Search Markers

Corsicana, TX

A New York native, Charles Henry Allyn served as a Union captain in the Civil War before coming to Texas in 1868 and settling in Corsicana with his wife Angela in 1871. There he became a pillar of the growing town's economy, helping organize its first national bank, savings and loan companies, and cotton mill. He served on the city council and as mayor from 1888 to 1890, remaining active in civic, educational, and church affairs until his death in 1918.

Frankfort, KY

Daniel Weisiger III (1763–1829) was a pillar of early Frankfort—merchant, farmer, county clerk, city trustee, and the town's first postmaster—as well as the first Master of the Hiram Masonic Lodge. Around the 1790s he enlarged Tunstall's Tavern into the Weisiger House, "at the Sign of the Golden Eagle," which became a leading social and political gathering place; a grand ball was held there in 1825 to honor the Marquis de Lafayette. After Daniel's death his widow Lucy managed the inn and stage stop for over a decade before the city bought it in 1852.

Prairieville, TX

Alabama-born Edward Thomas Broughton settled in Texas as a boy, became a lawyer, and was serving as district attorney in Kaufman when war came in 1861. He helped raise a local company, the Kaufman Light Infantry, which mustered at Prairieville and was renamed the Johnson Guards before joining Colonel John Gregg's 7th Texas Volunteers. Captured at Fort Donelson and again in 1863, sickened in prison yet returning each time to command, Broughton survived the war to serve in the Texas Senate before his death in 1874.

Mt. Vernon, TX

Born in 1823, F. Marion Hastings enlisted from Dade County, Missouri, in 1861 and rode with Sterling Price, Jo Shelby, and John S. Marmaduke through the hard-fought cavalry raids that swept Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Surrendering at Shreveport in June 1865, he came to Texas that autumn and rebuilt a public life on the Franklin County frontier, serving as county commissioner and then county judge into the 1890s. His path from Confederate trooper to local jurist traces the wider story of Southern veterans who shaped Reconstruction-era Texas.

Goodrich, TX

Hardy B. Purvis wore a badge across the roughest chapters of early-20th-century Texas — the oil boom towns, dock strikes, and prison riots that tested a lawman's nerve. From the 1920s through the 1950s he served as a Texas Ranger, rising to captain of a company before retiring at Houston. His son followed him into the Rangers, extending a family legacy of frontier-style law enforcement into the modern age.

Cotulla, TX

A Georgia native who came to Texas in 1853, Jasper N. Daniel won election to the state legislature in 1859 and served as a Confederate captain during the Civil War. Settling in Cotulla in 1884, he became justice of the peace and then county judge, helping impose order on La Salle County during its rough, lawless frontier era. He and his wife raised sixteen children.

Austin, TX

Jesse Billingsley joined the Texas army in 1835 and led Company C of the First Regiment of Texas Volunteers at San Jacinto. His public life continued through the Republic's early congresses, the 1842 Woll Campaign against a Mexican incursion, and later the Texas state senate. Born in Tennessee in 1810, he died in Bastrop County in 1880.

Muncy Creek Township, PA · est. 1947

John Brady earned his reputation across the colonial wars and the Revolution as a hard frontier soldier, commanding a fortified post on the West Branch of the Susquehanna at present-day Muncy. On April 11, 1779, he was ambushed and killed by Native warriors near here, one of countless settlers and soldiers who fell in the running border warfare that consumed the region.

Sherman, TX

Virginia-born John Henry LeTellier joined the Confederate army in 1861, fighting at Manassas, Williamsburg, Gettysburg, and other battles and taking several wounds. After the war he came to Texas and ran the Sherman Private School from 1871 until his death in 1913. A gifted mathematician and demanding teacher, he trained many students who went on to prominence.

Missoula, MT

Captain John Mullan is best remembered for the military wagon road he engineered across the northern Rockies, but this marker recalls his earlier trail-work of 1853–1855, when he explored and surveyed routes through the mountains of the Northwest. His efforts helped open a practical overland path between the Missouri and Columbia river systems. The roads that followed carried soldiers, settlers, miners, and freight into a remote corner of the country.

Austin, TX

John R. Hughes served as a Texas Ranger for nearly three decades around the turn of the twentieth century, a stretch when the Rangers policed a still-rough Texas frontier. Kansas-born and drawn to Texas in the 1870s, he earned a reputation for steadiness and nerve before retiring into ranching and banking. His grave marker honors a career that spanned the closing of the open frontier.

Pottsville, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1816, John Stephen Potts married a cousin of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and served as a justice of the peace and sheriff in Missouri before soldiering for the Confederacy. After the Civil War he came to Texas, paying $500 in gold for Hamilton County sheep range in 1872 and gradually adding land. A devout Baptist and Mason who donated a cemetery site, he was honored when the town of Pottsville was named for him in 1878.

San Antonio, TX

Born in San Antonio in 1797, José Antonio Menchaca was a Tejano who cast his lot with Texas independence and fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. He lived out his long life in the town of his birth, dying in 1879, and this state marker honors him and his wife, Teresa Ramón Menchaca. Their shared memorial stands as one of many placed across Texas in 1936 for the centennial of independence.

Salado, TX

Tennessee-born Milton Wesley Damron came to Texas in the 1840s as part of the Mercer Colony, married Sarah Pennington, and settled in what became Bell County when the colony's original plans fell through. He served as the county's first tax assessor, then joined the Confederate Army, leading a cavalry unit in Indian Territory and Arkansas. Returning to Salado, he worked as postmaster and won election as a legislator, though as a former Confederate he was barred from taking his seat.

Bryan County, GA

Fort McAllister, an earthwork fort guarding the Ogeechee River south of Savannah, was the last obstacle in Sherman's March to the Sea. When Union troops stormed it on December 13, 1864, the defenders fought hand-to-hand rather than yield. Captain Nicholas Clinch's refusal to surrender — answering the demand with his sword and absorbing a dozen wounds before being overpowered — became one of the defense's most-remembered moments.

Pleasanton, TX

Peter Tumlinson was nineteen when his family reached Texas in 1821, and he followed his father—John Jackson Tumlinson, remembered as the first Texas Ranger killed in the line of duty—into that frontier service. Over some forty years he clashed with Indian raiders and the border figure Juan Cortina, fought in the Texas Revolution, and by family tradition witnessed the aftermath of San Jacinto. Granted land in Atascosa County, he served as county commissioner and founded the local Masonic lodge.

Liberty Township, PA · est. 1964

This memorial marks the graves of ten frontier militiamen of Captain Phillips' company, killed on July 16, 1780, during the brutal backcountry fighting of the Revolutionary War. Along Pennsylvania's western frontier, British-allied Native war parties raided isolated settlements, and local rangers like Phillips' men bore the danger of defending them. Their deaths were one small, bloody episode in a war whose frontier front is often overshadowed by the great eastern battles.

Washington, PA · est. 1947

Born on this site in 1860, Philo McGiffin graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at a time when America's own fleet offered few commissions, and so he sailed to China to help build and train its modern navy. In 1894 he served aboard a Chinese warship at the Battle of the Yalu River, where the fleet fought Japan to a bloody standstill. Gravely wounded, he never fully recovered and died three years later.

Wellington, TX

In 1852 Capt. Randolph B. Marcy led a U.S. survey expedition up the Red River to chart its channel and tributaries, accompanied by Capt. George B. McClellan of the Corps of Engineers. Entering the Texas Panhandle in June, the team crossed present Collingsworth County in July, tracing the river's sources before leaving Texas for Fort Arbuckle in what is now Oklahoma.

Henderson, TX

This marker honors Captain Robert Smith, who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836—the decisive engagement in which Texian forces under Sam Houston won independence from Mexico in less than twenty minutes of fighting. Veterans of that campaign became the founding generation of the Republic of Texas, and many, like Smith, settled the frontier counties they had helped free.

Jefferson, TX

Built in the 1860s in the East Texas port town of Jefferson, this house follows a cruciform plan whose roots reach back to seventeenth-century Virginia, carried west as families migrated and brought their building traditions with them. It has remained in the Singleton family since 1885 and was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Columbus, TX

Virginia-born William G. Hunt came to Columbus around 1831 and threw himself into the making of Texas, fighting at the 1835 Battle of Gonzales — the "come and take it" opening of the Texas Revolution — and in the capture of San Antonio that followed. A farmer and trader who later served in the 13th Texas Infantry during the Civil War, he bought this house in 1859 and lived here until 1898. Built around 1858, it is regarded as the oldest house in Columbus, still holding its original pine floors and ceilings.

Blossom, TX

This 1½-story Southern-style homestead was built in 1871 by Captain William E. Moore and his wife, Sarah Elizabeth Neal. During the Civil War Moore commanded the 'Shreveport Grays,' and in 1872—after a campaign in which he famously shared a buggy with his opponent—he won a state senate seat. He served under Governor Richard Coke, whose administration marked the end of Reconstruction in Texas.

Jefferson, TX

In the mid-19th century Jefferson was one of the busiest inland ports in Texas, its steamboats reaching Caddo Lake and the Red River trade. Capt. William Perry, an officer on one of those riverboats, built this house in the 1850s at the height of that boom. It survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark from that river-commerce era.

Beeville, TX

Born in Nacogdoches County to early Texas settlers, A. C. Jones became a cattleman and county sheriff before serving four years in Colonel John S. "Rip" Ford's Confederate cavalry, fighting at Palmito Hill—the last land battle of the Civil War, waged weeks after Lee's surrender. In peacetime he helped raise the capital to bring railroads to Beeville and led the town's banking and oil-mill enterprises.

Hempsted, TX

Alfred H. Wyly led a volunteer company at the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, the eighteen-minute rout that secured Texas independence from Mexico. Volunteer captains like Wyly raised and commanded the citizen-soldiers who made up Sam Houston's army, ordinary settlers who left their farms to fight. Wyly lived on in the young republic and state until his death at Hempstead in 1867.

Austin, TX

Andrew Briscoe was among the Anglo Texans who took up arms in 1835, serving at Anahuac and the capture of San Antonio before signing the Texas Declaration of Independence and commanding a company at San Jacinto. Afterward he became the first chief justice of the Harrisburg municipality. This 1936 centennial marker honors his part in Texas independence.

Belton, TX

Andrew Caddell was a North Carolina-born soldier who marched with the Texian army in the 1836 revolution, standing in the ranks as a private at the Battle of San Jacinto that won Texas its independence. He later rose to command a company of volunteers, part of the generation of frontier settlers who fought for and then built the young Republic of Texas. He and his wife Rhoda made their lives in the Bell County country, where this marker records their years.

Baird, TX

Andrew Jackson Berry was born in Indiana in 1816 and lived long enough to bridge two defining conflicts of 19th-century Texas. As a young man he fought at San Jacinto, the 1836 battle that won Texas its independence, and decades later he served as an officer in the Confederate Army. He died at Baird in 1899, one of the dwindling number of men who could claim both distinctions.

Erie, PA · est. 1946

In the spring of 1898 the Spanish-American War carried the U.S. Navy across the Pacific to the Spanish-held Philippines. At Manila Bay, Commodore George Dewey's squadron destroyed the Spanish fleet in a single morning, and his calm words to the captain of his flagship Olympia became one of the most quoted commands in American naval lore. That captain, Charles Vernon Gridley, was already gravely ill and died weeks later; he rests in this Erie cemetery.

Kerrville, TX

Born in France in 1838, Charles Schreiner emigrated as a boy, rode with the Texas Rangers, and fought for the Confederacy before opening a Kerrville general store in 1869. From that counter he built an empire — banking, ranching, and the marketing of wool and mohair through one of Texas's first such warehouses — until by 1900 he owned some 600,000 acres. A noted philanthropist, he founded the Schreiner Institute that still bears his name.

Shiner, TX

Born in Hanover, Germany, in 1835, Charles Welhausen immigrated through the Port of Galveston in 1843 and grew up in the German communities of Cat Spring and High Hill. He enlisted in the Confederate army, was cited for gallantry at the 1864 Battle of Calcasieu Pass, and rose to captain, later serving Fayette County as commissioner, justice of the peace, and legislator. After moving to Shiner in 1890 he founded a bank and, in 1911, donated this site to the city for a park.

Jersey City, NJ

This memorial park honors Captain Clinton E. Fisk, a Jersey City native born in 1882 who served with Company D, 107th Regiment of the U.S. Army's 27th Division and was killed in action at St. Souplet, France, on October 18, 1918. The 27th Division fought in the final Allied offensives of World War I, including the breaking of the Hindenburg Line, in the war's last weeks. Dedicating a neighborhood park in his name turned a shared public space into a permanent local tribute.

Erie, PA · est. 2003

A merchant mariner turned naval officer, Daniel Dobbins carried the alarming news of the fall of Forts Mackinac and Detroit to Washington in the opening months of the War of 1812. Commissioned a sailing master, he returned to Erie to oversee the building of the very squadron that Oliver Hazard Perry would command to victory in the Battle of Lake Erie. Dobbins spent three decades in the Navy and Revenue Cutter Service.

Nacogdoches, TX

In 1716 Captain Domingo Ramon led Spain's second attempt to plant a permanent settlement in East Texas, establishing a presidio and a cluster of missions near the Neches River in just weeks. The Hasinai Caddo tolerated and cooperated with the newcomers, who aimed to block illicit French trade pressing in from Louisiana. A minor French raid in 1719 scattered the fragile settlements, but the Ramon-Espinosa expedition had already helped open El Camino Real de los Tejas.

Houston County, TX

Elisha Clapp came to Texas in 1822, among the earliest Anglo-American settlers, and fought in the Battle of San Jacinto that won Texas its independence in 1836. He went on to serve as a captain in the Texas Army during the young republic's fragile early years. He died in 1856; his wife, Rebecca Robbins Clapp, outlived him until 1875.

Corpus Christi, TX

Soldier, colonist, and explorer, Captain Enrique Villarreal once held title to most of what is now Nueces County through the vast Rincon del Oso land grant, awarded by Mexico in 1831 though he had ranched it since 1810. Raiding forced him off the land until peace came in 1824, and as a Mexican officer he fought through the Mexican War for Independence, the Texas Revolution, and the U.S.-Mexican War. When Henry Lawrence Kinney founded his trading post on Villarreal's grant, he set in motion the sales that would make him the land's eventual owner—and give rise to the city of Corpus Christi.

Mobeetie, TX

George Washington Arrington (1844–1923) was one of the daring scouts in Colonel John S. Mosby's Confederate guerrilla command during the Civil War before drifting through Mexico and Central America and settling in Texas in 1867. He earned an outstanding record as a Texas Ranger from 1875 to 1882, then served as sheriff of Wheeler and fourteen attached counties, bringing law to the raw early settlements of the Panhandle. His life traces the arc from wartime irregular to the archetypal frontier peace officer.

Orange, TX

Orange, Texas sat where the Sabine River meets the Gulf, and its economy floated on the boats built along that water. George M. Levingston, a licensed river captain and son of an early shipbuilder, turned decades of local shipyard experience into the Levingston Shipbuilding Company in 1933, growing it into a major Gulf Coast operation. He also gave time to public life, serving on the Orange City Council in the 1920s.

Decatur, TX

George W. Stevens came to Wise County in 1855 and became a leader in defending the exposed Texas frontier, serving in a frontier cavalry company and as county sheriff during the turbulent 1860s. In 1874 he was named captain of Company B of the Texas Rangers' Frontier Battalion, leading some seventy-five men — mostly Wise County neighbors — in the last campaigns against Comanche and Kiowa raiders, and he was severely wounded in a fight at Buffalo Springs. He later helped chase the notorious Sam Bass gang before his death in 1893.

Flat Rock, TX

Alabama-born George Stevens came to Wise County in 1855 and made his name as a defender of frontier settlers, active in resisting Indian raids and serving as a guiding officer in local home-guard units. He also wore the badge of county sheriff across the 1860s and 1870s, keeping order in a raw and often violent region.

Junction, TX

Gully Cowsert served as a Marine Corps corporal in World War I before finding his lasting calling as a Texas Ranger, a badge he earned in 1942 and wore for fourteen years. He rose to command Company E and West Texas District, building a reputation for cracking cattle- and sheep-theft cases across the rangelands. His career bridged the mud of a world war and the enduring frontier tradition of the Ranger lawman.

Rockport, ME

In the seafaring town of Rockport on the Maine coast, local lore credits sea captain Hanson Gregory with punching the first hole in a fried doughnut in 1847, supposedly so the dense center would finally cook through. The claim is celebrated but contested, one of many folk origin stories for the ring-shaped treat. This monument keeps Rockport's tie to the legend alive.

Dublin, GA

In the decades after the Civil War, veterans across the South became pillars of their communities, and Captain Hardy B. Smith of Laurens County was one of them. Wounded at Mechanicsville and losing his right arm, he served two more years before returning to Dublin to farm, hold public office, and help launch the Macon and Dublin Railroad. He completed this Carpenter Gothic home in 1873 — now the oldest house in Dublin still on its original site — and raised ten children here.

Nacogdoches, TX

A Tennessee native, Captain Hayden Arnold led the Nacogdoches company at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive engagement of the Texas Revolution. He died in 1839, only a few years after the fighting that won Texas its independence. The State of Texas raised his marker in 1936.

Roby, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1815, Henry C. Lyon soldiered across the great dividing lines of nineteenth-century Texas: first in the army of the Republic of Texas, then as a company commander for the Confederacy in the Civil War. The state erected his memorial in 1936, though a later stone set the record straight that his body actually lies at Woods Chapel, not the Roby cemetery. His life spans the arc from frontier republic to Confederate war.

Marlin, TX

Henry Gray Carter left Vermont for Texas as a teenager, and when war came in 1861 he enlisted in Tom Green's Texas Cavalry Brigade, winning a captain's commission for gallantry. He fought Nathaniel Banks' Union forces at Fort Butler, Mansfield, Bisland, and Pleasant Hill — the Red River Campaign battles — and was wounded at the last. Settling in Marlin in 1871, he became a leading banker and rancher, and the house he built that year, with its ax-hewn log foundation and square nails, still stands.

Presidio, TX

A Kentucky-born frontiersman, Henry Skillman scouted in the Mexican War and in 1851 opened the first mail service between San Antonio and El Paso, later driving stages across dangerous West Texas country. When the Civil War came he served the Confederacy as a scout and courier through the far Trans-Pecos, spreading false rumors and evading the Union forces who occupied the region. Hunted by troops ordered to take him alive, he was killed resisting capture near here in 1864.

Quitman, TX

Henry Stout arrived in Texas from Tennessee in 1818 and lived through nearly every chapter of its early history. He served in the Republic of Texas Army in 1836, captained a Texas Ranger company from 1839 to 1845, and later helped organize Wood County, becoming its first sheriff and a state legislator before serving as a Confederate officer. He is buried in a family cemetery beside this site.

Quinlan, TX

Henry W. Wade (1832–1912) came to Hunt County as a young Kentuckian, married into the Kuykendall family in 1859, and settled the 640-acre tract that includes this burial ground. He served as a captain in the 6th Texas Cavalry of Ross' Brigade during the Civil War and afterward helped write Texas's 1875 constitution before making his living in the livestock trade.

Livingston, TX

Born in Georgia in 1839 and raised on a family with Texas plantation holdings, Isaac Newton "Ike" Turner mustered eighty Polk County volunteers at the Livingston courthouse in September 1861 and was elected their captain. He led them east as Company K of the 5th Texas Infantry in Hood's famed Texas Brigade, fighting through some sixteen battles—the youngest company commander in the brigade—before a mortal wound near Suffolk, Virginia, ended his life at twenty-four. First buried in Georgia, his remains were brought home to Texas in 1994 to rest among his family.

Kaufman, TX

Israel Spikes was an early settler of Kaufman County, where Spikes Prairie still carries his family's name. A Confederate veteran and Mason, he was chosen in 1875 to represent his district at the convention that drafted a new state constitution, riding horseback to Austin alongside John H. Reagan, the former Confederate Postmaster General and later U.S. senator. The 1876 Texas Constitution they helped write remained the state's governing document for generations.

Walnut Springs, TX

J.J. Cureton settled on the Palo Pinto frontier in 1854 and became a noted Indian fighter, leading neighbors in defense of their homes against raids. In 1860 he took part in the recovery of Cynthia Ann Parker, seized by Comanches twenty-four years earlier, and during the Civil War served as a captain in frontier troops guarding northwest Texas against both Indian attack and northern incursion. He later served as sheriff of Bosque County, and the C.S.A. outpost Camp Cureton bore his name.

Woodford County, KY

In the small hours of June 4, 1781, Jack Jouett spurred his horse some forty miles through the Virginia backcountry to reach Charlottesville ahead of Banastre Tarleton's British dragoons, giving Governor Thomas Jefferson and the fleeing legislature the minutes they needed to escape capture. Often called "the Paul Revere of the South," Jouett later crossed the mountains to build a life in Kentucky. This was also home to his son, Matthew Harris Jouett, who became one of the young republic's most admired portrait painters.

Bandera, TX

On December 29, 1876, Bandera County Deputy Sheriff Capt. Jack Phillips rode alone toward Sabinal Canyon and was ambushed by Indians at Seco Canyon Pass. After his horse was shot out from under him, he ran half a mile on foot before being killed; a passing couple bound for their own wedding found his body. Tragically, Texas Rangers had trailed the same raiders for miles but turned back exhausted just before the attack.

Bastrop, TX

Captain James Burleson served as a commissary under General Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812 and fought at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815, with his son Edward alongside him as bookkeeper. Decades later, the aging veteran took up arms again under that same son in the Army of Texas at the Grass Fight of 1835. Born in 1758, he died in early 1836 as Texas fought for its independence.

Kauaʻi County, HI

This statue on Kauaʻi honors the British navigator James Cook (1728–1779), whose Pacific voyages brought the first sustained European contact with the Hawaiian Islands in 1778. A cast of a monument in Cook's home port of Whitby, England, the figure was sculpted by Sir John Tweed. Cook's charts opened the islands to a wider world, with consequences both momentous and, for Native Hawaiians, profoundly disruptive.

Comanche vicinity, TX

Captain James Cunningham built this home in 1855 from local stone and lumber hauled all the way from Waco by ox wagon, an undertaking that speaks to the isolation of the early Comanche County frontier. The house hosted the county's first wedding and was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Victoria, TX

This state marker commemorates Captain James P. January, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence who served as an assistant surgeon and surgeon for the Republic of Texas. Erected by the State of Texas in 1962, it recognizes the medical service that kept the young republic's soldiers alive. Physicians like January were scarce and vital on the Texas frontier of the 1830s and 1840s.

El Paso, TX

Kentucky-born trader James Magoffin and New York-born miller Simeon Hart both built fortunes in the El Paso borderlands—Magoffin from a trading post at Magoffinsville and his deep contacts in Mexico, Hart from a mill grinding a hundred barrels of flour a day. When the Civil War came, both threw their commercial networks behind the Confederacy, funneling supplies to the 1861–62 Arizona–New Mexico campaign and trading Southern cotton for war goods through Mexico and Europe. Hart's arrangements even helped thwart a planned Union thrust across the Rio Grande in 1863.