Search Markers

Brazoria, TX

A Vermont-born newcomer to Texas, Don Carlos Barrett sat on the General Council of the 1835 Provisional Government during the opening months of the Texas Revolution. That body named him judge advocate general of the army with the rank of colonel, placing him at the legal heart of the fledgling war effort. He died in Texas in 1838, having helped shape the institutions of the emerging Republic.

San Marcos, TX

In 1807, at the request of Spanish Texas's governor, the Army captain and rancher Felipe Roque de la Portilla led more than fifty settlers to found San Marcos de Neve where El Camino Real crossed the San Marcos River. The colony issued town lots and built homes around a plaza, but floods, missing supplies, and raids by Comanches and Tonkawas broke it; by 1812 Portilla led his people back toward the Rio Grande. He remained a prominent frontier leader, later helping establish another Texas colony.

Progreso Lakes, TX

On land his family held by Spanish grant, Don Florencio Saenz built his homestead in 1902 as the headquarters of the sprawling Toluca Ranch, which once reached seventeen miles north from the Rio Grande. From here he ran a mercantile store and championed cattle ranching and irrigated river farming as the future of the lower Valley. In 1915, amid the cross-border turmoil of the Mexican Revolution era, raiders tried to burn the house and were driven off by U.S. soldiers in a fight that cost a private his life.

Orange County, CA

In the summer of 1769, the Spanish soldier Gaspar de Portolá led the first European overland expedition through Alta California, marching north from San Diego in search of Monterey Bay. His party camped at spots like this one along the way, opening a route that Spanish settlement would soon follow. This bronze was placed in 1932 by the Native Daughters of the Golden West to mark the campsite.

Palestine, TX

A 1954 Palestine High graduate, Don Hastings caught the knifemaking bug when a Hollywood film about Jim Bowie sparked a craze in his high-school metal shop. He mastered first the stock-removal method and then, after meeting bladesmith Bill Moran in 1972, the ancient art of forging Damascus steel — a technique then practiced by only a handful of people worldwide. A co-founder of the American Bladesmith Society, he earned its mastersmith rank in 1981 and helped launch a bladesmithing school before his death in 1986.

Lufkin vicinity, TX

Long before highways, the Bedias Trail carried Indians, explorers, traders, and missionaries from Bedias camps on the lower Trinity River to the Spanish missions near Nacogdoches. In 1746 Don Joaquin de Orobio y Basterra, captain of the presidio at La Bahia, led reconnaissance along the route and lent his name to this crossing of the Angelina River. Italian-born trader Vicente Michili later ran a large ranch nearby, and in time railroads and major roads traced the old trail's path, making it a backbone of Angelina County's growth.

San Antonio, TX

Don José de Jesús Rodríguez was among the Tejanos who fought for Texas independence, joining the storming party that entered Béxar in December 1835 during the siege of San Antonio. He went on to serve as a soldier and Ranger in the young republic. The State of Texas honored his service with this marker in 1963.

San Antonio, TX

José Miguel de Arciniega entered the Spanish military as a teenager in 1810 and, after Mexico won its independence in 1821, rose through San Antonio's civic ranks as alcalde and political chief. He served as a land commissioner for Stephen F. Austin's colonies and, after the Texas Revolution, continued in judicial and border-security roles. Fluent in Spanish, French, English, and several Native languages, he remained a leader through every change of government Texas endured.

San Antonio, TX

Born in San Antonio de Béxar in 1810, Juan Ximenes joined the fight for Texas independence in 1835–1836 and was among the storming party that took Béxar on December 5, 1835. Honored in his lifetime as a citizen, soldier, and Texas Ranger, he died in 1877, and the state raised this marker to his memory in 1963.

Port Lavaca, TX

After Mexico won independence from Spain, it used the empresario system to settle Texas with loyal colonists, and in April 1824 Don Martín de León secured a grant—second in success only to Stephen F. Austin's. Born in Nuevo Santander and a former captain in the Spanish military, de León established the town of Guadalupe Victoria and, by 1831, a colony reaching across much of modern Calhoun County west of Matagorda Bay. A port near present-day Port Lavaca gave the colony vital access to trade and supplies.

Victoria, TX

Born in Mexico in 1765, Martín De León secured an empresario grant in 1824 and founded the town of Victoria, planting one of the few largely Hispanic colonies of Mexican Texas. A cavalier, frontiersman, and stockman, he became known as the first great cattle baron of Texas before his death in 1833.

Falfurrias, TX

Pedro Jaramillo (1829–1907), born in Jalisco, Mexico, became the most beloved curandero of South Texas after arriving at the Los Olmos Ranch in 1881. Known as "The Healer of Los Olmos," he refused payment and credited all healing to faith in God, giving away much of what grateful patients offered to the poor. Hundreds left testimonials, and his shrine still draws pilgrims today.

Goliad, TX

Born around 1800 to a Spanish family, Rafael Antonio Manchola came to La Bahía in 1822 and married into the powerful de León family, empresarios of the region. He rose to command the presidio, served as alcalde, and sat in the legislature of Coahuila and Texas, where he championed separate statehood, corresponded with Stephen F. Austin, and even secured the town's renaming from La Bahía to Goliad. He died of cholera in 1833, and years later his de León kin were driven from Texas by anti-Mexican sentiment during the Revolution.

Victoria, TX

Around 1800, when Texas was still the northernmost reach of Spanish and then Mexican territory, Patricia de la Garza de León crossed from Tamaulipas to join her husband Don Martín de León in his effort to plant a colony on the frontier. Raising ten children, she made her home a hearth of pioneer culture at the founding of Victoria. When the Texas fight for independence came, she stood with the patriot cause.

Bartlett vicinity, TX

Settlers put down roots along fertile Donahoe Creek in the late 1840s, and when Samuel Gibbs Leatherman arrived in 1854 he opened the first store, gave land for the cemetery, and brought in the first doctor. The little community grew to boast a town square, post office, telephone system, and its own school and church. When good roads drew people to larger towns, Donahoe faded until only its cemetery remained.

Brookshire, TX

Paul M. Donigan, a native of Turkey, came to the United States around 1890 to study medicine and settled in Brookshire, drawn by relatives already in the area. In 1910 he built this home for his wife Rebecca, placing the main living floor on the upper level and using the ground floor as a cellar and his medical office. The pyramidal-roofed house, wrapped in a Neoclassical porch, was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1985.

Clarendon, TX

Donley County was created in 1876 from Young and Bexar territories and formally organized in 1882, with Clarendon as its county seat. It honors Stockton P. Donley (1821–1871), a Confederate officer who was elected to the Texas Supreme Court in 1866. Its creation marked the extension of Texas government onto the high plains of the Panhandle.

Clarendon, TX

Designed by Bulger and Rapp and built by the Troutman Brothers of Trinidad, Colorado, the Donley County Courthouse opened in November 1891 as a striking Romanesque Revival landmark of towers, red brick, and limestone. Remodeling in the 1930s stripped away the entire third floor and much of its ornament, but a careful restoration returned it to its original grandeur, rededicated on July 4, 2003. It is now the oldest functioning courthouse in the Texas Panhandle.

Donna, TX

In the late 1890s, East Texans T. J. Hooks and A. F. Hester set out to develop this stretch of the Rio Grande Valley, forming the La Blanca Agricultural Company to lay out farms and irrigation and to advertise the region's climate. When a rail line reached the site in 1904 they founded the town, naming it Donna for Hooks's daughter. It incorporated in 1908 and grew into one of the Valley's leading cities.

Donna, TX

Funded by a 1925 bond election, this is the oldest surviving building in the Donna Independent School District, designed by the firm of Elwing & Mulhausen. Its two-story central block, Tudor-arched entry, and pair of square towers made it a distinctive civic landmark. First an elementary school, it later served as a junior high from 1965 to 1983.

Donna, TX

Donna's school system traces back to a 1904 school in the nearby Runn community, where the earliest classes met in a settler's home. The new town's first school opened in 1908 in a one-room building and a borrowed store before its first schoolhouse was finished in 1911, and the district was formally organized in 1919. Over the decades it absorbed several early area schools to become one of Hidalgo County's leading systems.

Charleston, WV

This monument preserves the memory of Andrew Donnally Jr. and a cemetery once rooted in Kanawha City before being relocated here. Born in 1778 at Fort Donnally, a fortified frontier station in Greenbrier County during the era of the American Revolution, Donnally belonged to one of the pioneering families who pushed into western Virginia's Kanawha Valley and made their homes along the river opposite the salt-making community of Malden. When his old burying ground was moved, these stones came with it, carrying a family's story from the frontier generation into the settled 19th-century valley.

Austin, TX

Carpenter and contractor Gustavus Johnson built this house for his daughter Jennie when she married John K. Donnan in 1876, enlarging an older structure into a home that paired Victorian style with a Greek Revival central-hall plan. The Donnan family lived here, near the Capitol, until 1972, when Attorney General John Hill and his wife acquired it, moved it to this site, and restored it.

Salt Lake City, UT

Donner Hill marks a fateful chapter in the westward migration: it was here, on August 23, 1846, that the ill-fated Donner-Reed party arrived after grueling weeks hacking through the Wasatch Mountains. Lured by Lansford Hastings' promise that his untested 'cutoff' would save 250 miles, the emigrants instead lost precious time and strength—delays that would trap them in the Sierra snows that winter with tragic results. This steep final climb out of the canyon was one of their last brutal obstacles before the Salt Lake Valley.

Bartlett vicinity, TX

Set aside by pioneer settlers Samuel and Helen Leatherman in the 1860s, this ground became the burial place for the community of Donohoe, its earliest marked grave that of the Leathermans' infant grandson in 1869. Among those laid to rest are unknown travelers who died passing through and veterans of the Texas Revolution, the Civil War, and World War I. The town is long gone; the cemetery is all that remains.

Valparaiso, FL

This dedication at Doolittle Memorial Park honors all who served honorably in the armed forces of the United States. Rather than commemorating a single battle or war, it stands as a general tribute to American military service across generations. Community veterans memorials like this one gather the sacrifice of many conflicts into a single place of remembrance.

Junction, TX

On a January morning in 1878, the Texas Rangers closed in on the Dublin gang in the rugged Hill Country near Junction. When suspected murderer Dick Dublin bolted from his hideout, Ranger James B. Gillett and three others cut him down. The rest of the gang — including Dublin's brothers and their confederates — were rounded up after a partner turned informer, and several were convicted in 1880 for robbing the U.S. Mail at Pegleg Station.

Houston, TX

Built in 1916 in Houston's Eastwood neighborhood, this mission-style school pioneered the "cottage plan," spreading classrooms across free-standing pavilions meant to feel more like home than an institution. Its first principal, Dora B. Lantrip, led the school for twenty-six years with strikingly modern ideas—students planted WWI victory gardens, elected a mock city council and mayor, and studied world cultures through souvenirs she gathered on summer travels. Renamed in her honor in the early 1950s, the school later became an ecology magnet, continuing her hands-on tradition of teaching through gardens and nature.

Trinity, TX

Organized in 1876 as the Trinity Baptist Church in Christ under the Rev. D.S. Snodgrass, this congregation built its first sanctuary on land donated by the International & Great Northern Railroad. It weathered setbacks, including a 1909 fire, and took its present name in 1934 in memory of Dorcas Sheffield Wills. Over the decades it launched a Union Sunday school and helped spawn a second Trinity congregation.

Dorchester, TX

When the railroad brought new families to Dorchester in the early 1900s, two one-room country schools merged around 1907 to form the Dorchester School. A two-story brick schoolhouse rose here between 1913 and 1915, its auditorium doubling as the town's gathering place, and a WPA-funded building followed in 1940. For over fifty years the school anchored community life before consolidating with Howe in 1959.

Texas Township, PA · est. 1951

In 1865, as the nation emerged from the Civil War, Alsatian-born glassmaker Christian Dorflinger established works here in Wayne County that would become famous for the clarity of their flint glass. For more than half a century, artisans blew and cut fine tableware on this site, and Dorflinger's crystal graced the tables of a succession of American presidents in the White House. Production continued until 1921.

La Veta, CO

This memorial honors Doris Bristol Tracy, one of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), the pioneering program created in 1942 that trained women to fly military aircraft on non-combat missions so male pilots could deploy. The WASP ferried planes, towed gunnery targets, and tested aircraft; decades later, in 2009, the surviving members were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Tracy's marker ties a small Colorado town to that national story.

Waco, TX

Doris "Dorie" Miller grew up on a McLennan County farm and enlisted in a segregated U.S. Navy, serving aboard the USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. When the attack came, the mess attendant carried his wounded captain to safety, then manned an anti-aircraft gun he had never been trained to use. Admiral Chester Nimitz awarded him the Navy Cross, the first ever given to an African American; Miller was later killed in action in 1943, and a warship was named in his honor.

Raleigh, NC

Authorized in 1849, this was North Carolina's first public hospital for the mentally ill, created largely through the tireless campaigning of reformer Dorothea Lynde Dix. Horrified by the jailing and neglect of the mentally ill, Dix pressed legislatures across the nation to build humane asylums. The Raleigh hospital that bore her name grew from her crusade.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2019

On Pittsburgh's North Side in 1968, community activist Dorothy Mae Richardson refused to watch her neighborhood decline. She founded Neighborhood Housing Services, a pioneering model in which residents themselves—not distant officials—drove the work of rehabilitating homes and reinvesting in their community. Her approach proved so effective that it spread nationwide and led to the creation of NeighborWorks America.

Long Branch, NJ

The writer Dorothy Parker was born in 1893 at her family's summer cottage in the West End of Long Branch, on the New Jersey shore. She became one of the sharpest voices of the 1920s as a poet, critic, and founding wit of Manhattan's Algonquin Round Table, and later a committed campaigner for civil rights and social justice. Friends of Libraries U.S.A. designated the birthplace a Literary Landmark.

New York, NY

The writer and wit Dorothy Parker lived at this address as a teenager in 1910 with her father, J. Henry Rothschild. She would grow into one of America's sharpest poets, critics, and short-story writers, a founding voice of the Algonquin Round Table, and a committed champion of social justice. This early New York home belongs to the story of one of the century's most quotable women of letters.

New York, NY

From an apartment on this block, one of America's most fearless journalists warned the world about the rise of fascism. Dorothy Thompson, the "intrepid girl reporter," had interviewed Adolf Hitler and been expelled from Nazi Germany; her widely syndicated column "On the Record" pressed Americans to abandon isolation and confront the Axis threat. She lived here from 1941 to 1957, at the height of her influence.

Grapevine, TX

Dr. William E. Dorris brought his family to Grapevine in 1871 after a three-month wagon journey from Mississippi, having served as a Confederate captain during the Civil War. He bought a 37-acre farm near good water and put down roots in the growing community, where his son continued the family's medical practice for decades. The Folk Victorian farmhouse later passed to the Brock family, who raised twelve children here across 85 years.

Midland, TX

This Midland residence, built by Z. Taylor Brown, survives as an example of the ornamented craftsmanship of an earlier era, with its decorative trim, art-glass window, two fireplaces, and oak mantels. Recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965, the home reflects the settled prosperity that took hold as Midland grew from a raw railroad stop into an established West Texas town.

Andrews, TX

Dorsie M. Pinnell, a descendant of a Virginia Revolutionary War soldier, came to Texas at seventeen seeking better health. He served in the Spanish-American War with Company K of the 1st Texas Infantry before taking up ranching in Andrews County, where he raised four sons with his wife Jessie. His life traces the westward path of a young man who traded the East for the promise of the open Texas plains.

Doss, TX

Doss School traces its roots to 1884, when classes first met along Doss-Spring Creek Road in the German-settled hill country of Gillespie County. A donated acre, a modest frame building, then a 1905 limestone schoolhouse and a 1927 addition marked its growth, even as neighboring Onion Creek and Squaw Creek schools folded into it. Remarkably, it survived as one of the state's few remaining rural school districts, prized for its small student-teacher ratio.

Cleburne, TX

In the years just after Cleburne was founded, this modest white clapboard cottage rose within easy reach of City Spring on West Buffalo Creek, close enough to carry water home by hand. It was first the home of Martha Elizabeth 'Aunt Pat' Featherston Dotey, sister of the noted local educator W. B. Featherston. The Kirkham family took ownership in 1912 and kept it for more than half a century, adding a stone workshop out back for T. P. Kirkham's hat-making trade. Recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1965, it survives as a small window into a young frontier county seat.

Cicso, TX

The Texas and Pacific Railway built the Delmar Depot near here in 1880 before rail activity shifted toward what became Cisco. A community called Dothan grew up, gaining a post office in 1902, and settlers Jim and Manirval Dunaway donated land for a cemetery whose first burial, in 1905, was their own great-grandson. Dothan supported a school and stores and reported fifty residents by 1915, but the school closed in 1940. Families have kept up the cemetery, with its granite, limestone, and fieldstone markers and at least twenty-two veterans' graves.

Double Bayou, TX

In the piney woods and marshes of the African American community of Double Bayou, a humble one-room dance hall grew from cedar logs laid as a dance floor into a legendary home of Texas Blues. Rebuilt with its original materials after a 1941 storm, it drew crowds who came for Juneteenth and stayed for the music, becoming a stop on the Chitlin' Circuit—the network of venues where Black performers could play safely under segregation. Homegrown talent like Floyd "Pete" Mayes and his Texas Houserockers carried its sound into the decades that followed.

Marathon, TX

This spot in the Big Bend country was a natural water hole used since prehistoric times, its ancient importance recorded in the artifacts left behind and later by the Indians and Spaniards who traveled the roads up from northern Mexico. When Maravillas Creek cut the old pool away, rancher George Miller dug two wells around 1900 and topped them with twin windmills, giving "Double Mills" its name. It became a vital campsite for cattle drives, ore wagons, and U.S. troops on border patrol.

Jayton, TX

Deep on the Comanche frontier, more than a hundred miles beyond the outer forts, this Brazos River salt works was the northernmost business in Confederate Texas. Salt had become desperately scarce during the Civil War, yet it was essential for curing meat and hides and keeping army animals fed, so the state funded exploration that found spring water nearly pure salt. The reduction of the brine was overseen by the Texas Military Board, with troops standing guard over the dangerous, isolated work.

Douglas County, NV

Known also as Round Tent Ranch, Double Springs was a station at a pair of springs on the road threading the south end of the Pine Nut Mountains. It served travelers moving between the ranching and dairy country of Carson and Walker valleys and those bound for the Esmeralda mines, and a toll road once connected the area west to the Kingsbury Road toward Lake Tahoe. Nearby stood Carter's Station, which held the post office and 1861 polling place for the local mining precinct.

Dublin, TX

This site takes its name from a settler's alarm—'Indians a-coming! Double in!'—the cry to pull wagons together for defense. Alex Dobkins built the house here after his family settled on land his father-in-law, J. R. Holland, bought in 1846. Standing on the Fort Worth-to-Yuma stage line, the dwelling served as both a stage stand and a fort until raids in the area ceased around 1870.

Woodville vicinity, TX

In 1902, William McCready set aside land in Doucette for a church, and within a decade Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian residents were sharing a single sanctuary served by ministers who rotated among the denominations. The congregation drew members from all three faiths and focused especially on mission work, while the building doubled as a hall for weddings, funerals, social gatherings, and town meetings. As each denomination eventually built its own home, the shared Doucette Union Church ceased to exist.

Emory, TX

James W. Dougherty and his wife Isabella came to Texas from Kentucky in the late 1840s, joining Charles Fenton Mercer's colony and buying 640 acres here in 1851, where Dougherty farmed and worked as a tanner. In 1877 their son Robert donated an acre for a community burial ground, later enlarged by gifts of land in 1935 and 1964. The cemetery grew from one pioneer family's stake in the frontier.

Emory, TX

Robert Newberry Dougherty, son of the community's founder, took over the family farm in the 1860s and became sole owner of the land by 1870. He built a one-room house here in 1880–81, adding on over time as the homeplace became a gathering spot for the surrounding rural community. It has hosted weddings, music festivals, and reunions, and once served as headquarters for the local rural telephone company.

Gainesville, TX

Francis Marion Dougherty, an Alabama native, came to Texas in the 1840s and settled in Gainesville in 1858, later serving in the Civil War and seeing action in the Red River Campaign. Returning to Cooke County, he built a career as a merchant and banker and won election to the Texas House of Representatives in 1879 and 1881. There he worked on fence law, county boundaries, agriculture, and railroad development, while helping launch the county fair through the local board of trade.

Cle Elum, WA

This memorial honors Signalman First Class Douglas A. Munro, a native of Cle Elum who served in the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II. Munro is remembered for his courage under fire while evacuating Marines from a beach in the Pacific, giving his life in the effort. He remains a singular figure of valor in his service's history.

Allouez Township, MI

Douglass Houghton was Michigan's first state geologist, whose surveys in the 1830s and early 1840s documented the vast copper deposits of the Keweenaw Peninsula and helped ignite the nation's first great mining rush. His career was cut short in 1845 when he drowned in a Lake Superior storm off Eagle River, near where this memorial stands. The city of Houghton and Houghton County bear his name.

Eagle Pass, TX

This monument honors General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964), one of the most prominent—and most debated—American military commanders of the twentieth century, carrying one of his best-known exhortations about duty and sacrifice. MacArthur's career stretched from World War I through his command in the Pacific in World War II and the early Korean War, making him a towering figure across decades of American military history. Memorials to him appear in communities far from any battlefield, a measure of his hold on the public imagination.

Fort Worth, TX

From the late 1800s through the 1920s, amid Jim Crow segregation, Douglass and McGar parks gave Fort Worth's African Americans rare recreational ground. In 1895 Black entrepreneur Thomas Mason and partners bought land in the Trinity River bottoms that became Douglass Park — named for Frederick Douglass — which hosted annual Juneteenth celebrations drawing thousands and served Black churches and the Prince Hall Masons. When crowds for Negro-league baseball outgrew it, games moved to the nearby ballpark renamed McGar Park; flooding and industrial development erased both by the late 1920s.

El Paso, TX

Built in 1891 and named for the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, this was the school for El Paso's African American community under a segregated system established in the 1880s. It opened as a grammar school and by 1896 offered high school classes, foreign languages, and music. As Black families prospered through work on the railroads, in smelting, and in retail, they moved to new neighborhoods and won a second Douglass School in 1920, which served until the city desegregated in 1956. Through Jim Crow's inequities — lower pay, inferior supplies — its dedicated teachers sent graduates on to careers as surgeons, engineers, and educators.

Greenville, TX

Established in Greenville's historic East Hill Community in the early 1900s, this was one of three schools for Black children during segregation, first known as the East Colored School. It was renamed for Frederick Douglass in 1928 when a new brick building rose, and it taught grades one through eight for the African American community. In 1930 Mary J. Morris became principal here—the first African American woman to hold that role in Greenville.

Arlington, TX

Built in 1907 by local contractor Joe O. Crawley, this modest cottage was the home of Wilson M. "Bud" Douglass, Arlington's city marshal and later chief of police, and his wife Clara. It stood on land once owned by Clara's father, Arlington pioneer Seth Ramsey, and later passed to the Potts family, who kept it until 1987. With its steeply pitched roof, intersecting gables, and restrained wood trim, it is a classic example of the vernacular architecture of turn-of-the-century small-town Texas.