Search Markers

City of Dunkirk, NY

This marker honors Corporal Cyrus W. James, a young Dunkirk man who enlisted in the 9th New York Cavalry, Company G, in the autumn of 1861 at the age of 22. His regiment served in the Eastern Theater of the Civil War, and James fell on July 1, 1863 — the opening day of the Battle of Gettysburg. The 9th New York Cavalry was among the Union forces engaged that morning west and north of the town, where dismounted troopers helped delay the Confederate advance until the infantry arrived.

Cedarburg, WI

A dedication placed by American Legion Peter Wollner Post 288 in honor of those who served in the armed forces. The Legion post, named for a local fallen soldier, tends the memory of the community's veterans across the wars of the twentieth century.

Bryson City, NC

In the winter of 1864, the mountains of far western North Carolina were a contested frontier of the Civil War. Near Deep Creek, Union forces struck Thomas's Legion — a Confederate command that famously included Cherokee soldiers from the nearby Qualla Boundary. The blow here helped erode Cherokee support for the Confederate cause in the southern Appalachians.

Boyd, TX

Settled around 1854 by pioneers Sam Woody and Tom McCarroll and soon joined by neighbors from East Texas, Deep Creek grew into a farming community raising cotton, corn, and cattle, with a Baptist church that doubled as a schoolhouse. Its cemetery holds Civil War veterans and the grave of Sally Bowman, killed in an 1868 Indian raid — a reminder of frontier peril. Generations later the community even inspired a nationally performed ballet, "Winter at Deep Creek."

Austin, TX

Swedish immigrant Charles Johnson settled along the Colorado River in the 1850s, and in 1902 his children opened Deep Eddy Resort at a spot where the current swirled around a deep hole in the limestone riverbed. After A. J. Eilers bought the park in 1915 and added a concrete swimming pool, it blossomed into a full carnival ground with a Ferris wheel, diving tower, trapeze, and even a diving horse. The City of Austin bought the park in 1935, and after a devastating flood weeks later, the Works Progress Administration helped rebuild it into the beloved pool that reopened in 1936.

Deer Park, TX

In 1892 an Illinois transplant named Simeon Henry West platted the town of Deer Park near Houston, betting that its mild climate and access to waterways could make it a farming and trading hub. He built a hotel, marketed lots to Northerners, and drew more than ninety settlers hoping to raise fruit and tobacco — until the catastrophic 1900 hurricane scattered nearly every family back north. The town languished until 1928, when Shell Chemical Company arrived and set off the industrial growth that carried Deer Park to incorporation in 1948.

Monrovia, CA

In 1907 Ben Overturff leased a canyon retreat in the San Gabriel foothills above Monrovia, building first a wooden lodge and then, in 1911, a sturdy structure of creek boulders. Through the 1920s Deer Park thrived as a popular mountain resort, a getaway from the growing towns of the Los Angeles basin, until the catastrophic flood of 1938 swept away its fortunes. The family held on until 1948, and by 1958 only the stone foundations remained.

South Lebanon, OH

In the years just after the Revolution, pioneers pushed into the Ohio country, and the settlement that became Deerfield took root around 1795 in the Little Miami valley of what is now Warren County. Benjamin Stites laid out the town in 1802, and among its first residents were veterans of both the Revolution and the War of 1812, men who had traded muskets for plows on the young republic's frontier. As the community matured it folded into Union Township in 1815, took the name South Lebanon in 1871, and grew an industrial side — powder works and food businesses that gave the village a working economy well into the industrial age.

Dallas, TX

Everette Lee DeGolyer struck oil in Mexico while still a college student and went on to become one of the world's foremost petroleum geologists and a celebrated rare-book collector. In 1936 he and his wife Nell moved to Dallas and built this rambling Spanish Colonial Revival home above White Rock Lake, evocative of a Mexican hacienda and finished with fine craftsmanship. After the couple's deaths the estate passed to Southern Methodist University and the City of Dallas.

Austin, TX

Soon after the United States entered World War II, the Army Air Corps established an air base on Del Valle land once part of a Mexican land grant, with the City of Austin buying 3,000 acres to lease to the government. Opened in 1942 as a troop-carrier training center, it was renamed for Capt. John A. E. Bergstrom, Austin's first war casualty, killed at Clark Field in the Philippines in December 1941. Crews trained here flew in the invasions of Normandy and beyond, and over the next half-century the base served through the Berlin Airlift, Korea, and Iraq before closing in 1992 and becoming Austin's international airport in 1999.

Lincoln County, NV

Gold discovered by John and Olivia Ferguson around 1891 spawned a camp first called Ferguson, renamed Delamar after entrepreneur John DeLamar bought its best claims in 1893 for $150,000. Over 1,500 people crowded this remote place, served by a newspaper, hospital, school, churches, and an opera house, though water came 12 miles and all other goods 150 miles by mule team. The dry milling process threw off fine silica "death dust" that killed many residents and earned the town its grim nickname, "The Widow Maker," even as it produced $25 million in gold to lead Nevada at the turn of the century.

Rochester, MA

In the old towns of Plymouth County, families often buried their dead not in a village churchyard but on their own land, among the trees they had cleared and farmed. This marker identifies one such spot — a patch of Rochester woodland set apart as the resting place of John Delano. The Delano name runs deep in this corner of southeastern Massachusetts, reaching back to the settler families who put down roots in the old Plymouth Colony.

Honesdale, PA · est. 1947

Built between 1825 and 1828, the Delaware & Hudson Canal linked the Hudson and Delaware rivers to move northeastern Pennsylvania's anthracite coal to market. Honesdale served as its western terminus, fed by a gravity railroad reaching back to the mines at Carbondale. For some seventy years the canal was the region's lifeline, floating hard coal toward the cities that its clean heat helped to power.

Tinicum Township, PA · est. 1949

The little canal community once called Mexico took the name Uhlertown from Michael Uhler, a boatbuilder who ran his own line of boats along the Delaware Canal. Lock No. 18 and the tidy buildings clustered around it survive as reminders of the busy waterway era. In the mid-19th century, places like this hummed with the traffic of mule-drawn boats hauling coal and freight.

New Hope, PA · est. 1949

At New Hope the Delaware Canal reveals much of its working machinery, with locks No. 8 through 11 among the twenty-three lift locks that stepped boats along the route. The town also boasted one of the canal's nine aqueducts and the only toll station between Bristol and Easton. Coal was the great cargo, floated south by mule-drawn boats through this bustling river town.

Durham Township, PA · est. 1949

Here at Lock No. 21, one of twenty-three lift locks numbered from Bristol to Easton, the Delaware Canal carried boats over Cooks Creek by aqueduct. The nine aqueducts along the route floated both water and freight across the streams feeding the Delaware River. In the canal's heyday, mule teams plodded the towpath hauling coal and goods through this quiet stretch of Bucks County.

New Hope, PA · est. 1949

Opened from Bristol as far as this point in 1831 and finished to Easton by 1852, the Delaware Canal became one of Pennsylvania's vital freight arteries. An outlet lock built here in 1834 connected the canal to the river itself, and the nearby River House of 1794 served as a favorite stop for barge crews. For decades the canal bustled with boats carrying coal downriver toward Philadelphia and beyond.

Solebury Township, PA · est. 1949

Lock No. 12 marks one of the twenty-three lift locks that carried boats along the Delaware Canal between Bristol and Easton. Just upstream, one of the canal's nine aqueducts lifted the waterway and its traffic across a small stream draining toward the Delaware. In the mid-1800s, mule-drawn boats laden with coal passed through here in steady procession.

Williams Township, PA · est. 1949

Just below the highway runs the channel of the Delaware Canal, the towpath waterway that once carried anthracite coal and freight along the Delaware River. Here stand Locks No. 22 and 23, the final lift locks in the 60-mile run from Bristol up to the Lehigh River at Easton. In the canal era, such locks stepped boats up and down the changing elevations, letting mule-drawn barges move heavy cargo before the railroads took over.

Delaware Township, PA

This memorial stands in the Delaware Cemetery near Dingman's Ferry, a Delaware River hamlet in Pennsylvania's Pike County that grew up around one of the region's early ferry crossings. It was raised in 1982 by American Legion Post No. 851 — part of the veterans' organization chartered by Congress in 1919 in the wake of World War I — whose posts are customarily named for local servicemen, here Tilghman, Angle, and Smith. Rather than marking a single battle or soldier, the stone deliberately gathers 'all veterans' under one dedication, the kind of collective remembrance found in small-town cemeteries across America.

Media, PA · est. 1982

Formed out of Chester County in 1789, Delaware County takes its name from the great river along which William Penn first stepped ashore in Pennsylvania in 1682. The county holds the Old Chester Courthouse of 1724, among the oldest public buildings in the country and a survivor from the colony's founding generation. Its seat, Media, was incorporated in 1850.

Buffalo, NY

Delaware Park is the crown jewel of Buffalo's pioneering parks-and-parkways system, designed in the late 19th century by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux—the same partnership behind New York's Central Park. Rather than building a single park, the designers wove a network of green spaces linked by tree-lined parkways across the growing industrial city. The historic view captures Delaware Park Lake and Vaux's "Spirehead" gazebo around 1890, when the landscape was reaching maturity as a genteel Gilded Age refuge.

Delhi, TX

Orrin and Susannah Winters and their kin were the first known permanent settlers here, and by 1873 the community was large enough to seek a post office. Postal officials rejected the settlers' first choice, Iron Mountain, but accepted Delhi, said locally to honor a wandering patent-medicine salesman who once entertained the pioneers. Churches, a school, cotton gins, and assorted trades followed in the 1880s.

Scio Township, MI

On June 6, 1917, a violent tornado tore across Washtenaw County, wrecking the Delhi Mills settlement and the bridge that carried travelers over the Huron River. The little mill village had grown up around water power on the Huron, and the storm marked a turning point in its decline. The plaque keeps the memory of that day and of the crossing that once anchored the community.

Milton, KY

Delia Webster was a Northern-backed abolitionist who ran an Underground Railroad station on Kentucky land bought with funds from Northern supporters in 1854. Slaveholders repeatedly prosecuted her; she had already served time in the Kentucky penitentiary in 1844 for helping enslaved people escape near Lexington. Rather than abandon her work, she endured imprisonment and eventually fled across the river into free Indiana.

Floydada, TX

Della Plain sprang up in 1887 when a Baylor County rancher, driven by drought, founded a settlement here on the South Plains and named it for a benefactor's daughter. It quickly gained a school, church, post office, stores, and even a newspaper, hoping to become the county seat—but a poor water supply and the rise of nearby Lockney and Floydada doomed it, and by 1894 only the cemetery remained.

Clinton, UT

On October 10, 1905, Swiss-German immigrants Emil and Mary Dellenbach first looked upon the barren forty-acre homestead in Clinton, Utah, that they would turn into a farm and a family home. Their story is a small, vivid version of the immigrant experience that filled the American West — newcomers staking everything on hard, unpromising ground and dedicating themselves to a new life. Part of the old farm is now preserved as a heritage site honoring their labor.

Mt. Pleasant, TX

Long before Mount Pleasant existed, Caddo Indians camped around the mineral springs here, where waters were said to flow red, white, and blue. Benjamin Gooch built the area's first home in the 1830s, and by 1895 the springs had become a health and recreation resort, crowned from 1909 to 1916 by the lavish Dellwood Hotel. A favorite spot for Confederate reunions and political rallies, the site later burned and was acquired by the city in 1951 as Dellwood Park.

Delta Charter Township, MI

Delta Township's Methodists trace their congregation to 1837, when settlers on Michigan's still-raw frontier gathered to worship in a log schoolhouse — the multipurpose civic building of a young farming community. For years they were served by circuit riders, the itinerant Methodist preachers who covered vast territories on horseback to reach scattered settlers. The little class of two families organized in 1842 and grew steadily, gaining its first resident minister, the Reverend J. Gulic, in 1865.

Cooper, TX

Carved from parts of Lamar and Hopkins counties, Delta County was created on July 29, 1870, and organized that October during the Reconstruction era. Its name reflects its triangular shape, wedged between the forks of the Sulphur River, with the town of Cooper chosen as county seat.

Longview, TX

Delta Drilling Company was born in 1931 amid the frenzy of the East Texas oil boom—the largest field then known in the world—founded by Bob Stacy, Sam Dorfman, and Joseph Zeppa in an apartment on this very site. From those cramped beginnings it drilled many of the wells that flooded the region with wealth before moving to Tyler and expanding across the hemisphere and beyond. The firm grew into a technological leader in land-based drilling.

Delta Charter Township, MI

Erastus S. Ingersoll settled at this spot on the Grand River in 1836 and built a water-powered sawmill, soon adding a gristmill that drew farmers from twenty miles around to grind their grain into flour. The little milling community, known as Delta Mills, even boasted a school modeled on Ohio's progressive Oberlin College. Water-powered mills like this were the economic seeds from which frontier Michigan settlements grew.

Delta Charter Township, MI

In 1839, when Michigan had been a state for barely two years, the settlers of Delta Township raised a one-room wood-frame schoolhouse on this spot—big enough to seat sixty-five children of the surrounding farms. Such district schools were the beating heart of frontier community life, serving as classroom, meeting hall, and civic anchor all at once. The building endured for a full century before a 1940 remodeling added a second classroom, only for the district to eventually be absorbed into a larger one, as thousands of rural schools were across mid-century America.

Ann Arbor, MI

This 1982 plaque commemorates the centennial of Delta Sigma Delta, an international dental fraternity founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1882. The University of Michigan was an early center of formal dental education, and professional fraternities like this one emerged as dentistry organized itself into a recognized profession in the late 19th century. Its founding here reflects Ann Arbor's role in the rise of American dental training.

Delta Charter Township, MI

This marker chronicles the postwar transformation of Delta Township, a farming community on the western edge of Lansing that boomed alongside mid-Michigan's auto industry. Between 1940 and 1987 its population leapt more than tenfold and its tax base grew more than three-hundredfold, as suburban subdivisions, shopping, and industry filled in the once-rural landscape. Winning charter-township status in 1962 gave Delta the legal autonomy to govern its own explosive growth rather than be swallowed by annexation.

North Strabane Township, PA · est. 2009

In the mid-20th century, harness racing—the sport of trotters and pacers pulling a driver in a light two-wheeled sulky—was one of America's most popular pastimes, and few names loomed larger than Delvin Miller. Over an extraordinary career spanning eight decades he won thousands of races and captured the sport's crown jewels, while breeding and training champion horses whose bloodlines shaped the sport for generations. In 1963 he brought the action home to southwestern Pennsylvania by founding The Meadows, cementing the region's place on the racing map.

Loretto, PA · est. 1947

Demetrius Gallitzin was a Russian prince who renounced a life of aristocratic ease to become a Catholic priest on the American frontier, founding the colony of Loretto in 1799. He labored among the settlers of the Allegheny highlands for four decades until his death in 1840, and St. Michael's Church stands on the site of his original chapel. His tomb here honors one of the most unusual missionaries in early American history.

Blessing, TX

A wooden bridge built across the Tres Palacios River in 1857 for landowner Edward A. Deming gave rise to a gathering place for the settlers of western Matagorda County, complete with a Baptist church, post office, and Masonic hall. When the railroad drew people to nearby Blessing around the turn of the century, the community's institutions followed and the old crossing faded. Its cemetery endures, holding the graves of famed cattlemen Abel Head "Shanghai" Pierce and his brother Jonathan Edwards Pierce.

Goldthwaite vicinity, TX

Though families settled this Mills County area in 1878, the Democrat community's graveyard began only at the turn of the 20th century, its earliest documented grave a one-year-old girl who died in 1904. In 1905 J. L. Chancellor deeded three acres to the Democrat and Rock Springs communities for a public burial ground. Among its graves are children lost to the worldwide influenza epidemic and veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.

Houston, TX

In 1928 Houston hosted the Democratic National Convention inside Sam Houston Hall, a 20,000-seat auditorium raised in just 64 days thanks to businessman Jesse H. Jones. Meeting June 26–29, the delegates wrangled over Prohibition and the struggles of American farmers before nominating New York Governor Alfred E. Smith—the first Roman Catholic ever placed atop a major party's presidential ticket—with Arkansas's Joseph T. Robinson as his running mate. Smith lost decisively that November to Herbert Hoover and failed even to carry Texas.

Dallas, TX

For decades, engineers struggled to interconnect the growing tangle of transistors and components that made up modern electronics — a "tyranny of numbers" that threatened progress. In 1958, Texas Instruments engineer Jack St. Clair Kilby solved it by forming all the components of a circuit within a single piece of semiconductor material. On September 12, 1958, he demonstrated the first working integrated circuit to colleagues on this site.

Yoakum, TX

Mississippi-born D. B. Cain came to Texas as a boy and reached the railroad town of Yoakum in 1894, where he built D. B. Cain & Co. into one of the city's largest mercantile houses. In 1913 he crowned his success with an $8,000 Classical Revival home on Grand Avenue, complete with a two-story porch and distinctive green slag-glass windows. A devout Baptist honored as Texas Baptist Father of the Year at ninety-four, Cain saw his family occupy the house until 1976.

Camden County, NC

Dempsey Burgess answered the Revolution on two fronts — in the provincial congresses of 1775-1776 that guided North Carolina toward independence, and in the field as a lieutenant colonel of militia. After the war he served in the U.S. Congress from 1795 to 1799. His grave lies about seven miles to the southeast.

Grand County, UT

Carved into rock on the 3rd of May, 1836, this simple inscription — 'D. Julien' with the date — was left by Denis Julien, a French-American fur trapper and trader who roamed the canyon country of what is now Utah. Julien left a scattering of such inscriptions across the region, among the earliest surviving marks of a non-Native traveler in these remote canyons, decades before organized American settlement. Each one is a rare, dated trace of the fur-trade era's lone wanderers.

Forty Fort, PA · est. 1972

Built in 1790 in the Wyoming Valley, this house was home to Colonel Nathan Denison, who had served as a Revolutionary War officer during a turbulent era of frontier warfare and land disputes in northeastern Pennsylvania. After independence, Denison became a Luzerne County judge, helping build the civic institutions of the young republic. The home stands as a tangible link between a soldier's wartime service and his later role in ordering a new nation's local government.

Mt. Enterprise, TX

Augustus "Gus" Dennard came to Texas from Missouri with his family in 1883 and became a leader in the Concord community as a merchant, farmer, and blacksmith. He bought land in 1901, operated a forge, and completed this home the following year — a fine example of East Texas vernacular architecture with paired gables and turned porch posts.

Rosevine, TX

Established before 1836, when Texas was still part of Mexico, this ground began as a burial place for enslaved people of the Sulphur Spring community. Among those interred are men and women who arrived enslaved in the 1830s and, after Emancipation in 1865, became prominent builders of the area's Black community — including sons who took the name Dennis. With more than 100 graves, it remains a place of pride tended by descendants who still live nearby.

Hughes Springs, TX

Allen and Eliza Ann Dennis were among the first families to settle this corner of Cass County, buying the surrounding land in 1856. When Eliza Ann died in 1873 she was buried on the family farm, her husband laid beside her in 1880, and the plot grew — enlarged by a gift from the Smith family — into a community graveyard. More than three hundred people rest here, including pioneers of families like the Smiths, Masons, and Nelsons, many in unmarked graves, with the burial ground still tended by an association formed in 1976.

Cresson, TX

N.M. Dennis left Boston for Parker County in the 1890s and founded a small community on the Brazos, where in 1907 this sanctuary rose on land he donated. Church life was community life: summer revivals in an adjacent tabernacle, "dinner on the grounds" and afternoon singing after Sunday services, and "poundings" that welcomed new pastors with gifts of food by the pound. As the population thinned in the 1960s the congregation dwindled and disbanded in 1970, and the building was moved here and renamed Founder's Chapel in 1976.

Austin, TX

Charles Denny built this one-story limestone dwelling between 1869 and 1871, and the widowed Mrs. N. L. Holliday bought it in 1898, adding a second floor in 1906 to house her six children. Her daughter Margaret, a local physician, later lived here with her husband Dr. Simon J. Clark, and the couple renovated the home around 1920 with a stuccoed exterior and an elaborate new entryway. The house records the layered growth of an Austin family home across half a century.

Cherrytree Township, PA · est. 2004

In the frenzied years after Colonel Drake's 1859 strike, Pennsylvania's Oil Creek valley became the cradle of the world petroleum industry — but moving crude in leaky wooden barrels by wagon was slow and wasteful. In 1865 brothers James and Amos Densmore mounted two large wooden tanks on a flat railway car at nearby Miller Farm, each holding dozens of barrels, and shipped a successful test load to New York City. The design spread almost overnight, with hundreds in service within a year, and it set the template for the steel tank cars that still carry oil today.

Houston County, TX

Joseph Denson came to Texas from Alabama in the 1830s among the Predestination Baptists who followed Elder Daniel Parker to Houston County. Around 1851 he married Caroline Houston, a niece of Sam Houston, and the couple raised eleven children on their farm. From that land he set aside a burial ground, becoming its first marked interment, and the family still gathers there for an annual homecoming.

Grapeland vicinity, TX

John Denson arrived in this area in 1835 with his parents, hardshell Predestination Baptists who had traveled with the noted frontier preacher Elder Daniel Parker. In 1837 John added his name to the petition that created Houston County, and he raised his family in a log house on Bennett Creek beside his wife, whose first husband was said to be kin to Sam Houston. As relatives died they were buried near the home, with the last of some eighteen graves filled in 1890.

Slocum, TX

Settlers reached this area—known as Ioni after a nearby Indian village—in the early 1830s, and the land was granted to James Bradshaw in 1835. The cemetery began in 1851 with the burial of the infant son of Kindred and Diana (Bradshaw) Watkins near the family home, growing from a family plot into a community graveyard renamed Denson Springs in 1878. Set in a grove of trees, it holds marked and unmarked pioneer graves and the resting places of veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.

Denton, TX

Denton County was carved from Fannin County in April 1846 and organized that July, both town and county named for John B. Denton — a pioneer preacher, lawyer, and Indian fighter who died in 1841. The county seat wandered from Pinckneyville to Alton before settling permanently at Denton in 1850. The marker records the restless early years of a North Texas frontier county finding its footing.

Denton, TX

Completed in 1896–97, this is Denton County's fifth courthouse, following earlier seats at Alton and Pinckneyville and a Denton predecessor burned in a crime blamed on the Sam Bass gang. Architect W.C. Dodson designed it in a free mix of Victorian styles, with French Second Empire pavilions and ogival domes, using native limestone walls and Burnet County marble columns. It remains a landmark of frontier-era Texas civic architecture.

Denville, NJ

During the American Revolution, the Continental Army built a chain of signal fires on high ground across northern New Jersey and the surrounding region to relay warnings of British troop movements. When lit, one beacon would alert the next outpost, sending an alarm racing across the countryside far faster than any messenger on horseback. This replica in Denville recalls a single link in that network of 23 outposts spread across the Northeast, where sentries stood ready to set their pyres ablaze at the first sign of attack.

Houston, TX

Founded in 1893, the DePelchin Faith Home honored Kezia Payne DePelchin, a social worker, teacher, and nurse who spent the late nineteenth century tending Houston's most vulnerable. The orphanage moved into this Renaissance Revival building — designed by the architects Mauran and Russell, with an open arcade and a Doric-flanked entry — upon its completion in 1913, and remained until 1938.

Lufkin, TX

On a March evening in 1913, an explosion tore apart the Houston, East & West Texas Railroad depot at Lufkin, severing the town's lifeline of trade and travel. A railroad employee was presumed killed, declared legally dead, and his insurance paid to his stepmother. Three years later the very much alive man was hauled back to town to stand trial for insurance fraud, a charge on which he was ultimately acquitted.

Santa Cruz, CA

This depot freight building, dating to about 1913, served the American Railway Express Agency in the era when the railroad was the lifeline of a growing California coast town. Freight houses like this one handled the parcels, produce, and goods that moved by rail before highways and trucks took over, making the depot a hub of everyday commerce. Its survival marks the age when the whistle of an arriving train set the rhythm of local life.