Search Markers

Hillsboro, TX

Jo Abbott — a county and district judge, congressman, and local banker — and his wife Rowena bought this Hillsboro property in 1883. The T-plan house standing here was conveyed in 1899 to their banker son James and his wife Nancy at the birth of their first child. Additions in 1907 and 1918 gave the home its transitional classical-bungalow character.

Milton, MA

Founded by MIT graduate Abbott Lawrence Rotch as a private scientific station, the Blue Hill Observatory took its first weather observations on February 1, 1885 — a record that has continued unbroken ever since. That makes it the oldest continuously operating weather station in the nation and a benchmark for global climate study. Once run by Harvard for six decades, it now serves as a nonprofit climate station, museum, and educational center.

Canton, MA

This memorial in Canton, Massachusetts honors Abbott Lawrence Rotch, who in 1885 founded the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory on the nearby summit and directed it for the rest of his life. Rotch turned Blue Hill into a world pioneer of upper-air research, using kites and later balloons to probe the atmosphere and advance the young science of meteorology. His private observatory became one of the most important weather-research stations of its era.

Abbott, TX

Public schooling in Abbott began in 1885 with a one-story frame schoolhouse crowding 140 pupils and three teachers on the east side of town. A two-story brick building rose on this site in 1911 and served for 55 years, earning full accreditation around 1934 and adding a vocational agriculture program in 1939. As surrounding districts consolidated, the Abbott schools remained a central force in the town's growth.

Corrigan, TX

This pioneer graveyard served the vanished community of Asia, which grew up along Paces Creek after Samuel Crissman received a land headright in 1835. Settlers like the Meadows, Snell, and Standley families made it home, and James Standley's blacksmith and cabinet shops formed its nucleus. When the Trinity and Sabine Railway and a Houston sawmill arrived in the mid-1880s, loggers and mill workers poured in — until the timber was cut out before 1910 and the town faded away. Descendants restored the overgrown burial ground in the 1990s.

Abbott, TX

The first Methodist service in Abbott was held in 1883 by the Rev. G.W. Swofford, and a congregation quickly formed as a stop on the Hillsboro circuit. By 1886 it counted more than 600 members, and the current sanctuary was completed in 1899, succeeding the first frame chapel of 1884. Though the town and congregation both thinned after the 1940s, the church still carries deep ties to Abbott's early heritage.

Hillsboro, TX

Along Hackberry Creek in early Hillsboro grew a shady stand of pecan, hackberry, and elm that townspeople claimed for picnics, concerts, ball games, and reunions. They named it for Joseph "Jo" Abbott (1840–1908) — a nearby resident and a distinguished lawyer, judge, Texas legislator, and U.S. Congressman who often spoke there at anti-prohibition rallies. After his death, banker George Carmichael bought the Abbott home and helped turn the grove into a municipal park, a role it still fills today.

Cooper, TX

Abel Morgan came to Texas as the revolution was igniting, arriving at Bexar in late 1835 and serving under Colonel Fannin's command. He survived the 1836 Goliad Massacre—the mass execution of surrendered Texian prisoners on Santa Anna's orders—spared, in his own words, "for a nurse." His marker, bearing the Star and Wreath, commemorates one of the few men who lived through one of the darkest days of the Texas Revolution.

Victoria, TX

Abel Seymour Cunningham belonged to the generation of settlers who turned Texas from a Mexican province into an independent republic. He took up arms in the 1836 Texas War for Independence, then served the young Republic of Texas as a ranger guarding its raw frontier and as a congressman helping build its government. The State of Texas honored his service with this marker in 1962.

Aberdeen, OH

The village of Aberdeen was founded in 1816 on the north bank of the Ohio River at the terminus of Zane's Trace, the first continuous road cut through Ohio. Blazed under Ebenezer Zane in the late 1790s, the Trace linked Wheeling to the Ohio River crossing at Maysville, opening the interior to settlers, mail, and trade. Aberdeen grew up as a river crossing and gateway at the road's western end.

Aberdeen, MD

Aberdeen Proving Ground opened in 1917 as the U.S. Army's premier weapons and ordnance testing site on the Chesapeake Bay, soon joined by the neighboring Edgewood Arsenal, which became the center of the nation's chemical warfare research. For more than a century the soldiers, civilian scientists, and contractors stationed here have tested artillery, armor, and munitions—demanding and often dangerous work that has cost lives across generations. This monument gathers all of them—uniformed and civilian alike—into a single act of remembrance.

Pittsburg, TX

David Harper Abernathy came to Pittsburg as a boy in 1864 and grew into one of the town's leading merchants and Methodist churchmen, running the family dry goods business he learned in Nashville. In 1896 builder George Barber raised this two-story Queen Anne home for the family, with its wraparound porch, spindle work, and front gable. Much of the interior survives, a physical record of a family that shaped the town for a century.

Plymouth, PA · est. 1989

In 1807 Abijah Smith bought 75 acres along Ransom Creek and, with his brother John, began floating anthracite coal down the Susquehanna River on flat-bottomed arks—a trade they sustained for two decades. In 1818 the firm became the first to blast Pennsylvania coal loose with gunpowder, a leap in mining technique. Kept in the family for nearly seventy years, Abijah Smith & Company is remembered as the first commercially successful anthracite business in the United States.

Ballinger, TX

Welsh-born railroad builder Morgan Jones and his nephews Morgan C. and Percy Jones laid the Abilene and Southern line between Abilene and Ballinger in 1909, and this stone depot rose soon after the first train arrived that September. Its design — with distinctive octagonal twin towers — was unusually elaborate for a depot of the era. The line carried a brisk passenger and freight trade until passenger service ended in 1941 and freight in 1966.

Abilene, TX

Founded in 1906 by preacher-educator A. B. Barret, this West Texas school opened as Childers Classical Institute, named for Colonel J. W. Childers, who donated his homesite for a campus. Under Jesse P. Sewell's twelve-year presidency beginning in 1912 the institution expanded, becoming Abilene Christian College in 1920 and moving to new grounds in 1929. It took its present name in 1976.

Abilene, TX

Abilene Municipal Cemetery grew from five separate burial grounds, the oldest documented grave being that of Florence Phillips, laid to rest in the Masonic section in 1881 as the town was taking shape. Among those interred are Mary Houston Morrow, an Abilene postmistress and daughter of Sam Houston; C.W. Merchant, who donated land and helped found the town; Dr. W.H. Butler, an African American physician; and suffragist Jewel Scarborough. The city gradually took charge of the Masonic, Odd Fellows, and Cedar Hill grounds, which together hold more than 26,000 people.

Abilene, TX

Abilene's first public school for African American children opened in 1890 as a one-room building with a single teacher and twenty-two students. Over the decades it grew and moved repeatedly—holding its first graduation, of one student, at Macedonia Baptist Church in 1923 and rising to a ten-room brick campus by 1936. Renamed for historian Carter G. Woodson in 1951, the school served until 1968, when integration finally came to the Abilene district.

Abilene, TX

Abilene's oldest business institution began just three months after the town was founded, when C. E. Gilbert printed its first newspaper on June 17, 1881. When fire soon destroyed his office, Gilbert rode the train to Baird, borrowed a press, and rushed out an 'extra' about the blaze—one of many colorful episodes, including a duel between rival editors that both survived. Through mergers the paper became the Reporter-News, and publisher Marshall Hanks later joined Houston Harte to form the national Harte-Hanks communications firm.

Abilene, TX

Authorized by the Texas Legislature in 1899 and opened in 1904, this Abilene institution began as a center devoted to the study and treatment of epilepsy. Largely self-sufficient, it raised its own crops and livestock on surrounding land, and under long-serving superintendent Dr. T. B. Bass it became a site of notable medical research. By the mid-twentieth century it had evolved into a residential facility caring for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Abiliene, TX

Founded in 1928, the Abilene Woman's Club met in a series of homes before commissioning noted architect David S. Castle to design a purpose-built clubhouse on what was then the town's edge. Completed in 1955, its post-World War II Colonial Revival design and its great hall drew civic and cultural groups and helped spur the growth of south Abilene.

Abington Township, PA · est. 1992

Founded in 1714, Abington Presbyterian Church stood at the heart of one of Montgomery County's oldest colonial communities, with its adjoining burial ground opening in 1719 and receiving its first recorded interment in 1728. The grounds saw Revolutionary War skirmishing as armies maneuvered across the Philadelphia countryside, and generations of pastors, educators, and war veterans were laid to rest here. The cemetery links Abington to the wider intellectual worlds of Philadelphia and Princeton through the notable clergy and teachers buried within it.

Abita Springs, LA

Abita Springs grew up around an old Choctaw village that took its name from the medicinal springs prized in the area. The site included the Choctaw people's last burial and execution grounds nearby, used until about 1880. The springs later drew health-seekers, but their reputation began with the Native community that lived here.

Terrell, TX

Settled in 1853 by James and Eliza Ables on a Republic-era land grant, this cluster of natural springs in northeast Kaufman County grew into a quiet Methodist farming community. In 1878 the Ables family deeded nearly nine acres for a church, a camp-meeting tabernacle, a public school, and this cemetery, whose oldest marked grave dates to 1880. Church of Christ and Baptist fellowships and a Woodmen of the World lodge followed, but Ables Springs never became a commercial hub—it endured as a rural settlement whose school served the area until consolidation.

Harrellsville, NC

In the small Hertford County community of Harrellsville, this marker names a schoolhouse tied to the Harrell family for whom the town itself is named. Rural schoolhouses like this were the backbone of nineteenth-century education across the American South, often a single room where a whole neighborhood's children learned to read, write, and cipher.

Austin, TX

Arriving in the raw new capital of Austin in 1839, North Carolina native Abner Cook brought skills in design and building that earned him the title of master builder. Working as architect, engineer, and contractor, he raised some of the finest Greek Revival buildings in Texas, including the Governor's Mansion and the Neill-Cochran House. A founding member of Austin's First Presbyterian Church, he died in 1884 soon after completing the University of Texas's Old Main.

Exeter, NH

In the decades after the Revolution, New England's religious landscape was reshaped by preachers who broke from the established Congregational order and the rigid Calvinism of their fathers. Abner Jones was one such itinerant of the early 1800s — a physician turned evangelist who helped lead the 'Christian' restorationist movement, which rejected denominational labels and insisted that ordinary believers could read Scripture for themselves. Working across Vermont, New Hampshire, and beyond, men like Jones rode the energy of the Second Great Awakening, planting independent congregations in towns such as Exeter. The date on this marker sits near the close of a long life spent on horseback and in the pulpit.

Whitemarsh Township, PA · est. 2000

By the 1850s the Corson family's Whitemarsh homestead — a station on the Underground Railroad since long before — had become a center of antislavery activism. In 1856 George and Martha Maulsby Corson opened a meeting hall above their carriage shed where leading abolitionist orators addressed crowds of up to 200. Decades later the hall found a second life as the studio of Thomas Hovenden, whose painting "Last Moments of John Brown" became one of the era's iconic images of the abolitionist cause.

Barnstable, MA

Abraham Blish was among the first English settlers of Barnstable in 1640, part of the Puritan migration that planted towns across Plymouth Colony. Like many early townsmen he shouldered a rotation of civic duties — grand juror, constable, hayward, and surveyor of highways — and served in the colony's militia. In 1658 he built one of the region's earliest grist mills, grinding the settlers' grain into meal and helping a young community feed itself.

South Whitehall Township, PA · est. 1929

Born in Grabs, Switzerland, Abraham Blumer crossed the Atlantic to serve the German Reformed congregations of the Lehigh Valley, ministering at Jordan, Union, Egypt, and Allentown from 1771 to 1801. During the Revolution he also served as chaplain to the First Battalion of the Northampton County Militia. He spent three decades tending to the spiritual life of his frontier congregations and is buried in this cemetery.

North Bend, OH

The Ohio Valley into which Abraham Brower was born in 1822 was still a raw frontier, a patchwork of new river towns and cleared farmland spreading out from the Ohio River just a generation after the first American settlers pushed west of the Appalachians. North Bend, his corner of Hamilton County, sat on the river below Cincinnati and had already given the young nation a president in William Henry Harrison. A man who lived here from 1822 to 1911, as this memorial records, would have watched the valley transform from wilderness clearings into a settled landscape of farms, steamboats, and growing towns over the course of a long American century.

Dallas, TX

This half-acre family burial ground holds twenty-one graves and six generations of the Carver family. The patriarch, Abraham Carver (1806–1883), came to Texas in 1844 with his brothers Solomon and Daniel, and the cemetery sits on part of his original 320-acre land grant. Burials continued into the 20th century, the last in 1946.

Damon, TX

Abraham Darst came to Mexican Texas from Missouri in 1827 as one of Stephen F. Austin's colonists, part of the first wave of Anglo-American settlement on the Brazos. He took up arms in the 1832 Battle of Velasco, an early clash with Mexican authority, and though he died in 1833, five of his sons served in the Army of Texas during the revolution of 1836.

Hampshire County, WV

The Kackley family were among the settler households that put down roots in Hampshire County, one of the oldest counties in present-day West Virginia, carved out of the Virginia backcountry along the South Branch of the Potomac in the mid-1700s. A house carrying the family name marks the kind of modest, durable frontier homestead that anchored these Appalachian valleys as farming families cleared land and built for the generations to follow. Homes like this one outlasted their builders to become quiet landmarks of a region settled well before West Virginia existed as a state.

Upper Darby, PA · est. 1985

Abraham L. Pennock lived at Hoodland, a house built by his father-in-law in 1823, until his death in 1868. A leader in the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, he lent his energy to abolition alongside the causes of woman suffrage and temperance. Reform-minded visitors, including the poets John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell, passed through his doors.

Victoria, TX

Built before the Civil War with eight fireplaces and ten rooms, this Victoria home was owned from 1861 to 1881 by banker-merchant Abraham Levi, known for his charitable giving. In 1865 the U.S. Army of Occupation took it over as a Reconstruction headquarters, with a prison in the rear. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Los Angeles, CA

This monument honors Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president, who led the United States through the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation before his assassination in 1865. Statues of Lincoln became fixtures of American public space, cast as the preserver of the Union and 'the Great Emancipator.' Its placement in a Los Angeles civic setting reflects how deeply his memory was woven into the nation's shared identity.

Milwaukee, WI

This 1934 statue by sculptor Gaetano Cecere honors Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) as president, emancipator, and martyr, quoting the healing words of his second inaugural: "With malice toward none." Erected seventy years after his death, it reflects the enduring reverence for the leader who guided the Union through the Civil War and set emancipation in motion before his assassination. The monument stands in Milwaukee as a civic tribute to his memory.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1953

In the tense winter of 1861, as seven states had already declared their secession, President-elect Abraham Lincoln made his slow, whistle-stop journey east toward his inauguration. On February 22 — Washington's Birthday — he paused in Harrisburg at the Jones House hotel and spoke from its portico to a crowd packed into Market Square. Within days he would slip secretly through Baltimore amid assassination fears to reach the capital.

Hanover, PA · est. 1954

On November 18, 1863, a half block east of here, Abraham Lincoln paused during his journey to Gettysburg and spoke briefly to a gathered crowd from his special train. He was on his way to dedicate the National Cemetery there — the occasion for which, the next day, he would deliver the Gettysburg Address. This small trackside moment placed the wartime president, if only for a few minutes, among the ordinary townspeople of Hanover.

Bristol, PA · est. 1991

On February 21, 1861, the train carrying President-elect Abraham Lincoln from Springfield toward his inauguration in Washington paused near this point in Bristol, where he stepped onto the rear platform to greet a crowd of more than a thousand. His long, winding journey east came in the tense weeks after Southern states had begun to secede, and such whistle-stop appearances let anxious citizens glimpse the untested leader on whom the Union's fate now rested.

Pittsboro, NC

Abraham Rencher of Chatham County built a wide-ranging public career as a congressman, U.S. Minister to Portugal, and Governor of the Territory of New Mexico from 1857 to 1861. He was also known as a poet and essayist. He is buried two blocks west of this marker.

Tomball, TX

Abraham Roberts (1773–1850), a Georgia native, settled on Spring Creek about 1829 at a crossroads in the thinly settled community of New Kentucky. On April 16, 1836, Sam Houston's retreating army paused here, uncertain whether their general would keep withdrawing east. When soldiers asked Roberts—standing at his gate—the way to Harrisburg, he pointed southeast, a great shout went up, and Houston took that road, leading to the decisive victory at San Jacinto five days later.

Orangefield, TX

A Louisiana native, Abraham Winfree brought his family to the Texas frontier in the early 1830s, settling on Cow Bayou near the old Opelousas Trail while Texas was still winning its independence. He made his living as rancher, cattle drover, shingle maker, and logger, and in 1836 his home hosted the election of a delegate to the Congress of the young Republic of Texas. The community that grew up around him still bears his name, though he asked to be buried without a stone in an unmarked grave.

Columbus, TX

Abram Alley came from Missouri in the 1820s to join his brothers among the first colonists of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred, settling near the Colorado River. During the Texas war for independence he helped settlers flee the advancing army in the panicked Runaway Scrape, and his own home was burned. He returned late in 1836 to build this oak-log cabin, where he and his wife raised five children and welcomed travelers.

Groesbeck, TX

Born in 1817, Abram Anglin served as an early Ranger during the Texas War for Independence, riding with Captain Seale's company in 1835–36 under authority of the provisional Council of Texas. He lived on into the frontier era of the Republic and statehood, dying in 1875. His grave marker, crowned with the star and wreath, commemorates the volunteer soldiers who fought to sever Texas from Mexico.

Bastrop, TX

Abram Wiley Hill served as a soldier in the Texas War for Independence in 1836 and stood among the victors at San Jacinto, where Sam Houston's army routed Santa Anna and secured the Republic. The State of Texas placed this 'Star and Wreath' marker in 1962 to commemorate his service.

White Township, PA · est. 2009

Raised in the Indiana County countryside, Absalom Hazlett grew into a committed abolitionist and joined John Brown's small provisional army for the 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. The plan to arm enslaved people and spark their liberation collapsed, and Hazlett was captured, tried, and hanged for his part. Yet the raid electrified a divided nation and pushed it closer to open conflict.

Southlake, TX

When Absalom H. Chivers left Mississippi for the Texas frontier around 1852, he brought the plantation economy with him, working a farm along Dove Creek with five enslaved people until his death in 1856. His grave is believed to be the first in this family burial ground, formally set aside as a cemetery in 1889 by his widow Eleanor. The native sandstone cairns marking the graves preserve the improvised burial customs of pioneer North Texas.

Orange, TX

Born in Louisiana in 1812, Absalom Jett came to Texas as a boy in 1824, during the Mexican colonial era, and grew up to serve in the Army of Texas during the 1836 revolution under Captain Benjamin J. Harper. He lived on in the young republic and state until his death in 1878. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1957.

Hankamer, TX

When the Abshier and Weed families came from Louisiana in 1843 to farm this corner of Liberty County, they could not have known the family plot begun with Lucinda Abshier Higginbotham's burial in 1852 would grow into a community graveyard spanning generations. Those laid to rest here served in nearly every American conflict from the War of 1812 through Korea, and their graves include striking tree-trunk monuments of the Woodmen of the World. A cemetery association has tended the grounds since 1896.

Lavon, TX

John Abston, a Virginia-born veteran of the American Revolution, followed his family west across a lifetime — to Missouri in the 1830s and finally to Collin County, Texas, in 1853, when he was already past ninety. After his son Jesse died, the family set aside a small burial ground here, and Abston's own interment in 1856 was the first. By family tradition, Abston's daughter-in-law Sarah later gave a house and land to a former slave, Elias Bellew, in exchange for tending the graves — giving the site its other name, the Old Bellew Cemetery.

Atlanta, GA

Thirteen Atlanta physicians founded the Brotherhood of Physicians in 1854, an organization that grew through decades of name and location changes into the Fulton County Medical Society. In 1941 the society dedicated this elegant Neoclassical building, designed by Philip T. Shutze and R. Kennon Perry, as its Academy of Medicine. Its members drove advances in treating pellagra, hookworm, tuberculosis, and other diseases that plagued the South.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2013

When the Academy of Natural Sciences was founded in Philadelphia in 1812, the young republic was hungry to catalog the flora, fauna, and fossils of a still-unmapped continent. As the oldest natural science institution in the Americas, it became a hub for naturalists and explorers, amassing collections that helped define the study of life on Earth. It moved to its grand Logan Square home in 1876 and today anchors scientific research at Drexel University.

Grand Coteau, LA

Opened in 1821 in the small Louisiana town of Grand Coteau, the Academy of the Sacred Heart became one of the state's earliest schools, founded by Mother Audé and Sister Layton of the Religious of the Sacred Heart. The order had been brought to America in 1818 by Philippine Duchesne, a French nun later canonized as a saint. For two centuries the academy has educated young women on the same grounds.

Borger, TX

Asa P. "Ace" Borger, a Missouri-born townsite promoter, platted this Panhandle boomtown in 1926 and worked to tame a rowdy oil camp into a lasting community. In 1928–29 he and his wife Elizabeth built this two-story house—the first brick residence in Borger. It stayed in the family for three generations. Ace earned a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark designation in 1976.

San Antonio, TX

An acequia is a communal gravity-fed irrigation ditch, a system Spanish colonists brought to Texas and the greater Southwest and adapted from centuries of Iberian and North African practice. San Antonio's Spanish missions, founded in the early 1700s, depended on a network of these ditches — the acequias madre and their branches — to water fields and sustain settlement in the semi-arid landscape. The "acequia de arriba," or upper ditch, was one strand of that lifeline, and the community associations that governed water-sharing were among the region's earliest civic institutions.

San Antonio, TX

When the Spanish founded San Antonio in 1718, they and the mission Indians in their charge began digging a network of acequias—hand-dug irrigation ditches lined with dressed limestone—to carry river water to the fields. This one, the Acequia Madre, served the fields of Mission San Antonio de Valero, better known as the Alamo, making irrigation the lifeblood of the growing mission and town. The ditch became part of the modern waterworks after 1877, and this section was restored in 1968.

Santa Fe, NM

Santa Fe's acequias are gravity-fed irrigation ditches that have carried water to fields and gardens since the town's Spanish colonial founding in the early 1600s. The 'acequia madre,' or mother ditch, was the main artery of this communal water system, maintained cooperatively by the households it served. This marker identifies one of those historic ditches, still traced across the old city.

Llano, TX

Raised in 1892 by Llano stonemason John Goodman, this brick commercial row housed a parade of merchants — milliners, dry goods dealers, and clothiers — before the Acme Dry Goods Company bought it in 1919 and gave it its lasting name. Its round-arch transoms, keystones, and paired storefront windows are hallmarks of turn-of-the-century Main Street commerce. It became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1997.

Stephenville vicinity, TX

According to oral tradition, a traveler named John Wright died here around 1857-58 on his way west, and landowner Clayborn Oxford donated ground for his burial. The earliest marked grave is that of Oxford's infant grandson William, buried in 1859, and the family deeded the graveyard to Erath County in 1888 for the growing community, which lent it the name Acrea. Descendants of the pioneer families still tend it today.