Search Markers

Sterling City, TX

When the Concho, San Saba and Llano Valley Railroad pushed a line into Sterling City in 1909, it was chasing the wealth of West Texas ranch country—livestock that needed a way to distant markets. A boxcar served as the first depot until this mission revival station rose to take its place, becoming the hub of a young ranching town. Highways and pipelines eventually siphoned away the freight, and the line went quiet in 1958, leaving the depot as the last witness to the rail era that built the area.

Greenville, TX

Concord Baptist Church was organized in 1844 by the Rev. Ben Watson beneath a tree near Shady Grove, making it, by the marker's account, the oldest institution in Hunt County. The congregation raised its first building near that spot and, after several moves, settled on this site in 1885. Along the way it helped organize the Texas Baptist Convention in 1848.

Palestine, TX

Three Fitzgerald families settled Mound Prairie Creek in the 1840s, giving their name to the community that grew there. Fifteen charter members organized Concord Baptist Church at the local schoolhouse in 1871—naming it for a Louisiana community they had left—and worshipped in successive sanctuaries here despite a 1940 fire, with the adjoining cemetery holding early settlers and three Confederate veterans.

Crockett, TX

In 1889 Armistead Albert Aldrich gave three acres to the Concord Presbyterian Church for a sanctuary and graveyard in the piney woods of Houston County. The first burial came in 1895, and over the decades the wooded ground filled with the family names of the surrounding farm community, along with veterans and members of fraternal lodges. In 1963 the church handed the land to a cemetery association that still keeps lots reserved for descendants of those already resting here.

Quitman, TX

Settlers founded the Concord community in the 1870s, and early resident Hubbard Moseley gave land for a burial ground, a school, and a Baptist chapel. Velinda Wood, laid to rest in July 1875, has the oldest marked grave, though unmarked earlier burials lie among the roughly one thousand people from Concord, Hainesville, and nearby settlements interred here. Generations of caretakers and a cemetery association have tended the grounds ever since.

Rosenberg, TX

At the close of the 19th century a community of Mennonites settled these lots of the old Barnabas Wickson league, and their earliest dead—Heinrich Reimer in 1898, Maria Klassen in 1899, and children lost to typhoid in 1900—were laid to rest here. In 1905 a non-Mennonite neighbor, George W. Howell, deeded an acre beside the Concord school for a public cemetery. When the devastating 1900 storm drove many Mennonites away, families of German, Czech, and Polish descent moved in and took over the burial ground, whose earliest marked grave dates to 1913.

Bellmead, TX

The Concord Baptist Church organized in 1866, and the first burials in its adjoining cemetery came in 1869 with Elizabeth Parrish and her triplets. The graveyard is now nearly all that remains of Concord, a vanished town that once had a store, cotton gin, school, and church. Among the many veterans resting here is Elija Goodnight, considered the last U.S.-Mexico War veteran buried in Texas.

Kenney, TX

In the farmland of northern Austin County, Concord Cemetery opened in 1870 as the burial ground of the Concord Christian Church, its earliest grave holding a Confederate veteran and early settler. Around it gathered the pioneer families—Collins, Creath, McNutt and others—who had reached Texas in the 1830s, one of them serving with the baggage guard at San Jacinto. Confederate, Civil War and World War I veterans lie beneath its varied stones, a record of a rural community across a century of life. After decades of neglect, descendants cleared the overgrown grounds in 2010.

Troup, TX

Settlers drawn by cheap land and good water reached this part of East Texas in the 1840s, worshipping first in a brush arbor by Camp Ground Creek before building a church that doubled as a school. The Concord Cemetery grew alongside that congregation, its oldest documented grave dating to 1878, and land was deeded to it by the Martin family across the decades. Buried here are veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, tended each year in a cleaning tradition kept by pioneer families' descendants.

Belmont County, OH

Colerain Township holds the roots of Ohio Quakerism: the earliest Friends settlement and the first organized Friends Meeting in the state. A log meeting house rose in 1800, and after fire destroyed it, this sturdy brick building replaced it in 1815.

Omaha, TX

Built around 1860 to replace an earlier log church, the Concord Meeting House did the multiple duty typical of a rural East Texas building—serving at once as a place of worship, a schoolhouse, and a polling place. It carries on today as a Baptist church, a thread of continuity running from the eve of the Civil War to the present.

Whitley County, IN

This marker identifies the site of Concord Methodist Church, remembered as the first church site in Whitley County, Indiana. In the 1830s and 1840s, as settlers pushed into the recently opened lands of northern Indiana, a log or frame Methodist meetinghouse was often among the first community institutions raised, serving as both house of worship and social anchor on the frontier.

Robbins, TX

Organized in April 1855 by pioneer settlers before the community of Concord even took shape, this Missionary Baptist congregation raised a Greek Revival meetinghouse on land donated by Isaac Burleson, its first pastor the Rev. W. A. Walker. The church anchored its Leon County neighborhood for more than a century and a half. Tragedy struck on Labor Day weekend in 2011, when a wildfire swept through and destroyed the historic sanctuary.

Robbins, TX

For nearly a century, schooling anchored the rural community of Concord in Leon County. From a two-story frame schoolhouse of the early 1880s, the district grew to a brick building in 1920 and a 1927 structure with an auditorium serving the whole community; older buildings were handed down for the primary grades and, tellingly, for a segregated African American school. Consolidations swept in neighboring districts through the 1920s and '30s, peaking above 400 students, and by the 1950s Black schools of the area were gathered at Concord under the Carver name before the district merged into Leon ISD in 1960.

El Paso, TX

On land once known as Concordia—home of Chihuahua trader Hugh Stephenson, whose wife Juana was laid to rest here in 1856—this ground grew into El Paso's great frontier burial place. By the 1880s townsfolk drove three miles out to inter their dead, and by 1890 the grounds had been parceled into Catholic, Masonic, Jewish, Black, Chinese, Military, Jesuit, and other sections, a mosaic of the borderland's peoples. Among the thousands who rest here is the notorious gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, alongside pioneers, civic leaders, and war veterans.

Concordia, MO

This Concordia monument gathers into one memorial the town's sons who served across a run of American conflicts—the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and the World War that followed. Erected by a community proud of its record of service, it reflects the small-town tradition of honoring veterans of every generation on a single shared stone. The span of wars named traces the nation's passage from civil strife to overseas empire to global conflict.

La Vernia, TX

Concrete Cemetery grew out of the land of James Henry Newton, who brought his family from Mississippi about 1851–52 and set aside a burial ground when his brother Joel died in 1856, though an 1855 grave suggests earlier use. The surrounding community—first called Bethesda, then Concrete—took its name from an 1858 concrete building that served as school, church, and Masonic hall. Newton deeded the tract formally in 1875, and the cemetery came to hold both Anglo and Hispanic sections, with more than 800 burials of pioneers, veterans, and children.

Nanticoke, PA · est. 1998

In 1913, the coal division of the D L & W Railroad built an unusual experiment in worker housing north of Nanticoke. Twenty-two identical poured-concrete double houses, arranged around a central park, drew on emerging modern design ideas to shelter miners of the Truesdale Colliery. The community was short-lived, abandoned by 1924, its bare concrete shells left standing.

Cuero, TX

For sixteen years Concrete College was among the most respected schools in Texas, founded in 1865 by educator-minister John Van Epps Covey to teach everything from Latin and music to bookkeeping and etiquette. Students rose at five, studied by slate, and lived under strict rules barring liquor, gambling, and profanity; enrollment once swelled to 250. Epidemics and a railroad that bypassed the town of Concrete closed the college in 1881, and its stone walls were later crushed to surface roads, leaving only rubble behind.

Hubbard, TX

Built in 1906 for saddle and harness maker E. L. Condor, this cypress and long-leaf pine home showcased the era's small-town prosperity with a wraparound porch, Doric columns, and a pedimented bay. Condor was also an early trustee of Hubbard's Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the house stayed in his family for nearly half a century. It survives as a fine example of an early Texas city home.

Cone vicinity, TX

Cone Cemetery took its first burial in April 1897, when W. G. English was laid to rest on land his son J. P. English patented from the state later that same year. The burial ground gained its name in 1903 from a local post office honoring rancher Stanton J. Cone, and in 1910 the county formally acquired the property for public use. It stands as a record of the ranching families who settled the high plains of Crosby County.

Manor Township, PA · est. 1924

The people remembered here were survivors of the once-powerful Susquehannock (Minquas) nation, an Iroquoian people whose towns had commanded the lower Susquehanna before war and disease shattered them. Regrouped as the Conestoga, they lived on land within William Penn's proprietary manor and treated with Penn himself in 1701 under his policy of peaceful dealing. That fragile peace ended in 1763, when a vigilante mob from Paxton murdered the last of them.

Lancaster Township, PA · est. 2001

In the canal-building fever of the 1820s, the Conestoga Navigation Company set out to tame Lancaster County's Conestoga Creek with a slackwater system of locks and dams, connecting the rich farm country around Lancaster to the great port markets of Philadelphia and Baltimore. Chartered in 1825, its eighteen-mile course climbed through nine sets of locks, with Lock No. 1 standing here at the head of the line. Like many early canals it struggled financially against the coming railroads, collecting its last lock tolls in 1872. In a fitting second life, several of its abandoned dams were later harnessed to generate electricity from 1913 into the 1940s.

Oxford Township, PA · est. 1947

Founded as a mission in 1730 and crowned with a chapel in 1787, Conewago stands among the oldest Catholic congregations in the United States and the first dedicated to the Sacred Heart in Pennsylvania. Jesuit priests ministered here to a community of German and Irish Catholic settlers at a time when their faith was barely tolerated in the British colonies. The enduring chapel is a rare survival of colonial-era Catholic worship on the American frontier.

Warren, PA · est. 1947

On the ground where Warren now stands sat Conewango, a Seneca village of the mid-18th century. The French chronicler Father Bonnecamps first recorded it in 1749 as a cluster of twelve or thirteen cabins during Céloron's passage through the valley. Its name, drawn from the Iroquois tongue, means "below the riffles," a reminder of how thoroughly Native peoples read and named this river country.

Sparks, NV

When it opened in June 1909, Coney Island was one of the grandest amusement parks in the Nevada region, the creation of Otto G. Benschuetz, who laid out landscaped grounds, a bandstand, a dance pavilion, and even an artificial boating lake with bath houses. Its bright heyday was brief, fading after Benschuetz died in 1912. The site was reinvented again and again—an aircraft assembly plant, an auto court—before fires and the arrival of Interstate 80 in the 1960s erased what remained.

Corpus Christi, TX

In May 1862, with the Union warship Arthur blockading the Texas coast, enlisted men tried to desert the Confederate outpost at Camp Aransas by stealing a launch to reach the blockaders. Two captured men, both said to be from New York, were quickly court-martialed and hanged near Mesquite Street and Upper Broadway, the only military execution in Nueces County during the Civil War. Local Unionists were forced at gunpoint to view the bodies, marked with placards warning "traitors take warning," and many fled with their families to Matamoros, Mexico.

Marshall, TX

During the Civil War, this Marshall site sheltered the exiled Confederate government of Missouri, whose Union-held statehouse left its Confederate officials without a capital. From a modest one-story frame house, Governor Thomas C. Reynolds directed the civil and military affairs of Confederate Missourians from late 1863 until the war's end in 1865. The governor lived in a small cottage that once stood just across the street.

San Antonio, TX

Part of a 40-acre tract the Spanish crown once granted to San Antonio, this ground was carved into City Cemetery Number Four and, after an 1885 purchase by a United Confederate Veterans camp, became the Confederate Cemetery. Among its 900-plus burials lie noted Confederate figures including Texas Ranger and editor John Salmon "Rip" Ford, George Wythe Baylor, and General Hamilton P. Bee. Later graves of World War I and World War II veterans and of veterans' descendants share the same grounds.

Alvin, TX

Founded in the 1890s by a local camp of the United Confederate Veterans, this Alvin cemetery began as a burial ground for Confederate veterans and their families before its grounds were enlarged and opened to the wider public. Among those laid to rest here are veterans of four wars, victims of the deadly 1900 hurricane, and prominent civic leaders. The graveyard gathers the memory of a Brazoria County community across generations of service and loss.

Pewee Valley, KY

A mile south, beneath a granite obelisk, lie 313 men who died as residents of the Kentucky Confederate Home. Established on nearby high ground, the home sheltered aging and infirm Confederate veterans from 1902 until 1934. Their graves gather in one place the last chapter of a generation that had fought for the South a half-century before.

Round Rock, TX

Brothers Edward and John Hudson were Presbyterian ministers and teachers who came to Williamson County from Arkansas in 1856. Both served the Confederacy as chaplains — Edward joining an infantry company in 1862 and being wounded at Corinth and again in Georgia, John enlisting in a Texas cavalry regiment and serving to the war's end. On a private's pay, a chaplain held services, taught illiterate soldiers to read and write, tended the sick, and carried the dead from the field.

Jefferson, TX

Beginning in 1861, J. B. Dunn's meat plant near Jefferson dressed, packed, and shipped beef, pork, and mutton to the Confederate army, salting the meat in 42-gallon barrels and moving it along the Cypress Bayou shipping route. So much food and cotton flowed out of Texas that the state earned the name "breadbasket of the Confederacy," though the army sometimes complained of spoiled, bloody meat in the barrels.

Bonham, TX

During the Civil War this site served as the Confederate commissary for the Northern Sub-district of Texas, issuing uniforms, blankets, harness, saddles, and rations to soldiers guarding the state's northeastern frontier. At least seven brigades drew their supplies from here, and an army mess kitchen furnace cooked beef, pork, and wild game on the spot. To honor an 1861 treaty, the depot also distributed food to Choctaw, Cherokee, and other Indian Territory civilians allied with the South.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 1953

In the tense days before Gettysburg, the Confederate army swept north into Pennsylvania, and Chambersburg found itself briefly in the path of the invasion. On June 26, 1863, Robert E. Lee rode into the town square—the old "Diamond"—and conferred with corps commander A.P. Hill before setting up headquarters on the edge of town. Within days those same roads would carry his troops east toward the war's decisive battle.

Charleston, SC

Charleston Harbor is where the Civil War began: in April 1861, Confederate guns opened fire on the Union-held Fort Sumter, and the city then endured years of siege and bombardment. This monument honors the Confederate soldiers who defended Charleston until the war's end in 1865. Its inscription borrows the language of classical valor to frame their faith and courage.

Sargent vicinity, TX

In the winter of 1863–64, as Union forces pushed up the Texas coast capturing one port after another, Confederate commander John B. Magruder ordered the mouth of Caney Creek fortified against the advance. Thousands of Confederate troops threw up an earthen fort, redoubts, rifle pits, and trenches near this site, enduring weeks of naval bombardment. No infantry battle ever came—the fortifications did their job as a deterrent, and Banks soon shifted his campaign toward Louisiana.

Dare County, NC

Two miles to the southwest stood Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark, earthen forts guarding the vital inlet where the Atlantic meets Pamlico Sound. On August 29, 1861, after two days of heavy naval bombardment, they surrendered to Union troops. The fall of the Hatteras forts gave the North one of its first victories of the war and a foothold on the Carolina coast.

Frankfort, KY

During the Confederate invasion of Kentucky in the fall of 1862, the state government fled Frankfort for Louisville as Southern forces entered Lexington. Confederate cavalry passed through on September 3, and on October 4 Richard Hawes was inaugurated as the second Confederate governor of Kentucky, with Generals Bragg and Kirby Smith present. The ceremony was short-lived: the Confederates withdrew and Union troops reoccupied Frankfort on October 7.

Scott County, KY

This was the home of George W. Johnson, a Scott County native who in November 1861 was named Kentucky's first Confederate governor—leader of a shadow government in a state that never left the Union. When Confederate forces withdrew from Bowling Green into Tennessee in early 1862, Johnson followed. He served as an aide to General John C. Breckinridge but insisted on fighting as a private at Shiloh, where he was mortally wounded in April 1862, still holding the title of governor.

Rusk, TX

Built in 1862 by John L. Whitescarver and William H. and Benjamin F. Campbell, this East Texas works was meant to manufacture rifles for the Confederacy. Unable to obtain the materials and tooling for rifles, the operators instead produced Colt-model pistols. The inscription notes that a number of enslaved or free Black workers were employed at the factory.

Lincolnton, NC

In 1863, as the Confederacy struggled to supply its armies and hospitals under Union blockade, a medical laboratory was established here under Dr. A.S. Piggott to manufacture pharmaceuticals for the Southern war effort. With imported medicines cut off, such facilities became vital to treating sick and wounded soldiers. The laboratory operated until the war's end in 1865, and its remains lie two miles south.

Galveston, TX

Leon Smith went to sea from New England at thirteen and was a steamship captain by twenty before the Civil War carried him to the Texas coast. Commanding the marine department of the Confederate military district, he armored his ships with cotton bales and, with just two days' notice, prepared the waterborne assault that helped win the Battle of Galveston on New Year's Day 1863. Months later he rode through enemy fire to fight alongside Dick Dowling's men at the victory of Sabine Pass. His ships ran the Federal blockade, trading Texas cotton overseas for the guns, medicine, and goods the South could not otherwise obtain.

Clinton, SC

This monument stands in Clinton, in the South Carolina Piedmont, honoring the local men who served the Confederacy during the Civil War of 1861–1865. Like hundreds of similar memorials across the South, it was raised by a community reckoning with staggering wartime losses—few Southern towns emerged from the war without empty chairs at the table. Its phrase 'Lest We Forget' reflects the decades-long memorial movement, often led by local ladies' memorial associations and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, that shaped how the postwar South remembered its dead.

Columbus, TX

This sturdy brick tower — built by the town of Columbus in 1883 from more than 400,000 handmade bricks, with 32-inch walls — served as the community's water tower and fire house until 1912. Since 1926 it has been owned by the Shropshire-Upton Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which made it the Confederate Memorial Museum. Its dual life joins civic infrastructure with Lost Cause memorial culture.

Austin, TX

In 1884, John B. Hood Camp of United Confederate Veterans launched a home in Austin for aging, disabled, and destitute Confederate soldiers, aided by fundraising from the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Opened at 1600 West Sixth Street in 1886, the home grew from sixteen to twenty-six acres and passed to state control by 1891. More than 2,000 veterans lived here until the last resident died in 1954, and the buildings were razed in 1970.

Wilson, NC

During the Civil War, the buildings of the Wilson Female Seminary — chartered in 1859 — were pressed into service as a Confederate military hospital under Dr. S. S. Satchwell. Like many Southern schools and public buildings, the seminary was repurposed to treat the sick and wounded far from the front lines. The hospital stood a short distance southeast of this marker.

Wilson, NC

The twin dates 1861 and 1865 bracket the American Civil War, and the plain dedication "Our Confederate Dead" marks this as one of the memorial monuments that rose across the courthouse squares and cemeteries of the South. Wilson, a tobacco and cotton town in North Carolina's coastal plain, sent its men into a conflict that would claim hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides. Like most such markers, this one was raised by a later generation—monuments of this kind were erected largely between the 1890s and the 1920s, often by memorial associations and the United Daughters of the Confederacy—to grieve the fallen and shape how the war was remembered. It stands today as an artifact both of the war's staggering human cost and of the long, contested memory that followed it.

Pennsville Township, NJ

During the Civil War, the Union held thousands of Confederate prisoners at Fort Delaware, on a low island in the Delaware River, where disease swept through the crowded barracks. Those who died were ferried across and buried on the New Jersey shore at Finn's Point, their individual graves eventually lost. In the early twentieth century the federal government raised this monument to mark the mass resting place of 2,436 Confederate dead — an unusual act of national reconciliation, honoring former enemies on Union ground.

Franklin, TN

The Daughters of the Confederacy dedicated this monument in Franklin on November 30, 1899 — the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Franklin, one of the bloodiest few hours of the entire Civil War, fought here in 1864. Erected 'in honor and memory of our heroes,' it is a characteristic product of the turn-of-the-century Lost Cause movement, when Southern women's organizations raised hundreds of such memorials. Its inscription praises the Confederate dead in the elevated language of that era.

Baytown, TX

Brothers Thomas and John Chubb established a shipyard on Goose Creek before the Civil War, and when the war came they answered the Confederacy's call for Texas manufacturing by turning it into the Confederate Naval Works. There they built and repaired the shallow-draft centerboard schooners—vessels like the Royal Yacht and Bagdad—whose light draft let them slip through the shoals of the Gulf and run the Union blockade. Thomas Chubb rose to captain and superintendent in the Texas Marine Department, and the yard kept building ships for years after the war before the land eventually became part of the Goose Creek oil fields.

Fort Davis, TX

This marker traces Jefferson Davis's ties to Texas: a Mexican War officer in 1847, then U.S. Secretary of War in 1855, when he strengthened frontier forts to open West Texas and famously experimented with imported camels for desert patrols and hauling. After the Civil War and his imprisonment, the former Confederate president returned to visit the state and its veterans. Jeff Davis County was named for him in 1887.

Pierce County, GA

In the last winter of the Civil War, the Confederacy scrambled to move Union prisoners away from advancing federal armies, throwing up hasty stockades across south Georgia. This site held one such camp, established in mid-November 1864 and crowded with more than five thousand captured Union soldiers before it was abandoned in the first week of January 1865. Its few weeks of existence reflect a prison system stretched far past its limits in a collapsing war effort.

Sulphur Springs, TX

As Union armies pressed into the Deep South, thousands of Confederate families fled to the relative safety of Texas, where only a few coastal towns ever came under fire. Among them was the Louisiana family of Mrs. Amanda Stone, rescued after a road accident by Hopkins County neighbors who shared what little they had — even their last stewing hen. The marker recalls a broader exodus, noting Gen. Stand Watie's family in the Indian Territory and Gen. Kirby Smith's relatives, and the poverty, grief, and dependence on enslaved labor that the refugees carried with them.

Livingston, TX

As the Civil War opened in 1861, an Indian agent trained Alabama and Coushatta men of Polk County as cavalry, and in 1862 nineteen of them, including Chief John Scott, enlisted in the 24th Texas Cavalry. Reassigned as infantry and then briefly to naval duty, the company eventually numbered well over a hundred and spent much of the war building and running flat-bottomed scows to move Confederate supplies down the Trinity River. Wartime governors' correspondence recorded their service.

Newton, NC

Raised to honor the men of Catawba County who served the Confederacy between 1861 and 1865, this monument is one of hundreds erected across the South to the generation that fought the Civil War. Newton, the county seat, sent soldiers into a conflict that reshaped the nation and the region. Monuments like this one, typically dedicated in the decades after the war, became fixtures of the courthouse square.

Higginsville, MO

Dedicated in 1935 at Confederate Memorial Park in Higginsville, this monument honors the Confederate soldiers of Missouri—a bitterly divided border state where neighbor fought neighbor during the Civil War. The park grew up around a home for aging Confederate veterans, and the memorial reflects the Lost Cause remembrance movement of the early 20th century, when such monuments rose across the country decades after the guns fell silent.

Charlotte, NC

For three years during the Civil War, Charlotte became an unlikely center of Confederate sea power. After the fall of Norfolk in 1862, the Confederacy moved its navy yard inland to this rail junction, far from Union warships, where workers forged anchors, propeller shafts, and ordnance for a navy fighting against long odds. The yard operated until the war's end in 1865.

San Antonio, TX

Established in 1863 just beyond San Antonio's limits, this Confederate tannery answered the South's desperate need for shoes, harness, and saddlery once the Union blockade choked off manufactured goods. Its tanners used a distinctive mesquite-based liquor that soaked deep into the hides, letting the works run through the Texas summer when other tanneries spoiled. Alongside it stood a river-powered cotton and woolen mill, part of a wartime scramble to make salt, hats, and cloth at home.

Austin, TX

When Texas seceded on February 1, 1861, its 8th, 9th, and 10th Legislatures found themselves consumed by the machinery of the Civil War—raising, equipping, and supplying some 90,000 soldiers while defending a 2,000-mile expanse of coast and frontier. As the Union blockade choked imports, lawmakers built plants to make guns, powder, cloth, and salt, taxed produce in tithes, and financed cotton-for-goods barter through Mexico. Poor pay and worthless Confederate money left many legislators camping in tents and wagons on the capitol grounds.