Search Markers

Jasper, TX

This cemetery lies within the 1280-acre grant given to Elizabeth Davis in 1841; believed to be of Indian heritage, she had brought her three children from Georgia to Jasper County in 1836. Local tradition holds that a sick Indian child she took in was the first buried here, though the oldest marked grave is that of Elizabeth Davis Kelly, who died in 1873. Once a family plot, the ground opened to the wider community as sawmills and logging arrived, and it now holds more than 370 graves, including citizens of the Republic of Texas and Civil War veterans.

Larue, TX

Named for the pioneering Davis family, who reached Henderson County before the Civil War, this graveyard has served its rural corner since the mid-1800s on land deeded by J.J. Deupree in 1883. It is closely tied to the Baxter community, which became a station on the Texas and New Orleans Railroad by 1901 and soon had stores, churches, cotton gins, and a school. Among those buried here are a county sheriff, a county chief justice reinterred from an earlier grave, and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War.

Independence, TX

The Davis family were renowned educators whose roots ran back to the Rev. Abner Davis, founder of Shurtleff College in Illinois. Drawn to Texas by Baylor Female College, daughter Martha and her husband joined its staff in 1851, and in the following years much of the extended family followed to devote their talents to Baylor at Independence. One daughter, "Little Mary," even taught among Indians briefly before turning to the college.

Sweetwater, TX

Walter Wright Davis and his wife Florence built this Sweetwater home in 1916, its design caught midway between the craftsman bungalow and the Colonial Revival. Exposed rafter ends, knee braces, and divided-light window sashes mark it as typical of 1920s domestic building. A 1927 remodeling added twin dormers and traded the original broad porch for a small entry.

McKinney, TX

John N. Davis, a traveling buggy salesman, and his wife Maggie (Hamilton) built this L-plan vernacular house in 1902, where all seven of their children were born—though only three reached adulthood. After Maggie's death in 1908, her mother Cornelia Allen Hamilton moved in to help raise the family. The home, with its front bay and wraparound porch, stayed in the Davis family until 1978.

Gainesville, TX

This ornate Queen Anne residence, built in 1891, was the home of William O. Davis — a Civil War veteran who came to Texas in 1870 and rose from a self-educated background to become a prominent Gainesville attorney, state senator, and the town's first mayor. Its gingerbread trim and decorative brickwork advertised Davis's standing among the community's early leaders during the flush years of the Gilded Age. The house was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1982.

McKinney, TX

Built between 1897 and 1908 for Judge Harvey Louis Davis and his wife Emma, this Transitional-style McKinney residence mixes Prairie-influenced and Classical detailing, from a Sullivanesque frieze to fluted Corinthian porch columns. The Davis family was steeped in public life, counting two county judges, a district attorney, a county commissioner, a postmaster, and a schoolteacher among its members. Across three generations who lived here for ninety-one years, the family gave Collin County a cumulative ninety-five years of public service.

Avalon, PA · est. 1987

In the decades after the Civil War, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers set out to tame the Ohio River for year-round navigation. Their first lock and dam on the river, built here between 1878 and 1885, was a marvel of its day—the largest movable dam yet constructed, with the world's first rolling lock gate and its widest lock chamber. It served until 1922, when the nearby Emsworth Locks and Dams replaced it.

Montgomery, TX

This modest frame building went up in 1845, the year Texas joined the Union, as the law office and home of Judge Nat Hart Davis, who trained a generation of young attorneys reading law under his supervision here. From 1848 to 1854 it doubled as the meeting place for Montgomery's mayor and city council, and over the decades it served as a school and later a U.S. Post Office from 1923 to 1936. Today it stands as one of the last tangible reminders of Montgomery's earliest days.

Brown County, KS

In Hiawatha's Mount Hope Cemetery stands the Davis Memorial, an extravagant array of marble statues commissioned by farmer John Milburn Davis after the death of his wife. Beginning in the 1930s, Davis poured much of his fortune into the carved figures depicting the couple across their lives, a lavish and much-debated act of grief during the lean years of the Great Depression. The result became one of Kansas's best-known roadside curiosities.

Salado, TX

William A. Davis built this mill in 1864, the first stone mill with a carding machine in the Salado vicinity, and added a sawmill and gin two years later. In 1871 he hauled French burr millstones, a Leffel water wheel, and silk bolting cloth in by wagon from Galveston to grind flour for Central Texas households. A local point of pride was recorded on the marker itself: no widow ever paid a toll to grind her grain at the Davis Mill.

New York, TX

In 1856, Davis Reynolds hauled his family — and several enslaved people — by wagon and on foot from Gordon County, Georgia, to Henderson County, Texas. Optimistic about its future, he named his settlement New York and donated land for the community's first cemetery, where his daughter's 1863 burial was the first marked grave. His hopes for a great city faded when the railroad bypassed New York in 1901, but the church, cemetery, and family store still endure.

Denison, TX

Around 1840, blacksmith Micajah C. Davis (1790–1860), one of Grayson County's founders, raised this cabin of hand-hewn oak logs at the Iron Ore Creek settlement near present Denison. Passing to the Ansley family in 1870 and occupied by their descendants into the 1950s, the pioneer home was later donated to the Old Settlers Village to be preserved.

Austin, TX

Austin architect Hal Thomson designed this Spanish Eclectic home in 1931 for Emma Levison Davis, a founding member of a local settlement club and widow of a pioneer Austin grocer. With its stuccoed walls, clay-tile roof, arcaded entry and square tower, the house showcased handmade tile, heavy timber trusses and custom ironwork and furnishings. It passed through the Davis family before the Sibleys acquired it in 1962.

Dublin, TX

Born in Dublin in 1920, George A. Davis, Jr. was one of six brothers who served in the military. He enlisted as an aviation cadet in 1942, flew hundreds of missions as an early P-47 Thunderbolt pilot in World War II, and became a leading jet Ace in Korea with the 334th Fighter Interceptor Squadron. On February 10, 1952, near the Manchurian border, he downed two MiG-15s before his own SabreJet was hit and crashed south of the Yalu River. He received the Medal of Honor posthumously.

Gainesville, TX

William Owen Davis carried the arc of the post-Civil War South into Texas: a Georgia native and Confederate veteran, he was admitted to the Georgia Bar in 1870 before settling in Gainesville near the Red River. There he built a decades-long public career — school board member, city alderman, state senator in the 1880s, and finally mayor at age 81 — while practicing law prominently enough to argue two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. His life traces the Gilded Age reintegration of Southern professionals into civic and legal leadership.

Texas City, TX

Frank and Florence Davison built this sturdy cypress Victorian between 1895 and 1897 in the young town then called Shoal Point, and it became the birthplace of the first child born in Texas City. A pioneer civic leader, Frank Davison opened the town's first store, installed its first telephone, and served as commissioner, postmaster, school trustee, and bank director. The house weathered many storms, suffering most in the 1947 disaster.

Crockett, TX

This park honors the frontier legend Davy Crockett, whose name the town of Crockett carries; the young Republic of Texas incorporated the town in December 1837, the same year it created Houston County in honor of General Sam Houston. Dedicated in 1937 during the state's centennial era, the park roots a modern community in the heroic memory of Texas independence. The marker records the civic leaders who oversaw its founding a century after the Republic took shape.

Hutchins, TX

Illinois-born Alanson Dawdy reached Dallas County in 1847 and, in 1854, was licensed to run a ferry across the Trinity River—then the southernmost crossing in the area. For citizens on both banks it was a vital link, charging a dollar for a fully loaded wagon down to a nickel for a person on foot, and it operated until about 1876, a dozen years before the first permanent bridge went in. Dawdy himself was a veteran of both the Mexican and Civil Wars.

New York, NY

"Dawn of Glory" stands at the edge of Brooklyn's Highland Park as a community's tribute to the local men who marched off to the First World War. The years carved into its base, 1917-1918, mark America's brief but costly entry into the war, when the United States sent some two million soldiers "over there" to the trenches of France and helped turn the tide against Germany. Memorials like this one rose in neighborhoods across the country in the years after the Armistice, each a bronze-and-stone act of civic grief and pride paid for by the very people whose sons had served.

New York, NY

From 1931 to 1942 the novelist and diarist Dawn Powell lived at this Greenwich Village address, turning out sharp comic novels like Turn, Magic Wheel and A Time to Be Born. An Ohio transplant, she made a career of skewering both small-town Midwestern life and the glittering ambitions of New York. Nearly forgotten at her death in 1965, Powell found an ardent new readership in the 1990s.

Lamesa, TX

Dawson County honors Nicholas Mosby Dawson, a Texas patriot who fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836 and later fell in the 1842 clash known as Dawson's Massacre during the turbulent years of the Republic of Texas. The county was created in 1858, recreated in 1876 from Bexar Territory, and finally organized in 1905, with Lamesa as its seat. Its name carries the memory of the sacrifices that won and defended Texas independence.

Kingsville, TX

Born in Bastrop County in 1887, Dawson Richard Murchison served as a Texas state game warden from 1930 until his death, stationed at Kingsville. In 1938 he was killed in the line of duty in neighboring Jim Wells County when he and fellow wardens confronted men illegally "spotlighting" deer at night. He and his wife, Mattie B. Wright, had five children.

Stephenville, TX

Built in the early-to-mid 1890s on a prominent corner of Stephenville's courthouse square, this limestone building likely first housed the Dawson Saloon. Under owner W. A. 'Billy' Dawson, with beer-barrel seating set out along the sidewalk for cowboys and passersby, it was a popular watering hole until his death in 1901. The building later held a restaurant, a confectionery, and—longest of all—Novit's Department Store, run by Belarusian immigrant Morris Astonovitsky until 1957, and its rebuilt limestone columns still mark the square.

Austin, TX

Around 1900, sisters Mary and Nannie Dawson built this stone house as part of Austin's South Heights development. Both were pioneering teachers in the young free public school system — Mary served as principal of Fulmore School before leaving education to build a career in real estate. Their brother Nick Dawson, a builder of several local stone houses, likely raised this typical middle-class home.

Lyon County, NV

Dayton is among the oldest settlements in Nevada, born as a riverside resting spot where California-bound emigrants paused after crossing the desert. In 1849 Abner Blackburn plucked a gold nugget from the mouth of Gold Canyon, sparking the prospecting that a decade later uncovered the fabulous Comstock ore bodies at Gold Hill and Virginia City. The town cycled through several names before settling on Dayton in 1861, honoring John Day, who surveyed its streets, and it thrived for decades as a milling and trading hub and as the Lyon County seat until 1911.

Lyon County, NV

Founded in 1851, Dayton Cemetery is one of the oldest continuously maintained burial grounds in Nevada, sited beside the emigrant trail to the California gold fields whose wagon ruts can still be traced nearby. The town grew from an 1849 gold discovery in Gold Canyon and was named in 1861 for surveyor John Day; that same year Lyman Crockett dug the cemetery's first grave. Among those buried here is James Finney, "Old Virginny," the namesake of Virginia City, alongside many Italian American families who farmed the Carson River bottoms to feed the Comstock.

Lyon County, NV

Dayton holds the site of Nevada's first Chinatown, settled as hundreds of thousands of immigrants from China, Japan, and Korea crossed the Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century — pushed by upheaval at home and pulled by the promise of gold and work in the Rocky Mountain West. In August 1857, Edward Rose hired Dayton's Chinese laborers to dig the four-mile Rose Ditch, carrying water from the Carson River to the placer miners at Gold Canyon. Facing steady discrimination but drawn by the work, they mined the canyon and settled along the river, and the community remained a vital hub for Chinese Americans in Nevada into the 1880s.

Lyon County, NV

Dayton served as the first seat of Lyon County, and residents celebrated the two-story Italianate brick courthouse finished in 1864 as a mark of their new state's sophistication. Fire destroyed the building in May 1909, and the county seat soon moved to Yerington. Rather than abandon the ruins, the legislature funded a high school on the site in 1918, a building that has since served the community as an elementary school, a junior high, and today a community center.

Lyon County, NV

In 1865 Lyon County built this imposing stone schoolhouse for Dayton, then the county seat—making it the second oldest schoolhouse in Nevada and the oldest still standing on its original site. It educated local children until it closed in 1959. In later years the building sheltered the Dayton Senior Citizens Center and, since 1991, has been home to the Dayton Historical Society Museum.

Dayton, TX

When Dayton was still part of Liberty, its children had few options for schooling until trustees established a school in 1849. This two-room Prairie-style building, built of cypress and topped with a cupola, served students from 1900 to 1910 before being moved and later converted to a residence. Saved from condemnation by the Dayton Historical Society in 2001 and restored, it reopened in 2007 as the Dayton Old School Museum, having survived a century of tornadoes and hurricanes.

Silver Spring, MD

For three weeks in October 2002, the Washington, D.C. region lived under siege as a pair of snipers shot people at random—at gas pumps, in parking lots, while mowing a lawn or loading a car. The killers, later identified as John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, struck across Maryland, Virginia, and the District, and the ten who died were an ordinary cross-section of the metro area: commuters and retirees, a cab driver, a landscaper, immigrants and native Washingtonians alike. This memorial gathers the names of those victims so that people going about the most everyday errands are not forgotten.

Sunnyvale, CA

In 1775–1776, Lt. Colonel Juan Bautista de Anza led a Spanish expedition, authorized by King Carlos III, to colonize the San Francisco Bay Area. The overland journey brought settlers hundreds of miles across the deserts and mountains of the Southwest to establish a lasting Spanish presence on the northern frontier of New Spain.

Oley Township, PA · est. 1948

In 1745 Dr. George de Benneville built his house in the Oley Valley, a fertile pocket of Berks County settled by German-speaking immigrants. A physician and itinerant preacher, de Benneville carried to America a radical theology of universal salvation, and from this rural corner he became the founder of Universalism in the colonies before his death in Philadelphia in 1793. His ministry took root among the diverse religious communities of colonial Pennsylvania, long a haven for dissenting faiths.

New Bern, NC

The Marquis de Bretigny, a French nobleman, served the Patriot cause as a state purchasing agent in Martinique in 1781–82, securing supplies for the Revolution. He also fought at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse and later served as a Councillor of State. His home once stood near this spot in New Bern.

Douglas County, NV

Known to the Washoe as De-ek Wadapush, Cave Rock has been a sacred place for thousands of years, a site where medicine people meditated and prayed and a landmark woven through the tribe's legends and traditional life beside da ow — Lake Tahoe. In the settlement era it also served the newcomers: quarried granite blocks still brace the old Lake Bigler Toll Road on its face, and highway tunnels were bored through the rock in 1931 and again in 1957. It is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a Traditional Cultural Property.

DeKalb, TX

De Kalb was named for Revolutionary War hero Maj. Gen. Johann de Kalb at the 1836 suggestion of David Crockett, who passed through on his way to fight in the Texas Revolution, as did James Fannin and William B. Travis. Settled by 1831, the town claimed the first college in Bowie County (1839), an early Masonic lodge, and a brief turn as county seat, and it sat on early stage lines and, later, the Texas & Pacific Railroad. Sawmills and, legend says, the nearby hideouts of outlaws like Sam Bass and Jesse James all figure in its lively frontier story.

Floresville, TX

On a bluff above the San Antonio River, this cemetery served the vanished trading community of Lodi. Its namesake, Nemencio de la Zerda, Sr., born in San Antonio in 1808, was a rancher and former soldier under Tejano leader Juan Seguín who bought the land in 1839. The earliest marked grave dates to 1877, though older unmarked burials are believed to lie here, and Spanish-language headstones and interior fencing reflect its Mexican American heritage.

De Leon, TX

When boll weevils, bad weather, and a national downturn broke Comanche County's long reliance on cotton, farmers turned to peanuts—and in 1912 N.T. Haskins organized the De Leon Peanut Company so growers wouldn't have to ship their crop all the way to Fort Worth. By 1914 peanuts were the county's leading cash crop, and a six-story plant completed in 1917 could process ten railroad carloads a day, helping earn De Leon the nickname "The Peanut Capital of the World."

Victoria, TX

Laid out by Martín De León, the empresario who founded Victoria in the 1820s, this square began life as the Plaza de la Constitución, patterned on the central plazas of traditional Spanish municipalities. His son-in-law José M. Carbajal expanded the plan in an 1830s survey, and over the decades the square gained a brick-lined well, a windmill, a bandstand, and Pompeo Coppini's 1912 Confederate memorial. In 1941 the United Daughters of the Confederacy led a beautification effort that renamed it De León Plaza in honor of the city's founder.

Yorktown, TX

DeWitt County was carved in 1846 from Gonzales, Victoria, and Goliad counties and organized that July with Cameron as its first seat. It honors Green De Witt, the Kentucky-born empresario whose colonization contract helped plant Anglo-American settlement in the region before his death in Mexico in 1835. The marker fixes a moment when the newly annexed state of Texas was drawing its county lines.

Cuero, TX

This ground lay within Green De Witt's 1825 empresario grant and became DeWitt County in 1846, its seat shifting from Cameron to Clinton and finally to Cuero in 1876. Settled first by Anglo-Americans and, by 1860, half by German immigrants, the county sent its men into nearly every fight of the Texas Revolution — the Alamo, Goliad, Gonzales, and San Jacinto among them. The marker rolls out a long honor list of the pioneers and soldiers who founded and defended it.

Cuero, TX

DeWitt County was organized in 1846, and after its seat shifted from Cameron to Clinton and finally to Cuero, a series of courthouses served its citizens. The present Richardsonian Romanesque courthouse rose from 1894 to 1896, a three-story sandstone and granite building crowned by a six-story clock tower and modeled on H. H. Richardson's celebrated Allegheny County Courthouse. Rededicated in 2007 in a ceremony echoing its 1896 original, it remains the county's civic centerpiece.

San Jacinto, TX

This plaza honors Lorenzo de Zavala, the Yucatán-born liberal who was jailed for years for his politics, taught himself English and medicine in prison, and served in the Spanish Cortes and as a Mexican governor before opposing Santa Anna's dictatorship. Loyal to Mexico's 1824 Constitution, he moved to Texas, signed its Declaration of Independence in 1836, and became the Republic's first vice-president; he, his descendants, and neighbors lie in the family cemetery across Buffalo Bayou.

Marble Falls, TX

First recorded by a naturalist in 1821, this deep natural shaft earned a dark reputation during the Civil War and Reconstruction, when it is believed as many as seventeen bodies were dumped into it. Among the victims were pro-Union Judge John R. Scott, settler Adolph Hoppe, several Reconstruction-era officials, and Ben McKeever, killed amid conflict with local freedmen; an oak that once stood over the hole reportedly bore rope marks from hangings. Poisonous gases kept the shaft unexplored until 1951.

Comstock, TX

This narrow canyon guarded one of the most feared stretches of the San Antonio–El Paso road, the overland lifeline that carried Forty-Niners and freighters toward California after the Gold Rush. Named by 1849 after a deadly ambush on Dr. Lyon's wagon train, it became notorious for raids and killings; freighter August Santleben later tallied nearly 400 deaths along the wider frontier road. The Army built Camp Hudson on the Devils River in 1857 to protect travelers, yet the pass was still considered dangerous into the early 1880s.

Carthage, TX

The community of Deadwood took root in the 1830s with the Adam LaGrone family, and its burial ground began in 1847 when Adam's wife Christeena died; he was laid beside her nine years later. Though not formally recorded as a public cemetery until 1859, it was already serving the settlement, and descendants of those pioneer families maintain it yet.

Laredo, TX

On March 17, 1837, Erastus "Deaf" Smith—the celebrated scout of the Texas Revolution, now a captain of scouts for the young Republic of Texas—led just 21 men against a larger force of Mexican cavalry from the Laredo garrison near this spot. The sharp encounter was one of many border skirmishes that flared along the contested Rio Grande frontier after San Jacinto. Smith, famously hard of hearing, was among the most trusted frontiersmen of the Texas cause.

Hereford, TX

Created in 1876 and organized in 1890, this Panhandle county honors Erastus "Deaf" Smith, the celebrated scout and spy of the Texas Revolution who distinguished himself for bravery at the Battle of San Jacinto. Its county seat began as La Plata — often called Grenada — before Hereford took the role in 1899.

Hereford, TX

Hereford's 1910 courthouse rose in brick faced with marble, inside and out, at a cost of $125,000 and was celebrated as only the second marble courthouse built in the United States. Its approval came only after a bruising bond-issue election, and the victors marked their win by parading down Main Street behind a band led by Judge John Slaton. It stands as a proud statement of civic ambition in the young Texas Panhandle.

Lake County, FL

This marker honors Dean R. Gilmore, a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Forces who died on November 14, 1944 — his twenty-third birthday — during the height of World War II. The USAAF was the wartime air arm that flew bombing and combat missions across Europe and the Pacific, and young officers like Gilmore paid a heavy price in those campaigns. His memorial in Lake County, Florida, keeps one airman's sacrifice from fading into the war's vast casualty rolls.

Kilgore, TX

In the years after the Civil War, small East Texas towns like Kilgore grew up around cotton and the gins that processed it. This house began about 1876 as a modest one-story dwelling built by S. G. Dean, and it grew with the town: after 1881 L. J. Keener added a two-story wing, and later it passed to cotton-gin man Wiley N. Crim. Its layered additions make it a kind of architectural diary of the community's early decades.

Denaville, TX

Deanville grew up on the Texas prairie in the years after the Civil War, when merchant James L. Dean laid out a town in 1872 beside a branch of the great Chisholm Trail, the dusty highway up which millions of longhorns were driven to northern railheads. A post office followed in 1877, and when the Houston & Texas Central pushed its rails through in 1913 the little community gained a lifeline to wider markets. The Sons of Hermann lodge, organized in 1916, kept the town's social calendar alive with its long-running Fourth of July celebration.

DeBerry, TX

Settled around an 1850 sawmill and grist mill, this East Texas cotton community became a market and ginning center before oil arrived after 1900. It took its name from Col. Alfred W. DeBerry, a Confederate cavalry officer who served in the wartime Texas legislature and later, as secretary of state under Governor Richard Coke, helped return state government to local control after Reconstruction.

DeBerry, TX

This East Texas fellowship traces its origins to the pioneer Bell-Fountain Baptist Church, organized before the Civil War. When fire destroyed the Bell-Fountain chapel in 1880, its members formed two new congregations—Shady Grove and DeBerry—the latter building its first sanctuary on donated land under its first pastor. The church has served the DeBerry community for well over a century.

Decatur, TX

Decatur Baptist College is remembered as the world's first institution planned, in 1898, as a junior college — a new model of two-year higher education. The surviving hall was built in 1892 for an earlier school on the site.

Decatur, TX

Organized in 1862 amid the upheaval of the Civil War, this was Decatur's first congregation, with early services held in a vacant store on the town square and in the home of pioneer members who had migrated from Missouri. The fellowship built its first sanctuary in 1881 on land deeded by the county, rebuilt after an 1890s fire, and completed its present brick sanctuary by Easter 1914. Its story tracks the settling of Wise County from wartime hardship into a growing community.

Austin, TX

Among the Swedish immigrants who settled Decker in the 1880s were many who had fled the state church of Sweden, and here they built a congregation of their own choosing—the Decker Swedish Evangelical Free Church. On land deeded by Joseph and Charlotta Johnson in 1892 they raised a church and opened the cemetery that still remains, holding services in Swedish for the growing community. Drought and crop failure later scattered the members, and the church disbanded, but the burial ground endures as the resting place of its charter families.

Austin, TX

Swedish immigrants settling along Decker Creek in the years after the Civil War first rode into Austin for worship, then gathered in one another's homes as a circuit preacher came to them. By Pentecost of 1879 they had raised and dedicated their own church, soon adding a school and parsonage, and by the early 1900s a proper sanctuary. The congregation's steady growth mirrored the quiet permanence of Central Texas's Swedish farming settlements.

Lebanon, VA

In the rolling hills of southwest Virginia, this memorial in Lebanon honors the men and women of Russell County who served in the United States armed forces across every generation. It was created in July 1991 as an Eagle Scout project by Kevin Alexander, the culmination of the Boy Scouts' highest rank — a tradition in which young people give back to their communities through lasting public works. Such locally raised veterans' tributes are a fixture of American county seats, gathering the sacrifices of neighbors into a single place of remembrance.