Search Markers

Perryton, TX

William B. Ochiltree helped build two governments and then took up arms for a third. He served the Republic of Texas as secretary of the treasury and its last attorney general, then in 1861 sat as a secession delegate and a member of the Provisional Confederate Congress that drafted the Confederacy's constitution and mobilized its war effort. Resigning from politics, he raised the 18th Texas Infantry and led it into Arkansas in 1862 to help repel Union forces. This memorial, erected by the State of Texas in 1963, honors Texans who served the Confederacy.

Newcastle, TX

William C. Young packed several frontier careers into a short life — Tennessee lawyer, U.S. marshal, Texas Ranger, delegate to the 1845 Annexation Convention, and a colonel in the war with Mexico. During the Civil War he raised and led the 11th Texas Cavalry, helping secure North Texas by capturing Forts Cobb, Washita, and Arbuckle and negotiating with the Comanches, Kiowas, and Chickasaws. He was murdered in 1862 in the Red River cane brakes by renegades in reprisal for his testimony tied to the Gainesville hangings.

Connellsville, PA · est. 1918

Born in Virginia in 1732, William Crawford was a pioneer surveyor and friend of George Washington who built his cabin at Stewart's Crossing on the Youghiogheny in 1765. He first came west with Forbes's 1758 campaign, crossed the Delaware with Washington in 1777, and shared the victory at Trenton. Leading the Sandusky Expedition against Native towns in 1782, he was captured and burned at the stake in Ohio — one of the frontier war's most infamous deaths.

Dallas, TX

In October 1840, Colonel William G. Cooke and about forty men of the Republic of Texas Regular Army camped near this spot while laying out the Central National Highway, a military road meant to link the young republic's settlements. The route helped open the region that would become Dallas.

Boston, MA

On June 17, 1775, in one of the first pitched battles of the American Revolution, Colonel William Prescott led New England militia in throwing up hasty earthworks on the high ground above Charlestown, overlooking Boston. Though the outnumbered colonists were finally driven off after their powder ran low, they inflicted staggering losses on the British regulars who stormed the redoubt. Tradition credits Prescott with steadying his green troops to hold their fire until the enemy was nearly upon them. His statue stands watch here at the ground of the battle remembered as Bunker Hill, though the fighting fell largely on neighboring Breed's Hill.

Childress, TX

Born in 1840, William Edgar Hughes came from Illinois to Texas in 1859 and rose from private to colonel in Confederate service, fighting at Shiloh, Chickamauga, and Nashville. After the war he taught school, read law, and built a banking empire stretching from Dallas to Denver, then in 1880 bought into the Mill Iron Ranch, assembling a vast spread that eventually ran up to 50,000 head of longhorns across four counties. He sold the last Mill Iron herd in 1918, the year he died.

Fairfield, TX

Arriving in Texas from Virginia in 1852, William L. Moody organized and captained Company G of the 7th Texas Infantry, the first Freestone County unit to march to the Civil War. Captured at Fort Donelson in 1862 and later exchanged, he won promotion to colonel for bravery, cited for rallying his men in hand-to-hand fighting in dense woods before wounds sent him home. After the war he moved to Galveston and became a leader in its financial, philanthropic, and civic life.

Halifax, NC

This colonial churchyard in Halifax holds the graves of several notable North Carolinians across the generations: Confederate general Junius Daniel, pioneering printer and editor Abraham Hodge, and U.S. District Judge John Sitgreaves. Together they span the town's long history from the colonial era through the Civil War. The graves lie one block northeast of this marker.

Chester, PA · est. 1954

Raised in 1724 in a restrained Georgian Colonial style and restored in 1920, this Chester landmark served as a courthouse for Chester County until 1786 and then for Delaware County from 1789 to 1851, later doing duty as City Hall. It is celebrated as the oldest public building in continuous use in the United States.

Augusta, GA

When General James Oglethorpe's Georgia trustees ordered this fort raised in 1735, Augusta was the raw edge of Britain's youngest American colony—a fortified trading post on the Savannah River where deerskins moved between backcountry hunters and the coast. Within a generation the settlement had grown enough to build St. Paul's Church tucked beneath the fort's earthen curtain wall in 1750. During the Revolution the British renamed the strongpoint Fort Cornwallis and held it against Patriot forces, making this quiet churchyard ground the site of some of the war's hardest fighting in the Deep South.

Concord Township, PA · est. 1959

In the early 1700s, water-powered gristmills were the beating heart of rural Pennsylvania, grinding a settlement's grain into flour and giving neighbors a reason to gather. This stone mill was raised in 1704 by Nathaniel Newlin, a Quaker who had crossed from Ireland two decades earlier into William Penn's tolerant colony. Restored to working order, it survives as a rare, tangible piece of the machinery that kept a colonial community fed.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1950

This Lancaster house, built in the true Georgian style before 1760, stands on ground merchant Thomas Poultney purchased in 1749. Georgian architecture — with its balanced proportions and formal symmetry — was the fashionable choice of prosperous colonial townsmen. John Passmore, Lancaster's first mayor, lived here at one time, tying the house to the early civic life of what was then one of the largest inland towns in the American colonies.

Weymouth, MA

These ruins mark an early meetinghouse of Weymouth, one of the oldest English towns in Massachusetts, first settled in the 1620s. In Puritan New England the 'Church of Christ' was the center of town life — congregation, government, and community all in one. The stones that remain recall an era when a New England town and its church were nearly the same thing.

Williamsburg, VA · est. 1934

As Virginia's colonial capital, Williamsburg was a center of revolutionary politics. Restored in the 20th century, it is now the largest living-history museum in the country.

Zapata, TX

In 1746 Spanish officials chose José de Escandón, a proven soldier and administrator, to colonize the lower Rio Grande Valley, then the northern frontier of New Spain. Leading more than 700 settlers, soldiers, and missionaries, he founded a string of towns — including Laredo, San Ygnacio, and others — in a district named Nuevo Santander after his home province. Escandón parceled the land into long riverfront tracts called porciones, and the General Visitation of 1767 confirmed private ownership, seeding the ranching culture from which South Texas's great cattle industry grew.

Flatonia, TX

In the 1870s, families uprooted from post-Civil War Mississippi carved a new community called Colony out of the Fayette County countryside, complete with three churches, stores, and a post office. In 1876 John A. and Margaret Young gave land here for a Methodist church and its burial ground, where the Reverend Samuel J. Brown was laid to rest in 1879. Generations of pioneers, children lost too young, and military veterans followed him into this quiet graveyard.

Beeville, TX

Beginning in 1894, Norwegian farm families settled the South Texas prairie in a community they called simply 'the Colony.' In 1897 the settlers organized a cemetery association and accepted Hans Thompson's gift of an acre around three existing graves, laying out four equal blocks with one reserved for anyone in need. Though the founders hoped to keep the ground for those of Scandinavian descent, the earliest burials — a child, a son, a young woman — soon filled the rows, and generations of Thompsons, Travlands, and Olsons followed.

Harford County, MD

This marker compresses nearly a century and a half of Maryland's founding story into a few lines. In 1634 the colony was chartered as a proprietary grant to Lord Baltimore, and in 1649 its Assembly passed a landmark act of religious toleration for Christians. The lines trace forward through the surveying of the Mason-Dixon Line, colonial defiance of the British Stamp Act, and the "Peggy Stewart" tea-burning at Annapolis on the eve of the Revolution.

Colorado City, TX

When the Texas & Pacific Railroad reached Colorado City in April 1881, the new town platted its lots and, almost at once, its cemetery—the earliest grave, Clint Mooney's, dating to that same month. The local Odd Fellows lodge started a burial ground for members beside a public plot, later deeding it to the city, which built a formal entry and rock wall in 1928. With more than 5,000 people laid to rest across its several sections, the cemetery is a stone record of the railroad town's whole history.

Colorado City, TX

In 1884 the young town then called Colorado issued waterworks bonds to solve the fundamental problem of survival in arid West Texas: a reliable water supply. The 90-foot steel standpipe, built that year by Riter and Conley of Pittsburgh, fed mains throughout the town and remained in service as emergency storage for generations. In a region where drought could doom a settlement, engineered water infrastructure was the difference between a town that endured and one that vanished.

Columbus, TX

Colorado County lay within Stephen F. Austin's First Colony and was formally created in March 1836, in the same weeks Texas declared its independence. It took its name from the river running through it — christened 'Colorado,' or 'red,' by Spanish explorers who confused it with the muddier Brazos. Columbus, the county seat, grew up on its banks.

Columbus, TX

Built in 1890–1891 in the shape of a Greek cross, the Colorado County Courthouse rose in brick and Belton stone with its cornerstone laid by the local Masonic lodge — a proud statement of a county coming into its own. A 1909 tornado nearly undid it, hurling the cupola's great bell 120 feet to bury itself in the ground and ending the clock-winder's fifteen-dollar-a-month job. In the repairs the building gained its distinctive copper dome, and it survives today as one of Texas's oldest working courthouses.

Columbus, TX

Columbus traces its roots to 1823, when Stephen F. Austin eyed the site — shown on his 1835 map as Montezuma — for his colony's capital. The provisional government created the municipality of Colorado in January 1836 and ordered the town laid out as its seat; that spring the county was born and the town soon incorporated. As a railroad terminal from 1869 to 1873 it thrived as a trading hub, and its marker honors generations of pioneers, defenders of Gonzales, San Jacinto veterans, Confederate officers, and citizens of distinction who called the county home.

Colorado City, TX

Built in 1899–1900 by the Colorado Opera House Company, this was the second opera house in Colorado City when the town stood as a cultural center of West Texas. Its stage hosted light opera, vaudeville, school programs, and — after 1911 — silent movies. Converted to a boarding house in 1925, the building was restored to its original theatrical use in 1971.

Sandoval County, NM

This scenic marker overlooks the Colorado Plateau, the vast tableland of mesas and canyons spreading across the Four Corners region of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. Beneath its colorful rock lie the mineral, oil, and gas deposits that drew prospectors, drillers, and mining communities into the region. The plateau's dramatic landscape has long shaped both the livelihoods and the imagination of the Southwest.

Ballinger, TX

In the 1880s this ferry carried travelers across the Colorado River on the Ballinger-San Angelo Road, with rates set by the county court ranging from a penny per head of livestock to a dollar for a six-horse wagon. It stayed in service until 1888, when the first wooden bridge finally spanned the river.

Hearne, TX

Now marked by a single surviving grave, this was a burial ground for African American residents of old Hearne, remembered in folklore as a farm or slave cemetery with its earliest known burial in 1879. When developers bought the land in 1947, descendants were forced to disinter and rebury their relatives—except the children of Hollie Tatnell, a formerly enslaved woman, who refused to move their mother's grave and compelled the builders to work around it.

Lexington, KY

Led by Mrs. E. Belle Mitchell Jackson, the Colored Orphan Industrial Home opened in Lexington in 1894 to shelter Black orphans and youth, who learned to read and write and acquired a trade, and it also gave refuge to elderly women. By 1909 the home had grown to 18 acres and two brick houses; after a fire in 1912, a new building was dedicated in 1913. That structure now serves as the Robert H. Williams Cultural Center.

Sykesville, MD

Across the decades when Maryland's public schools were racially segregated, Black communities were served by separate "colored" schoolhouses — often small, locally built and locally sustained buildings that became the heart of African American education and community life. A schoolhouse like this one near Sykesville would have taught generations of children in one or a few rooms, typically on limited public funding and outsized community effort. Such buildings stood as proof of Black families' determination to secure learning for their children under Jim Crow.

Austin, TX

This 1952 building was designed by John S. Chase, the first licensed African American architect in Texas, and originally housed the Colored Teachers State Association of Texas. Founded in 1884, the association won a series of civil rights gains for Black students and teachers in a segregated state. Its flat-roofed, industrial-influenced modern design served the organization until it dissolved in 1966.

Greenfield Township, PA · est. 1951

In 1797, as agent for the Pennsylvania Population Company, Judah Colt planted the first organized settlement in Erie County at the head of navigable water on French Creek. The location was chosen with commerce in mind: flatboats could carry goods and settlers downstream from this frontier launching point. Colt's Station became an early anchor for American expansion into the northwestern corner of the state.

Edom, TX

James Coltharp built this house in 1849, on the eve of the great migrations that filled East Texas. It served as a stagecoach stop, hosted the area's first sermon, and housed the Hamburg post office — a single building doing the work of inn, church, and civic hub. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Columbia, PA · est. 1947

Founded as Wright's Ferry in 1726 at a strategic crossing of the broad Susquehanna, the town later renamed Columbia became a hinge of early American movement inland. Turnpikes, canals, and railroads converged here, and the first bridge across the river was raised in 1812 — an era when this river town was even briefly considered as a site for the national capital.

West Columbia, TX

For a few pivotal months in the autumn of 1836, this quiet Brazoria County town was the beating heart of a new nation. Columbia became the capital of the Republic of Texas, where the first elected Congress convened, the first Constitution was ratified, and Sam Houston and Mirabeau B. Lamar took office as president and vice-president. It was here, too, that Stephen F. Austin—the exhausted Father of Texas—served briefly as secretary of state before his death that December.

West Columbia, TX

Surveyed in 1824 by Old Three Hundred colonist Josiah Hughes Bell as a shipping center, Columbia became a stage for revolution as its residents adopted resolutions for independence. In July 1836 interim president David G. Burnet named it the first capital of the Republic of Texas, chosen for its housing and its newspaper, and here the first Congress convened while Sam Houston was inaugurated president that October. In its brief tenure the young government organized its army and navy, land and post offices, courts, and national symbols before Congress moved to the new city of Houston.

Bloomsburg, PA · est. 1983

Columbia County was carved from Northumberland County in 1813 during the early republic's rapid subdivision of Pennsylvania's frontier interior, its name a patriotic nod to the young United States. Its seat, Bloomsburg, holds the distinction of being Pennsylvania's only incorporated town, and the county's Quaker roots reach back to a Friends meetinghouse raised at Catawissa around 1789. The famous twin covered bridges at Forks remain a beloved local landmark.

Columbia County, GA

This monument honors the men and women of Columbia County, Georgia, who answered their nation's call to arms and gave their lives in service. Its inscription reaches across every conflict in which the county's sons and daughters have fought rather than singling out one war. Community war memorials like this one anchor national sacrifice in the places soldiers called home.

West Columbia, TX

This is one of the few surviving Rosenwald schools in Texas, built through the partnership of Sears president Julius Rosenwald and educator Booker T. Washington to fund schools for African American children across the South. Opened in East Columbia in 1921 with grants matched by local and Black community contributions, it replaced a school that had shared space with a church. Under its first teacher, Mrs. P.A. Franklin, it taught grades one through seven until closing in 1949.

Covington, LA

Columbia Street Landing was the working waterfront where Covington began. From the early 1800s, schooners and steamers tied up here to move cotton, lumber, bricks, whiskey, and mail between this harbor and the river cities beyond. Oyster luggers still delivered their catch into the late 1930s, and many of the area's first settlers first stepped ashore at this spot.

West Columbia, TX

This congregation reaches back to the missionary energy of Texas's years as an independent republic, when in 1839 the Rev. Isaac L. G. Strickland was assigned to the Brazoria circuit and organized a Methodist church in Columbia, an early capital. As the town's fortunes shifted toward neighboring Marion, the congregation moved with them, and later fellowships in East and West Columbia merged by 1928. It has met in West Columbia ever since.

Washington, DC

From 1857 to 1959, this Washington, D.C. ground held the Columbian Harmony Cemetery, one of the capital's important burial places for African American citizens during an era when segregation extended even to the grave. Founded by a Black mutual-aid society, it became the resting place of many distinguished members of the city's Black community across more than a century. In 1959 the cemetery was closed and its occupants reinterred at the new National Harmony Memorial Park in Landover, Maryland, as the land was redeveloped.

Jefferson County, CO

Set in a Jefferson County park near Columbine High School, this memorial keeps the memory of those killed in the 1999 attack on the school — a day that seared itself into the national conscience. Its simple vow, "Never Forgotten," speaks for a community and a country grappling with grief and disbelief. The tragedy reshaped how America thinks about school safety, and the memorial has become a place of quiet reflection for visitors from far beyond Colorado.

Esmeralda County, NV

Columbus took root on the edge of a salt marsh in 1865, when a quartz mill rose at the only spot for miles with water enough to run it. Its real fortune arrived in 1871, when William Troop discovered borax on the marsh and four companies rushed in to work the deposits. At its 1875 peak the town held around 1,000 people, a post office, and a newspaper aptly named The Borax Miner — but once the borax played out, Columbus faded, all but abandoned by the early 1880s.

Waco, TX

On Christmas Eve 1900, Baptists in the fast-growing north Waco neighborhood gathered in a private home to plan a new congregation, and with twenty-three members transferred from First Baptist Church, they organized in January 1901. They worshiped in a Presbyterian church and the YMCA until raising a small frame sanctuary that October, later renaming the church for the street it stood on. Over the decades the congregation grew and reached out to students, the elderly, the deaf, soldiers at nearby camps, and the disadvantaged across the city.

Columbus, TX

This limestone sanctuary was raised in the 1870s as St. John's Church by an Episcopal parish organized in the 1850s, which had long held services in the courthouse and other borrowed spaces before building a home of its own. The Columbus Church of Christ, active in the town since 1887, met in similar makeshift quarters for years before purchasing the property in 1943. The building has served worshipers continuously ever since.

Watertown, MA

The closing lines here — "He gained a world... On! Sail on!" — echo Joaquin Miller's beloved 1890s poem "Columbus," a fixture of American schoolrooms that turned the 1492 voyage into a parable of perseverance. Monuments like this one spread across the country around the 400th anniversary of that crossing, when towns and civic and immigrant societies raised statues and boulders to the explorer. They stand today as artifacts of how earlier generations of Americans chose to remember the beginnings of European contact with the Americas.

Columbus, TX

In April 1837, only months after Texas won independence, a district court convened here in the open air beneath a spreading oak, with the colorful frontier jurist Robert M. Williamson presiding over the Third Judicial District of the young Republic. Holding formal court under a tree was ordinary on a frontier that had few buildings and even fewer courthouses. The moment marked the extension of orderly law across a raw new nation.

Columbus, TX

John Toliver deeded this Columbus tract to the local Odd Fellows lodge for a cemetery in 1871, and among its first burials were victims of the 1873 yellow fever epidemic. Erosion along a bluff repeatedly threatened graves, and after a devastating 1913 flood many stones were relocated here from the old city cemetery to higher ground. Its burials include judges, legislators, and figures from a notorious local feud, making the grounds a chronicle of Colorado County.

Columbus, TX

When this bank put up its building in 1919, it deliberately preserved a wall of the 1857 Boedecker Building, a structure that had already sheltered many enterprises including the city's first bank in 1875. A 1969 rebuilding again wove pieces of the older structures into the new. The result is a bank whose very walls carry more than a century of Columbus commerce.

City of Poughkeepsie, NY

Statues of Christopher Columbus stand in cities across the United States, many erected by Italian American communities around the 1892 quadricentennial of his 1492 voyage as symbols of heritage and belonging. A monument like this one in Poughkeepsie reflects that long tradition of civic commemoration.

Columbus, TX

Columbus grew on land whose water rights were granted to Elizabeth Tumlinson in 1824. After an 1883 fire threatened downtown, the city council built a water tower on the courthouse square, laid mains with seven hydrants, and organized a fire department. Because filtered Colorado River water proved unfit to drink, the city drilled an artesian well in 1890 — prized for its purported medicinal purity — and expanded its reservoir as the town grew.

Columbus, TX

Columbus's old cemetery holds the founders of one of Texas's oldest towns, with its earliest headstone dating to 1853 and the city taking title to the seven acres in 1870. Among the buried are Benjamin Beason and town founder W.B. DeWees, both of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" colonists, early historian Dilue Rose, a War of 1812 and Texas Revolution veteran, and numerous Confederate soldiers and victims of the 1873 yellow fever epidemic.

Independence, TX

Chartered by the Republic of Texas in 1845 and opened in 1846, Baylor grew from the efforts of Judge R. E. B. Baylor and others to become the oldest university in Texas still operating under its original name. For forty years it stood here at Independence—men on the hill to the south, women at Baylor Female College whose columns still mark this spot—before relocating to Waco and Belton in 1886. Among its early presidents was G. W. Baines, great-grandfather of President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Spokane County, WA

This monument in Spokane County, Washington, honors the explorers, fur traders, missionaries, soldiers, and pioneers who turned a Native footpath into the Colville–Walla Walla Road. That route followed trails long used by the region's Indigenous peoples, becoming a corridor for the fur trade, missions, and military and settler traffic across the inland Northwest in the 19th century.

Garden Ridge, TX

In the mid-1800s, German families—Schwab, Friesenhahn, Wenzel, Fey, and others—left nearby New Braunfels to carve farms out of the countryside, forming the village that became Comal. Among the first Germans to reach Texas in the 1840s, they built a close-knit farming settlement anchored by a cooperative cotton gin, a grocery, a blacksmith shop, and early church and school institutions. Some of their farms remain in the hands of descendants today.

New Braunfels, TX

Comal County was created and organized in 1846, carved from the Travis and Bexar land districts, and named for the river whose spring-fed islands suggested pancakes to early settlers. Its seat, New Braunfels, had been established a year earlier and honors Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, the German nobleman who led colonists here. The county's very names carry the imprint of its German founding.

New Braunfels, TX

Comal County held its first court in a clerk's home in 1846 and cycled through cramped quarters before commissioning renowned Texas courthouse architect J. Riley Gordon in 1898. Gordon's Romanesque design, built of stone quarried on land owned by statesman Edward Mandell House, features his signature rounded pavilion entrances and richly detailed masonry. A stone jail addition followed around 1930, and the building has been carefully renovated since.

New Braunfels, TX

The Comal County Fair has been a fixture of New Braunfels since the early 1890s, beginning in 1892 as a fundraiser tied to the dedication of the city hospital. A fair association organized in 1893 under president Harry Landa, and the event moved to permanent grounds along the Guadalupe River by the turn of the century. Scaled back during two world wars and the Depression, it endures as one of the largest county fairs in Texas, still closing local schools and businesses.

New Braunfels, TX

During the Civil War, Comal County and its seat of New Braunfels—settled by German immigrants—became a manufacturing and supply center for the Confederacy, its local newspaper pressing the secessionist cause so hard that the 1861 vote favored secession 239 to 86. More than 300 men enlisted, forming companies that fought in the New Mexico campaign, the recapture of Galveston, and the Red River Campaign. Local mills produced gunpowder, cloth, flour, and paper, and one firm even ordered European machinery to make newsprint from corn shucks before wartime losses ended the project.

Comanche, TX

First settled by five families in 1854 and organized in 1856, Comanche County was named for the Comanche people, whose hunting grounds were being overtaken by settlers. Early years were hard — raids on livestock, farmers kept from their fields, and near-starvation in 1861 relieved only by food from Bell County. Railroads arrived in 1880 and 1890, and an oil boom followed in 1918–1920.