Search Markers

Donora, PA · est. 1997

Built in 1916–17 to house workers at American Steel & Wire's Donora plant, Cement City was a planned community of 100 units in 80 Prairie-style buildings. Its buildings were poured in place from concrete — an experimental construction method meant to deliver durable, affordable company housing quickly. One of several such concrete communities across the country in that era, it endured to shelter generations of steelworkers' families and is now a National Register Historic District.

San Marcos, TX

Cementerio del Rio lies on the San Marcos River near the site of the early Spanish settlement of San Marcos de Neve, on land deeded in 1893 for a church, school, and Mexican American burials. Most of its surviving stones date from 1910 to 1920, reflecting the wave of Mexican immigrants who arrived around the Mexican Revolution, and include the graves of four members of the Woodmen of the World. Eclipsed by a newer cemetery and nearly forgotten until the 1990s, it endures as a record of Hispanic San Marcos.

Del Rio, TX

Recognizing that Del Rio's Mexican Colony had no burial ground of its own, early land developer Paula Losoya Taylor Rivers donated four acres for a cemetery in 1884. A cross set atop the hill gave it its name, Loma de la Cruz, and among those laid to rest here are three former U.S. Army Indian Scouts and the first pastor of the town's Mexican American Methodist church. The last burial took place in 1933, and a cemetery association has since restored and maintained the grounds.

Austin, TX

Tradition holds that in 1912 a traveling family buried a child, María de la Luz, on this ground, and later that year three men purchased the land for use as a Mexican cemetery. A grass fire in the 1940s destroyed many of its wooden crosses and markers, and further graves were lost to development in the 1970s as Austin grew out to surround the once-rural site. What remains is a quiet link to the area's Hispanic community.

Lockhart, TX

Also known as the Mexican Cemetery, this burial ground has served Lockhart's Mexican American community since about 1900, with its earliest dated grave, that of settler Severiano Sánchez, marked 1901. Community leaders, business owners, laborers, ranchers, teachers, and veterans dating to World War I rest here, many beneath the tree-shaped Woodmen of the World monuments that gave it another local name. In 2005 descendants formed an association to restore the grounds and renamed it for Tejano statesman and Texas Declaration signer José Antonio Navarro.

Aransas Pass, TX

By local tradition George Lewis gave half an acre here in the late 1800s to the area's Hispanic families for a cemetery, on the condition that he be buried at its center. Hand-carved stones mark graves reaching back into the 19th century, among them children lost to a 1940 influenza epidemic and veterans of many wars, though wind and rain have worn many illegible. A statue of St. Anthony holding the Christ child, carried across the border from Mexico by a local priest, still watches over the grounds.

San Marcos, TX

Built around 1890 on land the Dixon family sold to the San Marcos Cemetery Association in 1876, this carpenter Gothic chapel has hosted funerals and memorial services for generations. Its cruciform plan, board-and-batten walls, and Gothic-arched openings make it a fine example of vernacular church architecture. Among those remembered here are veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I.

Redwater, TX

Founded in 1840 by Republic of Texas pioneers Charles Moores and his wife Mary Harrison, this five-acre burial ground served the vanished town of Mooresville and its all-faiths chapel, where circuit-riding preachers once held services. About 100 graves lie here, including men who held Republic of Texas land grants, three sons who became Texas Rangers, and children of American Revolution soldiers. Restored in 1967, the cemetery is now the only trace of the community that once stood nearby.

Floresville, TX

This cemetery predates the church built in 1732 by Canary Island colonists who, led by Juan Leal Goras, arrived in 1731 to farm and raise stock in Spanish Texas. Their settlement, the villa of San Fernando, became the first organized municipality in Texas, and among the unmarked graves here lies the flamboyant Dona Maria Cavillo. The site is now owned by the county.

Gonzales, TX

Set aside in 1825 as part of the original town plan of Gonzales, this block became the resting place of some of the community's earliest residents. Among them lie Nicholas Peck, who fought at San Jacinto, and Daniel Davis, a veteran of the ill-fated Mier Expedition, alongside his wife Elizabeth. The square gathers the founders and soldiers of a town that stood at the center of Texas's fight for independence.

Kaneohe, HI

This cenotaph carries the words of Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwoʻole (1959–1997) himself, hope for the survival and flourishing of his people echoing his song "Facing Future." The Hawaiian singer's blend of gentle voice and cultural pride made him an enduring symbol of the islands after his early death, and his best-selling album remains the most popular Hawaiian record ever made.

Lampasas, TX

Founded in 1883 on the centennial of American Methodism, Centenary College was Lampasas's first coeducational college, opening with 174 students and a 36-hour Christmas break. After the school closed in the 1890s, the Dominican Sisters reopened the buildings in 1900 as St. Dominic's Villa, a Catholic boarding academy for girls that former students remembered fondly. Anti-Catholic agitation by the Ku Klux Klan helped force the villa to close in 1925.

Toledo, OH

This grove was planted on April 18, 1972, by one hundred local organizations, clubs, and businesses to mark the 100th anniversary of Arbor Day. Arbor Day began in Nebraska in 1872 as a day set aside for planting trees, and it spread across the country through schools and civic groups as a celebration of conservation and stewardship. A century later, Toledo's community groups gathered to plant this Centennial Grove in that same spirit.

Corpus Christi, TX

Forbes Britton, a Virginian and West Point graduate, first came to Corpus Christi as an army captain during the Mexican War of 1846 and returned as a civilian to build this classical revival house in 1849–50. He ranched, ran a shipping firm, helped fight for a deep-water channel, and served in the Texas senate, even carrying Governor Sam Houston's word to President Buchanan in 1860. During the Civil War the house served as a hospital for Confederate and then federal forces, and it is recognized as the oldest surviving structure in the city.

Corpus Christi, TX

Built in 1938 to 1940 as part of Texas's celebration of a century of independence, the Centennial Memorial Museum rose in Corpus Christi's South Bluff Park with money from the state, the city, and local citizens. Its cramped 60-by-40-foot hall held a three-in-one collection of history, art, and science, from cattle brands and ship models to geology and a growing gallery of art. After World War II the history and science exhibits moved on and the building became the Centennial Art Museum.

Commerce, TX

Two early congregations, Lebanon and Mt. Zion, served the first settlers around Commerce before local Methodists began gathering in a schoolhouse on Pecan Street. In 1881, four years before the town was incorporated, they joined the Lebanon fellowship in a Union Church, then built their own sanctuary in 1890, followed by larger buildings in 1907 and 1968. For more than a century the church has been a force in the town's growth.

Valera, TX

In 1936 four rural communities—Valera, Bowen, White Chapel and New Central—pooled their resources to build a consolidated high school, naming it Centennial to mark Texas's hundredth year of independence. After fire destroyed the first frame building in 1940, WPA grants funded a new schoolhouse, gymnasium and teacherage, and successive consolidations carried the campus through service as an elementary school before it finally became a community recreation lodge.

Springfield, OR

This viewpoint was built in 1985 to mark the centennial of Springfield, Oregon, which took shape as a Willamette Valley town in 1885. Overlooking the community it celebrates, it commemorates a full century of local growth from frontier settlement to modern city.

Twitty, TX

In 1906, D. M. Pollard bought Panhandle land and lived in a dugout, and near his home the Center School opened in 1909, doubling as a place of worship. The Center Cemetery was dedicated just to the west, its oldest marked grave dating to March 1909, with 34 marked graves and signs of many unmarked ones. Among those interred are a Civil War veteran and a World War II veteran, and Pollard's descendants still own the surrounding land.

Star, TX

As settlers pushed into the rolling country of central Texas after the Civil War, a former blacksmith and Texas Revolution veteran, Noah Turner Byars, gathered a congregation here in 1875 and helped knit it into a new association of frontier Baptist churches. Known first for nearby Bennett Creek, it took the Center City name in a 1901 deed, held summer revivals under a brush arbor into the 1940s, and rebuilt after a 1946 windstorm flattened the frame sanctuary. For generations it doubled as a shared community space and a training ground for deacons and ministers who went on to larger pulpits.

Star, TX

The Center City Cemetery began in 1874 with the burials of a settler's adult and infant daughters, a poignant marker of how fragile frontier life could be in the ranching country of central Texas. In 1905 a local judge bought the ground to serve as a community graveyard, and by the mid-20th century neighbors had organized a committee and endowed a maintenance fund to keep it up. More than 500 graves here hold many of the area's earliest settlers.

Star, TX

Settled in 1854 by the Jenkins and Morris families, this Mills County community was first called "Hughes Store" for the couple who opened a shop here in the 1870s. Hopeful founders platted a townsite in 1876 and dreamed of the railroad and the county seat, gathering beneath an ancient live oak long held by tradition to mark the geographic center of Texas. Renamed Center City, the town bustled with stores until the railroad passed it by in 1885; its post office lingered only until 1920.

Star, TX

In the young settlement of Center City—first known as Hughes Store—a circuit-riding preacher brought Methodism to the area in the early 1870s, and charter members organized a church in 1878. The congregation first gathered in the Masonic lodge before building its own home in 1901, then a new building in 1952. Through mission work and youth ministry, it has remained a spiritual anchor of this small central Texas community.

Cookville, TX

First known as the Yancey Cemetery, this burial ground began in the mid-1860s on land donated by David Yancey, Sr., whose party had traveled from Tennessee to Texas—an orphaned infant from that group being the first laid to rest here. Many of the earliest graves are marked only with rough fieldstones. Renamed Center Grove in 1900 for the nearby Church of Christ, it holds veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars.

Houston County, TX

The scattered families of communities like Corinth, Old Zion, and Randolph built their lives around farming and church, worshiping together at a Methodist building in Corinth that served as both church and school until fire took it in 1881. In 1883 George W. and Loucetta Julian donated three acres here for a new church, and because of its central location it took the name Center Hill. A community school met in the building until it merged into the Kennard district in 1935, but area families still tend the old Corinth cemetery.

Lovelady, TX

The Ellis family came from Mississippi to Texas in 1839, part of the wave of southern settlers pushing into the region in the years before statehood. Charles McHenry Ellis raised a large family here, and in 1876 his son deeded land, including the family burial ground, for use as a church and cemetery. Among its early graves is that of Elizabeth Lovelady Ellis, alongside unmarked graves believed to be those of enslaved people and, later, military veterans.

Cotton Center, TX

West of Hale Center, the Center Plains community grew up around a cemetery and schoolhouse on land donated by homesteader William S. Bolivar in 1890, with a post office opening in 1902. When a proposed railroad bypassed the area in 1907 and the line was abandoned by 1910, the nearby boomtown of Norfleet collapsed and the school moved back. Today only the cemetery remains of what was once the hub of a large rural district.

Center Point, TX

The land around Center Point drew its first settlers in the 1850s, including Dr. Charles Ganahl, who named the early community Zanzenberg after his Austrian hometown before it became Center Point in 1872. That same year land was set aside here for a church and cemetery, which grew over the decades to more than five acres and some 1,452 graves. Among the pioneers and community leaders buried here rest 32 Texas Rangers, an unusually dense gathering of the frontier lawmen.

Saint Jo, TX

Begun in the late 1800s as Fairview Graveyard on a hilltop that also held a Baptist church and school, this cemetery served as a gathering place for the surrounding community. The Armstrong and Dean families deeded the land in 1893, though the earliest marked grave—that of three-year-old Xanthippa Rountree—dates to 1875, and many unmarked graves may be older still. Pioneer settlers, young children, and Civil War veterans rest here together.

Center Point, TX

Founded in 1879 by traveling Kentucky minister Green L. Surber, this Disciples of Christ congregation grew alongside the frontier settlement of Center Point during a broader campaign to strengthen faith across a growing Texas. After the first building burned in 1888, the community rebuilt in 1892 with materials hauled from San Antonio and Kerrville. In the 1920s its members helped establish the Guadalupe River retreat known as Camp Christian, later shared with a Jewish youth camp and other groups.

Greenville, TX

Born amid the violence and upheaval of Reconstruction, Center Point Christian Church grew from the survival of formerly enslaved families who gathered in the thickets of Hunt County on land no one else wanted. Charlie Haley led early religious meetings until, in 1879, he and the ordained elder Andrew Jackson Hurdle organized a congregation in the middle of those thickets, with Hurdle as its first minister. The church became a pillar of its freedom colony — championing education, jobs, and homes, and even helping staff a Black theological and industrial college — and made a point of building its meeting houses debt-free.

Pittsburg, TX

In 1865, newly freed African Americans founded Center Point, building it into a self-reliant community anchored by the Center Point Baptist Church (1873) and the Industrial Union (chartered 1889), a cooperative that helped members buy farms and run a brick kiln, sawmill, and cotton gin. Its school, led by Mr. and Mrs. L. B. Cash, became a notable vocational campus whose 14 acres of buildings were largely erected by the students themselves, complete with a cooperative boarding plan. The school consolidated with Pittsburg in 1950.

Center Point, TX

Schooling in the Center Point area began in shacks and homes in the 1870s, moving through an academy and a plank building before Dr. J. C. Nowlin donated land in 1884. In 1910 renowned San Antonio architect Alfred Giles designed a handsome two-story limestone schoolhouse, which opened its doors in 1911. Remarkably, students still learn in that same building more than a century later.

Pittsburg, TX

Center Point grew up as a Freedmen's community in the years just after emancipation, settled by the Willie Johnson family and other formerly enslaved people around 1865–70. In 1899 G. W. Goulsby opened its first school in a single room, and over the following decades it expanded—aided by the Julius Rosenwald Fund—into a full campus with a library, dormitories, cafeteria, and gymnasium, where students ran a working farm and cannery. The school served the community until it closed in 1952.

Center Point, TX

Methodism reached this Hill Country spot before the town did: in 1852 Mrs. Henrietta Rees arrived from Tennessee and arranged for circuit riders to preach in the area. A congregation bought land in 1872, built an early church house around 1876, and after a storm toppled one building under construction, the men of the congregation completed the present structure in 1911. The church's story runs parallel to the founding of Center Point itself.

Boston, MA

Boston's Central Artery/Tunnel Project — the "Big Dig" — buried the city's elevated highway underground and reconnected neighborhoods that concrete had severed. Begun in 1987 and running for well over a decade, it was one of the largest and most complex public-works projects in American history. This plaque honors the more than 15,000 people who designed, managed, and built it, and especially those who died in its construction.

Burkburnett, TX

In 1924 fourteen people met at Bradley's Corner Community Center to organize a missionary Baptist church, soon relocating to the nearby oil boomtown of Thrift and building with donated lumber. As members moved into Burkburnett, the congregation carried its building into town in 1952 and, after further growth, renamed itself Central Baptist Church in 1961 to reflect its new role as a city church. It continues to serve the Burkburnett community.

Livingston, TX

The Baptists of Livingston founded Ariel Baptist Church around 1852, and the congregation has carried several names since — Livingston Baptist after the Civil War, and Central Baptist from 1917. In 1887 two women, Susan Hunt and Patience Watts, helped buy the church its first lot, and its first permanent building rose the next year. Across the decades the church built ministries in missions, education, publishing, and eventually radio and television.

Groves, TX

Central Baptist Church was organized in 1912 when fifteen members left Port Arthur's First Baptist Church, meeting first in the Singleton home and soon building a wood-frame church. Over the following century it moved and grew through the Gulf Coast boom region, pioneering the area's first Vacation Bible School in 1925, broadcasting services on radio and television, and opening its doors to volunteers after Hurricanes Rita and Ike.

Carthage, TX

Central Baptist Church was organized with seventeen members on September 26, 1901, under the Rev. H. E. Harris, drawing on founding families like the Harrises, Butlers, and Comers. The young congregation quickly formed a Sunday school and Ladies Aid Society, worshiped in rented rooms until its first sanctuary opened in 1911, and grew through the mid-century to build ever-larger buildings. Over time it launched a mission that became Southside Baptist Church and sustained programs of education, music, and outreach.

Jacksonville, TX

In 1906, twenty-two charter members met at the Rev. E.G. Musgrove's home to organize Central Baptist Church, named for its location at the heart of Jacksonville. A revival led by the famed preacher George W. Truett quickly swelled its ranks, and though fire gutted its new building in 1919, members voted to rebuild without outside aid and did so within five years. Over the following decades the congregation added educational space, sponsored mission churches and a Boy Scout troop, and eventually relocated in 2003.

San Antonio, TX

When San Antonio had no boys' school at all, Bishop Jean-Marie Odin recruited teachers from the Society of Mary in France, and on August 26, 1852, they opened a school in two rooms over a livery stable near San Fernando Cathedral. Relocated to a riverside campus as "St. Mary's Institute" in 1853, it finished the year with a hundred pupils of Anglo, French, German, and Mexican descent, day students and ranch-boy boarders alike. From that pioneer effort grew St. Mary's University, and in 1932 Central Catholic High School became the successor, now the oldest and largest private boys' school in Texas.

San Antonio, TX

Evangelist David Pennington organized this Disciples of Christ congregation in 1883 and built its first sanctuary here in 1884, just as the arrival of the railroad set San Antonio booming. The church grew with the city, helped found the Mexican Christian Institute to minister to refugees fleeing Mexico's revolution, and organized a Spanish-speaking Disciples congregation. A pioneer of religious broadcasting, it aired the city's first radio worship in 1924 and its first televised services in 1954.

Austin, TX

In 1847, only eight years after Austin was platted, ten members of the Disciples of Christ gathered to organize this congregation on the young Texas capital's frontier. By 1852 they were worshiping in a local schoolhouse, later building at Eighth and Colorado before moving to this site in 1929, and weathering a theological split in 1888 that left the church led by its laity until a pastor was appointed in 1896. As one of Austin's oldest congregations, Central Christian took its current name early in the 20th century and helped establish several other churches in the growing city.

Texarkana, TX

Organized in 1883 under the Rev. J. C. Mason, the Central Christian Church congregation raised this Tudor Gothic Revival sanctuary in 1932 under the supervision of architect and church member E. C. Seibert, who set the brick in a distinctive decorative pattern. Cast-stone details, pointed-arch windows, and a pointed-arch arcade linking sanctuary and education wing mark its careful design. It remains a landmark of Texarkana's ecclesiastical architecture.

Weatherford, TX

In 1894 sixty-five former members of Weatherford's First Christian Church broke away to found this Disciples of Christ congregation, dedicating a stone church near the courthouse square that May. It served for seventy years, and when a neighboring congregation disbanded in the 1950s, Central became the only Disciples of Christ church in Parker County. A new sanctuary followed in 1964, while the original building became a museum.

Sherman, TX

This Sherman congregation dates to the late 1850s, when pioneer minister Benjamin Franklin Hall arrived to preach and organize a church, gathering worshippers in a brush arbor and a Masonic-hall meeting house. A first sanctuary rose in 1875, and after acquiring a new site in 1895 the congregation built a larger church in 1905. It has served the people of Sherman for well over a century.

Nocona, TX

Built in 1894, six years after the Rev. M. F. Smith gathered the congregation, this sanctuary rose as one of the first Gothic Revival churches on the North Texas frontier. Its steeply pitched gables, pointed lancet windows, and fine interior woodwork brought a touch of old-world architecture to a young prairie town. The building earned recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1962.

Greenville, TX

Organized in 1879 as First Christian Church under an Alabama minister, this Disciples of Christ congregation built its present sanctuary in 1898–99 and took the name Central Christian Church. Costing $23,000, the robust Gothic Revival building — with its towers, art-glass windows, and ornate brickwork — is the oldest church structure still standing in Greenville and was carefully restored beginning in 1986.

Hillsboro, TX

Disciples of Christ in Hillsboro first gathered for worship in 1881 and formally chartered their fellowship in 1887 with 35 members, meeting in homes, the courthouse, and the schoolhouse before building a sanctuary. A fire destroyed that first structure in 1892, and the members rebuilt on this site. Long active in missions and benevolent work, the congregation counted missionaries Nona Boegman and the Rev. Allan Eubank among its members.

Winnsboro, TX

Organized in 1893 with twenty charter members, the Central Christian Church of Winnsboro built this sanctuary the following year as the Disciples of Christ movement spread across rural East Texas. A tornado toppled its original steeples in 1895, and a 1914 remodeling gave the building the prairie and classical revival lines it carries today. Its rolls long included many of the area's civic leaders.

Comanche, TX

The roots of this Comanche County congregation reach back to 1855, when Dr. G. W. Montgomery arrived from Mississippi and held frontier religious services in a log cabin that doubled as a church and school. The Central Christian Church itself was organized in 1894 by a visiting evangelist and 31 charter members, sharing services with the Presbyterians in the small-town Texas fashion of the Gilded Age. Its first pastor, Addison Clark, went on to lead Texas Christian University, and the congregation's women were the backbone that retired the debts on two church buildings.

Lampasas, TX

This Disciples of Christ congregation organized as early as 1879, with V. R. Stapp as its first full-time pastor. In 1905 it replaced an earlier sanctuary with the present building of hand-quarried native limestone, whose Romanesque-revival masonry and corner tower still stand out. The stonework reflects the craftsmanship of central Texas's limestone country.

Waco, TX

As early as 1867 a handful of Disciples of Christ believers in Waco met to worship in one another's homes, and in 1870 they formally organized a congregation under Rev. B.F. Hall — who came at the invitation of Phoebe Moore and Sallie Skidmore. Early converts were baptized in the Brazos River, a Sunday school followed in 1874, and a church building rose the next year.

Pollok, TX

Facing the chronic underfunding of tiny rural schoolhouses, five small East Texas schools around Pollok merged in 1929 to form the Central Consolidated Common School District. A new brick building opened that September to about 200 students, with nine teachers and eight in the first graduating class. Over decades it grew into the community's hub, adding gyms, a cafetorium, and technology and agricultural buildings before becoming an independent district in 1955.

Beaumont, TX

When Beaumont's fire department, organized in 1881, needed a proper home, the city built this station in 1927 on ground that had already held two earlier fire houses. The architects Livesay and Wiedemann dressed it in the Spanish Renaissance Revival fashion then in vogue, with ornamental red brickwork and geometric tile set beneath the eaves. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1983.

Philadelphia, PA

By the turn of the 20th century, Philadelphia's Free Library — chartered in 1891 during the great American public-library movement — had outgrown its quarters, and the city set out to give it a grand permanent home on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. When the Central Library opened its doors in 1927, it did so in the stately Beaux Arts manner then favored for civic temples of learning, its design carried out by the prominent Philadelphia firm of Horace Trumbauer alongside Julian Francis Abele, one of the first formally trained African American architects in the nation. The building embodied the era's conviction that a free, monumental library was a cornerstone of a democratic city.

Dallas, TX

In 1844 the Congress of the Republic of Texas commissioned a road to link the U.S. military highway crossing on the Red River with the Trinity River in Dallas County. Surveyed by George W. Stell, the 130-mile Central National Road ran thirty feet wide through five counties and met the Preston Road, which Col. William G. Cooke's soldiers had opened in 1840 toward Austin. Together these routes joined north and south Texas, easing the way for pioneers to settle the young republic.

Ladonia, TX

Authorized in 1844, the Central National Road was meant to link the young Republic of Texas with the United States, running from Dallas toward a Red River crossing. Surveyor George W. Stell laid out a thirty-foot roadway cleared of stumps, and a small trace of it could still be seen near Lyday Cemetery in the 1970s.

Paris, TX

Created by the Republic of Texas in 1844, the Central National Road was conceived as a military highway to link with a U.S. Army road north of the Red River and to knit the young republic together. Major George W. Stell surveyed its 130-mile route from the mouth of Elm Fork on the Trinity to the Kiomatia Crossing, running through the newly founded town of Paris and past John Neely Bryan's cabin, the seed of Dallas. Builders earned 160-acre land grants for each mile cleared to a road 30 feet wide.