Search Markers

Riverside, TX

After the Civil War, freed people around Riverside gathered to build a church of their own, and mine contractor James Broyles donated a site that took his name. Broyles Chapel Missionary Baptist Church opened its doors in 1895 under Reverend Nemon as the first African-American congregation in Riverside. It endures as a living reminder of the determination that carried a community from bondage into self-governed worship.

Wills Point, TX

German-born Oscar Pabst opened an apothecary in Wills Point in 1879, along the busy Dallas–Shreveport road. After fire damaged his store in 1888, the business passed to his son-in-law B.W. Bruce, who joined J.H. Human and other investors to form the Bruce and Human Drug Company in 1898. From a prime downtown building it has served the town ever since, sheltering doctors' offices, the telephone exchange, and even the posting of local election returns.

Commerce, TX

The first American Legion post in Texas was chartered at Commerce in 1919, the very year the veterans' organization was founded nationally. Moved to act by the funeral of a local soldier who had served in the First World War, a town doctor led the effort, and the post was named for the first Commerce man to die in that war. It went on to prominence at the state and national levels.

Athens, TX

Bruce Field grew out of Bruce Academy, a short-lived but influential preparatory school founded in 1898 and named for educator Dr. William Herschel Bruce, later president of what became the University of North Texas. In 1922 Bruce donated land for an athletic field, and in 1935 the Works Progress Administration matched local funds to add lights, fencing, and seating. For a century the field has hosted football and baseball, marching bands, wartime rallies, and community events at the heart of Athens.

Cresson, TX

When Alabama-born Madison Jones platted this Cresson neighborhood in 1889, he sold the lot to Richard Bruce, a stock raiser descended from a pioneer Johnson County family. Bruce built a modest frame house and dressed it with decorative porch trim, beaded walls and beaded ceilings. After his death in 1895 his widow Mary married James F. Davis, and the couple continued to live here, enlarging the home three times over the years.

Bruceville, TX

Organized around 1870-71 as Salem Baptist Church in the town of Mastersville, this congregation first met in a minister's home and a brush arbor. As the railroad reshaped the region, the church followed its people two miles south to the new rail town of Bruceville, building a sanctuary in 1896 that served until a new one replaced it in 1975.

Austin, TX

German stone-and-cement mason Julius Brueggemann, who had worked on the State Capitol, built this molded-concrete-block house around 1907 with his two sons as a home for his son Max. In 1913 it passed to Anders and Anna Sandbo, and it is Anna who gives the house its distinction: a civic leader who became the first woman to graduate from the University of Texas Law School and the first woman attorney in Austin.

Brownsville, TX

In 1925 Louis and Inez Brulay hired prominent Brownsville architect E. Guy Holliday to design this Spanish-Mediterranean home in the city's first suburb, complete with curved archways, white textured stucco, and a red terracotta roof. Louis was the son of George Brulay, a French immigrant whose Brulay Sugar Plantation outside the city was among the region's early agricultural ventures.

Gilmer, TX

Brumley Crossroads Cemetery sits near the old Cherokee Trace and the Jefferson-Quitman Road, routes that carried early settlers into Upshur County. The Mt. Gilead Primitive Baptist Church, organized in 1848, founded the burial ground, whose oldest legible stone marks the infant Muzado Harriss. Weathered fieldstones, ironstone, and later granite markers trace generations of pioneer families and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Bigfoot, TX

Tucked between the old Laredo and Fort Ewell roads, this pioneer burial ground was in use by 1860—its earliest known grave that of two-year-old Elijah Ross—and was formally deeded to the public in 1889 by Kizzie Brummett and her son William. Among its roughly 275 graves lie the family patriarch John T. Brummett and James Washington Winters, a veteran of the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, along with many of his descendants. It is recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery.

Hamilton, TX

Brummett Cemetery dates to around 1900 and was recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2012, a state designation reserved for burial grounds at least fifty years old with demonstrated historical significance. Country cemeteries like this one preserve the memory of the farming families who settled rural Texas at the turn of the twentieth century.

Bruni, TX

The town of Bruni grew up around Antonio Mateo Bruni, an orphaned Italian immigrant from Emilia-Romagna who came to Texas in the 1870s and built a mercantile and ranching fortune along the border. A railroad station on one of his ranches around 1881 drew a commissary, a school, and eventually a surveyed townsite. Oil strikes in the 1920s and commercial uranium mining from the 1970s gave the settlement successive economic booms.

Laredo, TX

When Governor Juan Fernando de Palacios elevated Laredo to the status of a villa in 1767, he followed the Spanish colonial tradition of laying out the town around a central plaza. Such plazas were the beating heart of frontier settlements in New Spain, serving as marketplace, gathering place, and civic stage. This square has anchored Laredo's public life since the era of Spanish colonization on the northern edge of the empire.

Columbus, TX

Charles Brunson left Westphalia, Germany, in 1845 as part of the great mid-century German migration to Texas, and by about 1867 had settled in Columbus, where his saloon prospered. In 1891 he erected this Victorian commercial building, adding an adjoining store in 1896; it poured drinks until around 1919 and then took on other uses. Aside from a lowered canopy and altered windows, it still wears its original Victorian dress.

Norcross, GA

Built in 1870 beside the newly opened 'Air-Line' Railroad, Norcross's three-story Brunswick Hotel became known as 'Atlanta's Favorite Summer Resort,' where city dwellers escaped the summer heat and dust. With 29 rooms, wide porches, a restaurant, and a park pavilion where a brass band played for dancing, it was the social heart of town, guests and locals alike dressing up to greet the arriving trains. The hotel was torn down at the end of World War II.

Brunswick, MD

This memorial in Brunswick, a Maryland railroad town that grew up around the Baltimore & Ohio's sprawling rail yards, honors the community's veterans of every generation. Its inscription deliberately pairs "peace and war" — recognizing not only those who served in combat but also those who wore the uniform during peacetime and stood ready. Small towns across America raised such memorials on courthouse lawns and in town squares, turning a shared sense of duty into a permanent civic landmark.

Brunswick, GA

During World War II, the J. A. Jones Construction Company's Brunswick shipyard employed more than 16,000 men and women who built 99 steel 'Liberty Ships' between 1942 and 1944. Turning out roughly four of the 447-foot cargo and troop carriers each month, the workers once built seven in a single December as the Battle of the Bulge raged in Europe. Their ships helped keep the Allied supply lines open.

Frost, TX

Born from meetings in a log schoolhouse, this Methodist fellowship organized south of Frost in 1874 with thirty-five members and the name Post Oak. A local family donated land for a permanent building in 1893, and the congregation took the name Brushie Prairie two decades later. It absorbed a neighboring flock in 1952 before finally disbanding in 1964, though former members still return each June for a homecoming that keeps the memory alive.

Edinburg, TX

Brushwood Cemetery opened in 1913 as the municipal burial ground for Chapin, the newly founded town later renamed Edinburg. Older graves reaching back to 1898 were moved here from El Granjeno near Mission, and today more than a thousand people rest here. Their headstones — Anglo, Spanish, German, and Irish — read like a roster of everyone who built the Rio Grande Valley.

Leon County, TX

The Yarborough family left South Carolina by way of Alabama and settled in eastern Leon County in the 1850s, and their five sons all served the Confederacy during the Civil War. Two brothers, Wade Hampton and William Burns Yarborough, bought 186 acres in the Brushy area in 1883, where Wade set aside three acres for a Primitive Baptist church and cemetery that doubled as a one-room school. Fire claimed the sanctuary in the 1920s, but the burial ground endured.

Bowie, TX

Settlers arrived in the 1870s, and by 1880 the community of Brushy had its school, church, and this cemetery on land deeded by the Wilcox family. The earliest documented grave dates to 1877, and among those resting here are Civil War veterans, pioneer families, and children in both marked and unmarked plots. Though the town faded, descendants still live nearby and tend the graveyard through an association formed in 1973.

Bowie, TX

This rise on the North Texas plains gave Kiowa and Comanche riders a commanding view of the country below, and from it they watched the wagons and cabins of newly arrived settlers in the mid-1800s. The mound also served as a burial place for an Indigenous leader, marking it as sacred ground long before Anglo settlement reached Montague County. In an era when the Comanchería still held sway over the southern plains, high ground like this was both lookout and landmark.

Tira, TX

The Brushy Mound community grew up around a Methodist church built in 1891 and took its name from the dogwood brush that once covered the area. A school had already opened in 1885 with Miss Mollie Wood as its first teacher, and a new church went up in 1917. The school was consolidated into the East Delta Independent District in 1949, marking the community's gradual absorption into the larger county.

Montague County, TX

Brushy Mound rises as a natural lookout over the rolling country of Montague County, on the edge of the North Texas frontier. According to this 1936 State of Texas marker, Kiowa and Comanche warriors used its summit to watch the movements of early settlers before striking, and tradition holds that a chief lies buried there. The marker was one of thousands placed during the 1936 Texas Centennial to fix frontier memory onto the land.

Bryan, TX

Chartered in 1909 by Bryan's mayor and its merchants, the Bryan & College Interurban Railway opened in 1910 to link the town with the growing Texas A&M campus a few miles away. Trolleys and gasoline rail cars ran ten daily round trips, spawning subdivisions and even an amusement spot called Dellwood Park along the route. Beset by the rise of the automobile, the line slipped into receivership in 1922 and made its last run in 1929—but along its path Bryan and College Station grew until they merged into one.

Bryan, TX

Rising from displaced farmland in 1942, Bryan Army Air Field became a key World War II training ground—home to the nation's only instrument-instructor school for a time, more than a thousand Women Airforce Service Pilots, and a segregated corps of African American servicemen. From here Col. Joseph Duckworth made the first intentional flight into a hurricane in 1943. Reactivated for the Korean War as a racially integrated jet-training base, it trained Tuskegee airmen, foreign pilots, and future astronauts before its land became part of Texas A&M University.

Bryan, TX

Bryan City Cemetery was established in June 1868, three years after the townsite of Bryan was laid out along the Houston and Texas Central Railroad. Landowner J. C. Hubert sold the original twenty acres to the city for $100, and the grounds have since grown to some 48 acres. Many of Bryan's prominent early citizens rest here, tended over the years by a city board and a cemetery association organized in 1920.

Pembroke, GA

Bryan County, created on December 19, 1793, honors Jonathan Bryan, a Revolutionary patriot and member of Georgia's 1777 Executive Council. Its first, temporary seat was the now-vanished colonial town of Hardwick on the Ogeechee River, laid out in 1755, named for the Lord Chancellor of England, and twice recommended as Georgia's capital. The county seat later moved through Cross Roads and Clyde before settling at Pembroke.

Pembroke, GA

This marker commemorates Jonathan Bryan (1708-1788), the planter, patriot, and public leader for whom Bryan County is named, honoring him as a founder and 'father' of Georgia. It was placed in 1991 by the Adam Brinson I Chapter of the National Society, Colonial Dames of the Seventeenth Century.

Pitt County, NC

Bryan Grimes rose to major general in the Confederate Army, and his war carried him from the 1862 Peninsula Campaign to the final stand at Appomattox in 1865, where his troops reportedly fired some of the last shots. His family plantation, "Grimesland," stood on this ground. He returned to farming here after the war.

Freeport, TX

Early in the 20th century, mining engineers found rich sulphur deposits at Bryan Mound, spurring the founding of the Texas Freeport Sulphur Co. in 1912. Their success drove the growth of the Freeport townsite itself. The operation was among Texas's earliest to use the Frasch process—superheated water pumped underground to melt and lift the sulphur—producing five million tons before it closed in 1935.

Bryan County, GA

Organized in 1869, Bryan Neck Missionary Baptist Church is the oldest African American congregation in lower Bryan County. Its first building, a 'Prayer House,' rose in 1870 beside the white Presbyterian 'Burnt Church,' led by London Harris, a freedman and community spiritual leader who was among its founders and first pastor. The church was renovated and enlarged in 1939 with support from Henry Ford, then building the nearby Harbor school.

Bryan County, GA

On the plantation coast of lower Bryan County, a group of wealthy rice planters organized this Presbyterian congregation, certified by the Presbytery of Georgia in 1830 and built into a frame meeting house by 1839. Fire claimed the first sanctuary, and the present church—the oldest public building in the county—rose in 1885. The founders' world of tidal rice fields depended entirely on enslaved labor, and the old burial ground, Burnt Church Cemetery, still holds the graves of these prominent early families.

Houston, TX

In the prosperous Houston of the 1920s, sisters Caroline Bryan Chapman and Johnelle Bryan — figures in the city's growing arts scene — built themselves a fashionable home in the exclusive Courtlandt Place enclave. Its Mediterranean flourishes, arched windows and tile roof captured the era's taste for Old World romance, all designed by a young architect at the very start of his career. The sisters lived there only briefly before an oilman's family made it their home for decades.

Liberty, TX

This family burial ground holds many of Liberty County's founding figures, including Luke Bryan, a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto who later served as county sheriff, and his brother Pryor Bryan, who fought in the Texas Revolution and the Civil War. Also resting here are Confederate captain and publisher Watson D. Williams, the businessman Isaiah C. Day for whom Dayton is named, and a remarkable cast of writers, musicians, judges, and benefactors whose lives stretch from the Republic of Texas into the twentieth century.

Buckholts, TX

Bryant Station began as a frontier trading post founded by Major Benjamin F. Bryant, who had commanded a company at the Battle of San Jacinto. Sam Houston, president of the Republic of Texas, appointed Bryant an Indian agent in 1842, and the little village at the Little River crossing sat astride important trail and stage routes. It kept a U.S. post office from 1848 to 1874.

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth builder and civic leader William J. Bryce raised this five-sided commercial building in 1910 to house his construction company. Bryce erected many of the city's downtown structures and later served as mayor from 1927 to 1933. Its irregular plan and Classical Revival detailing make it a graceful adaptation of a monumental style to everyday business use.

Catasauqua, PA · est. 2014

Founded in 1882 in the ironmaking town of Catasauqua, the Bryden Horse Shoe Works grew into one of the largest horseshoe plants in the world. Using George Bryden's patented process, it turned out shoes of such quality that demand reached across the globe—including thousands supplied to the British War Department during and after the Boer War. As the age of horsepower gave way to machines, the firm became the Phoenix Manufacturing Co. in 1928 and shifted to commercial forging.

Bryn Athyn, PA · est. 1947

Bryn Athyn Cathedral is the architectural centerpiece of the Swedenborgian church community, its buildings modeled on 14th-century Gothic and 12th-century Romanesque forms. Endowed by industrialist John Pitcairn in the early 20th century, it was raised in a deliberately medieval fashion by cooperative craft guilds of masons, carpenters, and metalworkers who shaped the stone and glass by hand on site. The result is a rare American revival of guild craftsmanship in an age of the assembly line.

Lower Merion Township, PA · est. 2001

From 1921 to 1938, the campus of Bryn Mawr College hosted a bold experiment: a summer liberal arts school for women who spent their days in factories and workshops. Led by educator Hilda Worthington Smith, it welcomed more than 1,700 students of varied races, ethnicities, and backgrounds, offering wage-earning women the kind of humanities education usually reserved for the privileged. Many graduates went on to become leaders in their unions, communities, and public life.

Bryson, TX

Henry E. Bryson, a Civil War veteran turned farmer and stockman, raised the first log cabin here in 1878, and a post office followed in 1882 to serve a growing cotton- and grain-growing district. The Rock Island Railroad arrived in 1902, but it was oil that made the town's name: the first well came in 1925, and from a gasoline plant in the 1920s to a refinery that ran until 1954, Bryson billed itself as Jack County's petroleum capital.

Liberty Hill, TX

John T. Bryson and his wife Amelia, among the first settlers of Liberty Hill, raised this home in the 1850s from notched and fitted hewn cedar logs with chimneys of native stone. Its open dog-trot plan was classic pioneer Texas construction, built for the heat with a breezeway between two log pens. The house doubled as a stop on the stagecoach line running between Austin and Fort Croghan near present-day Burnet.

Midway, TX

In 1774 Spanish authorities resettled East Texas colonists—recently uprooted to San Antonio—at a Trinity River crossing, founding the town of Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Bucareli under leader Gil Ybarbo. The community grew to some 345 people with a church, plaza, and wooden houses, but crop failures, Comanche raids, and floods drove the settlers away by 1779. Led again by Ybarbo, they moved east and rebuilt the old town of Nacogdoches.

Randolph, TX

Alexander Buchanan brought his wife Delilah and their eleven children from Illinois to the Republic of Texas in 1844, settling a 320-acre farm here in January 1846. Alexander died that same year and was buried on his own land, founding the family cemetery. Delilah farmed on until her own death, and their descendants — many of them future Fannin County leaders — joined them in the graveyard.

Burnet, TX

When a private dam project on the Colorado River went bankrupt in 1932, State Senator Alvin Wirtz turned to Washington, winning the backing of Congressman J.P. Buchanan — and the dam's name — to finish it. The 1934 Texas Legislature created the Lower Colorado River Authority to manage the river, and in the depths of the Depression the project put some 1,800 locals to work at 40 cents an hour. Completed in 1937, the dam raised Lake Buchanan behind it, drowning old Bluffton and forcing the relocation of graves, but bringing recreation, business, and steady power to the Hill Country.

Licking Township, PA

In the 1840s, the hills of Clarion County rang with the work of the charcoal iron industry, and the cold blast furnace built here in 1844 — named for James Buchanan, the Pennsylvanian who would soon become the nation's fifteenth president — was part of that booming trade. Furnaces like this one smelted local iron ore using heat drawn from vast quantities of charcoal, which meant they devoured the surrounding forests at a staggering rate. By 1858 the nearby timber was exhausted and the furnace fell silent, a common fate that turned many a prosperous ironworks into a quiet ruin in little more than a decade.

Mercersburg, PA · est. 1953

This Mercersburg house holds a double thread of early American history. Here James Buchanan — later a lawyer, diplomat, and the nation's 15th president — spent part of his boyhood from 1796 to 1807 after his birth nearby at Stony Batter. And here, in 1794-95, a young Patrick Gass apprenticed as a carpenter, years before he built the winter quarters that sheltered the Lewis and Clark expedition on its journey to the Pacific.

Louisville, KY

In 1914 Louisville passed a residential segregation ordinance barring people from moving onto a block where another race was the majority. The NAACP engineered a test case: William Warley agreed to buy a lot from Charles Buchanan, then withheld full payment because the law would forbid him from living there. When the dispute reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1917, the justices struck the ordinance down, delivering the first major legal blow against government-mandated housing segregation.

Cuero, TX

When Otto Buchel arrived in the brand-new town of Cuero in 1872, he opened a mercantile store—and, owning the only safe in town, soon found neighbors entrusting him with their valuables. Within a year he turned that trust into a private bank, and Buchel's Bank went on to weather financial panics, hurricanes, and droughts, steadying the young town's commerce. Incorporated as a national bank in 1907, it still serves South Texas as Buchel Bank and Trust.

Cuero, TX

Settlers reached this corner of DeWitt County as early as 1839, opening a school and post office within a few years of arrival. In 1894 the Cuero merchant and banker Otto Buchel donated land here for a community school first known as Oak View. When a new building rose in 1921 it took his name, and though the Buchel School closed its doors in 1950, the schoolhouse lived on as a community center. For generations the little school was where a farming neighborhood educated its children and gathered as a community.

Bedias, TX

Buck Foster Cemetery took its name from William Harrison "Buck" Foster, who reserved an acre for burials when he sold his land in 1882 — though eroded sandstone markers show the ground served the Loma community even earlier. Among its hundreds of graves lies Nancy McCulloch Heath, of Choctaw and German descent, who came to Texas in 1845, alongside Civil War veterans and generations of her descendants. Its weathered stones, carved with Masonic, religious, and ranching symbols, form a folk record of southwestern Walker County.

Brokenstraw Township, PA · est. 1947

Buckaloons stood at the meeting of Brokenstraw Creek and the Allegheny River, a site so long inhabited that excavated burial mounds attest to its deep antiquity. In 1749 the French officer Céloron de Blainville passed through on his expedition to claim the Ohio Valley, and in 1779 the village was destroyed during Colonel Daniel Brodhead's Revolutionary War campaign against the Seneca. Its story spans centuries of Native life along these rivers.

Markham, TX

In the early 1900s land promoters lured northern families to Texas with promises of warm weather and fertile soil, and Buckeye — named for the founders' native Ohio — was one such planned town. Dr. Ambrose Plotner and John Stoddard bought the old Kuykendall pasture in 1902, laid out a vast irrigation canal, secured a railroad right-of-way, and platted streets named for citrus and figs. Despite a school, a post office, and hopes of an oil strike in the 1930s, the town gradually declined, its post office closing in 1971 with only a few houses left today.

Buckholts, TX

Bohemian and Moravian immigrants of the Unity of the Brethren — a faith tracing to the Czech reformer Jan Hus — began arriving in Texas as early as 1848. Buckholts residents held their first Brethren services in the Czech language in 1894 and formally organized in 1907, raising a wooden sanctuary in 1913. Only around 1951, with a new building, did the congregation begin worshiping in English, adopting its present name in 1959.

Buckholts, TX

In 1879 Central Texas Czechs founded the SPJST, a fraternal society offering members both social life and insurance. Members from Cameron, Marak, and Buckholts chartered Lodge No. 15 in 1907 and dedicated their first hall here in 1911; after a storm and a later arson fire, the present octagonal frame dance hall rose in 1936. For generations it has hosted dances, barbecues, and fundraisers — and drew country, polka, and western-swing greats like Bob Wills and Johnny Horton, its shows broadcast on Taylor radio in the 1950s.

Bellville, TX

Established in 1880, Buckhorn Cemetery is among the rural burial grounds of Austin County that trace the settlement of central Texas after the Civil War. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2001, it preserves the resting place of an early farming community. Such graveyards are often the last physical record of the families who first worked the surrounding land.

Lyon County, NV

Samuel S. Buckland settled here in 1859, starting a ranch, a station for the Overland Stage Company, and a tent hotel, and building the first bridge across the Carson River below Genoa. In 1860 his station became the assembly point for volunteers in the Pyramid Lake War and a remount stop on the Pony Express. He later ran a store supplying soldiers at nearby Fort Churchill, and built his two-story house from timbers salvaged when the fort was dismantled.

West Chillisquaque Township, PA · est. 1947

Founded by Pennsylvania Baptists in 1846 as the University at Lewisburg, this institution grew along the Susquehanna into a respected center of learning. In 1885 it conferred its first degrees on women students, and the following year it was renamed Bucknell University to honor benefactor William Bucknell, a devoted donor and trustee. From modest religious beginnings it became one of the state's enduring liberal arts universities.

Dallas, TX

In 1879 the Rev. Robert Cooke Buckner opened a home in Dallas for orphaned and dependent children, beginning with a single building in 1880 that sheltered just six youngsters. Demand grew astonishingly fast—by 1910 the institution cared for some 600 children—and in 1914 it came under the Baptist General Convention of Texas. Renamed the Buckner Baptist Children's Home, it grew over more than a century into a leader in Texas child care.

Pinehill, TX

John S. Buckner brought his family from Georgia to settle this Rusk County area before 1850, and was among the first laid to rest in the family burial ground in 1870. Both his sons served the Confederacy — Arthur Washington Buckner was at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, when Lee surrendered, then returned to run a sawmill, store, and cotton gin at Pinehill. His daughter May Buckner Hillin later led the women of Pinehill to smash the whiskey containers of a drugstore after an 1892 stabbing, an axe-wielding echo of the temperance crusade.