Search Markers

Gettysburg, PA · est. 1994

In the spring and summer of 1918, a young Army captain named Dwight D. Eisenhower lived in this Gettysburg house with his wife Mamie and their infant son while commanding nearby Camp Colt. There he trained American soldiers in the new weapon of the First World War, the tank, on the very fields where the great Civil War battle had been fought. Decades later he would return to Gettysburg as a five-star general, Supreme Commander in Europe, and President of the United States.

Saint Jo, TX

The Dye Mound community took shape in the late 1850s, named for a trapper who kept a trading post at the foot of the hills. Cemetery trustees bought more than three acres in 1889, and the growing cotton town raised its first church by 1890. Decline set in by the late 1920s, and by 1956 only a ghost town remained—though the cemetery still serves the area.

Abilene, TX

On January 21, 1963, Dyess Elementary became the first school in the Abilene Independent School District to integrate, enrolling 38 African American children — most from military families at Dyess Air Force Base who had been bused past this closer school to the segregated Woodson School. Texas had tried to stall desegregation with House Bill 65, but after the state attorney general declared it unconstitutional in 1962 and the Defense Department threatened to cut funding, the district's board voted unanimously to begin. Full integration of Abilene's schools followed step by step, completed only in 1970.

New York, NY · est. 1986

This room honors the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914–1953), whose lush, incantatory verse and legendary readings made him a transatlantic literary celebrity. During his American tours he became a fixture of Greenwich Village's bohemian scene before his death in New York City at just thirty-nine. The plaque preserves his wit and his enduring bond with the neighborhood that embraced him.

New York, NY · est. 1964

At the storied Chelsea Hotel, long a haven for writers and artists, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas spent his final creative days before collapsing and dying in New York in 1953. This plaque, dedicated on what would have been his fiftieth birthday, casts his last months in the elegiac language his own poetry made famous. The Chelsea's rooms had sheltered a parade of literary figures, and Thomas became among the most mourned of them.

Anchorage, AK

On September 22, 1995, a Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS of the 962nd Airborne Air Control Squadron went down shortly after taking off from Elmendorf Air Force Base for a routine surveillance training flight, with the loss of all 24 crew aboard — among the deadliest peacetime U.S. military aviation accidents in Alaska. The memorial honors the American and Canadian airmen who died.

Granbury, TX

Born in England, raised in Ohio, and a Union Army veteran, E. A. "Doc" Hannaford came to Granbury in 1871 and opened his drugstore in a tent before prospering. In 1886 he and merchant J. D. Baker put up a two-part Italianate commercial building — among the first stone structures in town — known as the "Arch Block," its cornice advertising Hannaford's Drug and Book Store. He became a leading civic figure, and the upper floor housed the local newspaper, doctors' offices, and a beauty parlor.

Granbury, TX

Edwin Augustus Hannaford, a native of England, came to Granbury in 1871 and opened the town's first drugstore, becoming a respected civic leader alongside his wife Nettie. In 1881–82 he built this home as a reflection of his standing, giving it fashionable Italianate touches — a central entry flanked by bay windows, bracketed eaves, and pedimented window surrounds. The house remains a handsome emblem of Granbury's Gilded Age prosperity.

McKinney, TX

In 1895, at the height of the Victorian building boom that reshaped North Texas county seats, financier and philanthropist Edward A. Newsome raised this grand two-and-a-half-story home for his wife Laura and their family. With its high ceilings, ornate woodwork, majestic stair landing and panels of cocoa (solar) glass, the house became a center of McKinney's social life. It passed through several owners—including the Murphy family in 1966—yet survives as a distinctive architectural landmark.

Moscow, TX

Built in 1856 by a craftsman known as "Daddy Poe," the E. C. Matthews Home is a striking survivor of early Texas building ingenuity. Its columns were fashioned from hollowed pine trees and it features an unusual swinging upstairs porch—vernacular solutions born of local materials and frontier resourcefulness. The home was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.

New York, NY

E. E. Cummings (1894–1962), the poet and painter who made expressive art out of commas, parentheses, and lower-case letters, spent the last forty years of his life at this address. He once described himself as 'an author of pictures, a draughtsman of words,' capturing the way his verse and his visual art fed one another.

Duplin County, NC

For more than four decades E. E. Smith led the State Colored Normal School in Fayetteville—today Fayetteville State University—shaping one of the South's key institutions for training Black teachers. He also served as U.S. minister to Liberia from 1888 to 1890, representing his country abroad. He was born about two and a half miles southeast of this marker.

Eagle Lake, TX

Before Eagle Lake had a school for Black children, they were taught at home, in churches, and even a blacksmith shop. In the late 1920s professor Eugene H. Henry—a Prairie View and Howard graduate and World War I veteran—rallied the community to seek a Rosenwald grant, the matching-fund program launched by Sears president Julius Rosenwald to build African-American schools across the segregated South. Parents, churches, and businesses raised money, and the school opened in 1930 as Colorado County's only Rosenwald school, becoming a hub of Black community life until integration in the 1960s.

Nacogdoches, TX

Opened in 1903 as the Nacogdoches Colored School and renamed in 1937 for longtime principal E. J. Campbell, this school served African American students from the town and surrounding countryside under Texas's 'separate but equal' segregation laws, which in practice left Black schools underfunded. Beginning under Campbell, students regularly visited Prairie View Normal School to glimpse the possibilities of higher education, and the results were remarkable: at one point more than two-thirds of graduates went on to college, many returning as certified teachers. The school served its community until Nacogdoches fully integrated in 1970.

Bryan, TX

In 1893, Bryan builder Charlie Jenkins raised this ornate Queen Anne home—all domed tower and wraparound veranda—for his brother Edwin James Jenkins. An English immigrant who reached Bryan in 1878 as a boy, E.J. Jenkins went on to run a downtown drugstore for more than half a century while serving as both mayor and city councilman. The house stayed in the family until 1971 and earned Recorded Texas Historic Landmark status in 1982.

Denison, TX

Ernst Martin Kohl, a former German Navy captain, arrived in the booming railroad town of Denison in 1885 and built the first floor of this structure in 1893 for a grocery and saloon. He raised three more stories in 1909–11 as a family residence, and by the 1930s the building had become the Traveler's Hotel serving the nearby rail district. Later owners restored it, and it was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1975.

Bellville, TX

On land first granted by the Mexican government to Austin County pioneer John Nichols, this vernacular Italianate commercial building was raised in 1896 by E. Oscar Finn and John Thomas Colleton. Finn, a German-born master mechanic who came to America as a child, made buggies and wagons on the ground floor while his family lived above, drawing water from an indoor well and a rainwater cistern piped to an upstairs bath. Known as the Carriage House, it still shows its paired Italianate windows, cast-iron columns, and a hand-operated dumbwaiter from Philadelphia.

Galveston, TX

Abraham Levy and a partner opened the clothing firm of Levy & Weiss in Galveston in 1877, raising this building the next year in the booming Gulf port. Under the Levy name from 1879, the family became fixtures of the island's commercial and civic life across generations. The store stood as a landmark of Galveston's Gilded-Age mercantile prosperity.

Snyder, TX

Built in 1908 as a rancher's town home in Snyder, the E. W. Clark House was a social center outfitted to last, with solid brass hardware, beveled-glass doors, and embossed leather wainscoting. Such in-town residences let West Texas ranching families enjoy the comforts and society of the county seat while their operations ran out on the range. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Austin, TX

Built in 1872, this Italianate commercial building housed the thriving grocery of Edward H. Carrington, a formerly enslaved man who became a successful Austin merchant. After his death in 1917 his son-in-law Louis D. Lyons — a trustee of Samuel Huston College — carried on the business and turned the second floor into a hall that hosted many gatherings of the Black community.

Colorado City, TX

Built in 1890 in the young ranching town of Colorado City, this West Texas home later became the birthplace of Martin Dies Jr., the influential congressman who chaired an early House committee investigating un-American activities. It was also home to the colorful ranching couple G. W. and Alice Garrett Plaster, Mitchell County stockraisers for more than half a century. The house links pioneer ranch life to national politics.

Sultan, WA

This marker honors Chief Tseul-Ted, known to settlers as John Sultan, the Native leader for whom the Snohomish County town of Sultan is named. Born in the mid-1830s and dying in 1906, he witnessed the transformation of the Skykomish River country from Indigenous homeland to a settlers' logging and mining town. The place name carries his memory into the present day.

San Francisco, CA

This monument honors Eadweard James Muybridge (1830-1904), the pioneering photographer who, working in and around San Francisco, proved through rapid sequential photography that a galloping horse briefly lifts all four hooves off the ground. His motion studies laid the groundwork for the moving image, earning him the title "Father of Cinema." Muybridge's experiments in 1870s California bridged still photography and the birth of film.

Santa Clara County, CA

In 1878 and 1879, at Leland Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm — now the grounds of Stanford University — photographer Eadweard Muybridge solved a question that had eluded the eye: whether a galloping horse ever leaves the ground entirely. Using a battery of twenty-four cameras fitted with fast electric shutters, he captured animals in motion frame by frame. His sequential photographs laid crucial groundwork for the coming art of motion pictures.

San Antonio, TX

Just off Alamo Street stands a six-room stone house built at the close of the Civil War for Sarah Eagar, born in 1842 and remembered as the first Anglo-American girl born in San Antonio. The land, bordered by the old Alamo acequia, came to her as a wedding gift from her father. The irrigation ditch has long since vanished, but the house endures behind a screen of greenery.

Dallas, TX

Eagle Ford took root beside an important crossing of the Trinity River's west fork, where settlers like the Hortons arrived in 1844 and built farms, a grist mill, and a cemetery. Railroad and depot land donated by James Horton spurred the village until the line pushed on to Fort Worth and the town began to fade. A new chapter opened in 1907 when Michigan investors founded a Portland cement company here, drawing Mexican immigrant workers whose descendants — among them decorated World War II soldier Eladio Martinez — enriched the community's culture.

Clinton Township, PA · est. 2001

Here in Lycoming County, farmers organized Eagle Grange No. 1 on March 4, 1871, making it Pennsylvania's very first local chapter of the Patrons of Husbandry. Part of a national movement founded in 1867, the Grange gave isolated rural families a way to fight back against high railroad rates and middlemen through cooperative buying and collective advocacy, and it championed rural free mail delivery. Notably progressive for its time, the order granted women full and equal membership. The community built its Grange hall on this spot in 1887.

Wilmington, IL

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Eagle Hotel is one of the older surviving hostelries in Wilmington, a town that grew up along the busy overland routes of northern Illinois. In the 19th century, hotels like this served travelers, teamsters, and traders passing through, and later generations of motorists rolling down Route 66. Its survival makes it a tangible link to the era when a town's fortunes rose and fell with the road that passed its door.

Boggs Township, PA · est. 1947

Around 1810 Roland Curtin began making iron at nearby Curtin, launching an enterprise that would outlast nearly all its peers. Remarkably, the last old-style charcoal furnace in the entire United States stood here, remaining in blast until it finally went cold in 1922. The site is a living bookend to more than a century of American iron-making tradition.

Clute, TX

Eagle Island was the Brazoria County home of William Harris Wharton and his wife Sarah Ann Groce Wharton, and it served as a gathering place for the leading figures of the Texas independence movement. William Wharton was a delegate to the 1832 convention, president of the pivotal 1833 convention, a senator in the Republic of Texas Congress, and the young republic's first minister to the United States. Here the political currents that carried Texas from Mexican province to independent republic ran through the parlor.

Eagle Pass, TX

Though the coal beds along the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass had been known to Indigenous, Spanish, and Anglo residents for generations, commercial mining only began in 1885 when F.H. Hartz opened a hillside mine that briefly became the largest producer in Texas. Over the next decades a cluster of companies—Olmos, Eagle Pass Coal and Coke, and others—sank shafts that fueled Southern Pacific locomotives and spawned company towns like Dolchburg (later Seco Mines), employing hundreds of workers at peaks of over a thousand tons a day. Competition from oil and natural gas steadily shuttered the mines, most by the 1910s and 1920s.

Eagle Pass, TX

Eagle Pass got its first post office in 1849, the same year the Army established Fort Duncan on this stretch of the Rio Grande border. After several moves, the postal service completed this Renaissance Revival building in 1912 to a design by supervising architect James K. Taylor. When a new post office opened in 1964, the well-preserved structure found a second life as the city's public library.

Eagle Pass, TX

When Union forces seized the lower Rio Grande in 1863, Eagle Pass became a vital Confederate customhouse and port of entry, the western terminus of the famed Cotton Road. Oxcart trains hauled thousands of cotton bales from San Antonio across a dangerous, bandit-plagued road to be ferried into Mexico and traded for guns, medicine, and supplies. Fort Duncan and Camp Rabb guarded the crossing in a town that had voted overwhelmingly against secession, and citizens once fought off raiders from behind barricades of cotton bales.

Oglesby, TX

Organized in 1858 by the Baptist missionary John McLain from an older fellowship known as the Church of Onion Creek, Eagle Springs Baptist grew as its namesake community thrived, baptizing new members in the waters of the Leon River. By 1880 the surrounding settlement boasted grocery stores, doctors, a post office, and a school, but families drifted away in the new century, the school closed in 1935, and the congregation disbanded in 1948. The church building endured for reunions and remains one of the few structures left of the vanished community.

Allamoore, TX

For nearly three decades this remote West Texas spot served as a station on the Overland and Chihuahua trails, where stagecoaches and wagon trains paused on the long haul between the settled East and the far frontier. From 1854 to 1882 it offered mail, passengers, and supplies to travelers crossing one of the loneliest stretches of the American Southwest.

Halifax, NC

In the decades after independence, taverns like Halifax's Eagle Tavern were the social and civic hubs of a market town—places to eat, sleep, trade news, and do business. Built in the 1790s, this one earned its place in memory when it hosted a banquet for the Marquis de Lafayette on February 27, 1825, during the aging Revolutionary hero's celebrated farewell tour of the United States. The building has since been moved a short distance from its original site to the northeast.

Carson City, NV

Sitting between Nevada's early settlement at Genoa and the silver riches of the Comstock Lode, Eagle Valley — today's Carson City — became a crossroads of westward travel and communication. The Carson branch of the California Emigrant Trail funneled overland pioneers through here, and the same corridor carried the first overland telegraph in 1859, the Pony Express, the Butterfield-Wells Fargo stages, and eventually the Virginia & Truckee Railway in 1906.

Langtry, TX

Near the dramatic confluence of the Pecos River and the Rio Grande, people have crossed this rugged land for centuries. A pair of golden eagles nesting on the far cliff gave their name to the canyon, the river crossing, and the railroad camp that grew on this bank—a crossing used over the years by Native tribes, ranchers, soldiers, and Texas Rangers. The settlement later became Langtry, but the eagle's nest across the water long remained a familiar landmark.

Ponder, TX

Noah and Susan Eakins brought their family from Kentucky to Denton County in 1855, part of the wave of settlers filling north Texas before the Civil War. The cemetery on their land began around 1855-58 with the burial of neighbor Angelina Rayburn, fatally burned cooking over an open fire, followed by an infant of another pioneer family in 1861. It grew into a community burial ground that still serves the rural area today.

Amarillo, TX

In 1923 Amarillo architect Guy A. Carlander designed this striking 'airplane bungalow' for the family of Clarence M. Eakle — a Craftsman-era style whose broad, low upper story and sweeping eaves evoked the flying machines then capturing the American imagination. The form was a national fad of the 1910s and 1920s, and surviving examples are increasingly rare. Its presence reflects early Amarillo's taste for up-to-date, fashionable design.

Amarillo, TX

As Amarillo boomed on the Texas Panhandle in the 1920s, its rising business and civic families built substantial homes that announced the young city's ambitions. This one was designed by noted local architect Guy Carlander and built by Byron Singleton in 1925 for Clarence and Lorraine Eakle. Its designation as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1994 recognizes both its architecture and the people who shaped early Amarillo.

West Lake Hills, TX

Established in 1874, Eanes Cemetery gave travelers and residents of eastern Travis County a resting place when they had no family graveyard of their own. The land came from early settlers William and Sophia Teague, who also deeded ground nearby for a church and a school. Some graves are marked only by rough fieldstones, while the earliest legible stone — that of Mike M. Teague — dates to 1895.

West Lake Hills, TX

Education in the hill country west of Austin began humbly: a log cabin raised on Robert Eanes's land in 1872, then a one-room frame schoolhouse on land donated by William and Sophia Teague. Circuit-riding ministers preached in the schoolroom and a community cemetery grew up nearby, while a 1928 stone chapel was later folded into the school's use. The Eanes name endured into the modern Eanes Independent School District, which by 1975 served over 1,800 students.

Austin, TX

Alexander Eanes moved from Mississippi to Texas in 1845 and had acquired this Travis County ranch by 1857, later selling it to his brother Robert, who came west after the Civil War. A log cabin on the ranch became the first Eanes school, and the surrounding community took the family name as well. In 1883 the ranch passed to Robert's son-in-law, Hudson Boatner Marshall, who moved the ranch house to a site by the nearby creek.

Odessa, TX

Earl Rodman and William Noel came from very different starts in the oil business—Rodman a WWI veteran turned oilfield developer, Noel a University of Texas chemist who began as a roustabout—before joining forces in Odessa in 1946. Their Odessa Natural Gasoline Company sought to profitably use the natural gas that refineries were wasting, and their vision drew El Paso Products, Rexene, General Tire, and Shell to open plants in the town. Over a thirty-year partnership the two men built the petrochemical industry that transformed West Texas.

Duquesne, PA · est. 2024

Born in Duquesne, Earl 'Fatha' Hines revolutionized the way the piano was played in jazz, developing a bold 'trumpet-style' approach that freed the instrument from a purely rhythmic role. In 1921 he became one of the first Black musicians to perform on American radio, and his big band went on to launch the careers of countless jazz greats. His orchestra served as an early incubator for the bebop revolution that reshaped American music.

Texarkana, TX

By the end of the 1890s Texarkana was prosperous enough to fill with fashionable homes, and the Earl-Rochelle house — built in 1899 for realtor and merchant John W. Earl — was the last of three nearly identical residences in town. Its Queen Anne design revels in asymmetry, with a busy roofline of gables and polygonal turrets and delicate Eastlake woodwork in the gables. The Rochelle family made it their own from 1929 until 1966.

Mansfield, TX

Indiana-born Earle Claud Driskell came to Texas as a boy in 1888 and, though trained as a lawyer, found his calling in journalism at the Fort Worth Star in 1907. He became a leading editorial voice for improving local roads, and his campaigning helped pass a landmark 1911 county road-bond package that other Texas communities imitated. Driskell died of smallpox at his Fort Worth home the following year, still a young man.

Waco, TX

Rising on the young frontier town of Waco just before the Civil War, this Greek Revival house announced that culture had arrived on the Texas prairie—even though only half of the ambitious design was ever finished. Built from local post oak, plantation-made brick, cypress, and heart pine by an unnamed shipwright, it passed from the widow of physician B. W. Earle to her brother, a Confederate general and lawyer, in 1872.

Waco, TX

This Waco house grew in stages across turbulent decades: John Baylis Earle built its first two rooms in the 1850s and, in a mill raised in 1861, manufactured uniforms for the Confederacy. The main house followed in 1868 for the Napier family, newly arrived from Alabama, and a Napier daughter lived here until 1957.

Jacksonville, TX

In 1858 Elijah Earle set aside this land as a burial ground, reportedly choosing his own plot and marking it by carving his initials into a tree. The cemetery became a resting place for East Texas pioneers and their descendants, including a veteran of the Texas Revolution, soldiers of the Civil War and both World Wars, and victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic. Expanded over more than a century, it remains cared for by a community association.

Jacksonville, TX

The Earle's Chapel community grew from families who settled Prairie Branch in the late 1830s and 1840s, including a veteran of the Texas War for Independence and pioneer Elijah Earle, who built a mill and gave land for a school and church. A log church rose here in 1859, burned in 1875, and was promptly rebuilt as the Earle's Chapel Society organized with twenty-five charter members. A new building followed in 1889 and, though battered by a 1987 tornado, still serves descendants of those first families.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1950

This modest one-and-a-half-story house, dating from about 1730, represents the everyday architecture of Lancaster's earliest settlers. Plain and practical, such homes were the common dwelling type across the growing town — the marker notes that most local houses were still built in this style as late as 1800. It offers a glimpse of ordinary colonial domestic life, far from the grand Georgian mansions of the wealthy.

Crockett, TX

This late-19th-century commercial building, with its cast-iron front and pressed-tin ornament, was built in 1893-94 for a bank that grew out of merchant W. E. Mayes's store. In the 1880s Mayes had begun handling cash, loans, and credit for his customers, and in 1891 he sold the business to the First National Bank of Crockett, which he helped organize. The building later served an abstractor after 1954.

Eastland, TX

Eastland's banks rose and fell with local fortunes, beginning soon after the Texas and Pacific Railway reached town in 1880 and a merchant opened the first bank inside a dry goods store. A wave of new institutions followed the 1917 discovery of the nearby Ranger Oil Field, when the town's population leapt from 1,000 to over 9,000 and county banks numbered eighteen. Oil decline, the 1929 crash, and Depression-era runs wiped out bank after bank, leaving Eastland without one until a new Eastland National Bank opened in 1934 amid strengthened federal banking regulations.

Belton, TX

A two-story log jail first stood on this site in 1854, replaced in 1873 by this building of native limestone. In 1874 vigilantes gathered from across Texas raided the jail and executed nine men held on charges of murder, robbery, and horse theft—an act contemporaries credited with helping end the region's lawlessness. The building later served the city of Belton before being sold, and was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1967.

Somerset, PA · est. 1954

In 1813, in a log cabin on this spot, printer Charles Frederick Goeb produced what is remembered as the first Bible printed west of the Allegheny Mountains. Getting a printing press — and the paper, type, and skill to run it — across the mountains was no small feat on the early frontier, where books were scarce and precious. A Bible off a local press meant a community had crossed a threshold from raw settlement toward established cultural life.

Boerne, TX

Public education in Boerne began in 1873 when the town's German Gesangverein (singing society) donated land for a school, and a two-room stone building opened in 1874 for children of every grade. As the town grew, upper and lower grades were separated, and a larger two-story stone school followed in 1910, serving all ages until a dedicated high school opened in 1929. The schoolhouses trace a German-settled Hill Country community investing in its children.

Rio Vista, TX

Texas had been famed for beef since Republic days, and during the Civil War its herds fed much of the Confederacy—civilians and soldiers alike—along a web of trails running to Vicksburg, Natchez, Mobile, Little Rock, and beyond. Drovers swam cattle across rivers as wide as the Mississippi, and the hazards ran to mistaken arrests: one officer and his son died in prison on such a drive. Johnson County supplier Meredith Hart, a veteran of 1836, kept sending beef even after being cheated with counterfeit money.

Lexington, TX

The Methodist Episcopal Church South bought this cemetery site in 1850, though some burials predate it. Among those resting here are San Jacinto veterans — including Lexington's founder, Capt. James Shaw, and William Hawkins — Civil War soldiers, an early county judge's wife, and, in a set-apart section, enslaved people.