Search Markers

Marble Falls, TX

Kentucky-born Jesse Burnam fought as a Tennessee volunteer in the War of 1812, including the Battle of New Orleans, before bringing his family to Texas in 1821 and joining Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred." On the Colorado River frontier he built a home, fortified trading post, and ferry, served as a militia captain and delegate to the conventions leading to the Texas Revolution, and saw Sam Houston order his crossing burned in 1836 ahead of the Mexican army. In 1855 he resettled in Burnet County, raising sheep and wheat on land where the family homestead still stands.

Huntsville, TX

A few blocks from Texas's first prison — the 1848 Huntsville Penitentiary — the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery holds more than 3,000 people who died in state custody, the earliest laid to rest in the 1850s. For a century the graves went largely unrecorded until assistant warden Joe Byrd cleared the overgrown ground and located over 900 of them, lending the cemetery his name. It remains the only active burial place in Texas for inmates whose bodies go unclaimed.

West Chillisquaque Township, PA · est. 1928

John Brady settled this stretch of the Susquehanna frontier in 1769, working as a surveyor before the constant danger of raids drove him to the fortified Muncy Manor that took his name. A veteran soldier, he fought in the French and Indian War, led a company in Pontiac's War, and raised a company for the Continental Line in the Revolution, taking a serious wound at the Battle of Germantown. Home on sick leave in April 1779, he was killed in an ambush near Fort Brady, one of countless casualties of the unrelenting frontier war.

Smithville, TX

John Campbell Hunt was born in Alabama in 1811 and came to Texas in time to fight at San Jacinto, the 1836 battle that won Texas its independence. He rose to captain in the Army of the young Republic of Texas before his death in 1840, at just 28. His grave marks one of the ordinary soldiers whose service turned a rebellion into a nation.

Holliday, TX

John Holliday came to Texas around 1835 and survived the Goliad Massacre of March 1836, one of only two dozen to escape that infamous killing of Texian prisoners. Joining the ill-fated Texian–Santa Fe Expedition in 1841, he carved his name on a tree near this spot before the party was captured and marched to a Mexican prison. Freed in 1842, he died of yellow fever at sea within sight of Galveston, and the carved tree gave its name to nearby Holliday Creek and the town.

Martinsburg, WV

This memorial honors Captain John Kearney, who took up arms in the American Revolution during the long war that won the colonies their independence from Britain between 1775 and 1783. Born in 1745, he belonged to the generation that came of age fighting for the new nation, and he lived on into the early republic before his death in 1805. Markers like this one in the Shenandoah Valley town of Martinsburg remember the ordinary officers whose service, alongside their families, sustained the Continental cause far from the famous battlefields.

Kerrville, TX

Joseph A. Tivy came to Texas from Canada in 1837 and served as a Texas Ranger before joining the 1849 California Gold Rush, where he ran a hotel and sat in the state legislature. Returning to Texas, he fought in the Civil War, rose to captain, and became a surveyor, rancher, and legislator before serving as Kerrville's first mayor in 1889, donating land for the city schools. He and his family are buried on nearby Tivy Mountain.

Fairfield, TX

Alabama-born L. D. Bradley came to Texas in 1855 and commanded a company in Waul's Texas Legion during the Civil War. On May 22, 1863, in the Siege of Vicksburg, he led a daring volunteer party of some forty men to seal a Federal breach in a Confederate fort on the Mississippi, acting under heavy fire. He later commanded a regiment defending the Texas coast and in the 1864 Red River Campaign.

San Antonio, TX

North Carolina-born Lee Hall came to Texas in 1869 and won national fame as a frontier lawman, serving as a Grayson County marshal and then in the Texas Rangers' Frontier Battalion from 1876 to 1880, pursuing notorious outlaws like Sam Bass and John Wesley Hardin and quelling the Taylor-Sutton feud. Decades later he was cited for gallantry in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War era.

Hallettsville, TX

Leiper Willoughby came to Texas in 1831 and fought in Captain William H. Patton's company at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the engagement that won Texas its independence. He remained in arms for the young Republic, serving in the 1842 Vasquez Campaign against Mexican incursion and in frontier fighting that same year. He died in 1874, and the state honored him with a Star and Wreath marker in 1956.

Sherman, TX

Connecticut-born Noble Allan Birge came to Texas before the Civil War, served as Marion County's first sheriff and then as a Confederate captain, and afterward became a leading cotton merchant. He moved his family to Grayson County in 1874, and after the great Sherman tornado destroyed his earlier home, he built this exuberant Queen Anne and classical revival house in 1896, where the Birge family remained until 1969.

Brookshire, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1793, Captain Nathen Brookshire took part in the storming and capture of Bexar in December 1835, one of the opening victories of the Texas Revolution, and served as a captain in the Texas Army in 1836. The community of Brookshire later carried his name. He died in 1853.

Cobb County, GA

During the 1864 Atlanta Campaign, Union and Confederate armies grappled across the hills of north Georgia in a series of grinding engagements. Captain Peter Simonson, an Indiana artillery officer serving as a division chief of artillery, was entrenching a battery here on June 16, 1864 when a Confederate marksman killed him.

Odessa, TX

As the 1849 Gold Rush drew thousands westward, the U.S. Army sent Captain Randolph B. Marcy to escort the 'Forty-Niners' toward Santa Fe, opening a wagon road from Fort Smith with the help of the Delaware scout Black Beaver and engineer James H. Simpson. After delivering his party, Marcy set out to survey a return route from West Texas, guided by a noted Comanche named Manuel across the Pecos, the Monahans sandhills, and an old Comanche trail near present-day Odessa. The resulting Fort Smith–Santa Fe road gave emigrants a shorter southern path across the continent.

Teague, TX

Richard B. Haley was among the Anglo colonists who took up arms in 1835 as Texas moved toward revolution against Mexico. He fought in the Grass Fight in late November and in the capture of San Antonio that December, service that earned him six land grants. Born in Tennessee, he had settled in the Shelby County area in 1824 and later lived in Leon and Freestone counties.

Palestine, TX

Steven L. Bennett was born in Palestine in 1946 and grew up in Louisiana, joining the Air Force after studying aeronautical engineering. Serving in Vietnam in 1972 as a forward air controller, he and his back-seater helped scatter a large enemy force threatening a South Vietnamese platoon. When his aircraft was struck and his companion's parachute was found damaged, Bennett chose to ditch rather than eject, sacrificing his own life to save the other man, an act that earned him a posthumous Medal of Honor.

Lower Windsor Township, PA · est. 1924

When Thomas Cresap settled here in 1730, the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland was undrawn and hotly contested, and he claimed these lands for Lord Baltimore against the heirs of William Penn. His stubborn defense made him a flashpoint of "Cresap's War," the frontier feud over the disputed boundary. In 1736 Pennsylvania forces burned him out of his fortified log house and hauled him off a prisoner to Philadelphia.

Greencastle, PA · est. 1954

On July 2, 1863, as the armies clashed just miles away at Gettysburg, young Union cavalry officer Ulric Dahlgren led a bold raid into the square at Greencastle and struck a larger body of Confederate horsemen. His troopers captured couriers carrying dispatches intended for General Lee, seizing papers that offered a glimpse into enemy movements at a decisive moment of the campaign.

Floresville, TX

Will Wright (1868–1942) was a founding officer of Company D of the Texas Rangers, part of a family threaded through the Rangers and the Border Patrol. Before that he served Wilson County as deputy sheriff and then sheriff from 1902 to 1917, raising his family in the jailer's quarters while in office. Remembered as always armed and a stern but gentlemanly leader, he embodied the lawman of the South Texas borderlands.

Uvalde, TX

Maryland native William Benson trained as a civil engineer, then turned to teaching after settling in Brazoria County. During the Civil War he commanded a cavalry regiment as one of the youngest captains in the Confederacy before moving west to Uvalde, where he again took up the schoolroom. Around 1874 he and his wife Felicia settled on this site, living in a log house until their permanent home was finished about 1881, and Benson became a leader in the region's early irrigation efforts until his death in 1922.

Palestine, TX

This marker honors Captain William Kimbro, who came to Texas in 1831 during the Anglo-American colonization of the Mexican province and cast his lot with the revolution that followed. In April 1836 he commanded a company at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive eighteen-minute clash on the coastal prairie where Sam Houston's army routed Santa Anna and won Texas its independence. Kimbro settled in Anderson County, where he lived out his days until his death in 1856.

Liberty, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1802, William M. Logan moved to Liberty in 1832 and, four years later, organized and commanded a company of Texas volunteers at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. He went on to serve as Liberty County's first sheriff before his death in Houston in 1839. His short life spanned the birth of the Republic of Texas.

Jefferson, TX

Arriving about 1840, William Perry helped turn Jefferson into a thriving inland port, running a shipping business and dredging a turning basin so boats could work the Big Cypress Bayou. He grew wealthy in land and shipping, tried his luck in the California gold rush, and served as Jefferson's mayor in 1863–64 before being fatally shot on his way home after midnight in 1869.

Jefferson, TX

Arriving about 1840, William Perry helped make Jefferson a busy inland port, running a shipping business and dredging a turning basin so vessels could navigate the Big Cypress Bayou. He grew wealthy in land and shipping, joined the California gold rush, served as Jefferson's mayor in 1863–64, and was fatally shot walking home after midnight in 1869.

Seabrook, TX

A New York-born steamboat man, William Plunkett Harris came to Texas in 1830 and settled near Harrisburg, the town founded by his brother John, for whom Harris County is named. He plunged into the movement to reform Mexican rule, serving in the conventions that led toward independence and chairing the new government's naval affairs committee. During the Revolution his steamboat Cayuga ferried families fleeing the advancing Mexican army—and in April 1836, moored at Galveston, it served as the temporary capitol of the interim Texas government.

Galveston, TX

William S. Fisher, a Virginia-born soldier, captained a company at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, helping win Texas independence. Six years later he led the ill-fated Mier Expedition, a Texan raid into Mexico that ended in capture and the notorious "black bean" lottery of its prisoners. He died in Galveston in 1845, on the eve of Texas statehood.

Junction, TX

Descended from a line of famed Indian fighters who fought at Bandera Pass in 1841, William Walter Taylor came to Kimble County in 1889 to ranch and rose to county sheriff by 1898, steering the area through the turbulent 1902 land rush. In 1917 Governor W. P. Hobby appointed him a captain of the Texas Rangers, a post he held for a decade at hotspots like Ranger, Brownsville, and Borger. His career spanned the transformation of the Texas frontier into the modern oil-boom era.

Utopia, TX

This marker commemorates William Ware (1800–1853), a Kentucky-born soldier who commanded a company in the Texian army during the fight for independence. His unit served in the 2nd Regiment at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 engagement that secured Texas's break from Mexico. He lived out his years in the Texas Hill Country.

Newburgh, IN

In the summer of 1862, Confederate raiders crossed the Ohio River and seized Newburgh without a fight, bluffing the town into surrender with a small force and fake artillery fashioned from stovepipe and wagon parts. It is often remembered as the first Confederate capture of a town north of the Ohio, a jolt that spread alarm through the southern Indiana border country. The raiders carried off arms and supplies before slipping back across the river.

Sabine Pass, TX

When Texas seceded, the Union blockaded its ports, and the closeness of Sabine Pass to Galveston made it a prize for both sides. In January 1863, Confederate Gen. John B. Magruder ordered an attack on the two Union sentry ships using "cottonclads"—riverboats armored with cotton bales. In a two-hour fight on January 21, forces including Lt. Richard "Dick" Dowling's all-Irish Davis Guard neutralized the frigate Morning Light and forced the Velocity to surrender, capturing both ships, $10,000 in supplies, and 109 prisoners.

Vernonburg, GA

In the spring of 1864, Confederate sailors devised a daring night raid to seize a Union gunboat patrolling the Georgia coast. On a dark, stormy June night, boarding parties rowed with muffled oars up to the USS Water Witch, cut through her nettings, and captured her in a fierce hand-to-hand fight that killed their commander, Lt. Thomas Pelot.

Goldthwaite vicinity, TX

After the Civil War, families settled the Mills County area first called Lookout, and in 1889 A. F. Smith deeded two acres for a public school. When the infant son of the Nixon family died that year, he was buried on the school land, seeding a cemetery that remained when the school later burned and moved. More than 150 graves include veterans from the Civil War through both World Wars, and the burial ground endures as one of the few remnants of the vanished town of Caradan.

Carbon, TX

After a jailbreak destroyed Carbon's 1905 lockup, the town built this squat reinforced-concrete calaboose with a single steel door in 1921. Lacking lights or heat, it was meant only to hold prisoners briefly before transfer, and it often stood empty—used in World War II for scrap-drive collections and, by local custom, to lock up newlyweds on their wedding nights. It survives as a rare example of a building type once common in small Texas towns.

Jim Thorpe, PA · est. 1982

Carbon County, formed in 1843 from Northampton and Monroe, was named outright for the element at the heart of its wealth: the rich anthracite coal beds that fueled America's industrial rise. Its seat began life as Mauch Chunk, a booming coal-shipping town on the Lehigh, and in 1954 took the name Jim Thorpe to honor the great Native American athlete, whose remains were brought there. The renaming stitched a legendary Olympian's memory to a hard-coal town.

Carbon, TX

Organized in 1890 by I. N. Reeves, the Carbon Methodist congregation first met in a Texas Central Railroad section house and a mercantile store before erecting its own sanctuary in 1914. Rebuilt in the 1920s after a fire, the building is a notable example of Craftsman design, with a corner entrance, decorative windows, and bracketed eaves. The congregation disbanded in 1991, leaving the building as a landmark of the railroad-town era.

Carbondale, PA · est. 1947

In 1822 the Wurts brothers of Philadelphia gambled on a hard, hard-to-burn rock that most people still doubted could be sold as fuel: anthracite coal. To reach the buried seams of this Lackawanna Valley town, they opened one of the first true underground mines in the region here in June 1831, and to carry the coal to market they helped pioneer the Delaware & Hudson gravity railroad. The mining boom grew so fast that by 1851 the settlement was chartered as a city — reputedly the first in the anthracite fields.

Carbondale, PA · est. 1947

In the hard-coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania, the Wurts brothers gambled that the black rock underfoot could power a nation, laying out this settlement in 1822 to tap the region's anthracite. Here in June 1831 the first underground mine in the area was opened, a turning point from surface digging to deep shafts that would define Pennsylvania coal for a century. Growth came fast enough that the community won a city charter in 1851 — one of the earliest in the anthracite fields.

Carbondale, PA · est. 1947

In 1822 the Wurts brothers, gambling on the hard, clean-burning anthracite locked in these northeastern Pennsylvania hills, laid out the settlement that would become Carbondale. Nine years later, in June 1831, the region's first underground anthracite mine was opened here, driving shafts into the earth rather than merely stripping coal from the surface. The venture helped spawn the Delaware & Hudson enterprise that hauled the coal to distant markets, and by 1851 the fast-growing town had earned a city charter.

Lockhart, TX

John Madison Cardwell came to Caldwell County as a teenager, served through the Civil War, and returned to Lockhart to open a mercantile store on the courthouse square. In 1917 he commissioned this Classical Revival home with its two-story gallery and eleven-foot ceilings, but died before it was finished; his widow Martha lived here until 1944. The house survives as a graceful emblem of a self-made merchant's rise in a small Texas county seat.

Jacksonville, TX

Cherokee County's first commercial oil field was discovered near Carey Lake and Boggy Creek by the Humble Oil and Refining Company in 1927. A well at the northeast corner of Carey Lake revealed the telling link between oil deposits and underground salt domes, and Humble pioneered recovery methods here, using seamless tubing and oil-gas ratios that became industry standards. Production continued into the 1950s.

Columbus, GA

As Columbus grew into a Chattahoochee River industrial city, this 1902 building housed a succession of food producers — candy makers, syrup refiners, and a hosiery mill — and later the Sol Loeb wholesale grocery firm. Loeb was among the first customers of the Wrigley chewing-gum company and a founding member of the local telephone exchange.

Boyertown, PA · est. 1991

A 1914 West Point graduate who flew over France in World War I, Carl A. 'Tooey' Spaatz became one of America's foremost air commanders. In World War II he led the U.S. Eighth Air Force and then the Strategic Air Forces in Europe, directing the bombing campaign that supported the invasion and liberation of the continent, and in 1947 he became the first Chief of Staff of the newly independent U.S. Air Force. Boyertown was his home.

Galveston, TX

Two years after the 1900 hurricane leveled much of Galveston, German immigrant Carl Christian Biehl arrived and built a shipping firm that served the island in the years before Houston's port rose to prominence. In 1915 he bought a storm-damaged property at 1416 Broadway and replaced it with a brick-and-concrete Classical Revival home, designed by architect Anton F. Korn, Jr. and engineered to withstand the Gulf's storms. The house stayed in the Biehl family for nearly a century, cared for at the last by their daughter, the artist Margaret 'Sis' Biehl.

Williamsport, PA · est. 1995

In 1938 Carl Stotz dreamed up a scaled-down, organized baseball league for boys, and the next year just three teams played twenty-four games on Williamsport fields. On this site Stotz set the shortened base paths and field distances suited to pre-teen players—dimensions still used worldwide. The first dozen Little League World Series were played here between 1947 and 1958, as the league exploded from sixty teams into thousands across many nations.

Miami Beach, FL · est. 2018

A 1961 exile from Cuba, Alfredo Gonzalez, Sr. worked several jobs before opening a small Cuban luncheonette in Miami Beach and, later, the beloved David's Café, which he ran for decades. His success let him support the city's churches and champion its elderly, and he restored several historic properties, including a bungalow built by Carl Fisher in 1914. In 2018 the City of Miami Beach dedicated this marker to honor his family's story.

Miami Beach, FL · est. 2020

Carl Fisher laid out Lincoln Road in 1914 as Miami Beach's "Fifth Avenue of the South," and it flourished as a fashionable shopping street. When traffic and competition threatened it in the late 1950s, merchants hired architect Morris Lapidus, who in 1960 reimagined it as a landscaped pedestrian promenade with his signature "piano key" paving, planting beds, and follies. It became one of the first pedestrianized thoroughfares in the United States and the oldest pedestrian mall in Florida.

Pend Oreille County, WA

This gravesite marks Carl Harvey, remembered as a beloved fixture of the community along the Pend Oreille River. Nineteenth-century gold seekers were the first non-Indians to settle the area, and while most drifted off as anonymously as they had come, a few, like Harvey, stayed to take up homesteads and put down roots.

New Braunfels, TX

Born in Prussia in 1821, Carl Heinrich Guenther immigrated to Texas in 1845 and became a pillar of New Braunfels — one of its first public school teachers and a leader of the German singing societies. In 1854 he presided over a statewide Saengerfest that adopted an anti-slavery platform, an unpopular stance in Texas; though he shared those leanings, he later joined the Confederacy as a captain. After his death his widow Margarethe carried on the family brewing business.

Arlington, OR · est. 1981

Arlington, a small town on the Columbia River in Oregon's dry wheat country, put up this plaque in 1981 to honor its most famous native son, Carl "Doc" Severinsen. Born here in 1927 and a 1945 graduate of the local high school, he went on to become one of America's most celebrated trumpeters, best known as the flamboyant, dazzlingly dressed bandleader of the NBC Orchestra on Johnny Carson's "The Tonight Show." A marker like this is small-town pride cast in metal: proof that a world-class talent can begin on a quiet Main Street far from any spotlight.

Steamboat Springs, CO

Carl Howelson (1877–1955), a Norwegian stonemason known as the "Flying Norseman," emigrated to America and thrilled circus crowds with daring "ski sailing" leaps for Barnum & Bailey before settling in Steamboat Springs. There he introduced ski jumping and Nordic competition, earning the title "Father of Skiing in Colorado." His statue honors the immigrant showman who helped turn a mountain town into a winter-sports mecca.

Pacifica, CA

In November 1769, the Spanish land expedition led by Gaspar de Portolá crested the hills above present-day Pacifica and became the first Europeans to sight San Francisco Bay — a discovery that would reshape Spain's colonial plans for Alta California. This marker honors Carl Patrick McCarthy, who devoted the last fifteen years of his life to winning national recognition for that Discovery Site, personally guiding thousands of visitors and sharing the expedition's story until his death in 1981. His meticulously counted 11,863 visitors and 9,343 slide-show attendees testify to one man's determination to keep a pivotal moment of American exploration from being forgotten.

Flat Rock, NC

Carl Sandburg, the celebrated "Poet of the People," spent the last two decades of his life, from 1945 to 1967, at Connemara, a farm just west of this marker. There he wrote and kept goats while cementing a reputation built on his poetry, his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Abraham Lincoln, and his championing of ordinary Americans. His home is now preserved as a national historic site.

Orange County, NC

Carl T. Durham was a small-town druggist who carried his practical knowledge to the halls of Congress, serving from 1939 to 1961. He became an influential voice on pharmaceutical legislation and chaired the powerful Joint Committee on Atomic Energy at the dawn of the nuclear age. His career linked Main Street medicine to the frontiers of atomic policy.

Schulenburg, TX

Born near Muldoon in 1887 to Swedish immigrant parents, Carl T. Morene came to Schulenburg in 1928 as a utility manager and became the town's beloved volunteer music teacher. When the school could no longer pay for music in 1933, he taught students after his workday, bought instruments with his own money, and during World War II spent his gas rations to get students to performances. Though he lacked a high school diploma, he earned a teaching certificate, led award-winning ensembles, and wrote the school's official song before his death in 1948.

San Antonio, TX

Carl Wilhelm August Groos left Germany for Texas in 1848 and became a founder of the Groos National Bank in San Antonio. In 1880 he built this limestone Victorian home, designed by the noted architect Alfred Giles, where his descendants lived until 1948. The San Antonio Girl Scouts acquired the house in 1957.

Carlin, NV

Carlin, the oldest town in Elko County, was laid out by the Central Pacific in December 1868 at a meadow long favored as a stopping place by emigrant wagon trains, where crews built a roundhouse and shops and named the town for Union general William Passmore Carlin. Through the 1870s and 1880s it vied with neighboring towns for the freighting business of the surrounding mining camps, and for decades it served as an important icing station for refrigerator cars. In 1965 it became the shipping point for the nearby Carlin gold mine, one of the largest in the country, and remains a working railroad division point.

Elko County, NV

Carlin Canyon opened to European Americans in December 1828 when Peter Skene Ogden's Hudson's Bay Company brigade passed through; one of his trappers, Joseph Paul, died and became the first emigrant buried in the Humboldt country. Frémont's men struggled through in 1845, and the doomed Reed-Donner Party glimpsed it in 1846. The Central Pacific's Chinese crews pushed the transcontinental railroad through in 1868, and later the Western Pacific followed in 1907. In 1913 the first auto road took over the old rail grade—becoming the Victory Highway, U.S. 40, and at last Interstate 80.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1947

Founded in 1751 as the seat of Cumberland County, Carlisle grew into one of Pennsylvania's key frontier towns, a staging point for movement into the interior. Its people supplied a contingent for the first regiment of the Continental Army in 1775, and in 1794 the federal march against the Whiskey Rebels set out from here. The town sat at the crossroads of the young nation's military and westward ambitions.

North Middleton Township, PA · est. 1947

Founded in 1751 as the seat of Cumberland County, Carlisle grew into one of Pennsylvania's key frontier towns, a staging point for movement into the interior. Its people supplied a contingent for the first regiment of the Continental Army in 1775, and in 1794 the federal march against the Whiskey Rebels set out from here. The town sat at the crossroads of the young nation's military and westward ambitions.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1947

Founded in 1751 as the seat of Cumberland County, Carlisle grew into one of Pennsylvania's key frontier towns, a staging point for movement into the interior. Its people supplied a contingent for the first regiment of the Continental Army in 1775, and in 1794 the federal march against the Whiskey Rebels set out from here. The town sat at the crossroads of the young nation's military and westward ambitions.