' — each cut with the same 1890 date the corner was surveyed and set. Markers like this were placed by town and state officials to fix in stone a jurisdictional line whose origins reach back to the colonial disputes over where Massachusetts ended and New Hampshire began, finally settled by royal decree in the 1740s and periodically re-surveyed thereafter.

Birmingham Township, PA · est. 2001

On September 11, 1777, the rolling farmland around Birmingham Township became the stage for the largest single-day battle of the Revolutionary War. Washington's Continentals tried to hold the fords of the Brandywine against Sir William Howe's advancing British and Hessian troops, but a wide flanking march turned the American position and opened the road to Philadelphia. The Commonwealth Treasure designation recognizes this preserved ground as hallowed to the founding struggle.

Coatesville, PA · est. 1985

This Chester County house passed through several early families before becoming linked to the Brandywine Iron Works. When Dr. Charles Lukens died in 1825, his widow Rebecca took over the struggling mill rather than let it fail. Running the ironworks until her death in 1854, she built a reputation for shrewd management and vision that was extraordinary for a woman of her era.

Waelder, TX

In the mid-1930s the families around Waelder built a new frame schoolhouse to replace the older Cedar Springs School, naming it for community leaders John and Paulina Branecky, who had settled here in 1896 and donated the land. More than a place of lessons, the Branecky School hosted the meetings, socials, and dances that gave the rural neighborhood its common life. It served the district until 1950, when Waelder ISD absorbed Branecky School District #56, and the building was later razed. Its story survives in the memory of a close-knit farming community.

Dawson, TX

On May 3, 1968, Braniff International Flight 352, a Lockheed Electra bound from Houston to Dallas, flew toward a line of intensifying thunderstorms. Attempting to skirt the weather, the crew descended and turned into severe turbulence and hail; the aircraft rolled, its wing and tail failed, and it broke apart, killing all 85 aboard. The people of Dawson were first on the scene, and the ensuing investigation drove new federal rules on how pilots use radar to avoid storms.

Buffalo, TX

On the night of September 29, 1959, Braniff Flight 542 — a nearly new Lockheed Electra bound from Houston to New York — suffered a catastrophic failure of its left wing and broke apart in the sky over Leon County, killing all 34 aboard in the nation's first no-survivor commercial crash in 31 years. When a similar Electra went down in Indiana months later, investigators traced the disaster to violent wing oscillations caused by a weakened engine nacelle and unbalanced propeller. Lockheed's urgent redesign of the entire Electra fleet followed.

Waco, TX

In 1890s Waco, the acid-tongued writer William Cowper Brann skewered institutions — Baptists and Baylor University above all — in his wildly popular magazine, The Iconoclast, splitting the city into armed factions. The feud produced a fatal 1897 duel and, in 1898, a shootout on this spot: Baylor partisan Tom E. Davis shot Brann, who returned fire, and both men died of their wounds. It was one of the deadliest episodes of American frontier journalism.

Colleyville, TX

Named for pioneer Felix Grundy Bransford, this Tarrant County hamlet coalesced around a post office that moved to the railroad line in 1889, drawing stores, doctors, blacksmiths, and a lodge hall to the depot. Two daily passenger trains and the surrounding farms kept it humming until the post office closed in 1913 and highway travel drew life away. By the time Colleyville incorporated in 1956, Bransford had all but vanished.

Nahunta, GA

Brantley County was carved from neighboring counties by the Georgia legislature in 1920 and named for Benjamin D. Brantley. Local tradition holds that the old Brunswick & Western Railroad running through it marked the southernmost point reached by Sherman's forces, and the marker lists the county's first slate of officers — sheriff, ordinary, clerk, tax collector, and the rest. It stands as a compact civic record of a young south-Georgia county's founding.

Brownsville, PA · est. 1946

John A. Brashear, born here in 1840, rose from a working life in the mills to become one of America's most celebrated makers of precision telescope lenses and mirrors, and a beloved educator. His grandfather ran the Brashear House, a leading tavern on the National Road through Brownsville. In 1825 the Marquis de Lafayette, touring the nation he had helped free, addressed the townspeople from its doorway.

Towns County, GA

Rising 4,748 feet, Brasstown Bald is the highest point in Georgia, its bare, grassy crown giving it the Cherokee name Itseyi, 'a place of fresh green.' English-speaking settlers misheard that word and rendered it as 'brass,' the name that stuck. Cherokee tradition tells of a great flood survived by a few families who came to rest atop the mountain in a giant canoe, where the Great Spirit cleared the summit so they could plant and endure until the waters fell.

Round Rock, TX

John Bratton brought his family from Kentucky to Texas in the late 1830s and later set aside an acre of his land as a burying ground for kin and neighbors. Many of the more than one hundred graves are marked only with rough fieldstones, and most date to the 1800s. As one of the area's oldest cemeteries, it records the short lives and hardships of a frontier community.

Brazoria, TX

Founded in 1828 by John Austin, a friend of colonization leader Stephen F. Austin, Brazoria grew into a port, market, and social center for the young Anglo colony. Here Jane Long — widow of the filibuster Dr. John Long, who had tried in 1819 to wrest Texas from Spain — kept a tavern that anchored the town's public life. Burned during the Texas Revolution and rebuilt, Brazoria served as a county seat and business hub until 1897.

Snook, TX

Also called the Old Tunis Cemetery, this burial ground served pioneers of the fertile Brazos valley, with graves reaching back to the 1840s. John and Sarah Wright Echols formally set aside the land in 1867 for a graveyard and a Baptist church that later disbanded. Among those resting here is Judge John Gregg, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence, planter, and Milam County justice.

Bryan, TX

Carved from Washington County in 1841 as part of Stephen F. Austin's colony, this county was first called Navasota with its seat at Boonville, then renamed Brazos in 1842. Through the Civil War, Millican flourished as the end of the railroad from Houston, but when the line pushed north Bryan became the county seat in 1866. The 1876 opening of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas — now Texas A&M — drew College Station into being around it.

Bryan, TX

During the Civil War, the Brazos County Commissioners Court became an engine of the Confederate home front, outfitting local men with horses, clothing, and equipment and levying war taxes while exempting soldiers' estates. It surveyed the needs of soldiers' families and appropriated funds for their care, and it issued its own small-denomination county warrants that circulated as legal tender. The court also procured scarce goods—powder, lead, medicine, shoes, cotton cards—for resale to a blockaded citizenry.

Graham, TX

On the 37,000-acre Brazos Reservation created by Texas in 1854, more than a thousand people from the Anadarko, Caddo, Delaware, Ioni, Shawnee, Tawakoni, and Tonkawa nations farmed the land and served as U.S. Army scouts. Their children attended a small school where teacher Z. E. Coombes reported striking goodwill in his classroom even as hostility mounted beyond the reservation's bounds. The school and the reservation alike ended in 1859, when the tribes were forced north out of Texas.

Hearne, TX

Established in 1863 along a Brazos River tributary and chartered by the Texas legislature, this company was meant to produce flour and cloth for the Confederate war effort. With coastal blockades choking off imports, Texas scrambled to build factories, and planters funded the enterprise with cotton in exchange for the right to export bales of their own. Like many wartime ventures, its output proved small and came too late to matter.

Benjamin, TX

Built in 1938-39 to replace a deteriorating 1901 span, this bridge carries a state highway across the Brazos River south of Benjamin, linking the Knox County seat to points beyond. Texas highway engineers gave it a special continuous-truss design—one of only five such bridges built in Texas before World War II—fabricated by the Virginia Bridge Company. Construction was complicated when a pier of the old bridge upstream subsided, forcing a detour, but the new crossing opened to traffic in January 1939.

Graham, TX

In 1854 the Texas Legislature set aside land along the Brazos River for federally run Indian reservations, surveyed that summer by agent Robert S. Neighbors and Army captain Randolph B. Marcy. On the tract in Young County were gathered the Anadarko, Caddo, Tehuacana, Tonkawa, Waco, and remnants of many other nations, who under federal guidance made real strides in farming and stock raising. Drought and mounting hostility doomed the effort, and in 1859 the tribes were removed to Indian Territory in present Oklahoma.

Cooks Point, TX

For decades the Brazos River flooded Burleson County, and after repeated disasters citizens led by W. S. Mial persuaded the county to build a nine-foot levee stretching thirty miles south in 1909. Its first great test came in the storm of December 1913, when residents trusting the levee delayed fleeing; the water rose, the levee trapped and then broke, and roughly 180 people died with millions in losses. Voters approved rebuilding, and the debt was not paid off until 1963.

Waco, TX

Organized in February 1941 by eleven small member cooperatives, this was the first generation-and-transmission electric cooperative in Texas, an outgrowth of the New Deal's Rural Electrification Administration. Aiming to supply affordable wholesale power to rural communities, it started in Fort Worth and moved its headquarters to Waco in 1945, eventually serving a wide swath of central and North Texas.

South Padre Island, TX

This narrow sea channel between Brazos and Padre Islands, named by the Spanish, sheltered small ships even as its shifting depths turned away larger vessels—and its seclusion made it strategic in war after war. Texas's warship Invincible battered the Mexican Bravo here in 1836, Zachary Taylor massed thousands of troops on Brazos Island for the war with Mexico in 1846, and the depot changed hands again on the eve of the Civil War. Federal troops landed unopposed in 1863, and the region saw the war's last land battle at nearby Palmito Ranch in 1865 before a hurricane finished the depot in 1867.

South Padre Island, TX

Guarding the mouth of the Rio Grande, Brazos Santiago Pass became one of the Confederacy's most vital lifelines during the Civil War. With the Union blockade choking Southern ports, cotton and war material moved through neutral Mexican Bagdad and slipped into this pass from Cuba, Europe, and beyond, keeping the Trans-Mississippi supplied. The region changed hands repeatedly, and troops staged from Brazos Island fought at Palmito Hill in May 1865 — the last land engagement of the war, weeks after Appomattox.

Breckenridge, TX

Breckenridge Cemetery began with the burial of Dr. Alexander Miller in December 1872, and W. R. Brown patented the land and began selling plots in 1881. Formally dedicated as Oaklawn in 1926, it passed to the City of Breckenridge in 1952 and has grown to more than 10,000 graves. Veterans from the Texas Revolution to the present rest among its sandstone, marble, and granite markers.

Breckenridge, TX

Breck Walker was a local boy who rose with his hometown, running a stagecoach line between Breckenridge and Ranger before turning to banking and buying control of the First National Bank. When oil was struck in the 1910s, he co-founded an oil company and rode the 1920 boom that swelled Breckenridge from about 1,500 people to 15,000 in a single year. His company built the town's first water system and newspaper, and he served as mayor until failing health forced him out in 1928.

Breckenridge, TX

When the oil boom made Breckenridge one of Texas's overnight fortunes, banker and oilman Breckenridge Stephens Walker (1876–1929) built this three-story brick residence in 1922 as a wedding gift for his daughter, Pansy. Set commandingly atop a hill, the Tudor Revival house boasted the town's first central heating and — fittingly for a banker's home — a vault in the basement. It stands as a monument to fortunes made in the roaring days of the boom.

Fayetteville, TX

David and Sarah Breeding came from Kentucky in 1833 with their sons to settle here in Mexican Texas, and three of those sons—John, Napoleon, and Fidelio—fought in the Texian army, sharing in the victory at San Jacinto in 1836. On the family's land in 1834, a teacher named Rutland held what is remembered as the first school session in Fayette County, drawing children from settler families for miles around. The family cemetery opened with David Breeding's burial in 1843 and still holds him and his kin.

Lubbock, TX

When Lubbock lacked an airport in the 1920s, civic boosters raised money for a municipal field, opened in 1930 and managed by local flyer Clent Breedlove. In 1941 Breedlove opened his own 219-acre airport east of the Tahoka Highway, complete with four runways, hangars, a café and a control tower. During World War II the field trained thousands of cadet pilots through the Civilian Pilot Training Program and Texas Tech's pre-flight detachment, feeding the nation's desperate wartime need for aviators.

Bremond, TX

Once part of an 1841 land grant, this site was sold in 1869 to investors who promptly granted right-of-way to the Houston and Texas Central Railway. The first train arrived in 1870 to a crowd of more than a thousand, and the new town—named for railroad executive Paul Bremond—quickly gained merchants, churches, doctors, a school, and a newspaper. Joseph Bartula and his family were among the many Polish immigrants who began arriving in the 1870s.

New York, NY · est. 1965

Brendan Behan (1922–1964) was a celebrated Irish playwright and author whose hard-living wit made him a literary star on both sides of the Atlantic. During a stay at New York's storied Hotel Chelsea he wrote 'Brendan Behan's New York,' a love letter to the city. This plaque, presented soon after his early death, marks that connection.

Brenham, TX

Founded in 1843 and named for Republic of Texas patriot Richard Fox Brenham, this Washington County seat became a railhead and supply center during the Civil War. It grew into a hub of farming, trade, and manufacturing and gave rise to Blinn Memorial College in 1883. Its celebrated Maifest keeps alive the folk traditions of its German-influenced community.

Brenham, TX

Brenham's two volunteer fire companies were founded in May 1867, ostensibly to battle blazes but in reality doubling as armed companies meant to keep order in the turbulent Reconstruction years until 1874. Over the following decades the firemen installed an alarm bell and cistern on the courthouse square and bought the second steam fire engine in Texas. In 1881 they launched the Brenham Maifest, a German-rooted spring festival they sustained for sixty years, even building a pavilion for it in Fireman's Park.

Brenham, TX

Brenham Normal and Industrial College grew out of a 1905 meeting of Black and white community leaders after educator Daniel Porter came seeking land for a school for African Americans, and it was legally established in 1906. Its board was led by A.L. Sledge, a former slave who had served in the Texas Legislature, and its inaugural class of ten swelled to 130 students by 1913. The college trained future schoolteachers alongside courses in trades, business, agriculture, and domestic arts before closing in 1927, though its theological department carried on.

Brenham, TX

Brenham Presbyterian Church was founded in 1877 by the Rev. Warner B. Riggs and a small band of charter members, and within three years its rolls topped fifty names and a sanctuary rose on West Main Street. Financial hardship once forced the church to close for eight years, but the congregation endured and kept serving the community. Since 1951 it has worshipped in a sanctuary originally built in 1913 by the Fourth Street Methodist Church.

Brenham, TX

Founded in 1901 by the Fortnightly Literary Club, the Brenham Public Library was the first in its county, opening with a thousand donated volumes. Sustained by the women's club with city and county support, it moved into a city-built home in 1934. Every roof over its books was, by the marker's telling, a gift.

Fayetteville, TX

Built in 1874 by Czech-Moravian immigrants, this Brethren church stands near the site where the first Czech Protestant worship service in Texas was held in 1855. It marks the spiritual roots of one of the largest Czech settlements in the American South, where newcomers preserved their faith and language on the Fayette County prairie.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 1964

The Moravians who founded Bethlehem built this stone house in 1748 to lodge their unmarried men, and it quickly became a hive of colonial-era craft — a bell foundry, silkworm raising, and other trades that made the community largely self-sufficient. During the Revolution it sheltered wounded Continental soldiers as a military hospital, and after 1815 it opened as a girls' school before becoming part of Moravian College and a museum.

New Braunfels, TX

New Braunfels was founded in 1845 as a colony of German immigrants, who brought Old World building traditions to the Texas Hill Country. This 1858 home is a fine example of "fachwerk" construction, its walls framed in cedar timbers and packed solid with sun-baked adobe brick. Several generations of the Breustedt family were raised within its walls before it was moved and restored in the 20th century to preserve its craftsmanship.

New Braunfels, TX

This hand-hewn limestone building was raised in the 1860s as a detached kitchen for the New Braunfels home of German immigrant Johann Andreas Breustedt, his wife Caroline, and their nine children. Its craftsmanship reflects the meticulous building traditions the town's German colonists brought to the Texas Hill Country, from ceilings of adobe-and-grass plaster on split cedar lath to hand-wrought hinges on unique casement windows and a stone-lined well. After the main house was removed, the kitchen was carefully restored in 1968.

New Orleans, LA

This Garden District mansion was built in 1857 for Albert Hamilton Brevard, designed by architect James H. Calrow. Over the following century it passed through prominent hands — including federal judge John Minor Wisdom — before becoming, in 1989, the home of novelist Anne Rice and her husband, poet and painter Stan Rice.

Douglass, TX

This family burial ground dates to 1816, when East Texas was still Spanish and later Mexican territory, and it holds members of the Brewer family who helped win Texas independence. Henry and John Brewer took part in the Battle of Nacogdoches, an 1832 clash that pushed Mexican forces from the town, while Henry Mitchell Brewer fought in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. Their graves record a household woven directly into the fight for the Texas Republic.

Cushing, TX

In 1835 the Mexican government granted Henry Brewer a league of land — some 4,000 acres — where settlers built log cabins by the springs and farmed, raised stock, and mined iron on the peak variously called Flowery, Brewer, or Iron Mountain. Brewer and his son John fought in the 1832 Battle of Nacogdoches, and Henry Mitchel Brewer served at San Jacinto before John later joined the Confederacy. A 1936 Texas Centennial marker honors the family and doubles as a grave marker; descendants revived the overgrown cemetery in 2001.