Search Markers

Morton, TX

Cochran County was created in 1876 and named for Robert Cochran, a New Jersey native who died defending the Alamo in 1836. Settlement came slowly on this remote plain — the 1900 census counted just 25 cowboys — until the county finally organized in 1924 with Morton as its seat. Oil discovery and irrigated farming then drove rapid growth, and its Silver Lake had been known to early Spanish explorers as Laguna Quemado.

Belton, TX

The store that became Cochran, Blair and Potts began in 1869 when Henry Mansfield Cook opened a business in Centerville, later partnering with son-in-law Thomas W. Cochran. After moves to Buffalo and, in 1883, to Belton, the firm settled at this site and passed through generations of the Cook, Cochran, Blair, and Potts families. Surviving a devastating 1928 fire, the business carried on under family ownership for well over a century.

Buda, TX

Established in 1883, Cocke Cemetery is a rural burial ground in the Buda area of Hays County, dating to the settlement era of Central Texas. It was recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2016, a state designation that documents and protects burial places at least fifty years old.

Eustace, TX

In 1929 Dr. Lonnie Lee Cockerell bought second-story space on Eustace's city square, and the following year opened the first hospital in Henderson County. From vaccinations to dental work to surgery, he treated both acute and chronic cases and accepted every patient regardless of ability to pay. When he built a new hospital in Athens in 1937 the Eustace facility closed, though the physician kept caring for his local patients.

East Manchester Township, PA · est. 1954

Built in 1765, Codorus Furnace was part of the charcoal-iron industry that turned Pennsylvania's forests and ore beds into a colonial and Revolutionary-era workshop. It was operated during the Revolution by James Smith, a York County lawyer who signed the Declaration of Independence. As the oldest surviving relic of York County's iron trade, the restored stack recalls an age when local furnaces cast the tools, stoves, and munitions of a new nation.

Rockdale, TX

In the 1930s Rockdale businessman H. H. Coffield clad this rental home in petrified wood, part of a construction fad that swept Texas and the Southwest after the National Park Service popularized rustic buildings made of natural materials. The "stone tree house" combined a cross-gable plan with petrified-wood walls, brick-trimmed openings, and decorative bargeboard. Since 1995 it has served as the Rockdale Chamber of Commerce.

Denison, TX

While David Harman Coffman served in the Confederate army during the Civil War, his wife Harriet and their four sons made their way from Missouri to North Texas. After the war he rejoined them and bought this land, and in 1878 the Coffmans deeded a one-acre plot to the county for a public cemetery and an adjoining acre for a school and Baptist meetinghouse. Among those buried here is J.K. Miller, the pioneer on whose land the city of Denison was laid out.

Anna, TX

This burial ground grew up around the mid-nineteenth-century community of Coffman, on land given by early settler John Coffman, whose son George farmed nearby. The oldest marked grave dates to 1876, and for more than a century the cemetery served as the community's primary resting place. Descendants of many families buried here still live in this corner of Collin County.

Brownwood, TX

Completed in 1876, this two-story commercial building rose from a partnership between prominent ranchers and philanthropists Samuel R. and Moses "Mody" Coggin and businessman W.C. "Clay" Parks. Sitting on a prime downtown corner, it housed a grocery, hardware store, business college, and restaurant, and figured prominently in Brownwood's early growth. Though its exterior was later heavily altered, the building endures as a landmark of the town's frontier commercial beginnings.

Azle, TX

Settlers began reaching this part of North Texas around 1849, among them James and Sarah Hoggard, whose daughter Nancy Jane married cabinetmaker and teacher John "Coho" Smith in 1861. The couple built a one-room cabin here that grew with their family and reportedly doubled as a school. Later digs uncovered a hand-dug well, root cellar, spring house, and rock walls hinting at a fortified structure.

Robert Lee, TX

Coke County was carved from Tom Green County and created in March 1889, part of the wave of county organization that followed the settlement of West Texas. It honors Richard Coke, the Democrat who served as governor from 1874 to 1876 and then two decades in the U.S. Senate. The county seat moved from short-lived Hayrick to Robert Lee in 1890.

Robert Lee, TX

Built in 1907 by the Southern Structural Steel Company of San Antonio, this jail replaced Coke County's original one-room lumber lockup of about 1891. At least seven early sheriffs lived on the ground floor and doubled as jailkeepers, tending an average of only about four short-term prisoners a month. The gallows built on the second floor were never used—the county never sentenced anyone to death.

Perry Township, PA · est. 1946

The dome-shaped brick beehive ovens found near here are emblems of a region that once fed the American steel industry. Around 1840, coal from near Connellsville was first baked into coke in ovens of this type, producing the hot, clean-burning fuel that iron and steel making demanded. From 1870 onward, Connellsville coke became indispensable to the mills of Pittsburgh and beyond.

San Antonio, TX

South Carolinian John "Jack" Coker came to Texas in 1834 and fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, earning a large land grant along Salado Creek north of San Antonio, where he summoned his brothers to help settle. The cemetery began in 1857 with the burial of a six-year-old killed by a rattlesnake, his limestone headstone still the most prominent stone on the knoll. In 1873 the family set aside three acres for a church, school, and graveyard, and the church still stands beside the cemetery today.

Colorado City, TX

Opened in 1924 to process Mitchell County crude, this refinery was soon acquired by Standard Oil of California and renamed Col-Tex, running at a full 12,000 barrels a day from the 1930s into the 1950s. It was woven into Colorado City's daily rhythm—employing scores of residents who set their clocks by the refinery whistle—before changing hands through Cosden, American Petrofina, and Fina, which closed operations in 1969 and later began environmental cleanup. The site charts the whole arc of a West Texas oil-town industry from boom to shutdown.

Paducah, KY

On March 25, 1864, Confederate cavalry under Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest swept into the Ohio River town of Paducah, seeking the medical supplies and munitions his raiders badly needed. In the fighting, Col. Albert P. Thompson — a respected local lawyer who had left his practice to command the 3rd Kentucky Infantry — was killed on this ground by a Union cannonball, dying near the town where he had made his home. After the war his remains were reinterred at Murray, Kentucky.

Corsicana, TX

Clinton McKamey Winkler settled in the Republic of Texas in 1840, was admitted to the bar in 1843, and served in the Second Texas Legislature before the Civil War. He raised 150 men for Hood's Brigade and served four years in the Confederate army, suffering a wound at Gettysburg. After the war he returned to the legislature and became one of the three original justices of the Texas Court of Appeals, and a Texas county was named in his honor.

Paducah, KY

Here stood the home of Colonel Ed Murray, who oversaw the building of the USS Merrimac in 1855. Seized by Confederates at Norfolk in 1861 and rebuilt as the ironclad CSS Virginia, the ship helped usher in a new age of naval warfare. In March 1862 it sank two Union vessels at Hampton Roads and then fought the USS Monitor to a draw in the first-ever battle between ironclad warships.

Oil City, PA · est. 2011

Born in the oil-country town of Oil City to Polish immigrant parents, Francis "Gabby" Gabreski became one of America's greatest fighter pilots. Flying in World War II and again in the Korean War, he ranked among the nation's leading aces and, as a squadron commander, passed his hard-won combat tactics on to the pilots under him. His skill and valor earned him high decorations from the United States and its allies.

Louisville, KY

A Revolutionary War veteran from Maryland, Frederick Geiger settled in the Louisville area in the 1790s and grew into a prominent landowner, ferry operator, and mill owner along Beargrass Creek. He raised a company of Kentucky Mounted Riflemen for the 1811 campaign against Native forces, was wounded at Tippecanoe, and served as a colonel in the War of 1812. The neighborhood he helped shape, Butchertown, became a bustling pork-packing district supplying the Ohio River steamboat trade.

Palestine, TX

Col. G.R. Howard, a merchant and public official, built this Palestine residence in 1851, in the years when East Texas was filling with new arrivals and commerce. His family held the house for well over a century before selling it to the city in 1965 for use as a museum. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark the following year.

North Strabane Township, PA · est. 1947

George Morgan was one of the most experienced Indian traders and agents on the early American frontier, and from 1796 to 1810 he made his home on this ground. It was here that Aaron Burr, the former vice president, came calling with a scheme to raise a private venture in the West. Morgan grew alarmed at what he heard and became one of the first to warn President Thomas Jefferson of Burr's designs.

Hamilton, TX

George Freeman left Kentucky for Texas in the 1840s and fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Afterward he captained the treasury guards—about thirty former Confederates who repelled an 1865 raid on the state treasury, saving most of Texas's funds. Moving to Hamilton in the mid-1870s, he built a legal career capped by arguing the Greer County boundary dispute for Texas before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Town of Huntington, NY

George Washington Brush was born in this house in 1842 and went on to earn the Medal of Honor — the nation's highest decoration for valor — during the Civil War. Serving with New York troops, he was among the relatively small number of soldiers singled out for extraordinary bravery in that conflict. His birthplace links this quiet Long Island spot to the great national struggle over slavery and union.

Paducah, KY

This was the headquarters of Colonel Stephen G. Hicks, who commanded Union occupation forces during the Battle of Paducah on March 25, 1864. When Confederate raiders used nearby houses as cover for their assault on the fort, Hicks ordered some sixty private homes burned to the ground the following day. Most owners sued for compensation, but were never repaid for their losses.

Palestine, TX

Born in Anderson County in 1901, Homer Garrison, Jr. took his first lawman's job at nineteen as a deputy sheriff, against his father's advice. He was among the first thirty Texas Highway Patrol troopers in 1930 and, when the Department of Public Safety was created in 1935 by merging the patrol with the Texas Rangers, rose to become its director and chief of the Rangers in 1938. Over thirty years he built the agency to more than 3,400 employees and pioneered training, licensing, and safety programs.

Quitman, TX

Col. James A. Stinson came to Texas from Georgia in 1868, a widowed Confederate veteran who built this pine-and-oak home the next year and made himself a force in Wood County — running a large sawmill, championing scientific farming, and leading the Grange movement to protect rural interests. In his parlor in 1874, his daughter Sallie married James Stephen Hogg, who would become the first native-born governor of Texas, and Stinson's ideas on good government are said to have shaped the young reformer.

Highspire, PA · est. 1946

From his home "Tinian" on the Susquehanna, Col. James Burd served the frontier in the French and Indian War, helping cut roads for Gen. Edward Braddock's ill-fated 1755 expedition and later commanding at Fort Augusta, a key defensive post upriver at Sunbury. When the Revolution came, the veteran soldier again took up the patriot cause. His house, the marker notes, still stood on the opposite hill.

Bonham, TX

In late 1835 James Tarleton raised a company of 36 riflemen in his native Kentucky and set out for Texas, arriving to find San Antonio already liberated. Though an officer, he fought in the ranks at the victory of San Jacinto in April 1836. Having lost his wife Nancy in Kentucky that same year, he settled afterward in Fannin County with his son Robert.

Coffeeville, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1804 and seasoned in Tennessee, Col. John Hamilton McNairy came to the young Republic of Texas in 1837, settling first in Shelby County and reaching Upshur County in 1847. A year later his neighbors elected him the county's first representative. Father of eleven children, he died at Old Coffeeville in 1853, one of the founding figures of a frontier community.

Canyon, TX

After the Civil War, waves of settlers pushed west onto the Great Plains and clashed with the Native nations who lived there, prompting Army campaigns against the Southern Plains tribes. In 1872 Colonel John I. Gregg led Eighth Cavalry troops from New Mexico into West Texas hunting raiders, and on August 16 they skirmished with Kiowas near this spot. That fight, with the later Red River War of 1874-75, drove the subjugation of the Plains tribes and their confinement to reservations.

Kelly Township, PA · est. 1952

John Kelly settled in the Buffalo Valley around 1769 on the Pennsylvania frontier and in 1775 built the log house that still stands nearby, later clad in weatherboard. When the Revolution came he served with distinction under Washington at Trenton and Princeton, the twin winter victories that revived the American cause in 1776–77. He lived on until 1832 and lies buried at Lewisburg.

San Antonio, TX

Born in San Antonio in 1783, José Francisco Ruiz served as an officer in the Mexican army before casting his lot with the Texas cause, becoming one of the few native Tejanos to sign the 1836 Texas Declaration of Independence. He went on to represent his people as a senator in the first Congress of the Republic of Texas. He died in 1840, honored in the city of his birth.

Mt. Calm, TX

Leonard Williams lived the turbulent frontier of Republic-era Texas, where relations with the Comanche shaped daily survival. Once a Comanche captive himself, he later served as a diplomat and Indian agent, earning a colonel's rank from his friend President Sam Houston. He settled near here in 1845 and built the area's first stock tank, scraping it out with a rawhide sled.

Austin, TX

Georgia native Lewis Washington came to Texas around 1835 and joined the revolutionary forces at San Antonio, serving on Colonel Fannin's staff with the Georgia Battalion at Refugio and Goliad. He held an office in Sam Houston's administration during the days of the Republic of Texas. Years later he was killed in Nicaragua while working as a news reporter in Central America; his body was never recovered, though his wife Rebecca is buried here.

Parke County, IN

This memorial in Parke County — the heart of Indiana's Turkey Run country — honors Colonel Richard Lieber, the German-born conservationist remembered as the father of Indiana's state park system. Its inscribed lines of verse, on the hidden connection between a flower and a star, capture the ethic of preservation he championed in the early twentieth century. Lieber helped launch the state parks as part of Indiana's 1916 centennial and shaped the national conservation movement.

Delaware Township, PA · est. 1949

Matthew Smith captained a company of Lancaster County militia in one of the Revolution's most grueling feats: Benedict Arnold's midwinter march through the Maine wilderness to attack Quebec in 1775. Surviving that ordeal, he went on to serve in 1779 as Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Council, part of the state's Revolutionary government. He died in 1794 and was buried here in a grave that long went unmarked.

Erie, PA · est. 2001

Erie native Philip Cochran carved out a reputation as one of World War II's most colorful airmen. He first drew notice flying P-40 fighters in North Africa, then commanded the 1st Air Commando Group during the 1944 Allied campaign in Burma, pioneering the use of gliders and light aircraft to insert troops deep behind Japanese lines. A colonel at 33, he earned the Distinguished Service Medal and Britain's Distinguished Service Order—and inspired cartoonist Milton Caniff's characters Flip Corkin and General Philerie.

Cincinnati, OH

Raised in 1878 by veterans of the 9th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, this monument honors their fallen commander, a member of the celebrated 'Fighting McCooks' — an Ohio family that sent a remarkable number of its sons to fight for the Union. The 9th Ohio was recruited largely from Cincinnati's German immigrant community and saw hard service in the war's western campaigns. That his old soldiers paid to remember him more than a decade after his death speaks to the bonds forged in that regiment.

Crockett, TX

Steward Alexander Miller came to Texas from Virginia in 1839, during the days of the Republic. In 1843 he joined the Snively Expedition, a Republic of Texas venture aimed at Mexican trade caravans on the Santa Fe Trail, and in 1846 he served in the first state legislature after Texas joined the Union.

Waterford, PA · est. 1994

Born in this Erie County town in 1837, Strong Vincent rose to command a Union brigade in the Civil War. On July 2, 1863, at Gettysburg, he acted on his own initiative to rush his men—including the 83rd Pennsylvania—onto Little Round Top, holding the Union army's exposed left flank at a decisive moment. Mortally wounded rallying his troops, he was promoted to brigadier general days before he died.

Dauphin, PA · est. 1948

Timothy Green's life traced the whole arc of Pennsylvania's revolutionary generation. He first bore arms as an officer in the French and Indian War, then in June 1774 joined his neighbors in signing the Hanover Resolves, a bold early declaration of readiness to resist British authority. Through the Revolution that followed he stood out as a leader of this Susquehanna-region community, and he rests today in the graveyard just south of the marker.

Connellsville, PA · est. 1966

William Crawford was a frontier soldier and surveyor who settled near the Youghiogheny River after 1766, serving as George Washington's western land agent at a time when Virginia and Pennsylvania families were pushing across the Appalachians. During the Revolution he took up arms on the frontier, leading a 1782 expedition against Native villages along the Sandusky River in Ohio. The campaign ended in disaster: Crawford was captured and put to death, a killing that became notorious in the bitter borderland warfare of the era.

Schulenburg, TX

Arriving in Texas in 1853, W. F. Upton settled near High Hill and, when war came in 1861, organized and led Texas state troops guarding the frontier and coastline as a lieutenant colonel. After the war he became a leading state legislator who worked to rebuild Texas, while keeping a store in Schulenburg for many years. A West Texas county bears his name and that of his brother John, a colonel killed at the Second Battle of Manassas in 1862.

Denison, TX

Established around 1853 by Benjamin F. Colbert, this Red River ferry carried thousands of immigrants into Texas during the 1850s. From 1858 to 1861 it served the Southern Overland Mail Line, whose stagecoaches linked St. Louis and San Francisco with mail and passengers. The crossing endured until 1931, when a highway bridge finally spanned the river.

Denison, TX

About 1855, pioneers camped near a spring on William S. Reeves's land while awaiting their land grants built this one-room log schoolhouse. Their leader, William L. Holder, had migrated to Grayson County from Missouri, and his son Clinton later lived in the cabin as a home. In 1974 the structure was moved to Old Settlers Village and restored.

Alto, TX

In 1876 land here was deeded to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and to the county school superintendent for a church and public school. The Cold Springs Methodist Church, named for a large nearby spring, was served over the years by circuit-riding ministers. The public school began with a single teacher, added more after about 1900, and closed in 1944; together the sanctuary and schoolhouse long served as the heart of this rural community.

Coldspring, TX

This Methodist congregation traces to 1848, when Mr. and Mrs. F. H. Rankin gave land from an Austin Colony grant for a church built just to the north. The building was moved to a new site in 1917, and its bell has now tolled for well over a century. It is a living link to the frontier settlers who planted churches alongside their homesteads in the Republic-era Texas backcountry.

Hico, TX

Built in 1901-1902 by a real estate investor, this two-story frame house in the small town of Hico soon belonged to druggist John Baldwin Cole and his wife Minnie. Cole ran the Cole and Grace Drugstore alongside his father-in-law, Dr. J. W. Grace, a common family-business pairing in turn-of-the-century Texas towns. Its offset gable, wraparound porch with Chippendale screen, and steep hipped roof reflect the comfortable domestic architecture of a prospering merchant class.

Rosenberg, TX

Czech immigrants Fred Felcman and Miles Podlipny opened the Liberty Theatre here in 1919, showing silent and Czech-language films. Renamed the Cole Theatre in 1935 and refaced in art deco, it drew crowds with Saturday cowboy matinees, live acts from The Ink Spots to Shirley Temple, and Depression-era 'Bank Nights.' Yet like theaters across the South, it seated patrons by race—floor and balcony—until 1968, and after 63 years it closed in 1982.

Crosbyton, TX

Handy P. Cole — foreman of the sprawling Spur Ranch and later sheriff of Dickens County — bought this West Texas property in 1897 and built the original house around 1900. In 1904 rancher James Calvin McNeill, Jr. acquired it and moved over from his father's adjoining spread, enlarging the home in 1917. It later passed to the estate of West Texas business leader Morgan Jones, with the McNeill family staying on.

Colebrookdale Township, PA · est. 1967

Founded around 1720 on Iron Stone Creek by a partnership including Thomas Rutter and Thomas Potts, this ironworks is regarded as the first blast furnace erected in Pennsylvania. Named for a furnace in England, it drew on the region's rich ore and abundant timber for charcoal, casting the iron that a growing colony needed. It launched a Pennsylvania iron industry that would one day help make the state the forge of the nation.

Coleman, TX

Coleman County occupies land where Apache, Comanche, and Kiowa people once camped and kept lookouts from its hills. White settlement began in 1857 around Camp Colorado, a U.S. 2nd Cavalry post on Jim Ned Creek; the county was created in 1858 and named for Robert M. Coleman, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and San Jacinto veteran. In 1862 cattleman John Chisum arrived to raise beef for Confederate troops, and the county formally organized in 1864.

Coleman, TX

Erected in 1890 to replace a small 1879 structure on the courthouse lawn, this was Coleman County's second jail — a sturdy example of Victorian jail design with Romanesque Revival touches and decorative belt courses between its floors. The jailer and family lived on the ground level while maximum- and minimum-security cells filled the upper story. In all its years, only one man, a convicted murderer, was ever hanged here.

Westbrook, TX

The 1920 Westbrook discovery well opened commercial oil production in the vast Permian Basin, and in the frenzy that followed, local physician Preston C. Coleman promoted drilling on his own Mitchell County land. His P.C. Coleman No. 1, completed in 1923, was never a gusher — coaxed along with nitroglycerine, capped with a cedar stump, and finally abandoned in 1940 — yet it proved that oil lay beneath the Eastern Shelf. That promise paid off in 1946, when large finds nearby confirmed the region's petroleum wealth.

Taft, TX

Organized in 1879 from an earlier cattle partnership, the Coleman-Fulton Pasture Company ran 167,000 acres of South Texas range and pioneered fencing the open range and shipping cattle by boat from its own wharves. Financial troubles passed control to Ohio investor David Sinton, whose son-in-law Charles P. Taft lent the ranch its name; under manager Joseph F. Green it became one of the state's largest and most innovative operations. The company town of Taft, platted in 1904, outlived the ranch, whose enterprises were sold off by 1928.

Victoria, TX

When diphtheria swept the German settlement of Steinerville in 1872, August and Thekla Spitzer buried two young sons on this ground and soon deeded the land to trustees of the community's new German church and school. Renamed Coletoville for nearby Coleto Creek, the settlement grew a cemetery whose oldest residents were born as early as 1812 and whose graves are laid out in rows by date rather than family plots. A 1997 survey counted more than seven hundred graves, including several veterans.

Colfax, TX

A. L. Kellam donated five acres in 1883 to help establish this cemetery, whose first burial in 1884 was Elisha Tunnell, founder of the chapel and community that became Colfax. The surrounding land held three schoolhouses and two churches over the years and hosted revivals and summer camp meetings. Today the cemetery holds roughly a thousand graves of the area's pioneers and their descendants.

Fort Worth, TX

Built in 1907–08 with money from the Swift and Armour packing companies and the Fort Worth Stock Yards, this hall finally gave the traveling Fat Stock Show a permanent home. Within its walls the indoor rodeo was born, and in 1923 WBAP carried the first live radio broadcast of a rodeo from this very floor. Over the decades the Coliseum also welcomed former President Theodore Roosevelt, who spoke here in 1911, and the great tenor Enrico Caruso, who sang here in 1920—all while the ground beneath it passed through three different cities.

DeKalb County, GA

Covered or lattice bridges once dotted the eastern United States, their timber trusses roofed to shield the wood from weather. This one, built in the nineteenth century, originally spanned the North Fork of the Oconee River in Athens, Georgia, linking College and Hobson avenues before it was preserved and relocated. Its crisscrossed lattice of planks is a hallmark of a bridge-building age before steel and concrete.