Search Markers

Kyle, TX

Col. John Claiborne Kyle and his wife Lucy came to the Republic of Texas from Mississippi in 1844 and built this hand-hewn cedar log home after buying land here in 1850. Its four-pen dog-trot form stood along the busy Austin–San Antonio stage route, making it a fixture of early travel and politics. Five of Kyle's sons served in the Confederate Army, and the nearby town of Kyle takes its name from one of them, Capt. Ferg Kyle.

LaVernia, TX

This marker, set with the Star and Wreath that Texas places on the graves of its Revolutionary veterans, honors Claiborne Rector, who fought in Captain William H. Patton's company at the Battle of San Jacinto. That brief, decisive fight in April 1836 won Texas its independence from Mexico. The state erected the memorial in 1962.

Abilene, TX

Born in East Texas and hardened by service in the Confederate army, Claiborne "Clabe" Merchant turned to the open range, founding his first ranch in 1874 as cattle became the engine of the West Texas economy. When the railroad reached the plains in 1881, he helped establish a new town and gave it the name Abilene, after the famous Kansas cattle hub. He spent decades pouring his time and fortune into the community he helped raise from open country.

Seguin, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1803, Claiborne West threw himself into the founding of a new republic: he served as a delegate to the conventions of 1832 and 1835, sat on the provisional government's council, and on March 2, 1836, signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. He fought as a soldier and served in the Congress of the Republic of Texas before his death in 1866. Texas erected this Star-and-Wreath grave marker in his honor in 1962.

Vidor, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1800, Claiborne West brought his family to the Cow Bayou settlement in 1825 and soon threw himself into the struggle for independence from Mexico, attending the 1832 Convention and 1835 Consultation at San Felipe de Austin. On March 2, 1836, at Washington-on-the-Brazos, he was one of 58 signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence and helped draft the Republic's constitution. He served in the volunteers, sat in the first Congress of the Republic, and gave shape to what became Orange County before settling his final years in Seguin.

Clairette, TX

Joseph and Elizabeth Salmon came to the Republic of Texas in 1839 and settled this area in 1854. When their teenage son Albert died in 1858, he was buried at his favorite campsite in a grove of oaks on the family land, and in 1876 his brother deeded the surrounding acre as a community cemetery. Later additions enlarged the grounds, whose varied gravestones reflect the region's pioneer roots.

Clairette, TX

Clairette's first schoolhouse was a one-room log building raised as early as 1871. This two-story structure went up in 1912, a year after the Clairette Independent School District was created, and served until the rural school closed in 1949. Built of native stone with a Tuscan-columned porch, it later hosted community gatherings.

Walker County, TX

Local tradition holds that this cemetery was established by deed in 1853 specifically so that people of mixed Native American and pioneer heritage—turned away from other burial grounds—would have a place of rest. The first known burial was Martha Johnston Andrews in 1860, and the cemetery grew alongside the nearby Pleasant Grove Baptist Church. Among its more than 500 graves lie early settlers of Scots-Irish ancestry and veterans of every war from the Civil War to Vietnam.

Paducah, KY

In March 1884, Clara Barton—who had founded the American Red Cross just three years earlier—arrived in Paducah aboard the steamboat Josh V. Throop to direct relief for victims of a great Ohio River flood. Relief boats ran the length of the river from Pittsburgh to Cairo in what became the young organization's first flood-relief operation. It was a proving ground for disaster response that the Red Cross would repeat for generations.

Austin, TX

Clara Driscoll's finest hour came in 1903, when—alarmed at plans to demolish part of the Alamo—she personally bought the property to buy the state time to preserve it. A wealthy rancher's daughter and San Jacinto descendant, she was also a novelist, Broadway producer, women's-club organizer, Democratic national committeewoman, and philanthropist who gave her Laguna Gloria home to Texas as an art museum. This Austin building, headquarters of the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, stands thanks to her generosity.

San Antonio, TX

Born to a wealthy Refugio County ranching family, Clara Driscoll learned in 1903 that the Alamo's Long Barrack was about to be sold as a hotel site and, when the state failed to act, bought the property with her own funds to save it—earning the title "Savior of the Alamo." The state reimbursed her in 1905 and placed the shrine in the care of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, which she led. A force in business, politics, and the arts, she served as Democratic National Committeewoman and gave generously to Texas cultural and charitable causes before lying in state in the Alamo Chapel after her death.

Corpus Christi, TX

Clara Driscoll, descended from an early Texas colonist, inherited her family's vast estate of ranches, oil and gas, and real estate when her brother died in 1929. Already celebrated as "the Savior of the Alamo" for her role in preserving the mission, she was a philanthropist and Democratic power broker who built hotels and helped establish the Naval Air Station at Corpus Christi. At her death in 1945 she left the family fortune to found a charitable children's hospital, which opened in 1953 and remains a leading pediatric center in South Texas.

Exeter, NH

In the late 1890s, small New England towns like Exeter, New Hampshire, ran on the quiet labor of local schoolteachers—often women who anchored a community's one- or two-room schoolhouses and shaped generations of children. This modest marker fixes the name of Clara E. Kimball to that work, dated 1897, when public education across the Gilded Age Northeast was expanding and professionalizing. Exeter itself was already a town proud of its learning, home to the venerable Phillips Exeter Academy, so a marker honoring a local teacher speaks to how deeply the place valued schooling.

Orange, TX

Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, raised in Orange amid a blend of Texan and Cajun cultures, built a recording career of more than fifty years on a restless refusal to stay in one genre. A master of guitar and fiddle, he moved from Houston R&B hits on Peacock Records through country, western swing, blues, and Cajun, winning a Grammy in 1982 and eight W.C. Handy awards. Evacuating Hurricane Katrina, he returned to Orange in 2005 and died there two weeks later.

Town of Clarence, NY

In 1829, David Vantine opened a store at this crossroads in the Town of Clarence, and the cluster of homes and businesses that grew up around it took the name Vantine's Corners. Like countless hamlets across western New York, the little settlement was anchored by a single merchant whose shop served as gathering place, post stop, and informal town center. As the community matured it took on the name Clarence Center, marking the steady transformation of frontier farmland into settled village life in the decades after the Erie Canal opened the region.

Town of Clarence, NY

In 1842, Robert Brown raised a grist mill at this spot in the young farming town of Clarence Center, harnessing local water power to grind the wheat and corn of western New York's settlers into flour and meal. Over the next four decades the mill passed through a succession of millers — Eli Herr, Abraham Gantz, Daniel Blocher, Alexander Burns, and Oscar King — anchoring the community's economy until fire swept it away in 1888.

Raleigh, NC

For half a century, from 1903 to 1954, Clarence Poe edited and published the Progressive Farmer, one of the South's most influential agricultural journals. From this Raleigh neighborhood he pressed for better farming methods, rural schools, and social reform across a still overwhelmingly agrarian region. His voice reached farm porches from Virginia to Texas.

Clarendon, TX

On this bold promontory lies the first cemetery of Donley County, resting place of the earliest settlers of Old Clarendon in the Texas Panhandle. Founded as a colony in the late 1870s, Clarendon was among the first Anglo settlements on the high plains, where pioneers faced hardship, isolation, and loss. In 1938 the State of Texas dedicated this granite monument to those first dead and the survivors who built on after them.

Clarendon, TX

Founded by the Methodist Church in 1898, Clarendon College was the first college in the Texas Panhandle, opening its doors that September to students ranging from first-graders to collegians on a still-sparsely-settled plain. It graduated its first class in 1904 and even fielded one of the region's earliest football teams, and under later leaders it rose to senior-college status before settling into its enduring role as a community junior college. A 1968 endowment from sisters Etta and Ida Harned funded the modern campus it occupies today.

Baltimore, MD

Baltimore sisters Claribel and Etta Cone traveled to Paris in the early 20th century and began buying the work of then-controversial modern painters like Matisse and Picasso, long before American museums took them seriously. They filled two adjoining apartments here with one of the finest private collections of modern art in the country. That collection now anchors the Baltimore Museum of Art's Cone Wing.

Clarion, PA

When Pennsylvania carved Clarion County from Armstrong and Venango in 1839, it named the new territory for the river whose clear, bell-like current early travelers likened to a distant clarion horn. The hills here proved rich in the raw materials of the young industrial age: charcoal-fired iron furnaces sprang up across the county, while abundant coal seams and vast timber stands fed a lumbering trade that floated logs downstream to market. The seat town of Clarion took shape quickly, incorporating as a borough by 1841 as the county organized itself around courthouse and commerce.

Port Lavaca, TX

This burial ground served the Clark family of the vanished Chocolate community, named for nearby Chocolate Creek where Sylvanus Hatch and his brother Joseph settled in 1846. Residents raised cattle and horses, farmed, and worshipped at St. Paul's-on-the-Prairie, whose building also housed the school. In the mid-1850s John Clark arrived and built stock pens known as Clark's Station along the Indianola Railroad, letting area farmers ship crops and cattle to market; he deeded this cemetery in 1899.

Weatherford, TX

This burial ground began with the pioneer families who camped along the Clear Fork of the Trinity River in the 1830s, and its oldest marked grave belongs to Anzaline Godfrey, wife of a Methodist circuit-founder, who died in 1859. Ground-penetrating radar has since revealed some sixty-five unmarked pioneer-era graves alongside the named ones. Formally established in 1880 on the site of Godfrey's Chapel, the cemetery holds early Methodist founders, county organizers, a chief justice, and veterans reaching from the Texas Rangers through Korea and Vietnam.

Gainesville, TX

Begun by the Hatcher family in the 1850s, this Cooke County burial ground took the name of the Clark family, German-speaking pioneers who settled the area. Its earliest marked grave belongs to Nathaniel Miles Clark, a Unionist hanged in the 1862 Great Hanging of Gainesville, when wartime hysteria led to the mass lynching of suspected Union sympathizers. Obelisks, curbing, and German-language markers still stand among the graves, cared for by descendants since 1939.

Lockhart, TX

North Carolina native James E. Clark came to Texas and married in Bastrop County before buying land in this area in 1881, where he and his wife Mary raised nine children. In 1884 he set aside ground for both a school and a family cemetery, and when he died in 1898 his was the first marked grave. The adjoining community center now stands on the site of the old school, tying the two institutions together.

Winchester, KY

Clark County, created in 1792 and named for Revolutionary War hero General George Rogers Clark, has seen a succession of courthouses on this Winchester site—from a two-room log cabin in 1794 to a brick building in 1797 and a third courthouse in 1821, where Henry Clay argued his last jury case in 1849. The present limestone courthouse, designed by noted Lexington architect John McMurtry and completed in 1855, was later heightened and expanded, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

Vancouver, WA

This memorial in Vancouver honors the war veterans of Clark County who died defending their country. Rather than naming a single conflict, it gathers the service and sacrifice of many generations of local men and women into one place of remembrance. Such community memorials often anchor annual observances of Memorial and Veterans Day.

Rio Frio, TX

In 1887 newlyweds Joseph and Annie Clark bought this Hill Country land from Annie's father, beginning a family story marked by a haunting coincidence. Joseph died in a 1901 wagon accident on a nearby curve; Annie later married his brother David, who was killed on the very same curve decades later. Annie was buried between her two husbands in the family plot that still holds their kin.

Bandera vicinity, TX

Amasa Clark, a veteran of the Mexican War, became the first permanent settler of Bandera and worked an orchard and nursery on this homestead for decades—living to the remarkable age of 101. This family cemetery, opened with the 1883 burial of his first wife, holds several generations of Clarks, including Amasa, two wives, and many of his nineteen children.

Butler, WI

Butler, Wisconsin grew from a handful of families who settled the area in its earliest days, and the Clark family was among those first residents. This modest marker fixes the spot of their home, anchoring the village's origin story to a specific place. It is the kind of hyper-local memory that keeps a small community's founding generation from being forgotten.

Astoria, OR

On this Astoria site once stood the Astoria Theatre, where in the summer of 1922 a young Clark Gable took his first steps as a professional actor. The building burned that December, but the career it launched did not. Gable would rise to become one of Hollywood's most iconic leading men, forever remembered as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.

Van Horn, TX

The Clark Hotel was the first permanent structure in Van Horn, its earliest 1901 portion housing the original city post office and its main block built in 1905–06 from concrete blocks handmade on site. When Culberson County was newly organized in 1911–12, the building served as the county courthouse, and over the years it hosted theatrical programs, school graduations, a saloon, offices, and shops before Fred Clark converted it into a hotel in 1918. Few buildings did more jobs in a young West Texas town.

Belton, TX

Built in the early 1890s, this Belton house was given by businessman Peter Hammersmith to his son as an 1895 wedding gift, then sold in 1899 to Sophie Clark, the widow of a Rogers lumberman. During World War II it was divided into a duplex to ease the housing shortage created by nearby Fort Hood. Distinguished by its semicircular shingled bargeboards, it stayed in the Clark family for over eighty years.

Santa Barbara County, CA

This hall at the University of California, Santa Barbara honors Clark Kerr, president of the University of California from 1958 to 1967. Kerr was the principal architect of California's landmark 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, which shaped the state's tiered system of universities, state colleges, and community colleges and became a model for public higher education nationwide. The plaque, dedicated in 1977, recognizes his commitment to teaching quality.

Bonham, TX

This congregation took shape in 1893 at a meeting in the home of Mrs. S. J. Stevenson, gathering there for worship until members built a small church on this site in 1901 — a building that still serves as the sanctuary today. In the 1920s the church was renamed Clark Memorial in honor of longtime member Mrs. John Clark. Over the years it has sent a number of its own members into the ministry.

Anderson Township, OH

When James Clark raised these stone walls around 1801, Ohio was raw frontier — barely settled country on the far edge of the young republic, where a durable stone dwelling was a rare mark of permanence among log cabins. Clark himself carried an older story in his bones: as a boy soldier he had beaten a drummer's cadence at Yorktown in 1781, the siege that effectively ended the Revolutionary War. Two decades later he was among the pioneers pushing west across the Appalachians into the Northwest Territory, trading a battlefield for a homestead in the Ohio wilderness.

Hemphill, TX

Before Texas was even a decade into its own republic, William and Mahala Clark carved a homestead out of the Big Sandy Creek country of the East Texas piney woods. Their family plot became the resting place of pioneers whose names time has mostly erased—earlier travelers are thought to lie here in unmarked graves. Alongside the neighboring Smith burying ground, these quiet cemeteries are the last tangible trace of a frontier farming community that has otherwise vanished.

Hemphill, TX

Eausel Clark built this home in 1919–1920 after marrying Bertie Fullen, using lumber salvaged from older houses and two hand-hewn sandstone fireplaces. Rebuilt in 1934 with sawmill lumber and passed through the Clark and James families, the house was home to people who lived by subsistence farming and timber work. It stands as a plain, honest record of the working lives that sustained Sabine County in the early twentieth century.

Gainesville, TX

Randolph Lee Clark's life spanned the transformation of Texas from open range to modern schooling: a Fort Worth native, he cowboyed on the sprawling XIT Ranch before earning a degree at Add-Ran Christian University. He rose through the state's education offices and superintendencies, and after moving to Gainesville in 1923 he persuaded the city — with the Kiwanis Club's help — to open Gainesville Junior College in 1924. Active in state and national organizations, he became a recognized pioneer of the Texas junior college movement.

Lockhart, TX

When William and Nancy Clark brought their family from Alabama to Caldwell County in 1850, worship in this corner of central Texas still happened in parlors and open fields. That changed in 1877, when twenty-six neighbors gathered in the Clark home to organize a Methodist congregation, and a land gift from Joseph and Jennie Magee soon gave them both a church and a burying ground. The little two-year-old laid to rest here in 1882 became the first of generations linked by this soil, and long after the church itself came down in 1950, Clark and Magee descendants kept the cemetery alive through reunions and shared care.

Diboll vicinity, TX

Before bridges spanned the Neches, ferries were the vital links across East Texas rivers. I. D. Clark established this crossing in 1856, and after his death in 1859 his widow Ann kept it running with the labor of two enslaved people until her own death in 1863. The Clark family held the land for decades; a town called Clark's Station, or Miami, grew up at the crossing, with a community cemetery laid out nearby in 1860, until modern highways finally made the ferry obsolete.

Louisville, KY

From 1876, architects Charles Julian Clarke and Arthur Loomis designed many of Louisville's most memorable buildings, from the Conrad-Caldwell House to the Speed Art Museum. Their Levy Brothers Building, opened in 1893 in the muscular Richardsonian Romanesque style, housed a beloved clothing store for nearly a century. Outlined in electric lights at night, the store gave the city its own phrase for brilliance—"lit up like Levy's."

Galveston, TX

This grand Victorian home was raised in 1895 by shipping figure Captain Charles Clarke during Galveston's heyday as a great Gulf port. Its unusual double brick walls let it withstand the catastrophic 1900 hurricane and later storms, and neighbors sheltered inside it many times. In 1928 it passed to grain exporter Julius Jockusch, who served as a consul abroad.

Austin, TX

Clarksville took root in 1871 when Charles Clark, a newly freed man, bought two acres on Tenth Street and set out—so tradition holds—to build a community for his people on Austin's wooded outskirts. Life gathered around the Sweet Home Baptist Church, whose members famously greeted the dawn with hymns sung from their porches, and the freedom colony produced figures like legislator Elias Mayes and the Rev. Jacob Fontaine, who founded Austin's first Black newspaper. By the 1930s the fourth church building stood, anchoring a close-knit village of nine square blocks.

Clarksville, TX

James Clark, founder of Clarksville, began this burial ground in the 1830s, and it holds his father Benjamin, a Revolutionary War veteran whose grave is the earliest here. Among the others laid to rest are Albert Hamilton Latimer, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, the pioneering newspaperman Col. Charles DeMorse, and the early preacher-educator Rev. John Anderson. Long known as the Baptist Cemetery, it gathers the founding generation of one of northeast Texas's oldest towns.

Claude, TX

Claude Cemetery began in 1890 when settler Dan Cavanagh donated a grave for railroad worker Neal DeBerry, and it soon gathered the dead of the Fort Worth & Denver Railroad right-of-way along with the town's pioneers. James and Harriet Grimes deeded the land to the public in 1905, an association formed in 1912, and a $10,000 gift from Jim Hill established perpetual care in 1936. Its rows hold veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Sierra Blanca, TX

Claude Hudspeth went to work as a ranch hand at nine and was editing an Ozona newspaper by sixteen, largely self-educating himself before winning a seat in the Texas Legislature in 1902. Over a 29-year public career he served in the state Senate, was admitted to the bar in 1909, and represented Texas in the U.S. House from 1919 to 1931, championing legislation for working people. Along the way he backed sending federal troops to protect El Paso residents endangered by fighting during the Mexican Revolution — and the far West Texas county was named in his honor.

Claude, TX

In 1887 the Fort Worth & Denver City Railway pushed across the Texas Panhandle, and the man at the throttle of the first passenger train to reach this spot was engineer Claude Monroe Ayers. The new townsite that grew up along the tracks took his first name, as railroad settlements across the West so often borrowed the names of the men who built and ran them. Ayers lived until 1915, his brief moment on the frontier line permanently stamped on the map.

Claude, TX

Founded as the "Argus" on New Year's Day 1890 in the new railroad town of Claude, this Panhandle newspaper later merged with the "Goodnight News" to become the "Claude News." Among its early editors was Laura V. Hamner, who went on to become a leading historian of the great Texas Panhandle ranches. The paper passed through a chain of publishers, ending up with the Waggoner family by mid-century.

Temple, TX

Claudia Potter graduated from the University of Texas Medical Branch in 1904 as the only woman in her class and just the sixth woman to finish the program. Hired in 1906 by Dr. Arthur C. Scott, she became the first woman line physician for the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway and an anesthetist at the Temple Sanitarium—earning far less than her male peers. Regarded as Texas's first full-time anesthesiologist and the first to give nitrous oxide by machine, she trained many nurse anesthetists and helped build Scott and White into a leading surgical center over 41 years.

Temple, TX

Claudia Potter, one of eight children of a Denton County family, earned her degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch in 1904 and joined Temple's Scott and White Hospital as its first woman doctor. Over a 41-year career she became a pioneering specialist in the young field of anesthesiology, widely respected before retiring in 1947. She died in 1970, a day short of her 89th birthday.

Austin, TX

Built between 1912 and 1914 as Austin's seventh U.S. post office, this neo-classical revival building was designed under Treasury supervising architect James Knox Taylor and raised by a Kansas construction firm for nearly $173,000. When a new federal building opened in 1965, the government handed it to the University of Texas System, which remodeled it into administrative offices in 1970. It was later named for Claudia 'Lady Bird' Taylor Johnson, wife of the 36th U.S. president.

Henrietta, TX

Clay County's early years were so hard that it was formally disorganized in 1862 amid Indian raids, not reorganized until 1873. Henrietta served as a base for buffalo hunters until 1878, and in 1875 William S. Ikard brought the first Hereford cattle in Texas here from Illinois. The county seat itself moved from Cambridge to Henrietta in 1874.

Jefferson Township, PA · est. 1949

Built in 1845 by Vincent & Himrod and named for the statesman Henry Clay, this Mercer County furnace became a proving ground for American iron-making. In 1846 it achieved the first successful smelting of iron using raw bituminous coal in place of scarce charcoal, and a decade later, in 1856, it demonstrated that rich Lake Superior ore could be worked unmixed. Both breakthroughs pointed the way to the coal-and-ore industry that would soon make western Pennsylvania the heart of American steel. The furnace was abandoned in 1861.

Austin, TX

In 1902, entrepreneur A. J. Zilker built an aerial cable conveyor whose towers carried buckets of clay from pits south of the Colorado River up to a brickmaking plant in early-20th-century Austin. Brick was the building material of a fast-growing Texas capital, and Zilker's works fed that boom until the Butler Brick Company leased and expanded the operation around 1912. This surviving bucket tower is a rare relic of the machinery that once moved raw earth across the river into the walls of a city.

Electra, TX

On April 1, 1911, the Clayco No. 1 well roared in at 1,628 feet, opening what would become one of the world's greatest oil fields near Electra. The named crew—drillers and roughnecks like Hal Hughes and S. C. "Dad" Massengill—stood at the ground floor of the North Texas oil boom. Discoveries like this one turned quiet ranch country into a magnet for capital, labor, and speculation almost overnight.

Houston, TX

This Georgian Revival house, built in 1916-17 with Tuscan columns and an elegant fanlit entry, was the Houston home of cotton magnate William L. Clayton, co-founder of the trading giant Anderson, Clayton & Co. Clayton was far more than a businessman: he stepped into public service and became a principal architect of the Marshall Plan, the sweeping American program that rebuilt a shattered Europe after World War II.

Manor, TX

In 1903 the Rev. Joseph E. Clayton took charge of Manor's first school for Black children and built it into something ambitious—pairing vocational and mechanical training with the study of languages, arts, and sciences. Absorbed into the public system in 1919 and named the Clayton Vocational Institute in his honor, the school produced a stream of distinguished graduates. Clayton himself went on to organize with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, carrying his fight for opportunity into the fields.

Houston, TX

William Lockhart Clayton left school early to become a court reporter and rose to build Anderson, Clayton & Company into one of the world's great cotton firms, moving its headquarters to Houston in 1916 as the new ship channel opened. Drawn into government service, he became Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs under George C. Marshall and a principal architect of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt postwar Europe. His wife, Susan Vaughan Clayton, shaped the family's celebrated River Oaks homes and gave herself to philanthropy, women's suffrage, and the Houston Public Library, to which the couple bequeathed their home.

Kempner, TX

Oral tradition holds that six families organized this Missionary Baptist congregation in east Lampasas County in 1872, worshipping in a sanctuary on this site by the late 1870s under the Rev. Ambrose Elledge. Storms battered the building in 1912, revivals filled brush arbors and open-air tabernacles, and members were baptized in the Lampasas River until 1975.