Search Markers

Odessa, TX

Odessa's newspaper history began in 1895, when William C. 'Uncle Billy' Griffin launched Ector County's first paper, the Weekly News. A string of short-lived weeklies followed until the late 1920s, when the papers that would become the Odessa American took shape through a series of mergers. Consolidated in 1940 and sold several times, the American outlasted its many competitors and has been published from this site since 1951.

Odessa, TX

In 1924, hopeful geologists and drillers probed the West Texas plains near Odessa for oil and potash, only to be stopped cold at 900 feet by unfamiliar "Red Bed" rock. Two costly attempts failed, but the gamble paid off in 1927 when a well came in just west of town, and soon oil was struck within yards of that first dry hole. By 1964 Ector County counted thousands of producing wells.

Odessa, TX

The 1926 oil strike in Ector County flooded Odessa with workers and their children, and by the mid-1950s the school district needed a new high school on the city's south side. Opened in 1957 and named for Confederate general and Texas legislator Mathew Ector, the school served a student body that was predominantly Hispanic and African American. Its history became entangled in the long fight over desegregation, and rather than fully integrate, the district closed it as a high school after MALDEF's 1981 legal action.

Ector, TX

This Masonic lodge began in 1887 when Masons in Ravenna petitioned the Grand Lodge of Texas for a charter, then followed opportunity to the new railroad town of Ector in 1889, taking the name Ector Lodge No. 687 in 1901. Its members — area pioneers and prominent citizens — met in several homes before settling into their present building in 1980, sustaining charitable work throughout.

Ector, TX

The town of Ector took root in 1874 along the Texas & Pacific Railroad, and by 1885 a Methodist congregation was meeting in a nearby school under the Rev. R. R. Nelson. A frame church with twin steeples rose in 1888 and served until it was razed in 1960, replaced by later buildings and a new 1976 sanctuary. The congregation has ministered to the community for well over a century.

Moosic, PA

In the anthracite country of northeastern Pennsylvania, small towns like Moosic built much of their community life around the local ball diamond. This field is dedicated to Ed "Shovels" Kobesky, a Moosic native who made his career in minor league baseball as both a player and a manager. In the decades before television, clubs like the Redwings were the beating heart of a town's summer, drawing neighbors out to the bleachers on warm evenings.

Indianola, TX

Born near Leakey in 1905, David Edward "Ed" Bell settled at Indianola and opened a fish camp on Powderhorn Bayou that drew visitors as much for his tall tales as for the fishing. Over the decades his gift for a good yarn earned him a national reputation as a virtuoso storyteller who performed at events across the country. Locally he helped sustain Indianola's economy and, through his stories, kept alive the lore of the Texas coast.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2021

Ed Bradley grew up in Philadelphia and got his start in broadcasting at WDAS radio not far from this spot before rising to the top of American journalism. He reported from the battlefields of Vietnam and Cambodia, became the first African American television correspondent to cover the White House, and spent 26 years as a fixture on CBS's 60 Minutes. Along the way he collected 19 Emmys, a Peabody, and a lifetime achievement award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

Chattanooga, TN

In 1906 Ed Johnson, a Black man in Chattanooga, was convicted of a crime on deeply questionable evidence and sentenced to death. His attorneys, Styles Hutchins and Noah Parden — among the few Black lawyers of their era — pressed his appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered a stay; a mob defied that order and lynched Johnson, an outrage that led to United States v. Shipp, the only criminal trial ever conducted by the Supreme Court itself. This memorial honors both the man and the lawyers who risked everything for him.

Town of Union, WI

Ed L. Peet, born near Duluth in 1859, pioneered this corner of northern Wisconsin in 1895 and asked that his ashes be buried on the land he opened. His family placed this plaque, with the courtesy of the State of Wisconsin, to mark his tie to the place.

New Kensington, PA

New Kensington's Eddie Adams grew from a high school yearbook photographer into one of the most celebrated photojournalists of his time. His 1968 image "Saigon Execution" won the Pulitzer Prize and helped turn American public opinion against the Vietnam War. Over a career centered in New York, his work filled the nation's leading newspapers and magazines, earning him more than 500 awards.

San Marcos, TX

Jazz pioneer Eddie Durham was born in San Marcos in 1906 into a musical family and played trombone and guitar in bands across the Southwest before joining Kansas City's swing scene. Working with Bennie Moten and later Jimmie Lunceford and Count Basie, he helped shape the big-band sound and pioneered the single-string guitar style — recording what is often called the first amplified guitar in 1935. A gifted arranger, he had a hand in standards including 'In the Mood.'

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2014

Eddie Gottlieb discovered basketball as a student in this Philadelphia neighborhood in 1914, when the sport was still young. 'The Mogul' coached the famed SPHAS for decades and, in 1946, helped found the Basketball Association of America, forerunner of the NBA. He led the Philadelphia Warriors to the league's first championship and shaped the pro game for years as its longtime schedule maker and rules chairman.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1995

Born Salvatore Massaro in 1902, Eddie Lang grew up in this part of Philadelphia and grew into the musician often called the "Father of Jazz Guitar." A gifted soloist, he brought the guitar forward as a serious jazz voice, working alongside violinist Joe Venuti, bandleader Paul Whiteman, the Dorsey brothers, and others in the freewheeling music scene of the 1920s and early '30s. He was serving as Bing Crosby's accompanist when his sudden death in 1933 cut short a brilliant career.

Gettysburg, PA · est. 2000

"Gettysburg Eddie" Plank turned a small-town Pennsylvania upbringing into one of the greatest pitching careers of baseball's dead-ball era. Born in Gettysburg and schooled at Gettysburg Academy, he compiled a remarkable 326-194 record from 1901 to 1917, mostly for Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics, winning twenty or more games eight times and helping the A's to six pennants and three world championships. He returned home to Gettysburg, where he died, and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946.

Fort Worth, TX

Architect Howard Messer designed this ornate Victorian home in 1899 for Sarah C. Ball, widow of a Galveston banker. Fort Worth banker William Eddleman bought it in 1904 and later gave it to his daughter Carrie, wife of cattleman Frank McFarland, who lived here for seventy-five years. Its marble, sandstone, brick, and copper exterior and finely crafted woodwork survive largely intact.

Eddy, TX

In 1868 Methodists living between Elm and Bull Hide Creeks raised a simple sanctuary near a cedar-log toll bridge, served in the 1870s by circuit preacher Rev. James Peeler. When the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad reached the area in 1882, the community of Eddy shifted toward the tracks, and a relocated chapel served both Methodists and Baptists. The congregation built its present sanctuary in 1912, a fine Akron-plan church with German-made stained glass, a stamped-metal ceiling, and Prairie School touches.

Waxahachie, TX

Eddy Pennell Hawkins, of a pioneer Ellis County family, built the first two rooms of this Waxahachie home soon after marrying Netta Lewis Carson in 1878. By 1900, prosperous and prominent, he expanded it into a three-story Late Victorian residence blending Queen Anne and Shingle-style influences, with beveled glass and neoclassical porch details. The house mirrors the confidence and wealth of a rising Gilded Age businessman in the North Texas cotton country.

Eddystone, PA · est. 2019

When the guns of the First World War fell on Europe in 1914, an arms plant rose on the Delaware River at Eddystone to turn out Enfield rifles for Britain. After the United States entered the war, the factory retooled to make the American Model 1917 — and became the single largest rifle producer in the nation, employing some 15,000 workers, a fifth of them women. Its lines fabricated more than a million rifles, nearly half of the country's entire wartime output.

Eden, TX

Founded in 1882 and incorporated in 1910, the town of Eden took its name from Frederick Ede, an English-born pioneer rancher who owned the land and donated the ground for its public square. Set in the farming and ranching country of Concho County, it grew into a marketing center for wool and mohair. Its story is a compact portrait of how West Texas towns coalesced around ranching and a founder's gift of land.

Ogden Valley, UT

This cluster of plaques and a sculpture in Utah's Ogden Valley layers the area's history: the long Native American use of the valley, the founding of the town of Eden by early Latter-day Saint settlers, and the life of David Eccles (1849–1912), an immigrant boy who rose to become a lumber, sugar, and banking magnate and Utah's first multimillionaire. Together they trace the valley from Indigenous homeland to pioneer settlement to industrial fortune.

Eden, TX

The Church of Christ took root in the young West Texas town of Eden in 1903, when residents began worshiping in the local schoolhouse and later in a purpose-built church on Broadway Street. Over the decades the fellowship split into two congregations — Broadway and Main-and-Bryan — that grew and worshiped separately through most of the twentieth century. Dwindling to about twenty-five members each by 1997, the two reunited that September as the Eden Church of Christ, continuing the traditions of their frontier founders.

Eden, TX

Eden's first schoolhouse, built in 1885, drew itinerant preachers whose sermons attracted worshipers of every faith, and out of that ecumenical mix the Methodists organized around 1904. For years they met in a Baptist building until they raised their own house of worship in 1909, welcoming even Lutheran services under their roof in 1923. A charter member turned the first spade for a new sanctuary in 1948, dedicated on Easter Sunday the following year.

Bar Harbor, ME

Bar Harbor, Maine, was known as the town of Eden until 1918, and this monument honors the local men who served the Union during the Civil War of 1861–1865. Like countless New England communities, Eden sent its sons south to fight, and the plain dedication 'In Memory of Eden's Sons' speaks to how the war reached even the smallest coastal towns.

Universal City, TX

The Edens family were among the Anglo settlers who poured into Texas in the 1830s, reaching Houston County in 1831 before Banister Edens moved his family to a ranch on Cibolo Creek in Bexar County by the mid-1850s. When his wife Mary died in January 1856, her grave near the family farmhouse began this small family burying ground. Later generations — including Civil War veteran Napoleon Augustus Edens — kept the land and the cemetery, which their descendants still tend today.

Edenton, NC

In October 1774 some fifty women of Edenton, led by Penelope Barker, signed a public pledge to boycott British tea and cloth in support of the colonial cause. Their coordinated stand — one of the earliest known political actions by American women — drew mockery in the British press but real admiration at home. It announced that women, too, would take sides in the coming Revolution.

Duluth, MN

On the stormy night of April 30, 1967, Coast Guard Boatswain's Mate First Class Edgar A. Culbertson gave his life on the Duluth ship canal while trying to save three teenage brothers swept from the pier by Lake Superior's waves. The people of Duluth dedicated this plaque to their fellow citizen, whose death became one of the harbor city's enduring stories of sacrifice.

New Braunfels, TX

After earning his veterinary degree from Texas A&M in 1937, Dr. Edgar Alfred Grist (1915–1994) became the first licensed veterinarian in Comal County, riding out to farms to teach disease prevention and good animal nutrition. As Texas State Veterinarian and city meat inspector he cracked down on unsanitary slaughterhouses and battled rabies and anthrax outbreaks. Inspired by his son's letters from German festivals, he launched the sausage-and-beer celebration that became New Braunfels's beloved Wurstfest.

Baltimore, MD

This building, erected in 1836 for the Washington Medical College, is where Edgar Allan Poe spent his final hours. Brought here ill and semi-conscious on October 3, 1849, the author and poet died four days later under circumstances that remain one of literature's enduring mysteries. The structure later became part of Church Home and Hospital and survives as the east building of the complex.

Baltimore, MD

This simple memorial marks a house connected to the final chapter of Edgar Allan Poe's life in Baltimore in 1849. The city holds several sites tied to the author's last days, reflecting how closely his memory is bound to it. Poe had lived and written in Baltimore in the early 1830s, a formative period for his craft.

Boston, MA · est. 1989

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809 to David and Eliza Poe, actors at the city's theater, and the marker traces his surprising Boston chapters. Here he published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, and enlisted in the U.S. Army at Fort Independence in the harbor before the poverty-haunted career that produced his tales of terror and the modern detective story. He returned to lecture and to print his final tale in a Boston paper months before his death in 1849.

Baltimore, MD

In October 1833, three of Baltimore's literary gentlemen — John Pendleton Kennedy, James H. Miller, and John H. B. Latrobe — met in this house to judge a contest run by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. Their unanimous choice was "MS. Found in a Bottle," written by an unknown, penniless newcomer named Edgar Allan Poe. The fifty-dollar prize, the recognition, and Poe's lasting friendship with Kennedy helped set the struggling writer on his path.

Luling, TX

Edgar B. Davis came to Luling after careers in Massachusetts shoe manufacturing and overseas rubber planting, and in 1922 his wildcat gamble brought in the Luling Oil Field — 215 producing wells by 1926. Rather than simply pocketing the fortune, he handed his employees $2,500,000 in bonuses and endowed the Luling Foundation to advance agriculture and opportunity in the area. Its work in soil conservation and crop and livestock improvement carried his vision forward, and he remained in the community until his death.

Hopkinsville, KY

Born near Hopkinsville in 1877, Edgar Cayce became one of the most famous psychics of the early 20th century, delivering thousands of trance readings that ranged from medical diagnoses to spiritual counsel. A modest, deeply religious man, he never profited from his readings and framed his work as a way to help people understand a higher purpose. He died in Virginia in 1945 and is buried here.

New Orleans, LA

The French Impressionist Edgar Degas had deep New Orleans roots through his mother's Creole family, the Mussons, and this house connects him to that heritage. The property passed through prominent local hands, including a figure tied to the 1803 transfer of Louisiana from France to the United States. Degas's ownership ended when the house was sold in 1866, and it was later honored as a National Landmark in 1978.

Fletcher, NC

Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye (1850-1896) was among the most popular American humorists of his day, a newspaperman whose comic essays and lectures delighted Gilded Age readers nationwide. He retired to North Carolina in 1891, living at "Buck Shoals," and is buried one mile north.

Bryan, TX

Completed in 1925 for the family of prominent Bryan merchant Eugene Edge, this two-and-a-half story brick home is a textbook example of the Georgian Revival style, with a symmetrical facade, Doric-columned portico, stone quoins, and gabled dormers. It remained in the Edge family for more than half a century, until 1978.

Edgewood, TX

Edgewood was born of the railroad: in 1878 Judge John C. Robertson and his partner W. S. Herndon gave land for a depot, and a community quickly grew around it. Amid Van Zandt County's seat dispute, Canton residents shifted their shipping here from Wills Point. The town cemetery holds its earliest gravestone from 1889, but after a lost deed and declining use, the last burial came in the 1920s; long neglected, the plot has since been restored.

Lancaster, TX

Edgewood Cemetery grew organically from the graves of North Texas pioneers, beginning with a child, Lizzie Richardson, laid to rest in the summer of 1845 as the Republic of Texas was about to join the Union. Early settler Roderick Rawlins chose the ground and was buried here in 1848, and it holds a veteran of the American Revolution who died on the Fourth of July, 1858. Not formally dedicated as a cemetery until 1877, it now shelters more than 1,500 graves under the care of a local association.

Washington Township, OH

Long before Ohio was farmland and township roads, the Ohio Valley was home to the Adena, one of North America's earliest mound-building peoples, who flourished from roughly 1000 B.C. into the early centuries A.D. This conical earthwork—nearly sixteen feet high—is a burial mound, raised basketful by basketful of earth over the dead in a tradition that spread across the Eastern Woodlands. Its shape and dimensions place it among the hundreds of such mounds that once dotted southern Ohio, quiet monuments to a society that thrived here for well over a thousand years.

Edinboro, PA · est. 1968

Chartered as a state normal school in 1861, Edinboro was among the first teacher-training institutions west of the Allegheny Mountains, part of a 19th-century movement to professionalize American education. Normal schools existed to turn out qualified schoolteachers for a rapidly expanding public system. Over the following century it grew from a normal school into a teachers college and then a full state college.

Edinburg, TX

Designed by the Austin firm of Giesecke and Harris and completed in 1926, this Gothic Revival auditorium served the newly created Edinburg Junior College in the fast-growing Rio Grande Valley. With its ogee-arched windows and ornamental stonework, it stood as both a place of learning and a cultural center for the wider city. It remains a fine example of the ambitious educational architecture of the early twentieth century.

Akron, OH

Before Thomas Edison married Mina Miller in 1886, he courted her at the Akron home of her father, the inventor and Chautauqua co-founder Lewis Miller. Local tradition holds that Edison — ever the electrician — erected a light pole on the premises during the courtship. It is a charming reminder that the world's most famous inventor was also a suitor who couldn't resist showing off his craft.

Robert Lee, TX

Edith took root in the early 1880s after rancher Winfield Scott fenced his range, drawing both open-range cattlemen and stock-farming homesteaders. At its height it held three schools, a lodge hall, tabernacle, general store, cotton gin, and blacksmith shop, with a post office opened in 1890 and named for an admired young woman of Ballinger. As schools consolidated and families moved toward the cities, the post office closed in 1955 and the town faded.

Canadian, TX

When Thomas T. McGee, the first sheriff of Canadian, was laid to rest on a hill east of town in 1894, graves already dotted the ground dating back to 1883—the informal beginnings of a frontier burying place. His widow Mary bought the land, and it passed through the years as the McGee Cemetery before the Young family renamed it Edith Ford Memorial Cemetery in 1933. Home to thirteen of the county's first eighteen judges, it reads as a founders' roll for Hemphill County.

Baltimore, MD

The Hamilton sisters each left a lasting mark. Edith Hamilton became one of America's most beloved interpreters of the ancient world as author of The Greek Way, while her sister Alice Hamilton essentially founded the field of industrial medicine, exposing the dangers of lead and other toxins to American workers.

Town of Oyster Bay, NY

For more than half a century, Edith Hay Wyckoff chronicled life on Long Island's Gold Coast from the newsroom of The Locust Valley Leader, the weekly paper she edited and published from the close of World War II until 2001. In an era when few women owned or ran newspapers, she made the Leader a record of her community's births, deaths, controversies, and small triumphs. In 1946 she also founded the Locust Valley Boys Club, extending her civic reach from the printed page to the lives of local youth.

New York, NY · est. 2011

In the Gilded Age, 23rd Street marked the northern edge of fashionable Manhattan, and it was here, in her father's library, that young Edith Jones first fell in love with books. She grew into Edith Wharton, one of America's great novelists, dissecting the manners and cruelties of patrician New York with unmatched clarity. Though she spent her later years in France, that vanished world of old-money Manhattan remained the wellspring of her finest fiction, including The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.

San Saba, TX

In the hill country of San Saba, Edmond E. Risien turned the wild native pecan into a cultivated crop. An English immigrant who arrived in the 1870s, he spent decades selecting and improving San Saba's pecans, developing named varieties that helped make the pecan a commercial industry — work later recognized by the Texas Legislature. His son E. Guy carried the effort forward.

Sacramento, CA

For half a century this Sacramento site was home to Edmonds Field, ballpark of the Pacific Coast League's Sacramento Solons. On June 10, 1930, the park made history by hosting what was billed as the first night baseball game in the western United States, played under electric floodlights years before the major leagues embraced the practice. The ballpark stood from 1910 until 1960.

Canton, TX

Born into slavery in 1850, Edmund Arnold Wynne came of age just as emancipation transformed the South. By 1869 his father had bought 100 acres, and Edmund followed, purchasing his own land and then selling parcels for a dollar to Black churches and schools across the Big Rock and Canton areas. Over a lifetime he helped former slaves and struggling families become self-sufficient, supported teachers, and lent his name to the Wynne community, one of the oldest African American communities in Texas.

Austin, TX

University of Texas economist Edmund T. Miller and his wife Emily, an artist descended from San Antonio's pioneer Maverick family, acquired this Austin hillside in 1922. Emily herself co-designed their Mediterranean-style home, completed in 1923, working alongside her nephew and an architecture professor and calling on metal craftsman Fortunat Weigl for its details. The house was built to embrace its slope and still keeps much of its original landscaping.

Damon, TX

Edmund Calloway Darst was among the Missouri-born men who came to Texas in the turbulent 1830s and fought at San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 battle where Sam Houston's army secured Texas independence from Mexico in less than twenty minutes of fighting. Darst died just two years later, in 1838, during the fragile early years of the Republic of Texas. The State of Texas raised this marker in 1936 as part of the statewide centennial commemorations honoring the veterans of the revolution.

Hillsborough, NC

Edmund Fanning was a judge and colonial official in Hillsborough who became a lightning rod for backcountry anger. In 1770 the Regulators — farmers protesting corruption and unfair taxes — ransacked and destroyed his nearby home. His story sits at the heart of the unrest that shook North Carolina in the years just before the Revolution.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2006

Edmund N. Bacon led Philadelphia's city planning from 1949 to 1970, the postwar decades when American cities were remaking themselves for a new age. His vision reshaped the fabric of a colonial-era city, restoring the historic townhouses of Society Hill while opening modern civic spaces like Penn Center and the beloved LOVE Park. Time magazine put him on its cover as the face of a national urban-renewal movement.

Selma, AL · est. 1965

Some 600 marchers crossing the bridge toward Montgomery were attacked by police with clubs and tear gas. Televised nationwide, the violence galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Edmonton, KY

Edmund Rogers served in the Virginia campaigns of the Revolution and was present at Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown in 1781 before turning westward as a surveyor. In 1783 he joined his cousin, frontier soldier George Rogers Clark, and the next year pushed into the country south of Kentucky's Green River, making some of the earliest surveys along the Barren River. He settled the area and laid out the town of Edmonton in 1800.

New York, NY

From 1923 to 1929, novelist and playwright Edna Ferber lived here during the most productive stretch of her career, writing fiction marked by sweeping American settings and strong female characters. While at this address she published the Pulitzer Prize–winning So Big in 1924 and Show Boat in 1926, the latter adapted into a landmark American musical. She would later be best known for the novel Giant.

Dublin vicinity, TX

Grass, timber, and water drew pioneers to this corner of the western Cross Timbers in the 1850s, where ranching and cotton took hold. A community gathered around a school built in 1904 on donated land and named Edna Hill for the donor's granddaughter. Decline set in during the 1920s and deepened through the Depression, until by the 1990s only a church, a community center, and a few homes remained.

Llano, TX

This one-and-a-half-story L-plan Victorian cottage was built in 1892 for Frank and Alice Hargon with six hundred dollars of materials from the Llano Brick and Lumber Company, and it was soon sold to Edna J. Moore for a thousand. A rancher and banker, Moore lived here through her 1928 marriage to Julius Seaholm and long after his death, until her own in 1953. Its turned porch columns, jigsawn bargeboards, and box window make it a fine example of small-town Victorian architecture.