Search Markers

Dubina, TX

Named from the Czech word for "oak grove," Dubina was founded in 1856 by Moravian immigrant families who cleared farms in Fayette County. By 1900 the community had grown into a full village with a church, mill, cotton gin, blacksmith, store, and post office. A devastating 1909 storm and a 1912 fire broke its momentum, and the town never fully recovered — but it holds the distinction of being the first Texas settlement founded entirely by Czech-Moravians.

Morristown, NJ

For more than a century this Morristown neighborhood, known as Dublin, was the heart of the town's Irish American community. Beginning around the 1840s — the era of the Great Famine migration — Irish immigrants settled here and worked as laborers, domestic servants, and civil servants, building churches, families, and civic life. Generations of the neighborhood's sons and daughters also served in the nation's armed forces.

Dublin, TX

In 1891 Sam Houston Prim arrived in Dublin with $680 of bottling equipment and set up shop at Patrick and Elm streets. He began bottling Dr Pepper and, in 1925, formally claimed a 44-mile distribution territory centered on the town. According to the marker, Prim had bottled the drink longer than any other person by the time of his death in 1946, and his works is recognized as the oldest Dr Pepper bottler in the world.

Dublin, TX

As the railroad arrived and cotton money flowed into newly incorporated Dublin, former railroad president John G. Harris and three partners founded the Dublin National Bank in 1893. It weathered the hard years, absorbing the town's only other bank in 1933, and has operated from the same spot ever since. Today it stands as the oldest continuously operating bank in Erath County.

Dublin, TX

Drawn to Erath County in 1936, Madison Square Garden rodeo director Everett Colborn made Dublin a rodeo capital, staging its first "World's Championship Rodeo" in 1940 as a whole-community affair of parades, floats, and volunteers. The 1946 Colborn Bowl was the Southwest's largest outdoor arena, drawing thousands and celebrities like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

Jefferson Parish, LA

Joseph Villars Dubreuil settled here in 1719, becoming an early agricultural pioneer and prosperous entrepreneur in the young French colony of Louisiana. Nearby he raised one of the first plantation levees along the Mississippi, an early step in the vast river-control system that would one day protect the region.

Castroville, TX

In 1847, in the newly settled Alsatian colony of Castroville, French priest Father Claude M. Dubuis and Father Chazelle raised the first two rooms of this house; Chazelle soon died of typhus. Dubuis, the colony's first priest, was twice captured by Comanches that same year yet escaped unharmed, and later rose to become Bishop of Texas. The dwelling was the colony's first example of French-Alsatian architecture and was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

Lindale, TX

In the depths of the Dust Bowl era, the United States awoke to soil erosion as a national emergency, and in 1929 one of the country's first ten erosion-control research stations was established near here. By 1934 the surrounding Duck Creek watershed became a working demonstration where landowners across 25,000 acres adopted planned conservation—terraces, dams, tree and grass plantings—much of it built by a nearby Civilian Conservation Corps camp. The project drew visitors from across the nation and trained a generation of agronomists, foresters, and engineers who carried its methods to other states.

Elko County, NV

Established by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877 on the ancestral lands of the Western Shoshone, the Duck Valley Indian Reservation spans some 300 square miles across Nevada and Idaho and is home to Northern Paiutes as well. Known for a peaceful and cooperative spirit, its people carried their culture forward across generations while many kept alive ancient handicraft skills. Most residents ranch the valley, raising hay, wheat, and cattle under the elected Shoshone-Paiute Tribal Council.

Willow City, TX

August Duecker, Sr. left his native Germany in 1852 to join the wave of German immigrants who reshaped the Texas Hill Country, marrying Louise Feuge and buying a large farm here in 1878. His son August, Jr. built this two-story house in 1888 from limestone quarried on family land—a handsome example of the rural German Texan homestead. Enlarged over generations, it stands as a record of an immigrant family putting down deep roots.

Caldwell, TX

In the 1880s Rudolph and Anna Duewall carved a family farm out of Burleson County, and their son Edward and his wife Lizzie raised six children on the land. In 1928 the family replaced the original farmhouse with this vernacular home, whose carpenter thriftily reused timber from the old house and from the county's second courthouse. Its exposed rafters and cross-gabled roof are hallmarks of practical Texas farm building.

Clairette vicinity, TX

On a Sunday in October 1878, elders A. W. Elledge, O. W. Hughart, and D. Shipman gathered seventeen charter members to found the Duffau Baptist Church. Members soon built a sanctuary here, holding services one weekend each month, and after fire destroyed the first building in 1935 they raised the present one. Membership peaked near 125 before the local school consolidated with Hico in 1960 and the settlement declined, leaving this as the community's only active church.

Clairette vicinity, TX

Duffau grew from the late-1850s arrival of settlers like Francis T. Duffau, taking its name and gaining a post office by 1860; it became a busy trade center before fires and a railroad bypass sent it into decline. Nearby mineral wells drew health-seekers to a small resort, and churches, a school, and a cemetery anchored community life for over a century. The graveyard's oldest recorded burial dates to 1865, and among its 950-plus graves lie veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, and the Korean War.

Stephenville, TX

When the Duffau community's school burned, residents rebuilt in 1936 with a $4,700 insurance settlement, hiring Stephenville architect-contractor George Coleman to raise a modest brick-veneered schoolhouse with a hipped metal roof. Heated by wood stoves and lit by oil lamps, it taught local children until 1958, when Duffau consolidated with the schools in nearby Hico. Rather than let it stand empty, neighbors converted the building into a community center they have maintained ever since.

Willistown Township, PA · est. 2004

In August 1832, fifty-seven Irish immigrants, newly landed and desperate for work, were digging railroad line for a contractor named Duffy when cholera swept through their camp. Feared as carriers of disease and scorned as Irish Catholics, they were largely left to die, and their bodies were buried together in a hidden trench. The mass grave nearby holds them still.

Post, TX

So prominent it became Garza County's earliest benchmark, this sandstone height was fixed in 1877–78 by the peg-legged surveyor Jasper Hays as he mapped the bounds of the Llano Ranch, the first property settlers occupied in the county. Tradition holds that a crew member who died was buried near the peak, giving it his name. Hays's original notes, recovered from Mason jars he buried on the summit, later anchored the surveys that laid out C. W. Post's farm colony—one landmark among a landscape of colorfully named local formations.

Seguin, TX

First called Cottonwood Cemetery, this burial ground served the pioneers of the Cottonwood community before it was renamed for H. A. Dugger, who with his wife Nancy gave land for both the cemetery and a school. Its earliest graves are those of Lee Dora Southern and her uncle Asa, killed by robbers while traveling through in 1872; Henry A. Seay added land in 1935. Curbing, grave slabs, and fraternal markers still mark the ground an association has tended since 1959.

Armstrong County, TX

William Miles Dye, born in Kentucky in 1864, came to Texas as a boy and put down roots in newly organized Armstrong County in 1891. He hauled rock from Palo Duro Canyon to help build the county's first jail and raised his family in a dugout, the lower portion of which is still visible. Such earthen dwellings were a practical necessity on the treeless Texas Panhandle, where lumber and stone were scarce.

Alvarado, TX

Dr. John Duke and his wife Martha moved to Johnson County in 1854 and established a farm in what became the Willow Springs Community. When their ten-year-old daughter Zilla died in 1870 they buried her on the family farm, and she was soon joined by siblings and a young relative. In 1879 Dr. Duke deeded the burial ground to the community, and it became the resting place of Willow Springs ranchers, farmers, teachers, merchants, ministers and soldiers.

Arcola, TX

The Duke Community grew from land granted in 1824 to three of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colonists—David Fitzgerald, who fought at Anahuac, Thomas Barnett, who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, and Moses Shipman. Perched on a high bluff above Clear Lake with ample water for steam engines, the site drew railroads by mid-century and became the terminus of the Sugar Land Railway, loading sugarcane at a bustling depot named for storekeeper Duke Hessey. With its store, hotel, and sugar mills, Duke thrived until its post office closed in 1922; today only its cemetery remains.

New York, NY

Born in Washington and crowned in Harlem, Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington spent nearly five decades turning the big band into a vehicle for serious American art. From the Cotton Club of the 1920s through concert halls the world over, his "Mood Indigo," "Take the A Train," and ambitious extended suites reshaped how the world heard jazz. Championed by the cabaret singer Bobby Short and paid for by thousands of fans, this memorial rose at the northeast corner of Central Park in 1997.

Durham, NC

This is the country home where James Buchanan Duke and Benjamin Newton Duke were born, sons of a farmer who turned a postwar tobacco operation into an industrial empire. The brothers built fortunes in tobacco and hydroelectric power, then poured them back into philanthropy — endowing Duke University and creating the Duke Endowment.

McKinney, TX

Dr. Joseph E. Dulaney (d. 1877), a Confederate Army surgeon, came to McKinney after the Civil War and married Lucy Ann Field (1844–1941), daughter of Collin County pioneers. In 1875 he built this Victorian cottage, notable for its many gables and fine porch detailing. Lucy lived here until 1910 with children including Joseph Field Dulaney, a pharmacist who later donated land across the street for a public library.

McKinney, TX

Built in 1916 by Dallas banker John Field for his sister, this McKinney home stayed in the Dulaney family for more than half a century. Her son Joseph Field Dulaney, a local philanthropist, lived here until 1968 and donated the land across the street for the town's public library. With its Prairie School influences and wraparound veranda, the house reflects the comfortable domestic architecture of early-20th-century Texas.

Athens, TX

Dulcinea Ann Holland came from Athens, Georgia, to Henderson County as a girl in 1847, and local tradition credits her with naming the new town of Athens for her birthplace. Widowed during the 1860s and remarried in 1867, she raised a family, helped found the local Methodist church, and became a respected civic leader. Her life spans the pioneer settlement and maturing of a East Texas community.

Dummer, NH

In small North Country towns like Dummer, New Hampshire, a simple stone or plaque set on the town common has long been the way a community keeps faith with its own — the neighbors, sons, and daughters who left the farms and mill villages to serve in the nation's wars. Rather than naming a single battle, this memorial gathers all of that service under one dedication, honoring generations of local veterans from whatever conflict they answered. It reflects a deep New England tradition of civic remembrance, where the town itself takes responsibility for marking sacrifice.

Livingston, TX

Formal education for Livingston's African American children began in a West Street building in the late 1800s, in a segregated system so under-resourced that a former white schoolhouse was once rolled across town on logs by mule teams to serve Black students. In 1936 the community opened Dunbar High School—named for poet Paul Laurence Dunbar—the largest African American school in Polk County, with twelve grades and vocational training. Its Leopards won state football titles in 1953, 1954, and 1958, until the Freedom of Choice integration program led to Dunbar's closing in 1968; residents later saved the campus for continued public use.

Forney, TX

Duncan Graham McKellar and his wife Emma built this two-story frame house in 1886, when the couple stood at the center of Forney and Kaufman County's economic, social, and religious life. Its Queen Anne and Eastlake detailing made it one of the town's first high-style residences, and it remains the oldest surviving example of the style there. The McKellar family owned and lived in the home until 2010.

Corpus Christi, TX

Also called Flour Bluff Cemetery, this public burial ground was established in 1908 on land purchased by Edward and Minerva Duncan near Corpus Christi. Its oldest documented grave dates to 1909, and among those buried here are veterans of World War I, World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, alongside generations of families who helped build up Nueces County. It carries the state's Historic Texas Cemetery designation.

Paris, KY

Raised in stone in 1788, when Kentucky was still Virginia's far frontier, Duncan Tavern stood at Paris as a gathering place where pioneers, travelers, and would-be statesmen swapped news over a fire. In the twentieth century the Kentucky Daughters of the American Revolution rescued and restored it, giving the old inn new life as a shrine, museum, and library. Its walls hold the everyday sociability of a frontier that was fast becoming a state.

Gonzales, TX

Scotsman Benjamin Duncan began his ferry across the San Marcos River around 1834, on the eve of the Texas Revolution. Tradition says Susanna Dickinson, a survivor of the Alamo, stopped at Duncan's home while carrying word of the fort's fall to Gonzales, whose men had died in the battle. On hearing the news, Sam Houston ordered the Texas army's retreat and had the town and ferry burned in March 1836; Duncan later rebuilt and ran the crossing until 1866.

Duncanville, TX

First settled by farmers and ranchers in the 1840s and 1850s, this area became "Duncan Switch" in 1881 when the Chicago, Texas & Mexican Central Railroad built a switching station, with local resident John Duncan securing the right-of-way. When a post office application under the name Duncan was denied, the town became Duncanville, opening its post office in 1882. Growth stayed gradual — barely 300 residents by the 1930s — until postwar suburban expansion from nearby Dallas transformed it into a fast-growing commercial center.

Longview, TX

Raised on the eve of the Civil War, this ranch home was the work of Dr. J. N. Allison, a pioneer physician who hauled building materials all the way from Virginia and had its bricks fired on site from local clay by enslaved laborers. The house stood on land that would later prove to sit atop the vast East Texas oil field, with the nearby Lathrop Discovery Well extending that famous strike. It marks the layering of Old South settlement and 20th-century petroleum wealth on a single patch of Gregg County ground.

Omaha, NE · est. 1992

On the night of April 18, 1945, a Japanese balloon bomb drifted silently across the Pacific and exploded in the sky over the Omaha neighborhood of Dundee, near 50th and Underwood. The incendiary flared brightly but did no damage. Japan had launched thousands of these unmanned 'Fu-Go' balloons hoping to spark fires and panic across North America; U.S. officials suppressed all news of them so the enemy could never gauge their aim. Word of the Dundee blast stayed secret until the day after Japan surrendered.

City of Utica, NY

This monument was raised in 1931 by the citizens of Utica to honor George E. Dunham (1895–1922), remembered on the stone as an "advocate of good causes" whose short life was devoted to the public good of his city. Community-funded tributes like this one were a hallmark of early-twentieth-century civic life, when a grateful town might memorialize a local reformer or benefactor who died young. The inscription lets his neighbors' esteem speak for itself.

Waxahachie, TX

Built in 1890-91, this exuberant Queen Anne Revival house—complete with hexagonal and octagonal rooms—was the home of Judge Oscar E. Dunlap, a Waxahachie banker, industrialist, and civic leader. Dunlap founded the Sims Library and championed the Good Roads movement, and the home later passed through a succession of prominent local families. It stands as a showpiece of late-nineteenth-century architectural ambition.

La Feria, TX

Valley developer W. E. Stewart began this adobe-brick and stucco house in 1912 but sold it before completion to his employee Bailey H. Dunlap, an Illinois native. Dunlap founded La Feria's first bank, dealt in real estate across the Rio Grande Valley, and served as the town's first mayor in 1915, and the home was enlarged over the following decades.

Brownsville, PA · est. 1991

Spanning Dunlap's Creek along the National Road at Brownsville, this 80-foot cast-iron span was built between 1836 and 1839 as the first metal arch bridge in the United States. It replaced a string of earlier crossings on the site, including an 1809 Finley suspension bridge, and was fabricated under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with Capt. Richard Delafield and Lt. George W. Cass overseeing the work. It carried the young republic's great westward highway on a structure that pointed toward the age of iron.

Dunn, TX

Dunn began about 1881 as a change station where freighters resting their teams hauled goods north after the Texas & Pacific Railway reached Colorado City. A blacksmith shop and store sprang up to serve the wagon traffic, mail was dropped at the Dunn family home, and a post office named for them opened in 1890 with the first school built the same year. A community well, windmill, and trough once stood in the middle of the road—covered over only when the highway was paved in 1938.

Wheelock vicinity, TX

This burial ground grew from the homestead of James and Isabella Dunn, part of a group of Irish families who sailed to America in 1821 and, after stints in Charleston and Alabama, made the ox-wagon trek to Sterling C. Robertson's Texas colony in the winter of 1833. The cemetery opened in 1836 with the burial of the Dunns' infant child and has served the pioneer families' descendants ever since.

Coon Rapids, MN

Before railroads reached the northern plains, Red River ox-cart trails and the U.S. Military Road carried freight and travelers across what is now suburban Minnesota. The Dunn House stood at this corner as a hotel and stopover where those weary trail users could rest and resupply. It marks the everyday infrastructure of frontier travel in territorial-era Minnesota.

Eureka, TX

James and Isabella Dunn brought their family to Texas in 1832, and their son James Dunn, Jr., moved to Navarro County in 1850 with his wife and his cousin David J. Johnston. A log building known as Dunn's Schoolhouse rose nearby in that decade, and the cemetery began with the 1865 burial of James Jr. on his own property. His wife and members of the Johnston family, several in unmarked graves, joined him here among the area's earliest settlers.

Corsicana, TX

Kentucky-born Ewing Eric Dunn came to Texas in 1850, served as a county deputy sheriff, then fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War before building the first part of this frame house in 1866. He went on to serve as Navarro County sheriff from 1876 to 1884. Grocer S. M. Ransom enlarged the home in 1890, adding the wraparound porch, fish-scale shingling, and stained glass that five generations of the Ransom family enjoyed.

Duquesne, PA · est. 1997

The steel works at Duquesne began in 1886 and quickly fell into the empire of Andrew Carnegie, who acquired it in 1890 before it passed to the newly formed U.S. Steel in 1901. Generations of workers here pioneered advances in rolling mills and blast furnaces before World War I and later in pollution control, tending as many as six blast furnaces at the plant's height. The mill fed the nation's appetite for steel until it finally went cold in 1984.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1978

Duquesne University began in 1878 when Holy Ghost Fathers from Germany opened a small Catholic school in Pittsburgh. Chartered in 1882 as Pittsburgh Catholic College, it grew into a full university and took the name Duquesne in 1911. From the start it welcomed students of many faiths into both liberal arts and professional training.

Jones Creek, TX

Carved from Stephen F. Austin's 1828 Mexican land grant, Durazno—Spanish for "peach"—passed on Austin's death in 1836 to his sister Emily Austin Bryan Perry and then to her son William Joel Bryan, who built it into a cotton and sugar plantation. Its grounds held a main house, offices, barns, and a number of slave cabins, and it stayed in the family until 1928. The plantation's wealth, like so much of the antebellum South, rested on the labor of the enslaved.

Mullin, TX

Philip David Duren bought 390 acres here in 1876 and raised a log home, bringing his family from Houston County. His infant daughter Willie Lee, buried in 1878, was the first laid to rest in what became the community cemetery. Duren deeded land for a school that ran until 1947 and, in 1912, guaranteed free burial plots and a church open to all denominations; Pompey Mountain Church still serves the area.

Tool, TX

Durham Avant left North Carolina for Texas in 1834, arriving with his wife Susan during the restless years just before the Texas Revolution. Serving as a Texas Ranger, he helped survey and site the seat of newly formed Henderson County and later opened a hotel in the county seat of Athens. Late in life he enlisted in the Confederate army alongside his son, and died in 1862 not long after joining up.

Durham Township, PA · est. 1947

Built in 1727, Durham Furnace was one of colonial Pennsylvania's early ironworks, smelting local ore into iron through more than six decades of blast until 1789. In the colonial wars and again during the Revolution it cast cannon and shot for the fight, turning frontier iron into weapons of war. Among its owners were the prominent colonial statesman James Logan and George Taylor, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Hamilton, TX

John Jefferson Durham built this two-story rock residence in 1873, a substantial home on a landholding of several thousand acres in Hamilton County. A Civil War veteran, Durham was the first to teach school in Hamilton and made his mark as a merchant, builder, and community leader. The colonial-style stone house reflects the standing of one of the area's most influential early settlers.

Middletown Township, PA · est. 1988

This weathered stone once told riders exactly where they stood: one mile to Newtown. Set in place before 1741, it survives as one of only two remaining milestones along the 43-mile colonial road that ran from Bristol to the ironworks at Durham Furnace. Newtown, an important waypoint on that route, served as the Bucks County seat for most of the eighteenth century.

Nacogdoches, TX

This East Texas dwelling sits on land held since the days of Spanish Nacogdoches, owned by the family of a 1779 settler and sold in 1827 to Joseph Durst, then the town's alcalde. Its gable-end chimneys, tapered columns, and paneled shutters mark it as a traditional Anglo settler house, likely built during Durst's tenure in the Mexican-Texas years. Its later owners read like a roll call of Texas history — a San Jacinto veteran, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a Confederate congressman — before a Civil War veteran's family held it for over a century.

Fredericksburg, TX

Carl Durst arrived in the German settlement country of the Texas Hill Country in 1873 and started with a single-room cabin, adding on as his family and fortunes grew. The house expanded room by room over the decades—including an 1896 stone addition that sometimes housed teachers for the nearby Cherry Mountain School, on land the Dursts had donated. What survives is less a single building than a family's life told in wood and stone.

Covington, KY

The broadcaster Durward Kirby was born in Covington in 1911 and spent his childhood on Greenup Street, attending St. Benedict School before his family moved to nearby Fort Thomas. He got his start at WLW radio, reporting on the devastating 1937 Ohio River flood and hosting big-band broadcasts from area nightclubs like the Lookout House. From those Cincinnati-area roots he rose to national fame in the early decades of television.

Reading, PA · est. 1951

This winding road from City Park up to Reading's landmark Pagoda takes its name from Charles E. Duryea, an automobile pioneer who used its slopes from 1900 to 1907 as a proving ground for his cars. Duryea built one of America's first successful gasoline automobiles, and the hill let him test the machines' power against the very grades that stymied early motorcars.

Edna, TX

Built around 1860 in the town of Texana and later moved to Edna, this home sheltered many of the area's first families and typifies the modest frame dwellings of antebellum Jackson County. Its relocation echoes the fate of Texana itself, a river town that faded when the railroad passed it by. The house endures as a recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Middle Smithfield Township, PA · est. 2000

Long before Pennsylvania's roads and railroads, Dutch colonists pushed inland from the Hudson River valley toward the Delaware, following the rugged trace known as the Old Mine Road. Crossing at Walpack Bend, these early settlers opened up this corner of the Pocono region, making the route the oldest road in Monroe County. Their arrival marked the first sustained European presence in a landscape then largely shaped by Native peoples.

San Diego, TX

This marker records the founding of Duval County, created in 1858 and organized in 1876 with San Diego as its seat. The county honors Burr H. Duval, a young captain in James Fannin's command during the Texas Revolution. Taken prisoner after the surrender at Goliad, Duval was among the hundreds executed in the massacre of March 27, 1836.

San Diego, TX

Created by the legislature in 1858 and organized in 1879, Duval County took shape as settlers arrived — first from Mexico in the mid-19th century, then Anglo pioneers in the 1860s — building an economy on ranching and farming. The railroad's arrival in the late 1870s swelled population and employment, and the early-1900s discovery of oil, gas, and uranium brought a fresh wave of settlement. Its layered history reflects the blended cultures and resource booms of South Texas.

Alexandria, VA

In the heady months after the Revolutionary War ended, a victorious George Washington made his way home to Mount Vernon, and the nearby port of Alexandria welcomed its most famous neighbor in style. On the last day of 1783, the town's leading men gathered at Duvall's Tavern to honor the general's return from the long fight for independence. Taverns like this one were the social and political heart of early American towns, doubling as banquet halls, meeting rooms, and stages for civic celebration.