Search Markers

Plymouth, NC

The Confederate ironclad ram Albemarle, commanded by James W. Cooke, helped Confederate forces recapture the river town of Plymouth in the spring of 1864. The powerful vessel dominated the Roanoke River until a daring Union raid sank her; she went down about 600 feet north of here on October 27, 1864. Her loss reopened the region to Union control.

New Orleans, LA

Cucullu Row is the oldest intact row of houses in the French Quarter, six brick rowhouses built in 1828 for the merchant Simon Cucullu. But the corner's history runs deeper: here stood the 1730 celestial observatory of the architect-scientist Pierre Baron, followed by the Condé Market of 1782 and a fish market that grew until the great fire of 1788 swept the complex away. For nearly a century, from 1877 to 1970, Desporte Pharmacy served the neighborhood from these buildings.

Cuero, TX

Cuero sprang up in 1873 when the railroad arrived in the DeWitt County coastal plain, and it took the county seat from Clinton three years later. Its population swelled after the great coastal storms of 1875 and 1886 destroyed the port of Indianola, sending refugees inland to start over here. A farming, ranching, and later oil-and-gas center, Cuero also became famous for its Turkey Trot, begun in 1912.

Hochheim, TX

Stretching forty-five miles along the Guadalupe River, the Cuero I Archeological District was defined in the early 1970s to study and preserve sites threatened by a proposed reservoir. Excavations in 1972-73 uncovered 352 significant sites spanning some 9,000 years of human occupation — from the camps of prehistoric nomads to those of historic Tonkawas and Comanches. Later sites mark the arrival of Anglo-American settlers under Green DeWitt's colony in the 1820s and 1830s.

Cuero, TX

Chartered in early 1872, the Cuero Land and Immigration Company set out to develop more than 4,000 acres carved from an 1833 Mexican land grant. Its founders were men of standing — among them civil engineer and congressman Gustav Schleicher and Fletcher S. Stockdale, who had briefly served as governor of Texas in 1865. By donating land to lure the Gulf, Western Texas and Pacific Railway, the company brought the first train in March 1873, touching off a land boom that made Cuero a thriving railroad terminus and civic center.

Brownsville, TX

Built in 1893, this handsome brick building housed 'La Nueva Libertad,' the growing grocery and mercantile business of Don Andrés Cueto, a Spanish immigrant, complete with retail store, storerooms, a carriage house, and domed bakery ovens. Its corbelled brick cornice and parapet make it a fine surviving example of late nineteenth-century South Texas commercial architecture.

Van Horn, TX

Carved from El Paso County and organized in 1911, Culberson County took its name from David B. Culberson (1830–1903), a celebrated constitutional lawyer who served as a Confederate officer, a Texas legislator, and a longtime member of the United States Congress. The dusty town of Van Horn became its county seat. Its creation extended orderly government across the vast, arid reaches of far West Texas.

San Augustine, TX

Built in 1839, this Greek Revival home with Doric columns and a garret ballroom belonged to Ezekiel Wimberly Cullen, a Georgia settler who fought in the Texas Revolution and served in the Third Congress of the Republic of Texas. A friend of President Mirabeau Lamar, Cullen authored legislation setting aside public lands to fund public schools and a state university. The house survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Archbald, PA

In the anthracite country of northeastern Pennsylvania, 'culm' was the dark waste left over from mining and breaking hard coal — mountainous banks of it once loomed over towns like Archbald. This marker stands on such a heap of anthracite refuse, now slowly greening over as trees reclaim the old industrial scar. Its wry note, 'a raised forest, for now,' captures a landscape still shaped by the coal that built the region.

El Campo, TX

On September 8, 1962, El Campo took a symbolic turn as the honorary capital of Texas under the "Operation Home Town" booster campaign, with local figure Culp Krueger playing the role of governor for the day. Such civic promotions were a mid-century staple of small Texas towns competing for attention and investment. The marker commemorates that day of hometown pride and community spirit.

Elizabeth City, NC

In 1677 the colonists of the Albemarle region rose up against unpopular British trade laws and the officials enforcing them, with John Culpeper and George Durant among the leaders of the revolt. The rebels seized control of the government and ran the colony's affairs for a time before order was restored. The uprising unfolded about two miles to the southeast.

Temple, TX

Founded in 1958 amid a postwar boom in both Temple's population and national interest in the arts, the Cultural Activities Center grew from a "festival of the arts" envisioned by clubwoman and violinist Nora Lee Wendland. Seven founding groups—from a community chorus and civic orchestra to a camera club and theater players—came together under one banner. It became a model for arts centers elsewhere and spun off Temple's civic theater and heritage museum.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1982

Carved from Lancaster County in 1750, Cumberland County once stretched all the way to Pennsylvania's western frontier, a vast gateway for settlers pushing toward the Alleghenies. Its seat, Carlisle, was founded the following year and became a crucial staging point on the roads leading west. In the colonial and early national decades, this was the edge of English America, where the Great Wagon Road funneled families toward the interior.

Mansfield, TX

This burial ground was first used shortly after the Civil War, its earliest legible stone marking Julia Alice Man, who died in 1868. Her husband Ralph S. Man and his brother-in-law Julian Feild founded the town of Mansfield, and in 1874 the site was deeded to the local Cumberland Presbyterian congregation. Among its graves are Civil War veterans and victims of the 1918-19 influenza epidemic, making it the oldest section of Mansfield Cemetery.

Daingerfield, TX

This congregation reaches back to 1849, when Presbyterian settlers in the young state of Texas first gathered for worship in one another's parlors. For decades beginning in 1852 they met in the Chapel Hill College building on this spot, and for a time the sanctuary was shared with Baptists and known as the "Union Church." A shrinking population forced the church to close its doors in 1925, but the faithful reorganized in 1950 and returned to their historic ground.

San Marcos, TX

Built by at least 1901, this San Marcos church blends the pointed Gothic Revival arches of a house of worship with the fish-scale shingling and octagonal towers of the Queen Anne style. Raised by the Cumberland Presbyterians and later renamed Fort Street Presbyterian, it passed through Lutheran and Pentecostal congregations before being rehabilitated for office and residential use in the 1990s.

Marshall, TX

The Cumberland Presbyterian presence in Harrison County began in 1848 when the Rev. James Sampson and 22 charter members organized a Marshall congregation, dedicating a sanctuary in 1853. Over the next sixty years the denomination spread into rural communities like Ewing Chapel, Hope, Nesbitt, and Fairview, its members active in education and politics. As better roads let worshippers travel to town churches, the country congregations faded, until Fairview and Marshall merged in 1984.

Camp Hill, PA · est. 1948

In the autumn of 1775, as the newly rebellious colonies gambled on carrying the war north, Capt. William Hendricks raised a company of frontier riflemen from the Cumberland County countryside and marched them toward Canada. They joined the desperate assault on Quebec on the last day of the year, fighting under Gen. Richard Montgomery in a driving snowstorm. The attack failed, Montgomery was killed, and Hendricks fell with him.

Mechanicsburg, PA · est. 1992

Incorporated in 1831 and pushing rails from Lemoyne to Chambersburg by 1837, the Cumberland Valley Railroad became the economic spine of a fertile agricultural region. For more than eight decades it carried the Valley's produce and passengers, eventually reaching from Harrisburg toward Virginia before merging into the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad in 1919. The passenger station and stationmaster's house here date to the 1860s.

Cumby, TX

Named for a grove of black jack trees atop the highest point in the county—once beside an Indian camping ground and trail—this settlement grew from a frontier crossroads into a thriving trading center. A post office opened in a settler's home in 1848, and by 1860 the town had stores, physicians, blacksmiths, and a log schoolhouse. Renamed in 1896 for a Confederate veteran and legislator, the town later faded as improved highways drew commerce elsewhere.

Bellville, TX

Rebecca Cumings and her three brothers came to Texas from Virginia in 1821 as members of Stephen F. Austin's famous "Old 300," earning a 20,000-acre grant by building and running a creekside mill. After deaths in the family in 1885, a descendant designed this stuccoed-brick vault for their reinterment, and fifteen Cumings now rest inside. It stands as a rare architectural relic of Texas's first Anglo colony.

Alvin, TX

When the catastrophic 1900 Galveston hurricane destroyed his home, banker-investor Oscar Smith Cummings had contractors salvage the wreckage and build this Victorian residence in 1900–01. Meat-market owner Oscar Smith bought the house after Cummings moved to Houston in 1904. Slated for demolition in 1972, it was rescued and restored, earning designation as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1977.

Cuney, TX

This community began in 1870 when Andrew "Andy" Bragg and Nelson Sneed, former slaves turned farmers, settled here and were joined by other freedmen landowners and tradesmen. Promoted after 1916 by banker H. L. Price as a commercial and agricultural center for Black Texans, the town was renamed Cuney to honor the prominent leader Norris Wright Cuney and grew quickly with churches, stores, gins, sawmills, and a rail station. Falling farm prices after World War I sent residents elsewhere, leaving Cuney a quiet reminder of its founders' ambitions.

Comanche, TX

James and Susannah Cunningham arrived in the Republic of Texas about 1839–40 and put down roots in Comanche County in 1855, becoming a leading family that took part in frontier defense against Indian raids. In 1889 the couple and their twelve children held a first reunion; the gatherings grew into an annual summer tradition, with neighboring land later bought to keep them going. The marker commemorates a family celebration that has endured for generations.

Three Rivers, TX

When newspaperman Jim Cunningham's town of Oakville was bypassed by the railroad, he moved his family and the Live Oak County Leader seven miles west to the raw new settlement that became Three Rivers, where in 1913 he contracted the town's first permanent home. The five-room frame house blended Prairie, Foursquare, and Victorian touches, its long central hall and twelve-foot ceilings channeling coastal breezes through the rooms. From here the Cunninghams shaped the young town — publishing its paper, sitting on its first school board, and founding its first Baptist church.

Walker County, TX

A native of Walker County, Minnie Fisher Cunningham earned a pharmacy degree in 1901 before becoming one of Texas's most influential political women. As president of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association and a co-founder of the National League of Women Voters, she helped win the vote for women, then in 1928 became the first Texas woman to run for the U.S. Senate. She later ran for governor in 1944, placing second in a nine-candidate primary, and remained a force in Democratic politics — a friend of Franklin Roosevelt known fondly as "Minnie Fish" — until her death in 1964.

Crane, TX

Born in the East Texas town of Troup, C. B. Curry entered law enforcement young and joined the Texas Rangers in 1933, serving stints in Falfurrias and San Angelo. In 1935 he came to Crane as a special investigator, helping keep order through the raucous days of the West Texas oil boom. He later served as deputy sheriff and chief of police before turning to private business.

Boston, MA

In 2004, the Boston Red Sox ended one of the most famous droughts in American sports — 86 years without a World Series title, long blamed on the "Curse of the Bambino" said to have followed the 1920 sale of Babe Ruth. Their championship that autumn, capped by an unprecedented playoff comeback, was celebrated across New England as the reversal of that curse. This marker commemorates that long-awaited triumph.

Baltimore, MD

This plaque honors two very different Baltimore figures. Curt Richter, longtime head of the psychobiology laboratory at Johns Hopkins, did pioneering research on the body's internal "biological clock." Beside him is remembered Garry Moore, the genial host of 1950s and 1960s television variety shows.

Brady, TX

When World War II demanded thousands of new pilots, Brady mayor Harry Lamar Curtis secured his town's airfield as a national defense airport and won federal money to enlarge and pave it. A contract flight school relocated from Dallas's Love Field in 1941 and became Brady Aviation School, training more than 10,000 cadets under West Texas's clear, uncrowded skies before it closed in August 1944. The cost was not only financial: twenty-one cadets, six instructors, and a personnel officer died in training accidents here.

New Orleans, LA

Architect Nathaniel C. 'Buster' Curtis designed this house in 1963 for his own large family, and it stayed with the Curtises for half a century. Boldly modern in a city famed for its older styles, it was the first modernist house in New Orleans and the first work by the noted firm Curtis & Davis to reach the National Register. The city named it a landmark in 2010, and the National Register listing followed in 2014.

Pike Township, PA

This bronze plaque marks the Curwensville Dam, a flood-control project the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built across the West Branch of the Susquehanna River between 1962 and 1965. It rose during the postwar era when the Corps was reshaping American waterways with earthen dams and reservoirs to tame the seasonal floods that had long battered Pennsylvania's river towns. The plaque records the officers who oversaw the work, from the Baltimore District's division and district engineers down to the resident engineer on site.

Fort Worth, TX

Tennessee native A. C. "Clayton" Luther began developing this part of Fort Worth in the early 1930s with homes and commercial buildings. In the 1940s he built the Luther Apartments on Highland Street, later renamed Curzon Place when the avenue itself was renamed. Drawing on his travels through Florida, California, and Europe, Luther favored a distinctive blend of Spanish, Moorish, and Mediterranean styling for the property.

Damascus Township, PA · est. 1947

In 1755, settlers from Connecticut led by Moses Thomas and Daniel Skinner planted the first colony on the upper Delaware, on lands the Native peoples called Cushetunk. Their arrival reflected Connecticut's sweeping and contested claims to lands stretching west across Pennsylvania. During the Revolution the little settlement was overrun — seized in 1778 by a force of Indians and Loyalist Tories — a casualty of the brutal frontier warfare that swept the Delaware and Susquehanna valleys.

Boston, MA

Built in 1870 by T.F. Cushing, this house rose during the great development of Boston's Back Bay, when filled marshland was transformed into an elegant district of brick and brownstone townhouses. For nearly a century, until 1958, it was home to the Endicott family, bearers of one of Massachusetts's oldest and most prominent names. A careful 1985 restoration returned the residence to its Gilded Age character.

Tontogany, OH

Near this spot stood the modest Ohio farmstead where Emanuel and Maria Custer raised their family between 1856 and 1865. Emanuel, a blacksmith and farmer of German descent, and his wife Maria are best remembered as the parents of George Armstrong Custer and his younger brother Thomas—young men who left rural Wood County to win fame, and ultimately meet their deaths, on the battlefields of the Civil War and the Western plains. During the very years this homestead stood, the Custer sons were rising through the ranks of a nation torn apart by war.

Wheeler, TX

The banks of Sweetwater Creek lay in the heart of the Comancheria, where Plains peoples wintered in country rich with buffalo. In the winter campaign of 1868-69, George Armstrong Custer led the 7th Cavalry and Kansas volunteers to recover two Anglo women captured from Kansas settlements. Rather than open fire on a large Cheyenne village and risk the captives' lives, Custer detained several chiefs, opened tense negotiations with the Cheyenne leadership, and by ultimatum won the women's release in March 1869.

Monterey, CA

Built by the Mexican government in 1827, Monterey's Custom House collected duties on foreign shipping when the town was the capital of Alta California, Mexico's far northern province. U.S. consul Thomas O. Larkin contracted to enlarge it in 1841, and on July 7, 1846 Commodore John Drake Sloat raised the American flag over the building, signaling California's passage from Mexican to U.S. rule. Later restored, it stands today as California's first registered historical landmark.

Monterey, CA

Built by the Mexican government beginning in 1827, this Custom House levied duties on the foreign ships that anchored at Monterey, then the capital of Mexico's northernmost province, Alta California. Customs revenue was the lifeblood of the provincial government, and this adobe was where that wealth was tallied and taxed. It remains a rare survivor of the era when California traded hides and tallow with vessels from around the globe.

Morristown, NJ

This homestead dates to 1799 and the farm of Silas Condict, a New Jersey patriot active in the cause of American independence. It later became home to the Cutler family, including Augustus W. Cutler, a congressman remembered as a champion of free public schooling in New Jersey. The site witnessed more than a century of the state's political and civic life.

Paducah, TX

The CV cattle brand dates to 1850, and the herd it marked passed through the hands of famed cattlemen — including Charles Goodnight — before reaching Cottle County. Established in the 1880s across 47,000 acres, the CV Ranch was later broken up and sold as small farms in the late 1920s, giving rise to the community of Cee Vee with its stores, churches, school, and cotton gin. Drought, the Depression, and World War II thinned the population until only a handful of families remained by the 1990s.

Sugar Grove Township, PA · est. 2019

From her home in the hills of Warren County, Cynthia Catlin Miller turned a family tradition of abolitionism into organized action, founding the Female Assisting Society and the Ladies' Fugitive Aid Society. The Miller Mansion sheltered freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad, and her groups supplied them with food and clothing. In 1854 she and her son Franklin hosted Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists at the Sugar Grove Convention.

Cypress, TX

The Cypress region of northwest Harris County took shape after Attakapas and Akokisa peoples gave way to Anglo settlers like the Burnetts and Simmonses in the 1830s, with Matthew Burnett running an inn and serving as first postmaster at Big Cypress. German immigrants seeking land and religious freedom arrived in the late 1840s, and the Houston and Texas Central Railway reaching Cypress Top in 1856 turned scattered farms into a thriving depot community of stores, hotels, and dance halls.

Mt. Vernon, TX

Founded in 1851, the Associated Cypress Baptist Church built its meetinghouse on land later deeded to the congregation by Spencer Shearer, whose gift also created a burial ground called to service by the tolling of the bell tower. Local tradition holds that Confederate troops drilled on the church grounds during the Civil War. The congregation helped seed other area churches, and descendants of its founders remain active today.

Leakey, TX

Begun in the 1870s, Cypress Creek Cemetery served a scattered community of pioneers along Cypress Creek before the town of Leakey existed, on land belonging to settler John Bunyan Stidham, Sr. Its earliest graves reach back to the late 1870s, and its markers tell hard stories, including Laura Stidham and her young son Alonzo, killed when a tornado destroyed their home in 1927 and buried together beneath plain stones. More than seventy-five marked graves, many unmarked ones, and ten veterans lie among the descendants of the region's first families.

Center Point, TX

Cypress Creek Cemetery holds the nineteenth-century heritage of a German settler community in the Texas Hill Country. Its oldest documented grave, from 1861, belongs to Laura Steves Boerner, whose husband Wilhelm was killed at the Battle of the Nueces in August 1862—a deadly clash in which Confederate forces attacked German Unionists fleeing Texas. Pioneers, children, a respected physician, and even two strangers who died of tuberculosis while passing through rest here.

Cedar Park, TX

In the 1860s, families scattered along Cypress Creek pooled their effort to give their children a school, first a small log cabin on a hilltop above the water. As the settlement grew they replaced it in 1877 with a wood-frame building, still a one-room, one-teacher schoolhouse, which taught local children until 1937. A modern Cypress school rose on the site half a century later, carrying the old name forward.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Born in 1732 of White, Black, and Native American ancestry, Cyrus Bustill bought his own freedom and baked bread for Revolutionary War troops during the struggle for American independence. He became a founder of the Free African Society, one of the earliest Black mutual-aid organizations in the nation, and later opened a school for Black children near this site. His life spanned enslavement, revolution, and the first stirrings of organized Black community building in Philadelphia.

DeLeon, TX

A blacksmith by trade, Cyrus Campbell migrated to Texas in 1828 and did various work for the young Republic—including forging leg irons for the captured Mexican general Santa Anna after the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto. Active in the Methodist Church and remembered for choosing the site of the De Leon Cemetery, he moved to De Leon in 1883, where his became the first grave in the burial ground he had helped locate.

Village of Irvington, NY

In an age when a message could only cross the ocean as fast as a ship could carry it, the New York financier Cyrus W. Field spent years and several heartbreaking failures trying to lay a telegraph cable across the floor of the Atlantic. His persistence paid off in 1866, when a working line finally linked North America and Europe and let words leap between continents in minutes rather than weeks. Field made his home in the Hudson River village of Irvington, which honored its most famous resident by naming this road for him and dedicating it in December 1931.

Cheltenham Township, PA · est. 2005

Drawn to Philadelphia by the 1876 Centennial, Cyrus H. K. Curtis stayed and built a publishing empire, the Curtis Publishing Company, whose Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home Journal reached millions of American households. From 1891 until his death in 1933 he lived nearby at Lyndon, an estate whose Frederick Law Olmsted-designed grounds now form the public Curtis Arboretum. Only Curtis Hall, the home's music room, still stands.

Temple, TX

Raised near Travis in Austin County, Cyrus Maxwell Campbell enlisted in the Confederate army at 21 and rose to captain in the 16th Texas Infantry. After the war he farmed with the help of Freedmen, then turned to lumber, opening Campbell & Lovitt Lumber in Temple in 1888 and expanding across Central Texas until the Depression closed the family enterprise in the 1930s.

Exeter, NH

This plaque marks a house built around 1870 and identifies it by its owner of that era, Cyrus Morse. Exeter, one of New Hampshire's oldest towns, had by the years just after the Civil War grown into a settled community of tree-lined streets and comfortable wood-frame homes, and markers like this one preserve the names attached to its surviving 19th-century houses. Naming a home for the family who built or lived in it was a common way New England communities kept their local history close at hand.

La Grange, TX

On March 24, 1889, Czech immigrants gathered in La Grange to form the Katolicka Jednota Texaska (KJT), the Czech Catholic Union of Texas, chartered that July with six lodges. As a fraternal benefit society it offered life insurance, financial aid, and educational scholarships, eventually growing to more than a hundred lodges statewide. It remains a pillar of Texas's Czech-Catholic community.

Abbott, TX

Drawn from Fayette County and from Moravia in Austria-Hungary, Czech immigrants became one of Hill County's largest and most influential groups, many fleeing compulsory military service, political limits, and the imposition of German in their schools. Lured by cheap land and rich soil, the first arrivals came in the 1870s and drew others as the railroads opened the region, making Abbott the informal capital of Czech settlement. Neighbors admired their thrift and tidy farms, and for generations they kept their language and old-world customs.

Wimberley, TX

This cabin of hand-hewn cedar logs chinked with clay was built in Comal County around 1850 and, from 1858 to 1951, sheltered the family of Dr. Adolph Schlameus, who taught the area's first school near Fischer for settlers' children alongside his own twelve. Moved from the Canyon Lake area, it was restored in 1960 and recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Novice, TX

David Absalom Parker, an Ohio native born in 1849, came to Coleman County in 1876 with his wife Nannie and soon built this two-story stone home. He rose to prominence as a cattleman and, when rail lines reached the area in 1910, helped found the town of Novice. Owner of a general store and cotton gin, he was central to organizing its school, church, and post office.

Fredericksburg, TX

Pioneer David Crockett Riley built this stout stone house in the early 1870s near the Crabapple community, and four generations of his family lived in it. Its 24-inch outer walls were laid up from stone quarried a mile north, its timbers hewn from trees on the farm, and its milled lumber hauled ninety miles from Austin. Lacking store-bought hardware, Riley's shop forged the door locks by hand — and his workmen earned fifty cents and a pint of his home-distilled whiskey for a day's labor.

McAllen, TX

Brothers Enrique and Modesto Guerra opened a grocery in the brand-new town of McAllen in 1908, joined two years later by their father Diódoro to form D. Guerra and Sons. The family moved the business into this handsome brick and concrete building in 1912, where it operated until 1964. Its distinctive façade—recessed doorway, concrete brackets, and a molded-brick cornice with starburst and garland designs—still records the firm's name and construction date.

Dublin, TX

Built in 1901 by D. L. Harris, a partner in a Dublin mercantile store, and his wife Claire, this residence blends the architectural styles fashionable at the turn of the century. Its distinctive gabled roof with ornamental trim, wide veranda, and fishscale shingling mark it as a showpiece of small-town prosperity. Even the foundation stone was quarried locally and shaped on site.