Search Markers

McKinney, TX

When John McGarrah arrived with the Peters Colony in 1843 and set up a trading post, the Fort Buckner settlement grew around it and briefly served as Collin County's first seat. This burial ground on land later owned by the O'Brien family holds many of the county's earliest pioneers, including victims of a smallpox epidemic that swept through in the 1870s, and by local tradition a Kiowa man remembered as Spotted Tail. It is the last physical trace of a frontier community that has otherwise vanished into the North Texas prairie.

Dallas, TX

Dr. Robert Cooke Buckner was born in this rough-hewn two-story log cabin in Madisonville, Tennessee, in 1833, and moved to Texas in 1859. In 1879 he founded the Buckner Home for orphaned children, work that continued after his 1919 death under his sons and grandson. In 1912 staff and friends moved the cabin itself to this site, where children at play nicknamed it the "Tennessee House."

Doylestown, PA · est. 1982

Bucks County was one of the three counties William Penn carved out when he founded Pennsylvania in 1682, taking its name from Buckinghamshire, the English shire many of its early settlers left behind. Penn himself built his country estate, Pennsbury Manor, along the Delaware here, and the county grew into the agricultural heart of his Quaker colony. Doylestown, a crossroads town, was made the county seat in 1812 and incorporated as a borough in 1838.

Marlin, TX

First settled in 1837 by the Marlin and Menefee families, this Falls County spot grew into a lively frontier village once known as Jarett Menefee's Supply Station. By the 1840s it boasted a school, store, blacksmith, racetrack, saloon, stagecoach stop, and post office, and — as local legend has it — earned the colorful name Bucksnort from a tipsy saloon patron. By the 1850s, as settlers dispersed to other parts of the county, the community faded away.

Albany, TX

In 1900 the Texas Central Railway pushed a line northwest from Albany across the cattle ranch of Rose Ella 'Ella' Conrad, and she and her brother John A. 'Bud' Matthews quickly built cattle pens and a loading chute at the spot named for him. Surrounding ranchers soon shipped their herds — as many as 105,000 head a year — from this switch to the Fort Worth markets. Even after the railroad quit in 1967, ranchers kept loading cattle here onto trucks.

Buda, TX

Originally called Du Pre, this Hays County town was born in 1881 along the International and Great Northern Railroad after Cornelia A. Trimble donated the townsite land. The name "Buda," adopted late in the decade, has a murky origin — local legend ties it either to Budapest or to "viuda," the Spanish word for widow, honoring the women who cooked at a railroad hotel. In its heyday Buda boasted a theater, skating rink, newspaper, and two banks.

Buda, TX

Organized in 1893, the Buda Christian Church first shared the local Methodist building before raising its own sanctuary on this site in 1903. A storm leveled that structure in 1909, and the congregation rebuilt in 1912 in a modest frame design blending Italianate and classical revival touches. Membership faded after the 1940s and the congregation eventually disbanded, though the building found new life housing civic groups and, later, another church.

Buda, TX

The Buda school system grew from the consolidation of several nineteenth-century country schools, beginning with Mary Adams's 1881 classroom beside the railroad tracks. Successive buildings rose and burned, and the present Mission-style schoolhouse of 1928 was built around the surviving walls of its predecessor, still visible in the auditorium. Over the twentieth century the school integrated its Mexican American and African American students and eventually merged into the Hays Consolidated district.

Buda, TX

Established in 1880 under the pioneer circuit rider Rev. Thomas Garrett, this congregation was the first church in the new railroad town of DuPre, later renamed Buda. Its first sanctuary went up on this site in 1882, just as rail lines reached the fledgling community. Over the generations its members included many of the area's founding settlers and civic leaders.

Austin, TX

Albert and Rebecca Buddington raised the first part of this Austin compound as their home around 1860. In 1921 it became the residence of Dr. Harry Y. Benedict, a mathematician who rose to be a professor and later president of the University of Texas. Later owners reshaped the property with a rustic cottage, a carved fireplace mantel, an enclosing wall, and fine ironwork, layering decades of craftsmanship into a single walled compound.

Clear Lake, IA

The Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, hosted Buddy Holly's final concert before the young rock-and-roll pioneer boarded a small plane that crashed nearby in the early hours of February 3, 1959. Holly was just 21; the disaster, which also killed Ritchie Valens and J.P. 'The Big Bopper' Richardson, became mourned as 'the Day the Music Died.'

Lubbock, TX

Charles Hardin "Buddy" Holley was born in Lubbock in 1936 into a musical family and grew up playing guitar with local country "pickers." After seeing Elvis Presley in 1955, he fused country and rhythm into a new sound; recording "That'll Be the Day" with The Crickets in 1957 launched a string of hits and a 1958 tour of England that shaped British rock. His career was cut short on February 3, 1959, when his chartered plane crashed after takeoff; he was 22.

Windcrest, TX

Swiss immigrants Abram Louis and Anna Barbara Bueche settled the area known as Fratt in 1854, and their infant granddaughter, buried in 1892, is said to be the first laid to rest at this site. When a son-in-law bought the family farm in 1902, he set aside this tract as a cemetery, where a Bexar County deputy killed in the line of duty also rests. Descendants still tend the grounds.

Pharr, TX

Built in 1927-28, this school served Mexican-American children in the segregated Pharr-San Juan district, replacing an earlier facility on the site. It was named for educator Helen W. Buell, principal of the Pharr Mexican Ward School, and designed by noted San Antonio architect Harvey Smith with restrained Classical Revival touches. Its very existence reflects the separate schooling long imposed on Mexican-American students in South Texas.

Austin, TX

Austin financier Louis Nicholas Goldbeck built this Colonial Revival mansion in 1902, and in 1908 it was sold to the Texas association of Phi Gamma Delta, a fraternity first chartered in the state in 1856. As the home of the Tau Deuteron chapter, it has housed generations of University of Texas men who went on to careers in statecraft, culture, and business, aided by gifts from supporters including the family of regent H.J. Lutcher Stark.

Timpson, TX

This burial ground has served the Buena Vista community since it organized in 1848, on land donated by South Carolina native Joseph Penn Burns. Its earliest marked grave dates to 1851, and those interred include early merchants and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the War of 1812. When the railroad bypassed Buena Vista in the 1880s and the town faded, the cemetery endured as the community's lasting landmark.

Seven Points, TX

Before Henderson County even existed, the little settlement of Buffalo grew up around a Trinity River ferry crossing in the 1840s, briefly serving as the county's first seat of government from 1847 to 1850. Among its early figures was John H. Reagan, who went on to serve in the U.S. Congress and as Postmaster General of the Confederacy. When Athens won the county seat in 1850, Buffalo faded away, leaving little but the roads that once radiated from it in all directions.

Stafford, TX

Planned in 1840 to move sugar and cotton from the plantation country of the young Republic of Texas, this venture was chartered in 1841 and, after early failure, revived by San Jacinto hero Gen. Sidney Sherman with backing from leading Texans including Rice University benefactor William Marsh Rice. The first locomotive, the 'General Sherman,' arrived in 1852, and by 1853 the line ran twenty miles from Harrisburg to Stafford's Point, celebrated with a barbecue-jubilee. By 1860 the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado stretched eighty miles inland, becoming the first operating railroad in Texas.

Buffalo Township, PA · est. 1948

Presbyterian settlers pushing into the Buffalo Valley organized this congregation in 1773, only to see it scattered when frontier warfare swept the West Branch country during the Revolutionary years. The faithful regathered and installed their first settled pastor in 1787, and their humble log meetinghouse of about 1775 gave way to stone in 1816 and brick in 1846. Each rebuilding marked a community putting down deeper roots in a valley it had nearly abandoned.

Buffalo Township, PA · est. 1948

Organized by Presbyterian pioneers in 1773, this Buffalo Valley congregation was broken apart by frontier raids before regathering under its first regular pastor in 1787. A log meetinghouse of about 1775 was succeeded by stone in 1816 and brick in 1846 as the settlement steadied and grew. This marker points travelers toward the church that stands a mile to the north.

Canyon, TX

During the Great Depression, students, townspeople, and government funding combined to build a striking recreation complex at West Texas State Teachers College. Begun in 1933 using student labor and stone quarried in Texas and New Mexico—including limestone and petrified wood—the project produced a fieldhouse, dormitories, an outdoor pool, and stadium bleachers. Most was later razed, but the two-story recreation hall of 1941 survives, with a petrified-wood exterior, great stone fireplaces, and a second-story dance floor.

Buffalo Gap, TX

Buffalo Gap Cemetery is the oldest public burial ground in Taylor County, in use by the community even before its earliest known headstones appeared around 1877. The older section of the ten-acre tract holds 146 graves, among them many Civil War veterans and pioneer families who first settled this stretch of West Texas. Still active today, it stands as a record of the county's founding generation.

Buffalo Gap, TX

Founded in 1885 by the Presbyterian Church, Buffalo Gap College grew out of an earlier high school and at its peak drew more than 300 students, some from far away. Its two-story red sandstone building housed classrooms, an auditorium, and a belfry, and offered a rigorous classical curriculum of Latin, Greek, physics, calculus, and music. The college enjoyed its greatest success under president J. M. Wagstaff.

Buffalo Township, IL

This marker recalls the killing of William Durley on May 19, 1832, when he was ambushed near Buffalo Grove while carrying dispatches between American officers during the Black Hawk War. That conflict pitted the U.S. and its militia against Sauk and Fox people led by Black Hawk, who sought to return to homelands east of the Mississippi. The war brought violence across northern Illinois and hastened Native removal from the region.

Buffalo, NY

Before automated buoys and GPS, lightships were floating lighthouses—anchored at dangerous points where building a tower was impossible, their lanterns guiding vessels through treacherous waters. Light Vessel 82 marked the approach to Buffalo on Lake Erie until the catastrophic Great Lakes Storm of November 9–10, 1913, often called the "White Hurricane." That ferocious blow, with hurricane-force winds and blinding snow, claimed more than 250 lives and sank roughly a dozen ships, LV-82 and her entire crew among them.

Owensboro, KY

Long before wagons and railroads, migrating buffalo herds carved the first practical paths through Kentucky's wilderness, and pioneers followed them. In 1797–98, settler Bill Smothers traced one such trail from Rough Creek to the Ohio River and built his cabin at its end, at the site that became Owensboro—then known as Yellow Banks. An old court record described the buffalo road as a great gathering place for game.

Morton, TX

In the summer of 1877, troopers of Company A, 10th Cavalry—the African American Buffalo Soldiers who helped guard the Texas frontier—set out from their posts to pursue a Comanche party across the arid Llano Estacado. The Comanches drew the column away from every water hole, and after days in the heat Capt. Nicholas Nolan led his parched men and animals back toward Double Lakes, having gone 86 hours without water. Four soldiers who wandered off in a desperate search for water never came back.

Tahoka, TX

After the Civil War, African American "Buffalo Soldiers" patrolled the western frontier, and in July 1877 Company A of the 10th Cavalry set out from Double Lake in pursuit of a Comanche party. The Comanche drew the troopers away from water, and the soldiers endured extreme heat and 86 hours without water; horses and mules died and men became lost searching for springs. Four soldiers died on the expedition, including Pvt. John T. Gordon, buried at Double Lakes.

Mobeetie, TX

Fort Elliott was raised in 1875 to help confine Native peoples to Indian Territory reservations, and it was garrisoned in part by African American "buffalo soldiers" of the 9th and 10th Cavalry and 24th and 25th Infantry. They patrolled the Texas–Indian Territory line, guarded mail coaches, and strung telegraph lines. Among them served Lt. Henry O. Flipper—born to enslaved parents in 1856, the first Black graduate of West Point and the Army's first Black commissioned officer—who oversaw building a telegraph line across the Canadian River.

Buffalo Springs, TX

Known as early as 1849 and used by buffalo hunters, Buffalo Springs was briefly chosen in 1867 as the site of a permanent U.S. Army post, only to be abandoned within months for want of water and timber in favor of Fort Richardson. It then served as a stage stand and campground between that fort and Fort Sill. In July 1874 it was the scene of a fight between Indians and a company of Texas Rangers under Captain George W. Stevens.

Texline, TX

Buffalo Springs' permanent water made it a famed hunting ground teeming with buffalo and mustangs, and a cow camp before 1878. From 1882 it served as headquarters of the legendary XIT Ranch—once the largest fenced ranch in the world at three million acres—land the state of Texas traded to a syndicate in exchange for building its granite Capitol in Austin.

Buffalo Springs, TX

During the Civil War, Buffalo Springs stood in a thin line of sentry forts guarding the Red River and the exposed North Texas frontier from 1861 to 1865. Cavalry manned it at intervals — notably when 3,000 Federal troops massed to the north in Indian Territory in 1864 — while enduring chronic shortages of guns, food, and horses. Frontier families "forted up" here in a fortified square of picket houses, posting guards on wood- and water-gathering parties until a water famine forced them out in 1862.

Colorado City, TX

These preserved tracks come from an ancient buffalo trail, one of the deep grooves that thundering herds pounded single-file into the West Texas ground as they moved between grazing grounds and watering holes. Migratory routes ran from the Rio Grande to Canada, and buffalo hunters like the Mooar brothers killed thousands here in the 1870s for hides, tongues, and meat. Native peoples had long followed these paths to the herds, and later explorers and railroad engineers built roads and rail lines along the very same routes.

Goldthwaite, TX

Local tradition holds that this burial ground began when two sheep herders died while camping here, though its oldest marked grave dates to 1882. After Frank and Mary Crowder bought the land in 1889, Mary later gave part of it for a community cemetery serving the Buffalo and Ebony neighborhoods. Pioneers and veterans rest here, joined in the 1940s by three members of the Reynolds family reburied when their original graves fell within a new military camp.

Winder, GA

This steam locomotive, No. 208, was built in 1930 and spent its working life on the Gainesville Midland Railroad before the Seaboard Air Line Railroad presented it to Winder and Barrow County in 1959. Retired as one of the last steam engines still running in the region, it was set here as a permanent tribute to the machines that once moved the nation's freight and passengers.

Jefferson, GA

Built in 1907 and last run on the Gainesville Midland Railroad, this steam locomotive was among the final steam-powered engines to operate in the area. The Seaboard Air Line Railroad gave it to the City of Jefferson in 1959 as a lasting exhibit honoring the service such engines rendered the country.

San Antonio, TX

Dedicated in 1930 as the Army Air Corps' 'West Point of the Air,' Randolph Field consolidated flight training near San Antonio, and its 1931 administration building—Building 100—became instantly famous. Cadets nicknamed the tower-topped structure 'The Taj Mahal' for its exotic silhouette, which hides a 500,000-gallon water tank and an 1,100-seat theater. Designed by architect Atlee B. Ayres, it starred in aviation films and came to symbolize the rise of American air power.

Marfa, TX

Built in 1920, Building 98 served as the Officers Club and Bachelor Officers Quarters for Fort D.A. Russell near Marfa. In the final years of World War II, from 1943 to 1945, the fort held German prisoners of war from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps — and their ornate murals, depicting West Texas scenes, still survive on the building's interior walls. Its adobe-and-concrete construction and distinctive A-shaped footprint earned it recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Bel Air, MD

Built in 1898 at the height of the Gilded Age, Liriodendron was the elegant Palladian-style summer retreat of Dr. Howard A. Kelly — one of the celebrated founding physicians of the Johns Hopkins Hospital — and his wife. Named for the tulip poplar, the mansion reflected the era's taste for classical symmetry and country estates for the well-to-do. Today the house has a second life as a historical, cultural, and educational center serving Harford County.

San Marcos, TX

Raised in the 1850s by Edward Burleson, Jr., a noted frontier fighter, this San Marcos home later gained fame as the birthplace of Albert Sidney Burleson, who served in President Woodrow Wilson's cabinet as Postmaster General. The house thus bridges two eras—the rough frontier of early statehood and the national politics of the Progressive age. It was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Washington, DC · est. 1950

Around 1828, under architect Charles Bulfinch, two small gate houses were raised at the west entrance to the United States Capitol grounds. The structure marked here stood until 1874; its mate now stands near 15th Street and Constitution Avenue.

Washington, DC · est. 1950

Around 1828, architect Charles Bulfinch—then completing the United States Capitol—oversaw construction of a pair of small gate houses guarding the western entrance to the Capitol grounds. The structure marked here stood until 1874; its companion survives today near 17th Street and Constitution Avenue.

Durham, NC

From the 1920s through the 1940s, Durham's Hayti neighborhood and tobacco-warehouse district nurtured a distinctive regional blues sound. Musicians such as Blind Boy Fuller (Fulton Allen) and Blind Gary Davis played its streets and clubs, and their recordings shaped generations of players to come.

Goliad, TX

When the railroad reached Goliad in 1889, cheap brick, stone, and lumber fueled a building boom around the courthouse square. On the side of the Stout-Pettus block, painted sometime between 1894 and 1900, a traveling sign crew left an enormous Bull Durham tobacco advertisement — an eight-by-twelve-foot bull and the boast that the brand "has no equal." Hidden for decades behind an interior wall, the mural was rediscovered in 2012 and restored, a rare survivor of the era's hand-painted "wall dog" advertising.

Lorena, TX

Erected in 1914 over Bull Hide Creek at Winan's Crossing, this 69-foot Warren pony truss bridge was built by the El Paso Bridge and Iron Company with a timber deck and concrete piers. For most of the twentieth century it linked the rural Mabel, Levi, and Cottonwood communities. It stands as a fine surviving example of early metal-truss road engineering.

Cedar Springs vicinity, TX

One of the oldest cemeteries in Falls County, Bull Hill served for more than a century as a burial ground for African Americans, first for people enslaved on Churchill Jones's vast plantation and later for the freedpeople of the China Grove community. After emancipation, families such as the Baileys, Currys, and Taylors built a church, a school, and a vibrant freedmen's settlement, with some acquiring land and starting businesses. Archaeology and oral history have since confirmed more than 100 burials at this hallowed site, where the last interment took place in 1961.

Bullard, TX

Bullard Cemetery was established around 1870, in the years after the Civil War when the community that became the town of Bullard was taking shape. Recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2001, it holds the graves of the area's early settlers. Such burial grounds are often the oldest surviving record of a community's founding families.

Bullard, TX

This marks the site of Bullard's historic town well, the reliable water source around which the community grew. When the Kansas and Gulf Short Line railroad pushed south from Tyler in 1883, the new town of Bullard—named for postmaster John Henry Bullard—supplanted the older settlements of Etna and Hewsville. Drawing on the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer, the well watered people and animals alike and served as an early social gathering place.

Columbus, GA

Built in 1887 for Dr. William L. Bullard, a pioneering Columbus ear, eye, nose, and throat specialist, this Second Empire Victorian home was designed by a New York architect and stayed in the Bullard family for ninety years. Its guests reportedly included President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Generals George Patton and George Marshall, who dined on "Country Captain," a dish credited to the family cook, Arie Mullins. Listed in the National Register in 1977, it was carefully restored the next year.

Ligonier Township, PA · est. 2003

In the spring of 1759, during the French and Indian War, the frontier of western Pennsylvania was a contested and dangerous supply corridor. Captain Thomas Bullet's party of about 100 Virginians was hauling provisions from Bedford to Fort Ligonier when French and Indian troops ambushed them near here on May 22, inflicting more than 40 casualties and seizing many of their supplies. Such raids on supply lines were a defining feature of the war in the Ohio Country.

Lincoln County, NV

Bullionville sprang up in 1870 when John H. Ely and W. H. Raymond moved a five-stamp mill here from Hiko, drawn by the water that nearby Pioche lacked. Because ore could be milled beside a reliable water supply, most of Pioche's mills soon relocated here, and by 1875 the town had five mills, 500 residents, and eastern Nevada's first iron foundry. When a Pioche waterworks was built that same year, the mills drifted back, and even a tailings-reworking plant in 1880 could not halt the town's decline.

Statesboro, GA

Bulloch County was carved from Bryan and Screven Counties in 1796 and named for Archibald Bulloch, a leading Georgia patriot who in early 1776 was chosen president of the colony's Executive Council and became its first provisional governor. He held that post until his sudden death in February 1777, at the height of the Revolution. The marker also records the county's first slate of officers, commissioned in 1796.

Ranger vicinity, TX

When infant Georgia A. Barnes was buried on William Nolen's land in 1878, a one-room schoolhouse already stood on the site. In 1886 Nolen donated two of his 160 acres to formally establish a school and cemetery for the settlement that became the Bullock community. The grounds were even leased for oil drilling in 1918, though the well came up dry. A cemetery association formed in the 1960s, and the burial ground still serves the area.

Gladewater, TX

Built around the turn of the twentieth century, this Gladewater house blends Colonial Revival dormers and gable ends with Craftsman touches like tapered box supports on brick piers. Sawmill owner and road builder William E. Bumpus and his wife Catherine bought the property in 1927, and it stayed in the family until 1987. It survives as a well-preserved local landmark of early East Texas domestic architecture.

Asheville, NC

Built between 1824 and 1828, the Buncombe Turnpike ran some 75 miles from the South Carolina line to the Tennessee line, threading the French Broad valley and opening the isolated mountains of western North Carolina to the outside world. Settlers, travelers, and above all livestock drovers herding hogs and cattle to market crowded the road each fall. It became the region's commercial lifeline for a generation.

Warren, MI

The Bunert schoolhouse is a preserved example of the one- and two-room schools that once dotted rural Macomb County before consolidation swept them away. In such buildings a single teacher taught children of every grade together, and the schoolhouse doubled as the neighborhood's meeting place. Kept as a historical site, it lets visitors step into everyday education on the Michigan farm frontier.

New Iberia, LA

This New Iberia grave holds Willie 'Bunk' Johnson, a Louisiana trumpeter whose playing reached back to the earliest days of New Orleans jazz. Largely forgotten by the 1930s, he was rediscovered by music scholars in the 1940s and fitted with new teeth and a horn so he could record again. His late-career comeback made him a living link to the music's founding generation.

Catawba County, NC

Spanning Lyles Creek in Catawba County, the Bunker Hill Covered Bridge was built in 1894 and is among the last surviving covered bridges in North Carolina. Its sheltering roof protected the wooden trusses from weather, a practical bit of nineteenth-century engineering that let such crossings endure.

Kyle, TX

The Bunton Branch Bridge, built in 1915 by J.N. George & Sons, carried the Austin–San Antonio post road across an intermittent creek named for John W. Bunton, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Part of the first federal-aid highway projects in Texas, its single 40-foot reinforced-concrete arch was the only one of its kind among thirty-five bridges along the route. The improved road became one of the state's busiest by the 1920s before a later realignment left this span behind.

Sturgeon Bay, WI

Long before electronic navigation, sailors marked hidden reefs and shoals with floating objects tethered to the bottom, from a barrel or log lashed to a heavy rock to purpose-built buoys and sinkers like this one. Displayed among Sturgeon Bay's maritime relics, it shows the simple but vital tools that warned mariners away from danger. Such markers helped keep Great Lakes shipping lanes safe.