Search Markers

Sherman, TX

James Nelson Dickson spent nearly a half-century in Grayson County government, beginning in 1914 as a deputy tax assessor and rising to county judge from 1945 to 1962. After a 1930 courthouse fire destroyed public records, he painstakingly reconstructed them, including vital school bond papers. In retirement he turned to preserving local heritage through museums and a history of the county's schools.

Dido, TX

Settlement here began in 1848, and by 1887 landowner Dempsey S. Holt had donated three acres for a school, church, and cemetery, with a Confederate veteran and pioneer physician later adding more. The little village took the whimsical name Dido, after the mythological Queen of Carthage, and thrived with a post office and stores until the railroad passed it by in the 1890s. Around a thousand graves remain, holding many of the area's founding families.

Avondale, TX

Dido was among the first communities in Tarrant County, homesteaded in 1848 within the Peters Colony along the stage road from Fort Worth to Decatur. Its school opened in 1854 under a Missouri-born teacher, and when he left to serve in the Confederate Army his wife carried on the classes. Railroads, a new lake, and a wartime Marine base later reshaped the area, drawing families away until the school closed in 1947.

Nacogdoches, TX

Trained in the building guild of Oldenburg, German architect Diedrich Rulfs emigrated with his family in 1880 and settled in Nacogdoches, where he reshaped the town's skyline for four decades. His commercial buildings—the Opera House, Cotton Exchange, and Redland Hotel among them—dominated downtown, while his churches and houses carried Northern German motifs, including a corner tower modeled on Oldenburg's ducal palace. Blending Gothic, Greek Revival, and Italianate styles, Rulfs left an eclectic architectural legacy until his death in 1926.

Fredericksburg, TX

German-born Diedrich Rode built this cluster of buildings in the Cherry Spring community, completing a three-story limestone residence in 1880 with a top floor for storing wool and cotton from his land. A Lutheran, Rode served as an early minister and held services in a prayer chapel built into the second floor, and he taught school besides tending his ranch. The homestead passed to the Kothe family in 1929 and stayed with them for more than half a century.

Williamsport, PA · est. 1996

German-born publisher Dietrick Lamade founded the Sunday Grit in Williamsport in 1882, building it from this site after 1889 into one of the country's best-known "family newspapers." He grew Grit on a deliberate formula: upbeat "good news," content tuned to rural readers, and a nationwide army of young paperboys who sold it door to door. For generations of small-town and farm households, Grit was a weekly window on the wider world.

Gonzales, TX

Miles G. Dikes emigrated from Georgia in 1829 to become an original member of Green DeWitt's colony, one of the earliest Anglo-American settlements in Mexican Texas. Around 1850 he established this family cemetery on his Gonzales County land, where the first known burial, his son Lovic, came in 1859. The graveyard holds about twenty marked graves and is still used by his descendants.

Peaster, TX

The earliest recorded grave here dates to 1883, and the burial ground soon anchored the Peaster community's Baptist families as they settled the Parker County countryside. Among those laid to rest was Sarah A. Dodson, who reached the Republic of Texas in 1839 and worked as a midwife while raising six children alone after her husband's death. Farmers, merchants, teachers, ministers, and veterans of many wars fill its acres, including two dozen anonymous graves marked only with rough stones.

Llano, 1400 Hickory Street, Llano Street Cemetery, TX

South Carolinian Dillard Cooper reached Texas in January 1836 with Captain Shackelford's Red Rovers and joined Colonel Fannin's command. Captured after the defeat at Coleto Creek, he was among the prisoners held at Goliad when Mexican troops massacred more than 300 men — and one of the few who escaped, traveling two weeks by night through enemy lines to reach Texian forces. Cooper lived out his long life farming in the Texas Hill Country, dying in 1896.

Columbus, TX

Dilue Rose and Ira Albert Harris moved from Houston to Columbus in 1845, where Ira served as county sheriff and city marshal. Dilue drew on her girlhood during the Texas Revolution to write vivid reminiscences that were later published and became a treasured eyewitness account. In 1858 the couple built this unusual concrete house—with a rare basement—where they raised their nine children.

Columbus, TX

Dilue Rose Harris came to Texas as a child in 1833 and lived through the turmoil of the Texas Revolution, later setting her memories down in a 30,000-word "Reminiscences" published by the Texas State Historical Association. Married young to Ira Harris, she moved to Columbus in 1845 and raised nine children in the house built here in 1858. Her firsthand account remains one of the most valuable windows into everyday life during the birth of the Texas Republic.

Birmingham Township, PA · est. 1915

Near the village of Dilworthtown, the Battle of Brandywine drew to its close on the evening of September 11, 1777. After Washington's line was flanked and driven back through the surrounding hills, the last fighting flared here as darkness ended the day. The marker fixes the point where one of the Revolution's largest engagements finally spent itself.

Carrizo Springs, TX

Created by the Texas legislature in 1858 but not formally organized until 1880, Dimmit County honors Philip Dimmitt, a trader and captain in the army of the Republic of Texas who died in 1841. The long gap between creation and organization reflects how sparsely populated this stretch of South Texas remained through the mid-nineteenth century. Carrizo Springs became the county seat.

Carrizo Springs, TX

Named for one of the framers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, Dimmit County was carved from four counties in 1858 and organized in 1880 with Carrizo Springs as its seat. Its courthouse, commissioned in 1883 and built by J. C. Breeding & Sons on plans likely drawn from architect Alfred Giles, wore an Italianate look until the booming county hired Henry T. Phelps to enlarge and recast it in restrained Classical Revival style in the 1920s. The transformation left a single building embodying two eras of Texas civic architecture.

Delaware Township, PA · est. 1948

Long before bridges spanned the Delaware, travelers crossed by ferry, and Dingman's was among the earliest. In 1750 the pioneer settler Andrew Dingman built his own flatboat—shaping it, the marker says, with his own hand axe—to carry people and goods across the river. The crossing became a fixture of the region and gave its name to the settlement that grew up around it.

Elko County, NV

Dinner Station began in the early 1870s as a meal stop that William C. "Hill" Beachey established for the Tuscarora and Mountain City stage lines, first known as Weilands and later as Oldham's Station. After a fire in the 1880s, a handsome two-story stone house, outbuildings, and a corral replaced the earlier frame structure. For a time it was among the county's most popular inns, serving both horse-drawn stages and early automobiles—until cars made such stops obsolete after 1910.

Glen Rose, TX

In the limestone bed of the Paluxy River near Glen Rose lie fossilized footprints left by three kinds of dinosaurs roughly a hundred million years ago — a giant meat-eater, a three-toed plant-eater, and a huge five-toed sauropod. Discovered around 1910, the tracks were long a local curiosity; farmers even scooped stranded catfish out of the water-filled prints in dry seasons. Excavations by a major museum and several universities in 1938 finally brought the site worldwide scientific attention.

Austin, TX

In 1947 the Catholic dioceses of San Antonio, Galveston, and Dallas ceded counties to form the new Diocese of Austin, elevating St. Mary Church to a cathedral and naming Louis J. Reicher its first bishop. Reicher built or remodeled some 260 buildings and founded councils on women's leadership and human rights; his successors pressed social justice and drew Mexican Americans into religious vocations. By 2008 the diocese spanned 125 parishes across 25 Central Texas counties.

Mirando City vicinity, TX

This small family burial ground was established around 1878 by the Guerra family in the ranching country of Webb County, in the Spanish- and Mexican-descended borderlands of South Texas. Family cemeteries like this one dotted the region's ranches, marking where generations of settlers lived, worked the land, and were laid to rest. It was formally recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2000.

Canton, TX

For decades the American cattle industry bled tens of millions of dollars a year to Texas tick fever, until a dip and a vaccine developed in the 1890s offered a defense. Beginning in 1918, East Texas mounted a tick-eradication campaign, herding cattle through chemical dipping vats every two weeks in a ritual known as 'dipping days.' The compulsory program was so unpopular that some citizens dynamited vats or met inspectors with gunfire; this surviving vat, one of about fifty in Van Zandt County, stood on rancher G. M. Hilliard's land.

Butler, MO

Dedicated in 1987 by Disabled American Veterans Chapter 67, this monument in Butler honors every veteran regardless of the war they served in. The DAV was founded after World War I to advocate for wounded and disabled servicemembers, and chapters like this one carry that mission into local communities. The monument stands as a general tribute rather than a memorial to one conflict.

Plainview, TX

On the West Texas plains near Running Water Draw, a teenager's 1941 find led archaeologists to a bone bed where ancient hunters had killed scores of giant bison thousands of years ago. Excavations in the 1940s uncovered stone dart points among the remains of an extinct bison twice the size of modern species, and the distinctive point was named for this site. Radiocarbon dating places the kill some 8,000 to 9,000 years in the past, a window into the lives of Paleo-Indian hunters of the Great Plains.

Denver City, TX

Ranchers L.P. and Ruth Bennett, facing foreclosure amid Depression-era drought, saw their fortunes reversed on October 10, 1935, when wildcatter Red Davidson and Honolulu Oil crews struck oil on their Yoakum County land. The discovery well opened the vast Wasson Field and sparked a boom that gave birth to nearby Denver City in 1939. Petroleum remains the region's economic engine, and the family later donated this ground for a county park.

Richmond, TX

In Civil War Texas, cavalry was king: horsemen accustomed to the saddle flocked to mounted units for the mobility and dash of scouting and raiding. But the Confederacy needed infantry, and by mid-1862 whole Texas cavalry regiments were dismounted "under strong protest." At Richmond in 1863, an order stripping men of A. W. Terrell's regiment of their prized horses sparked a mutiny, with dozens riding off before most returned to fight in the 1864 Red River campaign.

Columbus, TX

In 1837, when logs meant for the courthouse floated past on the swollen Colorado River and left the building unfinished, this oak stood in as a shade for Texas jurors. Presiding over the open-air court was Robert M. Williamson, famously nicknamed "Three-Legged Willie" for the wooden leg he wore beneath a drawn-up crippled one.

Findlay, OH

In the era before consolidated public schools, rural Ohio educated its children in one-room schoolhouses scattered across numbered 'special districts' — and Hancock County's District No. 9 was one of them. The dates 1864 and 1889 likely bracket the school's founding and a notable rebuilding or milestone, spanning the years when Findlay grew from a farming town into a bustling community (soon to boom with the 1880s natural-gas discoveries). Decades later, in 1937, former pupils gathered as the 'No. 9 School Association' to preserve the schoolhouse bell and honor the place where a generation of neighbors first learned to read.

Robert Lee, TX

In 1896 the Smith and Chapman families set aside four acres on the divide between the Colorado and North Concho watersheds for a cemetery and an all-faiths sanctuary serving the scattered ranches around them. Callie Chapman, buried in 1897, was the first laid to rest here. Its roughly one hundred graves hold the region's earliest settlers and veterans of both World Wars and Korea, and descendants of those pioneers keep it in use today.

Mountain Home, TX

Schooling on this remote Kerr County ridge began in 1882 in a hired teacher's home, paid for by the only two families with children. In 1893 the Whartons gave land for a one-room schoolhouse that was later moved to follow the ranching families' children, and in 1909 residents organized the Divide Common School District — named for the ridge separating the Llano and Guadalupe watersheds. A new schoolhouse rose on the Klein Ranch in 1936, and the district still serves western Kerr County's ranch families.

Jasper, TX

Around 1850, an enslaved preacher known and loved as Rev. Richard "Uncle Dick" Seale gathered a congregation beneath the beech trees at this spot. In 1853 his enslaver, Joshua Seale—himself an American Revolution veteran and early settler—built the church a permanent home. That a Black minister led worship here in the antebellum South makes this ground quietly remarkable.

Jasper, TX

After Emancipation in 1865, formerly enslaved African Americans across the South built their own independent "freedom colonies" where they could own land and govern their own community life. The Dixie colony near Bevilport grew from the 1853 founding of Dixie Missionary Baptist Church — built jointly by planter Joshua Seale and the man he enslaved, Richard "Uncle Dick" Seale. After the war, Richard Seale became a community leader, establishing the Dixie School so the colony's children could be educated. The church, school, and nearby Indian Creek Cemetery anchored a life organized around faith, learning, and self-reliance.

Canton, TX

Announced in 1915 and named for the Dixie Highway that ran past it, this Canton hotel became a regional landmark for its lodging and generous meals. Under manager Mamie Maume it thrived through the oil boom of the 1920s and 1930s, when cots on the porches handled the overflow, and its cooks drew diners from across the region. Politicians, businessmen, and travelers, including a young Lyndon B. Johnson, passed through its two dining rooms.

Forney, TX

In the early automobile age, before the interstate system, private road associations promoted coast-to-coast routes that states and towns then paved piecemeal. The Dixie Overland Highway, launched by Savannah, Georgia, boosters in 1914 as an 'all-seasons' route, ran through 75 counties — including Kaufman — on its way west, though travelers here battled the notorious muddy, flood-prone 'Forney Gap.' Much of the route became U.S. Highway 80 in 1926 and was later superseded by Interstate 20.

Barksdale, TX

Dixie Settlement took its name from Camp Dixie, a Texas Ranger post along the military road to Fort Inge, and grew up in a hard frontier where Indian raids were still a living danger. Its first settler was the widowed midwife Jerusha Sanchez, followed by pioneer families and by Lewis Barksdale, a veteran of the Republic of Texas wars who claimed a land grant here in 1876. When a post office opened in 1882 under Barksdale's name, the old name Dixie quietly disappeared.

Pass Christian, MS

Built in 1851 by John Backe of New Orleans, this Pass Christian home hosted President Woodrow Wilson and his family for a winter vacation in 1913, as guests of owner Miss Alice Herndon. The stay gave the house its enduring nickname, the "Dixie White House." The Mississippi Department of Archives and History placed the marker in 2008.

Mason vicinity, TX

Dizenia Peters Todd came to Texas as a child in the 1830s and, with her husband George W. Todd's family, was among the earliest settlers and officials of Mason County in the 1850s. She was killed in an Indian raid near this site around January 1865, a period when frontier defenses had thinned during the Civil War, and was buried with a young Black servant in adjacent unmarked graves.

Taylor, TX

Built in the 1860s in an early ranch-style form, this Williamson County house has belonged to the Doak family since 1878. Its longtime owner, A. V. Doak, was Taylor's first physician and a civic force who helped organize the town's mule-drawn streetcar line. The home passed down through three generations of Doak doctors.

Taylor, TX

In 1891 Dr. A. V. Doak, an early Taylor settler and civic leader, built a grand amusement pavilion at the end of his own mule-drawn streetcar line. Capable of holding a thousand people, it hosted plays, dances, and entertainments for the growing railroad town. The venture was short-lived — the pavilion was sold and torn down in 1900.

Doan's Community, TX

In the 1870s the Western Trail carried longhorns north from deep South Texas to the railheads of Dodge City, Kansas, and near this spot drovers found a dependable ford across the Red River. In 1878 Ohio native Jonathan Doan opened a trading post here, becoming Wilbarger County's first permanent settler, and with his nephew Corwin logged the passage of hundreds of thousands of cattle. The place became simply Doan's Crossing—a landmark on one of the great cattle roads of the American West.

Doan's Community, TX

This monument marks the Red River ford where, between 1876 and 1895, some six million cattle and horses crossed on the Western Texas-Kansas Trail. It bears a characteristically wry blessing from humorist Will Rogers and honors George W. Saunders of the Old Trail Drivers' Association, the man credited with keeping the trail records straight. The stone stands where the great herds once churned the river's banks.

Eastham, MA

Deacon John Doane was among the founding settlers of Eastham, one of the small band of Plymouth Colony families who pushed out onto Cape Cod's sandy elbow in the 1640s to farm and fish. Born in England around 1590, he crossed the Atlantic in the great wave of Puritan migration and became a trusted figure in the young colony, serving as a church deacon and one of Plymouth's governing assistants. This granite shaft, raised in 1869 by a descendant, marks the spot where his house once stood — a reminder that a windswept Cape field was once the dooryard of a first-generation New England homestead.

Doan's Community, TX

In 1878 Corwin F. Doan settled on the Red River in far North Texas, and by 1881 he had raised this sturdy adobe house beside his trading store. His post sat squarely on the Western Trail, and each season he stocked goods for the cowboys driving thousands of longhorns north toward the Kansas railheads. The little village of Doan's Crossing grew to more than a dozen buildings, and the Doan family famously entertained everyone from visiting English lords to Plains Indians under this roof.

Gettysburg, PA · est. 1947

The Reverend Alexander Dobbin built this stone house in 1776, the very year of independence, and for some twenty-five years ran within it one of the first classical schools west of the Susquehanna River. Students here read Latin and Greek on a frontier that had only recently been wilderness, evidence of how quickly settlers sought to plant learning in new country. Today the restored house serves as a museum of that early-republic world.

Burnet, TX

The Dobyville Cemetery is the last trace of a small Central Texas community settled in the 1850s and named for the white adobe-rock hill on which it stood. More than 230 marked graves remain, with dozens of unmarked burials believed to be infants, the earliest documented being a young woman who died in 1857. Pioneers, local and state officials, and veterans of several wars rest here, and the ground still serves the surrounding area.

Reading, PA · est. 1951

On this Reading site stood the home of Dr. Jonathan Potts, who served from 1777 to 1780 as Deputy Director General of the Continental Army's Northern and Middle Departments. In an era when battlefield disease killed more soldiers than musket fire, Potts organized the army's overwhelmed medical service during the hardest years of the Revolutionary War.

San Antonio, TX

After Pearl Harbor drew the United States into World War II, the government detained not only more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in relocation camps but also thousands of Japanese, German, and Italian nationals—and their U.S.-citizen relatives—as 'enemy aliens.' Fort Sam Houston's old Dodd Field airfield became a U.S. Army temporary detention station, twenty acres ringed by double barbed wire and eight guard towers. From early 1942 it held detainees—never more than 150 at once—until they were paroled, exchanged, or moved to other camps, and it closed late that year.

Salado, TX

This 87-foot lenticular truss bridge, its curved top and bottom chords forming a lens shape, embodies a rare American bridge type patented by Connecticut's William O. Douglas in 1878. Through salesman William Payson, the Berlin Iron Bridge Company sold at least a dozen such spans to Texas, and this one—first built over Cowhouse Creek—was among four the Coryell County court ordered in 1889. Recognized as one of the few lenticular bridges west of the Mississippi, it was relocated to Dodd's Creek in 1997 to ease traffic and enhance the Salado Historic District.

Independence Township, PA · est. 1947

Around 1773 John Doddridge raised a cluster of stockaded cabins on this frontier, strong enough to shelter neighboring families when danger threatened. Through the Revolutionary years such fortified homesteads were the settlers' refuge from raids along the western border. The place is also remembered as the boyhood home of Dr. Joseph Doddridge, later a noted chronicler of frontier life.

Dodge, TX

Dodge sprang up in 1872 when the Houston and Great Northern Railroad pushed its line through this stretch of Walker County. Landowner W. J. Johnson donated the right-of-way on the condition that a station rise at the settlement, and the town was platted along the tracks with streets honoring local pioneers. Before long Dodge had churches, a school, a Masonic lodge, a bank, a cotton gin, and stores, and after 1900 it became a shipping point for lumber hauled in from an Oakhurst sawmill.

Wasioja Township, MN

This memorial honors the men of Dodge County, Minnesota, who served in the Civil War. Minnesota was the first state to offer troops to the Union in 1861, and rural counties like Dodge sent companies of volunteers to campaigns across the South. Nearby Wasioja was famous for a recruiting station where nearly an entire class of young men enlisted, many never returning—a loss memorialized throughout the county.

Hill County, TX

This burial ground in rural Hill County dates to 1859, on the eve of the Civil War and in the early years of Anglo settlement across the Blackland Prairie. Though its marker records only its founding date, the cemetery marks the presence of one of the area's pioneer communities.

Snyder, TX

Dr. J. C. Cornelius, a Confederate veteran and pioneer physician, built this Snyder-area house in 1883 with materials hauled by mule train from the nearest railroad at Colorado City. Its handmade cabinets, entrance hall, and two fireplaces survive as first built. Since 1894 the home has belonged to the family of A. C. Dodson, a former Tennessee schoolteacher, and it was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

McMullen County, TX

Built in 1880 for $2,800, this was the first county jail in McMullen County, deep in the South Texas brush country then known as "Dog Town." Its earliest supplies tell the story of frontier justice: a couple of blankets, a pair of leg irons, and two sets of handcuffs.

Fairfield, TX

Fairfield's first public school for Black children opened in 1926 on a one-acre plot beside the First Baptist Church, whose sanctuary doubled as a classroom as enrollment grew. In 1934 the community petitioned to move the school to this site and soon added the high-school courses that let it become a full institution, renamed Dogan High School for Wiley College president Dr. Matthew Dogan, Sr. Under principals like Randolph Titus, who led the school from 1936 to 1968, Dogan built a proud record — its Wildcat basketball teams reached the state finals four times — and sent alumni into medicine, law, ministry, and education before integrating in 1968.

Castroville, TX

German immigrants Louis and Rosina Dolch raised this stone house in Castroville around 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. Ownership later passed through Rosina's brother—a sheriff and U.S. marshal—before butcher Thomas Hans and his wife Amelia bought the homestead in 1907 and added a brick market building in 1910. With its barn, smokehouse, and well house, the compound grew into a working town farmstead that stayed in the family until 1969.

Brackettville, TX

In 1833 the English-born empresario John Charles Beales — holder of a staggering land grant across present-day Texas and New Mexico — led fifty-nine colonists to this spot to found a town named for his Mexican wife. Drought and Comanche raids battered the fragile settlement, and when the colonists fled south during the Texas Revolution in 1836, most of one party was killed on the road. The town never recovered.

Floydada, TX

Dolphin Ward Floyd, a North Carolinian who settled at Gonzales, was among the 32 men of that town who answered William B. Travis's call and slipped into the besieged Alamo in early 1836. He died there fighting for Texas independence, and when the county was created in 1876 it was named in his honor.

Boston, MA

Domingo F. Sarmiento was an Argentine writer, diplomat, and reformer who served as president of Argentina from 1868 to 1874. A passionate believer in public education, he studied the common-school systems of the United States, drew inspiration from American reformers, and built schools and teacher-training colleges across Argentina. This Boston monument reflects the deep ties he formed with American educators during his years in the hemisphere's north.

Galveston, TX

At the invitation of Galveston's bishop, twenty Dominican sisters left their Ohio convent and arrived by train and horse-drawn carriage in 1882 to open a school on the island. Within days they founded a convent and Sacred Heart Academy, educating girls for generations even as the catastrophic 1900 hurricane forced the convent's relocation. Through mergers and moves the sisters' educational work endured, eventually reaching dioceses across Texas, California, and Guatemala.

Fort Worth, TX

In the late 1880s this Fort Worth address housed Buck's Domino Parlor, a gaming house so notorious it was dubbed "the Casino of the Wild West," where high-stakes fortunes changed hands overnight. The area drew figures of Old West legend — outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid among them, alongside Luke Short, the gambler-gunman known for running honest high-stakes play. This was the raucous, cattle-town frontier of Fort Worth's famed "Hell's Half Acre."

Fredericksburg, TX

The oldest part of this stone building, with its vaulted-ceiling cellar, went up in the early 1850s on land owned by pioneer settler John Schmidtzinsky. Over the decades it served as a pharmacy and then H. R. Richter's jewelry store, where he also sold instruments and hosted concerts in the front room while his family lived in the rear. In more recent years it housed a cafe and a domino parlor.