Search Markers

Snyder, TX

Deep Creek was once a spring-fed tributary of the Colorado River that both began and ended within Scurry County. In the 1870s it watered buffalo hunters camped in hide-covered dugouts, and W. H. "Pete" Snyder's trading post on its bank grew into the town of Snyder. Though official surveyors named it Culvers Creek, the famed hunters John and J. Wright Mooar called it Deep Creek in 1876 and that name stuck, as the stream became the stage for the young town's picnics, horse races, and baptisms.

Channing, TX

Channing rose in 1890 as the headquarters and supply point for the vast XIT Ranch, one of the largest ranches in the world. The Methodist congregation organized here is said to have been the first Methodist church north of the Canadian River, and its earliest members read like a roster of the frontier town — the XIT's ranch manager and his family, a hotel keeper, a plumber, and Hereford cattle breeders. Trustees bought this site in 1901 and finished the building the next year.

Athens, GA

Cast in 1835 by George Holbrook, a New England bell founder from Medway, Massachusetts, this bell became the timekeeper and public voice of the young University of Georgia — the nation's first state-chartered university, then only a few decades old. For generations it summoned students to lectures, chapel services, and moments of celebration, its ringing woven into the daily rhythm of campus life in Athens. How exactly it made its way south from a Massachusetts foundry to the Georgia frontier remains a genuine campus mystery, the kind of gap in the record that a good marker invites you to wonder about.

Fort Worth, TX

This burial ground began with the mid-1850s settlement of the Fanning and Raibourn pioneer families, and, by family tradition, with the 1856 grave of Eliny Raibourn on land her brother-in-law John Fanning then donated as a cemetery. A one-room school — Horse Creek or Lone Star School — was the area's only communal building until a chapel rose beside the graves, giving the place its later name of Sweet Chapel. As families moved on and the chapel vanished, it became known simply as Chapel Cemetery, tended for years by neighbors before a cemetery association took it in hand in 1985.

San Augustine, TX

Chapel Hill Cemetery near San Augustine holds burials reaching back to 1838, beginning with a veteran of the American Revolution whose widow is said to have given land along the old El Camino Real for a public graveyard. Its oldest graves face north-south beneath slabs of hewn native rock, and among those interred is a Cumberland Presbyterian minister who served as chaplain and courier for Sam Houston during the Texas Revolution. The surrounding community lived and worshipped here through the cotton era until World War II drew its people to combat and coastal shipyards.

Fort Worth, TX

The Chapin School served the rural Mary's Creek community west of Fort Worth from a humble log cabin begun in the late 1870s on land donated by pioneer Ivory H. Chapin. Over the decades it grew and relocated more than once — from log cabin to frame house to a rock building — before the Fort Worth school district absorbed its common school district in 1961. It kept teaching local children until it finally closed in 1968.

Apalachicola, FL

This Apalachicola garden preserves the memory of Dr. Chapman, a physician and self-taught botanist who lived in the little Gulf Coast town for much of the 19th century. From this remote outpost he catalogued the plant life of the American South, producing a landmark flora that earned him recognition well beyond Florida. His careful fieldwork made a small port town an unlikely center of botanical science.

Chapman Ranch, TX

In 1919 Philip Chapman bought nearly 35,000 acres of the King Ranch's Laureles Division and sent his son to carve it into tenant farms. The venture grew into a company town with schools, a hospital, and its own power plant, and by the late 1920s Chapman Ranch was billed as the world's largest mechanized farm, testing new equipment and breeding a prized long-staple cotton. The town faded by 1941, though the family still ranches the land.

Cherokee, TX

Chappel, one of San Saba County's earliest settlements, dates to the 1850s, and this burial ground grew from land donated by Joab B. Harrell, the county's first Chief Justice, who had buried his own son here around 1871 before formally deeding the tract to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1886. A church, school, and store once made Chappel a community center. The graves chronicle the pioneers and families who settled this frontier corner of Central Texas.

Chappell Hill, TX

Founded in 1847 and named for early settler Robert Chappell, this Washington County town quickly became an education center, home to the Chappell Hill Male and Female Institute and Soule University. When war came in 1861, its male students marched off to the Confederate army, and the town served as a C.S.A. quartermaster depot.

Chappell Hill, TX

The Chappell Hill Male and Female Institute, founded in 1850, was a pioneer of higher learning in early Texas and came under Methodist control after 1854. Its women's branch was chartered separately in 1856, and the campus was rebuilt after an 1871 fire. This bell, cast in 1873, is the sole surviving relic of the college, which closed its doors in 1912.

Chappell Hill, TX

This burial ground opened in 1853 as a Masonic cemetery, with Chappell Hill's founder Jacob Haller its first interment. It became the resting place of the pioneers, soldiers, and statesmen who shaped early Texas, tended for over a century by Hubert Lodge No. 67 until a cemetery association formed in 1965.

Charleston, SC

In 19th-century Charleston, free and enslaved African Americans formed mutual-aid and benevolent societies—groups with names like "Charity" and "Benevolence"—that pooled members' dues to care for the sick, support widows and orphans, and guarantee every member a dignified burial. Excluded from many white institutions, these societies often maintained their own cemeteries, making the burial ground both a place of mourning and a testament to community self-reliance. This memorial marks one such African-American cemetery, honoring the societies whose charitable work sustained Charleston's Black community across slavery, the Civil War, and the generations that followed.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2021

After a standout, All-American career at Pittsburgh's Duquesne University, Charles "Chuck" Cooper made history on April 25, 1950, when the Boston Celtics made him the first African American ever drafted by an NBA team. His selection cracked open the color line in professional basketball. Cooper's courage and skill helped pave the way for the integration of a league that would become a global stage.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2024

For half a century Charles "Teenie" Harris turned his camera on Pittsburgh's African American community, amassing more than 80,000 images of everyday life, work, and celebration. Many ran in The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's most influential Black newspapers, and his lens captured the jazz greats who filled the clubs of the Hill District. He developed this vast record in a darkroom in the basement of his own home on Mulford Street.

Camp Wood, TX

Before he was the most famous man in the world, Charles Lindbergh was a barnstormer called "Slim" who flew a surplus World War I biplane to Texas so he could say he'd flown there. In March 1924 he landed near Camp Wood and, attempting to take off the next day, harmlessly crashed into Warren Puett's store—an incident the townsfolk forgave and remembered fondly. Weeks later he entered Army flight training at San Antonio, and in 1927 made his history-making solo flight from New York to Paris.

Portland, OR

This memorial carries the words of Charles A. Sprague, an Oregon newspaper editor and governor of the early 1940s who was widely admired for his principled essays on democracy and liberty. Writing and governing during the anxious years surrounding the Second World War, he championed individual freedom at a moment when that idea felt very much at stake in the world.

Lorena, TX

Charles Alexander Westbrook came from Mississippi to Texas in 1859 and, after Confederate service in the Civil War, settled his large family in McLennan County to establish a cotton plantation along Cow Bayou. In the 1870s he built a three-story stone home with square Doric columns beside the Waco-to-San Antonio stage road, often lodging travelers there. When the railroad arrived in 1881, the new town nearby was named Lorena for his daughter.

North Middleton Township, PA · est. 2003

Charles "Chief" Bender was one of the great pitchers of baseball's early modern era, anchoring the Philadelphia Athletics from 1903 to 1914 and helping them capture five pennants and three world championships. The son of a mother who was half Ojibwe, he attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School on this very site from 1898 to 1901 before rising to become one of the sport's first World Series stars. His 212 career wins carried him into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1954.

George West, TX

Charles "Mr. Charlie" Tullis and his wife Emma carried deep Texas roots: his forebears walked from Tennessee in 1834 and gave sons and supplies to the San Jacinto campaign, while her ancestor John McGloin died in the Goliad Massacre. Born in 1873, Charlie served as Live Oak County sheriff from 1909 — known for delivering tax notices without a gun — through the county seat's move from Oakville to George West, and later spent thirty-eight years as founding president of the First National Bank of George West. He and Emma married in 1913 and are buried among the Irish Catholic pioneers at Gussettville.

Goldsboro, NC

Charles B. Aycock served as governor of North Carolina from 1901 to 1905 and became known statewide as a crusading champion of public schooling, earning the label 'the education governor.' His campaign to expand universal education left a lasting mark on the state's school system in the early twentieth century. His former law office stands a couple of blocks from this marker in Goldsboro.

San Angelo, TX

Charles B. Metcalfe came to Texas from Tennessee in 1872 and helped build up Tom Green County, growing its first bale of cotton, installing its first cotton gin, and mapping the early county seat at Ben Ficklin. Serving in the Texas Legislature from 1915 to 1919, he authored the 1918 amendment that gave the state's women the right to vote in primary elections—three years before national suffrage was adopted.

Montgomery, TX

Charles Bellinger Stewart (1806–1885) came to Texas in 1830 and served as the young republic's first Secretary of State. A signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, he helped draft both the 1836 Republic constitution and the 1845 state constitution, and later served Montgomery County as district attorney and state representative.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2023

Born nearby in 1771 into a Philadelphia Quaker family, Charles Brockden Brown is often called America's first important novelist. His brooding Gothic tales, set amid the streets and fevers of his own city, helped invent an American literature and later inspired writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. As a novelist, editor, and historian he also wrestled openly with the questions of his young republic—women's rights, slavery, and the shape of the nation's politics.

Saint Paul, TX

A Maryland native, Charles C. Stibbens came to Texas around 1835 and fought in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto during the Texas Revolution. He settled afterward as a farmer and shoemaker, raised eleven children, and moved to Saint Paul in 1870. He is the only known San Jacinto veteran buried in Collin County.

Port Isabel, TX

Charles Champion, son of an Italian immigrant who settled in Texas in 1855, was born at Old Point Isabel in 1870 and bought the local general store in 1894, renaming it "The Champion Store." In 1899 he raised a two-story brick building he called "The Key of the Gulf," housing the store, the U.S. Customs House, and the post office, where he served as the town's second postmaster. In the early 1900s he helped launch the fishing industry that became a mainstay of the local economy, and he championed a deep-water port that opened in 1933, seven years after his death.

Charles City County, VA

In the decades after the Civil War, communities across the South erected monuments honoring their local soldiers, and rural Charles City County was no exception. This marker pays tribute to the men of the county who fought for the Confederacy between 1861 and 1865, opening with the Latin motto "Pro aris et focis" — "for altars and hearths" — a classical phrase invoking the defense of home and faith. The accompanying language, framing the cause as "constitutional liberty and the right of self government," reflects the Lost Cause memorial tradition that shaped how the war was remembered well into the twentieth century.

Sunnyvale, CA

Built in 1926, this Sunnyvale residence served as the Spalding family home into the early 1940s. Its era places it in the orchard-and-cannery years of the Santa Clara Valley, decades before the region became known for electronics — when much of the landscape was still fruit trees and small towns.

San Marcos, TX

Charles S. Cock built this limestone house in 1867, in the years when San Marcos was still a young frontier town finding its feet after the Civil War. A farmer who later served as mayor in the early 1880s, Cock raised his home from a mix of local materials—limestone, elm, pine, and cedar—the kind of hand-gathered construction typical of the Texas Hill Country.

High Island, TX

Born in Marseilles in 1805, Charles Cronea shipped to America as a cabin boy at thirteen and soon fell in with the privateers of Jean Laffite, cruising the Gulf off Spanish Mexico. Settling in Texas, he joined the fight for independence at the Siege of Bexar and, by some accounts, guarded prisoners near the Battle of San Jacinto; a decade later he marched under General Zachary Taylor in the war with Mexico. Awarded 1,280 acres as a surviving veteran of the Texas Revolution, the old adventurer farmed near Sabine Pass and finally settled his family at High Island, where he is buried.

Lee County, NC

Charles Duncan McIver was North Carolina's foremost champion of education in the late 19th century, crusading tirelessly for the schooling of women and for training teachers. In 1891 he became the founding president of the State Normal and Industrial School, today the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and led it until his death in 1906. His boyhood home stood just west of this marker.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1983

Charles Demuth, born in Lancaster in 1883, became one of America's foremost modernist painters, working from the family home where he spent most of his life. His crisp, geometric "Precisionist" canvases like "My Egypt" and the poster-portrait "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold" translated grain elevators, factories, and city signs into a distinctly American visual language. Though he traveled widely, he returned always to Lancaster, where he died in 1935.

Dallas, TX

Architect Charles Stevens Dilbeck, son of an Arkansas builder, moved to Dallas in 1932 and over the next decades designed at least 630 houses plus landmarks like the Belmont Hotel, working closely with local brickmakers and ironworkers. Between 1936 and 1940 he laid out roughly sixty small, whimsical bungalows on a former pecan orchard in Cochran Heights—today the greatest concentration of his work in Dallas, showcasing all five of his signature styles. His designs favored dramatic scale, aged materials, and homes meant, in his words, to "say welcome."

Boston, MA

In the closing decades of the 19th century a young landscape architect named Charles Eliot argued that a fast-growing industrial city needed wild places within reach of every resident. A protégé of Frederick Law Olmsted, he helped knit Boston's hills, riverbanks, and shoreline into one of the nation's first metropolitan park systems and championed setting aside scenic land for public use. He died young in 1897, but the greenways and reservations he mapped still ring the city.

Washington, PA · est. 2021

Charles F. West made history in 1922 as the first African American quarterback to play in the Rose Bowl, leading Washington & Jefferson College onto the national stage. When an opposing team demanded he be benched because of his race, West refused to yield, confronting the discrimination of the era head-on. A gifted all-around athlete, he competed in the pentathlon on the 1924 U.S. Olympic team before devoting five decades to medicine as a physician.

San Antonio, TX

In the decades after the Civil War, San Antonio's prosperous German community left a lasting mark on the city's streets and skyline. Charles F.A. Hummel, orphaned young and raised in the family gun-and-ammunition trade, rose to serve as city treasurer and auditor while remaining a pillar of that German world. In 1884 he and his wife Emilie commissioned architects Wahrenberger and Beckmann to build this ornate two-story limestone house, its Italianate pavilion, full-height gallery, and carved quoins announcing a family that had arrived.

Industry, TX

Charles Fordtran, a German of Huguenot descent, joined Stephen F. Austin's colony in January 1831 and earned a league of land surveying for Austin's partner Samuel May Williams. He fought in frontier clashes, rode with the "Spy Rangers" protecting fleeing families during the Texas Revolution, and raised fourteen children on his land near Industry. Arriving well before the great wave of German immigration, he was among the first Teutonic settlers in Texas.

San Antonio, TX

Born in New Hampshire in 1811, Charles Frederick King came to Texas and served in the Texas Army in 1836, the year of the revolution that won independence from Mexico. He later served two terms as mayor of San Antonio, in 1847–1849 and again in 1852–1853, guiding the frontier town through its early years as part of the new state of Texas. He died in San Antonio in 1869.

Oran, TX

In 1857 a twenty-one-year-old Charles Goodnight set up his first ranch at Black Springs on the very edge of the Comanche frontier, where cattle and danger ran together. He scouted for the Texas Rangers during the Civil War, blazed the Goodnight-Loving Trail in 1866, and famously hauled his dying partner Oliver Loving's body home for burial. Later he founded the panhandle's first ranch, the JA, and even bred buffalo with cattle—the "cattalo."

Goodnight, TX

Charles Goodnight glimpsed the promise of ranching at nineteen while crossing Texas bound for the California gold fields, and turned back to build a cattle empire. During the Civil War he scouted for the Frontier Regiment of Texas cavalry, guarding settlers against raids, and afterward he and partner Oliver Loving blazed the Goodnight-Loving Trail across the arid, Comanche-dominated lands of West Texas and New Mexico to supply distant forts. A legendary cattleman and Indian fighter, he also founded Goodnight College before his death in 1929.

Cuero, TX

Charles G. Breeden came to Cuero from Victoria at just fifteen to work on the "Weekly Star" newspaper and never left, rising to become one of south Texas's prominent merchants. He was a partner in the Breeden Brothers Company and the Breeden-Runge Wholesale Company and a leading figure in the town's business and civic life. In 1915 he married Mabel Claire Hall, and the couple raised two daughters.

Ballinger, TX

When 21-year-old Charles H. Noyes was killed in 1919 by a fall from his horse while working cattle on his family's ranch, his grieving parents commissioned a monument not only to their son but to all Texas cowboys. Sculptor Pompeo Coppini studied horses for two years before creating the bronze, producing a work that memorializes the vanishing world of the open-range cowhand.

Armstrong County, TX

Charles H. Roan (1923–1944) earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism during the Allied invasion of Peleliu in the western Pacific during World War II. His medal was presented posthumously in 1945 to his mother, Armstrong County Treasurer Lillabel Roan, in Claude. A Navy destroyer was christened in his name in 1946, and he lies in the Marine Cemetery on Peleliu Island.

Calhoun, KY

Charles Hansford (1759–1850) enlisted in Virginia in 1775 and again in 1777 before going to sea as a privateer in Virginia's navy during the Revolution, sailing off the American coast, the West Indies, and Spain. Captured three times by the British, he endured a brutal three-month confinement aboard the prison ship Jersey—nicknamed "Hell Afloat"—which he survived along with only one of thirty-six fellow prisoners. He later settled in Kentucky and is buried on Mayo Hill near Calhoun.

Rosenberg, TX

Arkansas-born Charles Harvey Waddell came to Texas as a child and grew into a driving force behind Rosenberg's development. He opened an automobile dealership in 1910, founded the Fort Bend Telephone Company in 1914, served as county tax collector and state legislator, and spread his energies across cotton gins, real estate, lumber, and a savings and loan. His ventures helped modernize a small Fort Bend County town in the early automobile age.

Horseshoe Bay, TX

Born in Vermont in 1814, Charles Haynes came to Texas in 1836 with Ohio's "Buckeye Rangers" to fight for independence, then settled at Lockhart, where he ran a blacksmith shop and served in early county government. Around 1859 he moved his family to Llano County, and in 1860 he organized a Masonic lodge at the Comanche schoolhouse. Twice married and father of eight, he was a builder of frontier civic and fraternal life.

Bonham, TX

Born in Bonham in 1916 to musical parents, Charlie Christian developed a distinctive single-string guitar style that helped pioneer the electric guitar as a lead instrument. He joined Benny Goodman's band in 1939 and played with jazz greats and at Carnegie Hall before tuberculosis took his life at just twenty-five.

Louisville, KY

This memorial gateway honors Charles Hermany (1830–1908), who spent nearly half a century as chief engineer of the Louisville Water Company. In an era when waterborne disease killed thousands in American cities, Hermany helped pioneer sand-filtration methods that made public water supplies markedly cleaner and safer. Erected in 1930, the gateway marks the enduring importance of the men who built the unseen infrastructure of a growing industrial city.

Orange, TX

Born in Mississippi around 1820, Charles Holmes Saxon came to Texas in 1842 and, after serving in the Mexican War, helped organize Orange County in 1852, sitting on its first commissioners court and later serving as sheriff. He farmed, made shingles, and rode into the Civil War, seeing action across Texas, New Mexico, and Louisiana before dying in 1919 at nearly a century old.

Claude, TX

A Claude native, Charles H. Roan (1923–1944) volunteered for the U.S. Marine Corps in December 1942 and shipped out to the Pacific in World War II. On Peleliu Island he threw himself on a Japanese grenade, saving four fellow Marines and giving his own life, an act that earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor. The medal was presented to his mother, county treasurer Lillabel Roan, at the courthouse in July 1945, and a Navy destroyer, the USS Charles H. Roan, was christened in his honor in 1946.

New York, NY

Charles Ives (1874–1954) led a double life at this address from 1908 to 1911: a successful insurance executive by day and one of America's most daring composers by night. Drawing on hymns, marches, and folk tunes, his adventurous works—like the Concord Sonata and the Fourth Symphony—stretched rhythm and tonality far beyond the conventions of his era. Long underappreciated, his music later won recognition as strikingly ahead of its time.

Wilson, NC

Charles Lee Coon (1868–1927) was an educational reformer, historian, and author who also served as secretary of the state's Child Labor Committee from 1904 to 1916. He combined a career in advancing public schools with advocacy against the exploitation of working children during the Progressive Era. His home stood a half-block west of this Wilson marker.

San Marcos, TX

In 1847 the McGehee family left Alabama for the fresh farmland of newly annexed Texas, and by 1859 Charles Lewis McGehee, Jr. had claimed a stretch of the San Marcos River. The cabin he raised for his wife Sarah Jane and their children — with its hand-hewn stone fireplace and chimney — remains one of the oldest structures in this corner of Hays County, a survivor of the era when settlers turned river bottoms into homesteads before drifting into town life.

Oil City, PA · est. 2007

Charles Lockhart rose to become Pittsburgh's largest crude oil refiner in the 1860s, a period when the new petroleum industry was transforming western Pennsylvania. In 1874 his firm, Lockhart, Frew & Co., folded its seven refineries into John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, and Lockhart took a seat on the board of a combine that controlled the overwhelming share of American oil refining, transport, and marketing. One of his early offices once stood on this spot.

Loretto, PA · est. 1947

Charles M. Schwab rose from humble beginnings in this Cambria County region to become one of the titans of American steel, so gifted that Andrew Carnegie reportedly said he knew more about steel than any man alive. At the height of his fortune Schwab kept a grand estate near Loretto, later given over to St. Francis College. His story tracks the explosive growth of the steel industry that powered America's rise as an industrial giant.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 2007

Charles M. Schwab rose through the ranks of the American steel industry to become one of its towering figures, and in 1904 he established the Bethlehem Steel Corporation. Under his leadership the company grew into one of the world's largest steel producers, its mills feeding the nation's building boom and, during World War I, its war effort. Schwab made his home in South Bethlehem, at the heart of the industrial empire he built along the Lehigh River.

Pittsboro, NC

Charles Manly served as North Carolina's governor from 1849 to 1851 and was a prominent Whig Party leader in an era of debate over public education, railroads, and internal improvements. A Chatham County lawyer by training, he was the last Whig to hold the state's highest office. His restored law office stands nearby.

Punxsutawney, PA · est. 2007

A native of Punxsutawney, Charles Margiotti rose to prominence as a lawyer, business leader, and political figure in early 20th-century Pennsylvania. Appointed state Attorney General by Governor George Earle from 1935 to 1938, he was among the first Italian Americans in the nation to hold such a high office, after running as the Republican candidate for governor in 1934. He built his practice in Pittsburgh and often defended immigrant workers without charge; he is buried here at Calvary Cemetery.

Baltimore, MD

Colonel Charles Marshall served as military secretary and aide-de-camp to General Robert E. Lee, and was at Lee's side at Appomattox Court House in April 1865. He helped prepare Lee's farewell address as the Army of Northern Virginia laid down its arms.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1998

Here in 1888 the young inventor Charles Martin Hall's method of producing aluminum by electrolysis was first put to commercial use by the Pittsburgh Reduction Company — the firm that would grow into industrial giant Alcoa. Before Hall's breakthrough, aluminum was a rare and costly novelty; his process made the lightweight metal cheap and abundant. What began as a Pittsburgh experiment turned aluminum into a staple of the modern age.