Search Markers

Burbank, CA

Sealed on July 4, 1977, by the Burbank Bicentennial committee, this time capsule was buried during the nationwide wave of celebration marking 200 years of American independence. Its makers addressed it to the citizens of Burbank in 2026, to be opened on Independence Day—a message across half a century. It captures a community's optimism at the height of the Bicentennial moment.

Chester, TX

In 1835, on the eve of the Texas Revolution, early settler Peter Cauble raised this house in the pine woods of present-day Tyler County. His son-in-law Valentine Burch, a veteran of the decisive 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, later enlarged it. Named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964, the home survives as a tangible link to the first families who put down roots on this stretch of the East Texas frontier.

Georgetown, TX

Designed by noted Austin architect Charles H. Page, this Dutch Colonial Revival home was built in 1908–09 for Georgetown dentist William Joseph Burcham and his wife Mayme, both civic and cultural leaders in the community. Its cross gambrel roof, square brick piers, wraparound porch, and shingled gables reflect the fashionable revival styles of the early 20th century. The house stayed in the Burcham family until 1981.

Pottsville, PA · est. 1996

In the anthracite country around Pottsville, Burd Patterson helped unlock the hard coal that would fuel American industry, devising in 1835 a slope method for mining below the water table where earlier operators had been stopped cold. A few years later his Pottsville Furnace became the first to successfully smelt iron using anthracite, proving that Pennsylvania's stubborn hard coal could power a modern iron industry. His mansion, begun around 1830, led the procession of grand homes that came to line Mahantongo Street.

Middletown, PA · est. 1946

Col. James Burd was among the frontier soldiers who fought in the French and Indian War, the 1750s–60s struggle that pushed European powers and their Native allies across the Pennsylvania backcountry. From his estate "Tinian," Burd also helped author the Middletown Resolves in June 1774, one of many local declarations of grievance that swept the colonies on the eve of the Revolution. He and his wife, Sarah Shippen — of a prominent Pennsylvania family — lie buried near the entrance of the Middletown Cemetery.

City of Troy, NY

In the booming iron city of Troy, New York, Henry Burden's works harnessed water power to mass-produce horseshoes at an astonishing rate — machinery so productive it is said to have helped shoe the Union cavalry during the Civil War. The lower works forged these famous horseshoes for the army in wartime and for civilian markets after. Troy's ironworks helped make the upper Hudson Valley a powerhouse of 19th-century American industry.

Bastrop, TX

Richard Burger left Germany around 1859 and, after riding with Terry's Texas Rangers during the Civil War, settled into life as a Bastrop tailor and merchant. He bought this newly built Greek Revival house and raised a family here with his wife Clara, whose skill in German 'hair art' reflected the community's Old World traditions. Burger helped anchor local culture as an original stockholder in a town gathering place called 'The Casino.'

El Paso, TX

Built in 1912 for prominent attorney Richard Fenner Burges, this El Paso house took its present classical look — a portico of fluted columns — in a 1927 remodeling by architect Otto Thorman. Burges lost his wife, Ethel, during the home's original construction, then went on to serve as city attorney and state legislator while raising his family here. The house stayed in the Burges family until 1986.

Alpine, TX

This desert spring carried a layered history: named San Lorenzo by the Spanish explorer Juan Dominguez de Mendoza in 1684, later called Charco Alzate for an Apache chieftain, and finally honoring pioneer freighter John W. Burgess, who reportedly outwitted Apache raiders here. Along its banks ran the emigrant road to California by way of Chihuahua. In the arid Big Bend country, reliable water dictated where travelers, traders, and armies could go.

Village of Kinderhook, NY

In 1816, a bequest from John Rodgers set aside this quarter-acre in Kinderhook expressly as a burying ground for "persons of color," and it served that purpose until around 1861. In an era when free and enslaved Black residents were routinely denied a place in white cemeteries, dedicated grounds like this were among the few spaces where African American families could bury and remember their dead with dignity. The Hudson Valley village had a substantial community of free and enslaved Black residents in the early 19th century.

Galveston, TX

David G. Burnet led an eventful life long before he served as provisional president of the Republic of Texas in 1836 — joining youthful expeditions to free Venezuela from Spain, running a Louisiana trading post, and, while ailing with tuberculosis, living some eighteen months among the Comanches of west Texas. Elected the republic's interim president by a margin of six votes, he guided a chaotic government that was often fleeing Mexican troops by minutes even as it pressed for military victory. A man said to carry a gun in one pocket and a Bible in the other, he held office through the republic and statehood before his death in 1870.

Paris, TX

John S. Chisum came from Tennessee to Paris as a boy in 1837 and grew into one of the West's greatest cattle barons, driving herds numbering in the tens of thousands from Texas into New Mexico. During the Civil War he supplied beef to Confederate forces west of the Mississippi while his cowboys guarded the frontier, and he later built a vast spread near Roswell. His fortunes ultimately soured amid a bad packing-house deal and the violent Lincoln County War that also entangled Billy the Kid.

Franklin Park, IL

Josette Beaubien lived at the very hinge of Chicago's beginnings. She survived the 1812 Fort Dearborn engagement, married Jean Baptiste Beaubien—among the settlement's earliest permanent residents—and was sister to a Potawatomi leader, embodying the mingled French, American, and Native worlds of the frontier trading post that would become a great city. When she was buried here in 1845, Chicago was still a raw young town on the prairie.

Prairie Lea, TX

Born in Pennsylvania in 1805 and schooled at Princeton, John McCullough was ordained a missionary in 1835 and reached Texas in 1838, at the height of the young Republic. He served as chaplain to the Third Congress, founded Galveston's First Presbyterian Church, and famously hauled a Conestoga wagon dubbed the "Little Church in the Wilderness" to San Antonio, where he helped raise the city's first Protestant sanctuary. He kept preaching and teaching across the frontier until his death at Prairie Lea in 1870.

Wayne Township, OH

In the early 1790s the young United States fought the Northwest Indian War for control of the Ohio country, and General "Mad Anthony" Wayne rebuilt the shattered American forces into a disciplined army known as the Legion of the United States. As Wayne's troops marched and camped across the frontier toward their decisive 1794 victory at Fallen Timbers, sickness and hardship claimed men far from any battlefield. Two of those soldiers died while the Legion camped here in 1793 and were laid to rest near this spot, their names lost to history.

Concord, MA

Near this spot, by Concord's Old North Bridge, lie British regulars who died on April 19, 1775 — the first day of the Revolutionary War. As the redcoats searched Concord for hidden arms, colonial militia confronted them at the bridge in the 'shot heard round the world,' and men fell on both sides. The graves quietly hold the memory of soldiers who died far from home at the war's very outset.

Loving, TX

This marker names seven teamsters hauling forage between Jacksboro and Fort Griffin who were killed on May 18, 1871, in a raid led by the Kiowa chiefs Satanta, Satank, and Big Tree along with Comanche warriors. The attack on Henry Warren's contract wagon train was one of the most notorious episodes of the Southern Plains wars, and it led directly to the arrest and trial of the Kiowa leaders. Texas erected the memorial in 1936.

Burkburnett, TX

Burkburnett got its name at the request of President Theodore Roosevelt after a 1905 wolf hunt with rancher Burk Burnett, and the townsite was laid out in 1907 along a new railroad. But it was oil that made it famous: after a 2,200-barrel gusher came in on the Fowler farm in July 1918, some 200 wells sprouted in the townsite within three months and the population leapt from 1,500 to 15,000 in a single year. The frenzy inspired the 1940 film "Boom Town," cementing the town's "Boomtown USA" legend.

Burkburnett, TX

The Burkburnett Masonic Lodge No. 1027 was chartered in 1910, just three years after the town's founding, with an Eastern Star chapter added in 1921. During the oil-boom 1930s it claimed 400 members in a town of only 3,200 and produced eight District Deputy Grand Masters. The lodge laid cornerstones for landmark buildings including the First United Methodist Church, the library and local schools.

Fort Worth, TX

The first known burial in this graveyard was Mary Overton Burke, who came in 1851 with her children and widowed mother to settle land her late husband had chosen. She died in December 1867, and her mother followed just two days later. In 1900 the half-acre was formally deeded as a family burial ground, and more than a hundred graves of the Burkes and allied families have since been recorded here.

Waynesboro, GA

One of Georgia's original counties, Burke was created in 1777 from lands ceded by the Creeks, having earlier been organized as the colonial Parish of St. George. It was named for Edmund Burke, the British statesman and orator whose speeches in Parliament famously defended the American colonies' grievances. The marker lists the county's earliest sheriffs, tax collectors, and clerks from the 1770s and 1780s.

Waynesboro, GA

Historic Burke County, the former St. George's Parish, claims eight Georgia governors by birth, residence, or marriage. Among them were Revolutionary figures like John Houstoun, Declaration signer Lyman Hall, and Edward Telfair, along with later leaders including Herschel V. Johnson—Stephen Douglas's 1860 running mate—and Progressive-era senator and governor Hoke Smith. Together their careers span more than a century of the state's political life.

Burke, TX

Burke Methodist Church was founded in 1889 by a small band of Methodists and quickly became a center of community life. H. and Nannie Belote donated land in 1894, and the first sanctuary was finished in 1901, later moved, remodeled, and eventually replaced by a brick church and educational building in 1957. Through worship, education, and outreach, the congregation has served the town of Burke for well over a century.

Burke, TX

When the Houston, East and West Texas Railroad reached this piney-woods country in 1882, the new community of Burke needed a school, and the Arringtons deeded an acre for one. A single room grew into three, then into a 1910 brick schoolhouse, and finally into a larger building raised with Works Progress Administration labor during the Depression. Even after Burke's district merged with Diboll's in 1964, the schoolhouse kept serving its neighbors as a senior center and polling place.

Eastland, TX

Joe Burkett — who with his father and brother discovered and propagated the original Burkett pecan tree in 1900 — was also a schoolteacher, county official, and state legislator. He and his wife Fannye built this home in 1919–1920 on a working farm lot with outbuildings. New owners reworked it in the 1930s in the popular period-revival taste, and its stucco walls, low hipped tile roof, and porte cochere give it a Spanish Colonial Revival look.

Putnam, TX

In 1900, near Putnam, J. H. Burkett selected and propagated a superior nut from a native pecan tree — the beginning of the Burkett pecan, a variety that would help turn Texas's wild groves into a commercial industry. Burkett, who lived from 1861 to 1945, became a leading champion of pecan growing across the state. The tree honored here stands as the source of that enduring cultivar.

Burkeville, TX

The Church of God reformation began in Indiana in 1881 as a movement for Christian unity, and word of it reached deep East Texas through Alice McAlfin, a schoolteacher who had learned of it in Louisiana. The congregation she helped gather in 1901 is thought to be the oldest Church of God fellowship in Texas. For years it worshiped in a schoolhouse and held weeks-long summer camp meetings and creekside baptisms before building its own tabernacles.

Carrizo Springs, TX

Among the first families to settle what became Dimmit County, the Burlesons arrived near Carrizo Springs between 1865 and 1870. In 1895 tragedy struck fast: three young Burleson men died suddenly, probably of food poisoning, and that July another brother succumbed to heat stroke and was buried alongside them and a Burleson child. Over the decades the graves faded into local mystery until a Texas Department of Transportation investigation in the late twentieth century identified the family resting here.

Greenville, TX

Founded by the Hunt County Baptist Association in 1895, Burleson College rode the late-19th-century wave of church-sponsored schools meant to bring extended education to rural children. Named for former Baylor president Dr. Rufus C. Burleson, it offered preparatory and college programs—free to men preparing to preach—from a hilltop west of the courthouse. Chronic debt, a dormitory fire, and the Depression finally closed it in 1930, but more than 8,000 students had passed through by then.

Caldwell, TX

The land here was farmed as early as 1744 by Native people under Spanish missionaries, and in 1830 Fort Tenoxtitlan guarded the Brazos crossing on the old San Antonio Road, drawing Anglo-Texans who lived off wild game. The county was organized in 1846 and named for Gen. Edward Burleson — a hero of San Jacinto, Indian fighter, and Republic of Texas vice-president — with its seat at Caldwell. During the Civil War it sent troops, cotton, and food to the Confederacy.

Caldwell, TX

Burleson County sits in the rich Brazos River basin, settled as early as 1825 along El Camino Real, the old King's Highway. Here in 1830 Mexico built the fort of Tenoxtitlan, between Sterling Robertson's colony to the north and Stephen F. Austin's to the south. Surveyor George B. Erath platted Caldwell in 1840 and later authored the 1846 bill creating the county, named for Gen. Edward Burleson — soldier of Texas independence, congressman, and vice president of the Republic. Plantation agriculture gave way after the Civil War, and railroads arrived in the 1880s.

Caldwell, TX

On February 23, 1861, Burleson County voters chose secession by 422 to 84, and within days the "Burleson Guards" organized and offered themselves to the state. Most joined Company G of the 2nd Texas Infantry, while others served in Walker's Texas Division, Waul's Legion, Terry's Rangers, and Hood's Brigade. At home, a state-troop regiment guarded local citizens and the county court funded food and supplies for soldiers' families.

Caldwell, TX

When the United States entered World War II, rural Burleson County answered far above its size: roughly 1,300 of its 18,000 residents put on a uniform, many leaving the county for the first time in their lives. Their war reached from the deck of the U.S.S. California at Pearl Harbor—where Somerville's Thomas J. Gary died saving his crewmates and earned the Navy Cross—to the bloody landings at Salerno, the Ploesti oil-field raids over Romania, the Bataan Death March, and the beaches of Normandy. At home, families ran short-handed farms, joined recycling drives, and sent their nurses and defense workers to the effort.

San Marcos, TX

This restored log house honors Gen. Edward Burleson (1793–1851), an officer in the Texas War for Independence, a leader in frontier defense, vice president of the Republic of Texas, and a state legislator. The original dwelling, built in 1848 of hewn elm and oak with a rock chimney, had fallen into ruin by 1917 before being rebuilt in 1964 using the old chimney stones and period logs. It stands for the generation that fought to establish and defend the young Republic.

Waco, TX

Named for Rufus C. Burleson, the first president of Baylor's Waco campus, Burleson Quadrangle took its enduring shape as the university's four original buildings rose between 1886 and 1903. For generations it has been the setting of Baylor traditions, from the spring "Ring Out" ivy-chain ceremony to the passing of the key to a 1945 centennial time capsule. Its bronze statue of Burleson, unveiled in 1905, is the work of the noted sculptor Pompeo Coppini.

Flower Mound, TX

This native post oak in Flower Mound predates 1820, meaning it was already a mature tree when the region was still open blackland prairie on the edge of Anglo-American settlement in Texas. The Town designated it a Historical Tree in 1992 and tied it to the Burleson Staton family, who farmed the surrounding 70 acres from about 1926 to 1966. It is a living witness to the shift from open range and homestead farming to the suburban growth of the Dallas–Fort Worth corridor.

Burlington, TX

Members of the German Evangelical Lutheran Church of Burlington established this cemetery in 1917 on land once owned by town founders Michael and John Jones. With the Catholic St. Michael's Cemetery already nearby, the Lutherans and other non-Catholics needed a burial place of their own. Passed through a series of church mergers to the United Church of Christ and now cared for by a local association, it still serves the Burlington community and the descendants of those who left it.

Burlington, WI

Dedicated on Memorial Day 1992, this Burlington monument honors the men and women of the community who served the United States across the world wars and later national conflicts. It belongs to a long American tradition of towns raising local tributes so that the sacrifices of their own neighbors are not forgotten. Standing on public ground, it turns an abstract idea of service into a place where families and veterans can gather.

Ennis, TX

In 1856 William R. and Edeline House bought this land in a bargain paid with an enslaved man named John, and after her husband's death Edeline laid out a 25-block town and donated an acre for a graveyard in 1861. When the Houston and Texas Central Railroad bypassed Burnam Square in 1871 and founded Ennis instead, residents and businesses drifted away. Today a small burial ground of some forty graves is all that survives of the vanished community.

La Grange vicinity, TX

In the mid-1820s, as Stephen F. Austin's colonists were spreading across the lower Colorado River country, Jesse Burnam set up a ferry where the old La Bahia Road met the water — the first in what is now Fayette County. It became a vital link on a route that carried settlers, traders, and travelers deep into Mexican Texas. During the frantic retreat of the 'Runaway Scrape' in March 1836, the Army of the Republic of Texas crossed here, and Sam Houston ordered the ferry destroyed so the pursuing Mexican army could not follow.

Burnet, TX

Built in 1884 of hand-hewn rock, the Burnet County Jail combined a lockup with living quarters for the sheriff, who also served as jailer in the frontier custom of the day. Its second floor became the unlikely birthplace of the county library, so that justice and learning shared a single stone building. It survives as a solid example of nineteenth-century civic architecture in the Texas Hill Country.

Burkburnett, TX

In the 1870s cattleman Samuel Burk Burnett launched his famous 6666 (Four Sixes) ranch in Wichita County. When drought struck the 1880s, Burnett and neighboring ranchers leased vast grazing lands from the Comanche and Kiowa across the Red River in Indian Territory, and he acquired land for a dedicated horse ranch during the outfit's greatest years of expansion and selective breeding. His son Tom kept ranching in the county after headquarters moved to King County; the family sold the horse ranch in 1906.

Morristown, NJ

In the early twentieth century, as Morristown grew from a Revolutionary-era county seat into a prosperous New Jersey town, prominent families often gave land for public use. In 1911 the Frederick J. Burnham family donated this ground to the community as a public park, and eight decades later, in 1991, the town rededicated it to mark the original gift. The marker reflects the Progressive-era conviction that open, green space was essential to civic life in a growing town.

Bullard, TX

From 1913 to 1919 a 400-member religious commune worked the former Douglas Plantation near Bullard, founded by the Chicago-born Metropolitan Church Association, popularly called the Burning Bush Society. The colony aimed at self-sufficiency, running its own school, sawmill, power plant, water system, and sewage works. Crushed by debt, it disbanded soon after World War I ended.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 1947

On the morning of July 30, 1864, Confederate cavalry under Gen. John McCausland rode into Chambersburg and demanded a ransom in gold and cash. When the town could not or would not pay, McCausland put it to the torch in retaliation for Union Gen. David Hunter's destruction in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. The fire gutted the heart of the town, making Chambersburg the only major Northern community burned by Confederate forces during the Civil War.

Montgomery Township, PA · est. 1947

Along this road on July 29, 1864, Gen. John McCausland's Confederate cavalry rode north through Franklin County. Passing by way of Mercersburg, they reached Chambersburg the next morning and burned it, then pressed on to McConnellsburg by that night. The raid traced a swift, punishing arc across south-central Pennsylvania in the war's final year.

Washington, NC

When Union forces evacuated the occupied town of Washington in April 1864, departing troops burned and shelled it, leaving much of the community in ruins. The destruction came at the close of a long Federal occupation of this Pamlico River port. It was one of many Southern towns scarred as armies withdrew.

Trenton, TX

Tennessee native William Boyd Burns donated the land for this cemetery in 1876, next to the log cabin where he lived as a pioneer settler of the Trenton community. He also gave ground for a union church and schoolhouse, tying the burial ground to the area's earliest institutions. Its graves include Civil War veterans — among them a physician who fought at Shiloh — and generations of the settlers who built up Trenton.

Cuero, TX

When Arthur Burns reached DeWitt's colony in 1826 and built a two-story log home, he planted the seed of Irish Creek, one of the county's earliest settlements—a house that sheltered families during raids and once hosted Sam Houston in 1836. A grist mill, store, blacksmith, and stage stop clustered nearby along the Victoria–Gonzales road, and the settlement came to be called Burns Station. The cemetery, its land donated in 1853, holds an Ireland-born pioneer among its oldest graves.

Burnside, KY

This spot on the upper Cumberland began as Point Isabel, one of the small settlements planted by families drifting west from the Carolinas and Virginia around 1800 in search of new farmland on the Kentucky frontier. Its greatest moment came in 1863, when the Union army recognized the strategic value of the site and turned it into a rendezvous point and supply depot. From here troops and provisions were staged for the push into East Tennessee, part of the Federal effort to break Confederate control of that mountainous, Unionist-leaning region.

Dublin Township, PA · est. 1947

The odd name Burnt Cabins recalls a rare moment when colonial authorities acted against their own settlers. In 1750, provincial forces burned squatters' cabins in this vicinity to answer Native protests that whites were trespassing on lands still guaranteed to them by treaty. The gesture was meant to keep peace on a frontier already straining toward violence.

Bryan County, GA

Established near here in 1830, Bryan Neck Presbyterian Church was the oldest organized congregation in Bryan County, serving the planter families of a lower-Bryan coast that had become one of the most productive rice-growing districts on the south Atlantic. Its burial ground lay beside the wooden sanctuary, and here rest members of prominent early families such as the Clays, McAllisters, and Maxwells. After the church accidentally burned in 1882, a new building rose in 1885 several miles east near Keller.

Tooele County, UT

This 1940 marker, one in a numbered series, points to the site of Burnt Station, a relay point on the Pony Express and Overland Stage routes across Utah's west desert. From 1860 to 1861 the Pony Express carried mail by horseback between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, while the Overland Stage ran the same country from 1858 to 1868. Stations like this one, spaced across the desert, kept riders and coaches moving through some of the loneliest land in the West.

Highland Park, IL

This aging burr oak was already a sapling some two centuries before its 1987–88 dedication, meaning it took root around the time the framers were debating the U.S. Constitution. Highland Park's Bicentennial Constitution Committee marked the ancient tree as a living witness to the founding era. The plaque links a piece of living Illinois prairie to the birth of the American republic.

Burr Ridge, IL

Bearing the familiar tribute 'All gave some, some gave all,' the Burr Ridge Veterans Memorial honors local residents who served in the nation's armed forces. Community memorials like this gather a town's gratitude into a single place of reflection, without singling out any one conflict. They are a fixture of American civic life, tying local identity to the broader story of national service and sacrifice.

Westport, CT

Built in 1740, this Westport house went up when coastal Connecticut was a landscape of farms, ferries, and busy post roads. Its marker records that Capt. Thomas Nash raised it for Zachariah Burr, a member of the prominent Burr family, and that by the time of the Revolution it served as an inn—one of the taverns where travelers, news, and sometimes soldiers passed through. Roadside inns like this were the social hubs of 18th-century New England.

Town of Shandaken, NY

John Burroughs (1837–1921) was one of America's most beloved nature writers, a bearded, benevolent sage whose essays taught a generation to look closely at the birds, streams, and woods of the Catskills he called home. From his rustic cabin retreat, Slabsides, near West Park in Ulster County, he hosted admirers ranging from schoolchildren to presidents, and his gentle, observant prose helped popularize the conservation ethic taking root in the early twentieth century. After his death, neighbors and the boys of the nearby Raymond Riordon School planted this memorial forest in his honor, turning reforestation itself into a living tribute to the man who had asked Americans to cherish the land.

Millard's Crossing, TX

Elijah M. Burrows, a Confederate veteran, built the back rooms of this Nacogdoches County farmhouse before marrying Molly Millard in 1867, then added the front rooms and porch over the next several years. His family lived in the house for more than a century, until a descendant of the original builder moved and restored it in the 1970s. It stands as a well-preserved example of a Reconstruction-era Texas pioneer home.

Junction, TX

Founded in May 1919, this American Legion post honored a local man killed in France during the First World War and quickly became one of Kimble County's best-known organizations. In 1938 members built a native-rock home on this site, lining its walls with wartime keepsakes, and added a memorial hall after the Second World War. In 1966 the old "Legion hut" passed to the county historical museum.

Cleveland, TX

Burton B. Tarkington and his wife Sarah left Indiana in the mid-1820s for the Mexican state of Coahuila, settling west of the Trinity River and building a ranch and farm on land that came to bear their name. Family tradition holds they fled in 1836 as Santa Anna's army advanced toward San Jacinto. After independence, the new Republic granted Tarkington more than 4,600 acres, and he later served in the Texas Militia and as a county commissioner.