Search Markers

Washoe County, NV

Authorized in 1903 and completed in 1905, Derby Dam diverts the Truckee River for irrigation as the first structure built under the U.S. Reclamation Service—its very Specification and Drawing Number One. It anchored the Newlands Project, named for the Nevada senator who championed the 1902 Reclamation Act, and delivered its first water in 1906. Modest beside its descendants, it was the forerunner of Hoover, Grand Coulee, Shasta, and Glen Canyon Dams. Here the federal effort to remake the arid West with engineered water began.

Snyder, TX

Dermott is a West Texas town that chased the railroads. It began as a crossroads community called Dark, took its later name from storekeeper and postmaster S. P. McDermott, and physically picked up and moved twice — in 1909 to the Roscoe, Snyder & Pacific line and again in 1915 to the Santa Fe. With competing railroads and full loading pens, it became a busy cattle-shipping point, faded when the R.S. & P. tracks were pulled up in 1942, then revived during the county's late-1940s oil boom.

Derry Township, PA · est. 1948

Founded in 1729, Derry Church grew from the Scots-Irish Presbyterian settlement that spread across the Pennsylvania backcountry in the early 1700s. Its first pastor, William Bertram, was installed in 1732 by the Donegal Presbytery, and in 1741 the sons of William Penn patented its wooded grove to the congregation. The surrounding churchyard is remembered as the oldest pioneer graveyard in the region.

Derry Township, PA · est. 1948

This churchyard, the oldest pioneer burial ground in Dauphin County, holds the first generations of the region's Scots-Irish settlers. Among the graves lie the early pastors William Bertram and John Roan, alongside men who fought in the French and Indian Wars and the Revolution. One of them, Col. John Rodgers, put his name to the Hanover Resolves of 1774, an early pledge of resistance to Britain.

Catasauqua, PA · est. 1998

Beginning in 1897, D. George Dery built his first Pennsylvania silk mill here in Catasauqua and rapidly expanded across the state. By 1914 his operation spanned fifteen mills and employed thousands, making him one of the world's largest silk manufacturers during the industry's Pennsylvania heyday. The empire proved fragile, and operations ceased in 1923.

Desdemona, TX

Serving the frontier community of Desdemona since J. S. and Rosa Jones deeded an acre for a public graveyard in 1880, this cemetery holds pioneer settlers, Civil War and world-war veterans, a physician who served the area for fifty years, and children lost young. When oil gushers surrounded the grounds in 1918, the boom brought sudden wealth—and new residents—to the very families buried among its oaks.

Desdemona, TX

Nine charter members organized this Baptist congregation in 1872, beginning with brush-arbor meetings under the Spanish oaks along Hog Creek where the Rev. Johnnie Northcutt preached to settlers who came by wagon, horseback, and foot. First called Rockdale Baptist Church, it built a sanctuary in the village of Desdemona and took the town's name around 1877. When oil was discovered and Desdemona boomed by 1919, the congregation fled the crowded conditions to build a new home at this site in 1921–22.

Columbia, SC

On September 11, 1963, the University of South Carolina admitted its first Black students since the Reconstruction era, ending decades of state-enforced segregation at the flagship university. The moment came amid the broader Civil Rights Movement, when courts and activists were dismantling the Jim Crow color line across Southern education, often against fierce local resistance. Unlike the violent standoffs seen at some other Deep South campuses, the integration in Columbia proceeded without the mob confrontations that made national headlines elsewhere. It marked a quiet but decisive turning point for higher education in the state.

Austin, TX

Lions Club members opened Austin's first public golf course on leased Brackenridge land in 1924, and "Muny" grew into an 18-hole city facility. Though it sat beside the historically African American Clarksville community whose young men had helped build it, segregation barred Black residents from playing. That barrier fell in 1951 when two Black youths simply walked on and played a round; officials let them finish, ushering in de facto integration years before federal public-accommodation law — a change some scholars call the earliest desegregation of a public golf course in the South.

Meadville, PA

In September 1880, Elias Allen tried to enroll his two children at Meadville's South Ward schools and was turned away because of their race. He took his case to the Crawford County Court of Common Pleas, where Judge Pearson Church struck down the 1854 state law that had required separate schools for Black children. The legislature amended the law the next year, ending mandated school segregation across Pennsylvania as of July 4, 1881.

Austin, TX

For generations Texas ran a segregated school system, its "separate but equal" doctrine cemented by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling began a slow, uneven dismantling of that system; over the following decades districts integrated grade by grade or by "freedom of choice," and beloved African American schools such as Austin's L.C. Anderson High closed their doors.

Lyon County, NV

About a mile south lie the remains of Desert Well Station, a typical stage stop of the 1843–1869 era that bridged the age of emigrant wagon trains and the transcontinental railroad. Later known as Nelson's, it won a measure of fame when Mark Twain recounted his stop there in Roughing It. The original site had two wells, an inn, and corrals—one well reserved for the camels famously brought to the Nevada desert to haul salt to the Comstock mines.

Cooper, TX

Built before 1850 by landowner Brig DeSpain and his neighbors where the Bonham–Jefferson Road crossed the South Sulphur River, this pioneer bridge of native oak and bois d'arc carried the region's cotton trade for some twenty years. The land traced back to Randolph DeSpain, a Texas Revolutionary soldier killed in the 1836 Goliad massacre. When floods washed the crossing out after 1870, the state replaced it, and the counties kept cotton and corn wagons rolling between the two regions for decades more.

Austin, TX

Established around 1874 in what is now northeast Austin, Dessau Cemetery served a farming community settled in the years after the Civil War, when German and other families worked the blackland prairie of Travis County. Its designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery preserves it as a record of that early rural settlement.

Los Angeles, CA

This granite block was erected in 1931 by the Ku Klux Klan, whose 1920s revival spread far beyond the South into California and the urban North before collapsing amid scandal. Now destroyed, the stone survives as an uncomfortable artifact of a period when the hooded order wielded real political and social power, its bland motto masking a movement built on racial, religious, and nativist hatred.

Boise, ID

The Oregon Trail did not appear from nowhere — it followed routes long traveled by Native peoples, which emigrant wagons then adopted through the mid-19th century and beyond. As Western mining booms erupted, new roads pushed out from camps toward supply hubs like Boise and Salt Lake City. Freight wagons and stagecoaches worked these old emigrant paths until railroads finally displaced most of them.

Lyon County, NV

This rugged reef of rock was one of the most famous landmarks of Nevada Territory, guarding the narrow gorge through which thousands of prospectors streamed toward the Comstock Lode. Nearby in June 1850, John Orr and Nicholas Kelly found the first gold nugget ever unearthed in Gold Canyon, opening a decade of placer mining. During the brief Paiute War of 1860, Silver City's residents built a stone battlement and even a wooden cannon atop the eastern summit for defense.

Devine, TX

The earliest graves in this Medina County cemetery belong to settlers killed by Native American raiders in the early 1870s, including seventeen-year-old Isaac Galbreath, whose father — a Texas Ranger and Mexican War veteran — also rests here. The town of Devine grew up in 1881 when the International and Great Northern Railroad reached the area, and landowner P.C. Hattox deeded the original acreage for the cemetery in 1891. A cemetery association has cared for the grounds ever since.

Devine, TX

Chartered by the Grand Lodge of Texas in December 1884, Devine Lodge No. 590 first met above Josh Herring's store, with John Redus serving as its first Worshipful Master. An Eastern Star chapter followed in 1900, and after meeting at various sites the lodge settled at its present home in 1962. Its rolls came to include many of the area's clergy, doctors, merchants, and public officials.

Belpre, OH

In 1791 the Ohio country was raw frontier, and the settlers clustered near Belpre—many of them Revolutionary War veterans who had come west with the Ohio Company—needed a reliable way to turn grain into flour. Jonathan Devol, a resourceful millwright, answered by mounting a gristmill on two boats anchored in the Ohio River, letting the current itself drive the stones. Sheltered beside Farmer's Castle, the fortified stockade built during the Indian wars of the early 1790s, his floating mill ground 25 to 50 bushels a day and served families scattered across some thirty miles of riverbank.

Easttown Township, PA · est. 2015

First held in 1896 as a modest one-day event to showcase fine carriage horses for the Main Line's landed families, the Devon Horse Show grew into the oldest and largest outdoor multibreed competition in the nation. By adding a Country Fair in 1919, it turned its prestige to charity, benefiting Bryn Mawr Hospital. In 2010 it earned the U.S. Equestrian Federation's highest honor as a Heritage Competition.

Dew, TX

Families from Alabama settled this Freestone County prairie in the 1850s, calling it Avant and then Sunshine before a postal clerk's misreading of "Drew" fixed the name as Dew in 1885. Land donated in 1869 by settlers W. S. Compton and D. A. Self created this community cemetery, whose earliest graves include victims of the 1873 yellow fever epidemic and, decades later, the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. A cotton-market town of gins and stores, Dew now gathers each Memorial Day to tend the eleven-acre burial ground of some 1,000 graves.

Mandeville, LA

The Dew Drop Social and Benevolent Hall in Mandeville dates to 1895, built by a mutual-aid society of the kind Black communities across the South formed to provide fellowship, insurance, and burial support. Its simple wooden hall became a stage for early jazz, hosting musicians in the music's formative decades. Now on the National Register, it stands as one of the oldest rural jazz halls in the country.

Mandeville, LA

The Dew Drop Social and Benevolent Hall in Mandeville dates to 1895, built by a mutual-aid society of the kind Black communities across the South formed to provide fellowship, insurance, and burial support. Its simple wooden hall became a stage for early jazz, hosting musicians in the music's formative decades. Now on the National Register, it stands as one of the oldest rural jazz halls in the country.

Missouri City, TX

In 1845 Thomas Walters Dewalt journeyed from South Carolina to settle along Oyster Creek, where he built a plantation in the coastal plains of what is now Fort Bend County. In 1850 he set aside land for burials, and the graveyard has served his extended family for generations, formally deeded in 1931 and expanded in the 1980s. Still in use, it remains reserved for the interrelated families whose roots reach back to antebellum Texas.

Bullard, TX

A veteran of the War of 1812, John Dewberry came to Texas in 1835 and by the mid-1840s had settled near Tyler, becoming a successful cotton farmer and helping to organize newly created Smith County in 1846. He began this Greek Revival house, which he named "Myrtle-Vale," in 1852 as the headquarters of his large cotton plantation. A rare surviving two-story antebellum residence in the county, it stayed in the Dewberry family until 1908.

Philadelphia, PA

In the early 1700s, the countryside northwest of Philadelphia was a patchwork of Quaker and German settlements where faith and industry often shared the same roof. William Dewees opened his home to the Reformed congregation at Whitemarsh, which gathered there for worship across thirty-five years until his death in 1745. Just across the road, around 1710, he built what is remembered as the second paper mill in America—part of the young colony's remarkable early lead in papermaking, a trade that fed the printing presses of a soon-to-be-revolutionary Philadelphia.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2018

In 1965, years before the Stonewall uprising, activists staged one of the nation's first LGBT sit-ins at Dewey's, a Philadelphia restaurant that had refused to serve gay and gender-nonconforming customers. Directly inspired by the African American lunch-counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement, the demonstrators occupied the counter until Dewey's backed down and dropped its discriminatory policy. It was a small, early, and largely forgotten victory in the long struggle for equal treatment.

Deweyville, TX

The site was first bought around 1886 — reportedly for a team of oxen — by Pierre Lavine from Bill Morrison, and was known as "Possum Bluff" before being renamed to honor Admiral George Dewey during the Spanish-American War. Its economy rose on lumber after the Sabine Tram Company built a sawmill in 1897, an operation later run by the Peavy-Moore Lumber Company from 1919 to 1943. The mill made Deweyville a working timber town in the East Texas pine belt.

Jasper, TX

Named for New York governor and Mason DeWitt Clinton, this Jasper lodge dates to the days of the Republic of Texas, holding its first meetings in 1845-46 and receiving a formal charter in 1848. Its members founded the Jasper Collegiate Institute in 1850 and supported it until it closed in 1857, and the lodge has long sponsored scholarships for local students. Many of Jasper's prominent citizens have belonged to it over the generations.

Yorktown, TX

This memorial honors the men and women of DeWitt County, Texas, who served in the Vietnam War. Placed by the local community and tied to the Vietnam Veterans of America, it stands for a generation of small-town Americans who answered the call during one of the nation's most divisive conflicts. It gathers their service into a single place of remembrance close to home.

Oxford, OH

Zachariah Price DeWitt, a New Jersey-born son of a Dutch family, migrated through Kentucky before settling with his wife Elizabeth near Four Mile Creek in the early 1800s, raising nine children and building the hewn-log homestead he completed in 1805. A sawmill operator, house builder, and War of 1812 rifle-company commander, DeWitt reportedly steered Miami University's founders to the nearby hilltop where the campus rose. His pegged-rafter house survives as the oldest building in Oxford Township and one of the oldest log structures in Ohio.

Nixon, TX

Methodist worship in the Sandies community began in 1842, and Sandies Chapel was formally chartered by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1857. When settlement shifted, the congregation moved a mile in 1897 to the new town of Dewville, building on land donated by Mrs. C. C. Vernor, wife of an early pastor. The church has remained an active center of local life ever since.

Montgomery, AL · est. 1974

From this church near the Alabama Capitol, a young Dr. King led the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott after Rosa Parks's arrest. The boycott ended segregated buses and launched King to national prominence.

Spartanburg, SC

This monument honors Dexter Edgar Converse, a Vermont-born industrialist who came south and helped make Spartanburg a powerhouse of the New South cotton-mill economy. In 1889 he lent his name and fortune to found the college memorialized here as a place for the higher education of women, at a time when such opportunities were still scarce. The Vermont-to-Carolina arc on the stone captures a familiar Gilded Age story: northern capital and know-how reshaping the postwar Southern landscape, one textile mill and civic institution at a time.

McGregor, TX

William Deyerle, a banker, rancher, and miller who came to Central Texas from Virginia, hired master stonemason Henry Wissman to build this limestone home, completed in 1892. Wissman quarried and hauled every stone himself, laying them to his own design beneath a hipped roof trimmed with arched windows and a bracketed cornice. After a family tragedy claimed Deyerle's widow and her second husband in 1926, the house passed to her sister and stayed in the Fall family until 1975.

Honey Grove, TX

This Queen Anne house rose in 1890, less than two decades after Honey Grove was chartered, built for lawyer William H. Gross, the town's first city attorney. In 1905 merchant Samuel M. Dial and his wife Ruby bought the home; Dial hailed from the nearby community of Lane's Academy, later renamed Dial for his family. Passed to their son Harry in 1932, the residence stayed in the family for more than sixty years.

Dialville, TX

After coming to Texas in an 1866 wagon train, John J. Dial settled here and took up farming. When the Kansas and Gulf Short Line Railroad arrived in 1882 he opened a store by the tracks and deeded land for a flag-stop station, and the town platted around it was named Dialville when its post office opened in 1885. The community boomed after 1897 as a shipping point for the region's tomatoes and peaches, thriving through the early twentieth century before declining by the mid-1920s.

Diamond Bar, CA

This windmill was a working fixture on the Diamond Bar Ranch from 1918 to 1957, an era when Southern California's vast cattle ranches still shaped the land that would later become sprawling suburbs. Erected by local Lions and the historical society, the marker preserves the memory of the ranching operation that gave Diamond Bar its name and brand. Windmills like this pumped groundwater essential to livestock across the arid West.

Honolulu, HI

Perched beside the ancient tuff cone of Diamond Head, this lighthouse has guided ships toward Honolulu since the early 20th century, its beam a fixed point on Oahu's volcanic coast. The crater itself was born of explosive eruptions thousands of years ago, and the light later became one of the islands' most recognizable maritime landmarks. It ties together Hawaii's dramatic geology and its history as a Pacific crossroads.

Whitesboro, TX

Founded in 1850 by brothers James R. and John Diamond—later joined by George, who started the paper that became the Houston Post—the Diamond Horse Ranch served from 1858 to 1861 as a station on the Butterfield Overland Mail. The Diamonds were political leaders active in frontier defense and Masonry, and James lies buried here.

Eureka County, NV

Long a gathering ground for Shoshone and Paiute people, Diamond Valley was first mapped by Captain John C. Frémont in 1845 as he charted routes for western migration. Colonel J.H. Simpson surveyed a path through here in 1859 that immediately became the Pony Express and Overland Telegraph route, while freight toll roads served the lead and silver camps booming in the 1860s. A limited livestock and dairy industry followed, and in 1957 a tapped underground lake brought irrigation water to the valley.

Elko County, NV

Jackson Lee Davis (1870–1949), known everywhere as "Diamondfield Jack," was a flamboyant gunman hired by cattle interests—including future Nevada governor John Sparks—to keep sheep ranchers off the ranges of southern Idaho and northeastern Nevada. Convicted in 1896 of murdering two sheepherders, he was sentenced to hang even after others confessed, and was finally pardoned in 1902. He remade himself as a successful mine operator in Tonopah and Goldfield before drifting into obscurity and dying in Las Vegas.

Mount Carmel Township, PA

Diamondtown is a small patch community in the anthracite coal country of Northumberland County, where hard-rock mining families sent generations of sons and daughters into the nation's armed forces. This memorial gathers all of them under a single dedication — not to one battle or war, but to everyone from the community who wore the uniform, in combat and in the quieter years of peacetime service. Marble and bronze tributes like this one became the civic heart of Pennsylvania's coal towns, where local identity and national service were tightly bound.

Madison, CT

Dianne Bullis Snyder, a veteran American Airlines flight attendant born in 1959, was working aboard Flight 11 on the morning of September 11, 2001, when it became the first hijacked plane to strike the World Trade Center. She and the rest of the crew were among the earliest victims of the attacks that reshaped the nation. This quiet Connecticut memorial anchors that vast national tragedy to a single hometown life and the tender epitaph her community chose to remember her by.

Diboll, TX

Diboll grew up around a sawmill that T. L. L. Temple established in the East Texas pinelands in 1894, and by 1900 the Southern Pine Lumber Company ran its commissary, post office, churches, homes, and schools. The town took its name from the New Orleans family from whom Temple first bought timber rights. It stayed a company town until the 1950s, when residents were finally offered the chance to own their homes and shops, incorporating in 1962.

Forney, TX

This American four-square home was raised in 1910, during the decades-long prosperity that cotton brought the town of Forney between the 1870s and the Great Depression. It was built for Dick Parmenas Moore, a Georgia-born merchant whose fortunes rode on the cotton acreage he owned nearby, and his wife Nancy lived in the house until 1958. Its Classical Revival porch details reflect the confident taste of a rising Texas commercial class.

Columbus, TX

After a 1907 fire destroyed his family home, retired dry goods merchant Leon F. Dick oversaw construction of this Classical Revival house in Columbus in 1908, complete with a full-height portico and Ionic columns. Dick was known for his hospitality, hosting Governor Pat Neff during the city's centennial in 1923. The home passed to his niece Alma Dick Gillette and remained in the family until 1976.

Dickens, TX

Dickens Cemetery opened in 1891, the very year the town was founded, when the wife of pioneer barber C. F. Jones died and was buried at the foot of a hill above the Croton Breaks. The landowner soon donated five acres around her grave for a community burial ground, and it grew to more than eighteen acres, gathering the town's early settlers, officials, and the man many called the "Father of Dickens," attorney W. C. Ballard. Among its graves lie veterans of every American conflict from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Dickens, TX

Carved from Young and Bexar territories, Dickens County was created by the Texas legislature in 1876 as the state organized its vast western reaches for eventual settlement. It was not formally organized until 1903, once enough ranchers and townsfolk had arrived to run a local government, with Dickens City as the county seat. The gap between creation and organization mirrors the slow pace of settlement on the rolling plains.

Dickens, TX

Fed by upland aquifers draining through porous sandstone at the head of a canyon ravine, Dickens Springs has drawn people to its water since the earliest human occupation of the Rolling Plains. Nomadic peoples camped here for millennia, leaving a wealth of stone tools later studied by Texas Tech archaeologists, before pioneer settlers arrived in the 1880s and a town promoter turned the springs into a beloved public park.

San Augustine, TX

William and Lucinda Dickerson, who had come from Florida to settle at Grapevine in 1839, established this burial ground after their son Levi died in 1858. They opened it to neighbors and kin, and additional land was donated over time; a community church joined the site in 1946. Now a community cemetery marked by curbing, grave slabs, and upright stones, it holds veterans of conflicts dating to the Civil War.

Elkhart, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1812, Dickerson Parker fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 clash that won Texas its independence, before his death in 1844. His wife, Lucinda Eaton Parker, is remembered with him. Both were part of the earliest Anglo settlement of Anderson County.

Town of Lewiston, NY

Tucked into the Town of Lewiston near the Niagara frontier, Dickersonville Cemetery holds the graves of some of the area's earliest settlers, with burials dating to the years just after 1810. The names recorded here — Hannah Mills, Isaac Woolson, and Second Lieutenant John Farley — trace the lives of pioneers who took root in western New York during a turbulent era that included the War of 1812 along the nearby Niagara River. The marker was placed by the Town of Lewiston's Historic Preservation Commission to honor this early burial ground.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1947

In the hopeful years just after independence, Dr. Benjamin Rush — a signer of the Declaration — imagined a practical, liberal-arts education fit for a self-governing people, and with Col. John Montgomery of Carlisle he founded a college to train future leaders. Chartered on September 9, 1783 and named for John Dickinson, it became the first college established west of the Susquehanna River. The school embodied the founders' belief that a republic could only survive with an educated citizenry.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1949

Founded in 1834 by the jurist John Reed — author of the influential "Pennsylvania Blackstone" — Dickinson School of Law became the oldest law school in Pennsylvania and one of the earliest in the nation. In an era when most lawyers still trained by apprenticeship, a formal school of law was a bold experiment in professional education. Among its early graduates was Andrew Curtin, who would serve as Pennsylvania's Civil War governor.

Dickinson, TX

Chartered in 1853, the Galveston, Houston, and Henderson Railroad was the first line to reach the Texas coast, its early wood-burning engines "Perseverance" and "Brazos" rattling across a trestle spanning Galveston Bay by 1859. The "Old Reliable Short Line" carried real military weight during the Civil War, aiding the Confederate recapture of Galveston. This 1902 depot, designed by architect George B. Stowe, later served excursion crowds and shipped the region's fruit and vegetables to market before being moved here in 1967 and reborn as a museum.

Gilmer, TX

For three decades, from 1900 to 1929, this was the only home in Texas for Black orphans, founded and led by W. L. Dickson, a Negro Baptist minister who served as its sole superintendent. Children stayed until age 21 unless adopted or indentured to families, and a children's choir toured to raise funds. In 1929 Dickson deeded the home—700 acres and 27 buildings—to the state, which renamed it the Gilmer State Orphanage for Negroes and ran it until 1943, when the roughly 180 children were moved to a state home in Austin.

Moulton, TX

Lavaca County established the Dickson School District in 1886, naming it for pioneer lawman William Dickson, and built a one-room schoolhouse on a nearby farm. As the county's population swelled, the district bought higher ground safe from Ponton Creek's floods in 1912 and moved and enlarged the building over the following years. Enrollment held steady at around fifty to sixty students until improved roads and school buses drew children to larger towns, leading to consolidation with Moulton in 1949.

Orlando, FL

In 1896 grocer Sidney Ives and feed dealer Henry H. Dickson merged their businesses, and by 1914 they were running a full department store. In 1920 they raised this brick building, dressed in beaux arts flourishes — a classical terra cotta cornice and decorative friezes — to house their thriving trade, which lasted into the mid-1960s. Dickson also championed the city's beautification, honored in 1937 with the dedication of H.H. Dickson Azalea Park.