Search Markers

Boulder City, NV

Eldorado Canyon runs east to the Colorado River, and around 1859 prospectors began digging its slopes for gold and silver, organizing the Colorado Mining District. Its three great mines — the Techatticup, Wall Street, and El Dorado Rand — yielded more than six million dollars, while steamboats and barges freighted goods some 350 miles up from the Gulf of California to the canyon's mouth. In 1867 the U.S. Army planted an outpost here to guard the river freight and the miners; the mines revived in the 1870s and worked on until World War II.

Gray County, TX

Established on March 20, 1886, Eldridge was the first post office in Gray County, sparing area ranchers a 20-mile ride to Mobeetie for their mail. First proposed under the name Elfin Grove, it stood near a blacksmith shop on McClellan Creek and shifted location more than once. About 1902 it moved south to the railroad, where Eldridge was reborn as the town of Alanreed.

Belton, TX

Ele Bright Baggett and his wife Mary Carolyn began this ornate Queen Anne house in 1892, its gable sunbursts and fish-scale shingles announcing the prosperity of a Bell County cattle family. Ele, his brother, and their father had come home from the Civil War to drive great herds north to the railheads of Kansas and Montana, and Ele parlayed the profits into land, cotton gins, and banking. His father Silas had been among Belton's founders, and the family home stood just across the street.

New York, NY

From 1933 to 1942, Eleanor Roosevelt kept a residence at 20 East 11th Street in Greenwich Village during the years her husband occupied the White House. It offered her a foothold in New York even as she remade the role of First Lady into one of activism and public advocacy. The plaque marks the address as one of her city homes.

Clifton, TX

When newly organized Bosque County held its first election in August 1854, most of the ballots — 17 of the 21 cast in the whole county — were polled beneath this oak tree. Neighbors gathered here to choose their first judge, sheriff, clerk, and other officials, an intimate picture of democracy on a thinly settled frontier. In later years the spot, known as Pool Park, hosted the reunions of the county's Old Settlers Association.

Electra, TX

When it went up in 1908, this was the first brick building in the oil-boom town of Electra, and it housed a succession of banks as the community grew. From the Waggoner Bank through the First State Bank to the Electra State Bank, it anchored Main Street commerce for decades. A 1952 remodel kept the original foundations and walls intact.

Asheville, NC

On February 1, 1889, Asheville opened North Carolina's first electric trolley system, an early adopter of a technology then transforming American cities. The line served the train depot a quarter mile southeast and helped knit the growing resort town together while boosting its tourist trade. Electric streetcars would shape Asheville's development for decades.

Palo Alto, CA

On this Palo Alto site stood the Federal Telegraph Company, founded in 1909 by Cyril F. Elwell, where the young inventor Lee de Forest and a couple of assistants advanced his three-element vacuum tube—the audion—into a practical amplifier and oscillator. That breakthrough made long-distance radio and, eventually, all of electronics possible, and the work done here rippled out worldwide. It is one of the true seedbeds of the electronic age.

Cat Spring, TX

Born in Kentucky in 1805, Elemelech Swearingen brought his family to Texas in 1831 and, when another applicant withdrew, became one of the very last additions to Stephen F. Austin's celebrated 'Old 300' colonists. He farmed near what became Millheim in Austin County, served as its first postmaster, and during the Texas Revolution fought as a second sergeant under Captain Amasa Turner before joining the ill-fated Mier Expedition. He and his wife Angelina raised nine children on the land where they are buried.

Saint Joseph, MI

In 1897, the aging veterans of the A.W. Chapman Post of the Grand Army of the Republic dedicated this eleven-inch Dahlgren gun and its grounds to comrades who had fought to preserve the Union. The GAR was the great fraternal organization of Union veterans, and across the North its posts planted such memorials so that later generations would not forget the Civil War's cost. The massive naval-pattern cannon stands as their tribute.

Sherman, TX

Organized at Camp Reeves near Sherman in May 1861, this frontier regiment drew nearly 900 men from across northeast Texas and first fought in Indian Territory to secure it for the Confederacy. Mustered in as the 11th Texas Cavalry, it saw hard service from Pea Ridge and Murfreesboro to Chickamauga, the Atlanta Campaign, and finally Bentonville. Across more than a hundred engagements, a handful of its troopers were still in the field at the war's end in North Carolina.

Reserve, NM

This monument honors Elfego Baca (1865-1945), the legendary lawman, gunfighter, and later attorney whose defiant stand in 1884 near Frisco, New Mexico became one of the great tales of the territorial Southwest. His quoted boast captures the swagger of a Hispano New Mexican who refused to be pushed around by Anglo cowboys in a tense frontier of shifting power. Baca went on to a long public career as sheriff, lawyer, and politician.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2016

Elfreth's Alley is one of the oldest continuously inhabited residential streets in America, its brick rowhouses raised between the 1720s and 1830s. Its first residents were the tradespeople of a growing colonial port—blacksmiths, cabinetmakers, and other artisans—followed in later years by working-class immigrants who labored in nearby industries. When demolition threatened in 1934, the alley's own residents banded together to save it.

Elgin, TX

Elgin was founded in 1871 when residents of the nearby pioneer settlement of Hogeye relocated to the newly completed Houston & Texas Central Railroad, naming their town for surveyor R.M. Elgin. Known as the "Brick Capital of the Southwest," the town was making handpressed brick as early as 1882 and became a noted agricultural center.

Elgin, TX

Organized in 1888 with the help of the Rev. B. B. Sanders, this Christian (Disciples of Christ) congregation drew its early membership from Elgin and the farming communities around it, worshipping in the local Presbyterian church until it raised its own sanctuary in 1892. The building and its replacement were both leveled by the devastating Gulf storms of 1900 and 1915, yet the congregation rebuilt each time, erecting a lasting home in 1916 and a modern one in 1965. More than a century of worship in a Central Texas railroad town is written into that cycle of loss and renewal.

Elgin, TX

Chartered in 1870 as Perryville Lodge No. 328 in the nearby community of Perryville (or Hogeye), this Masonic lodge moved to Elgin in 1877 and took the town's name in 1901. Its first two halls did double duty as public schoolrooms, a common arrangement in frontier Texas where fraternal orders often provided the earliest space for education. The absorption of neighboring McDade Lodge in 1934 reflects the shifting fortunes of small rural communities.

Elgin, TX

When this congregation organized in 1874, Elgin was a young railroad town on the central Texas prairie, and these Methodists were the first to gather a church there. A modest frame sanctuary of 1882 gave way in 1906 to the Gothic Revival building that still stands, its stairstep gable corbelling, corner pinnacles, and memorial art-glass windows the work of local contractor J. C. Miller. It is a fine example of how growing Texas towns expressed both faith and permanence in brick and colored glass.

Elgin, IL

This marker commemorates the Elgin Windmill Company, which manufactured windmills in Elgin, Illinois, from 1882 until 1948. Steel and wooden windmills were essential technology across the settling American plains and farms, pumping water for livestock, homes, and railroads, and Elgin was one of many Midwestern towns that built an industry around them. The firm's long run tracks the rise and eventual decline of the farm-windmill business as rural electrification spread.

Pharr, TX

In 1857 Nathaniel Jackson, a white former slaveholder from Alabama, settled a vast ranch in the Rio Grande valley alongside his Black wife Matilda Hicks, their children, and the people he had freed. On thousands of acres the interracial Jackson family raised crops and livestock and offered lodging to travelers in need — including runaway slaves who sought freedom near the Mexican border. The Eli Jackson Cemetery, passed to a son and tended by descendants into the 1990s, remains the family's enduring imprint on the land.

Gonzales, TX

Eli Mitchell was among the Anglo-American colonists drawn into the Texas independence movement in the 1830s, serving as a delegate to the 1833 Convention that pressed Mexico for reform. When fighting erupted at Gonzales in 1835 — the "come and take it" opening clash of the Texas Revolution — he took up arms and supplied the fledgling Texian army.

Houston, TX

Eli Noland served in Captain William S. Fisher's company at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 clash that won Texas its independence from Mexico. Born in Ohio in 1804, he died in Houston in 1841, in the early years of the Republic he had helped create.

Kelly Township, PA · est. 1968

Eli Slifer (1818–1888) lived in this house during the crisis years of the Civil War, serving as Pennsylvania's Secretary of the Commonwealth. As a close aide to the state's wartime governor, Andrew Curtin, he helped organize the enormous task of raising troops and marshaling supplies for the Union effort. A veteran state legislator and treasurer, he was one of the administrative hands behind Pennsylvania's war machine.

N. Richland Hills, TX

As Anglo settlers pushed into North Texas in the mid-1800s, small farming communities grew up around whatever church, school, or gin a generous neighbor could provide. Eli Smith, a Missouri native who came to Tarrant County in 1859, donated part of his farm about 1876 for a Methodist church and cemetery in the settlement then called Zion. Grateful residents renamed the place Smithfield in his honor, though Smith died suddenly just shy of his thirty-first birthday and lies buried here.

San Marcos, TX

Dr. Eli T. Merriman, a Yale graduate who came to Texas in 1838, built this hand-hewn timber house about 1846 as one of the three original owners of the San Marcos townsite and the area's first physician. He later lived along the coast at Brownsville, Banquete, and Corpus Christi, where his son founded the Corpus Christi "Caller." During the Civil War the family was famously divided, with Merriman and two sons serving the Confederacy while another son fought for the Union.

Corpus Christi, TX

Eli Todd Merriman came to Corpus Christi with his family in 1865 and, at eighteen, took up typesetting for the weekly Nueces Valley. In 1876 he co-founded the Corpus Christi Free Press, and after buying out his partner he built the paper that, sold and renamed in 1883, became the Corpus Christi Caller, today's Caller-Times. Known as the "Dean of Texas Newspaper Men," he later championed a deep-water port and the preservation of the old Bayview Cemetery, where he was buried in 1941.

San Antonio, TX

In 1877, former Confederate officer and Virginia legislator Elias Edmonds and his wife Lucy built one of the first houses in San Antonio's new King William neighborhood. Elias practiced law while Lucy ran a "high school for young ladies" on the grounds of their home. The handsome two-story limestone house later passed through prominent physicians and realtors, with one family living here for more than four decades.

Nacogdoches, TX

A Georgia native who came west to Texas, Elias E. Hamilton took up arms in the Texas Revolution, fighting in the 1835 storming of Bexar and the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. He died young, in 1840, in the East Texas community of Douglass. His marker was raised by the State of Texas in 1936 for the centennial of independence.

Corpus Christi, TX

Elihu Harrison Ropes, a New Jersey publisher and realtor, arrived in Texas in the late 1880s with grand plans to build a deepwater port that would transform Corpus Christi into an industrial city. Backed by Eastern investors, he began dredging a channel through Mustang Island and envisioned a railroad and a cliffside resort along today's Ocean Drive. The Panic of 1893 wiped out his funding, and his projects—including the never-opened Alta Vista hotel—collapsed, sending him back to New York, where he died in 1898.

New Waverly, TX

Born in Virginia in 1778, Elijah Collard lived the westering life of his generation, settling successively on the Kentucky and Missouri frontiers and fighting in the War of 1812 before migrating to Texas in 1833. He threw in with the Texas independence movement, winning election to the 1835 Consultation at San Felipe and serving on the General Council, then helped organize Montgomery County as one of its first commissioners in 1837. He moved to Walker County in 1840 and died there in 1847, leaving a large family with his wife Mary.

Brookville, PA · est. 2005

In 1835, decades before the Civil War, Brookville judge Elijah Heath joined others in freeing two men, Charles Brown and William Parker, from those who would return them to slavery. A Virginia slaveholder sued him and he was fined, yet Heath kept working the Underground Railroad through western Pennsylvania. His willingness to defy the law and pay the price marks the moral courage that antislavery convictions could demand.

Charco, TX

Alabama native Elijah Ray first came to Texas in 1847 and, during the Civil War, purchased this property and built a home for his family. Like many early Texas dwellings, it featured a central hallway and a two-story porch trimmed with decorative brackets. His son George later took over the homestead and, beyond ranching, became a noted oilman and banker — a family arc that tracks the region's shift from open-range stock raising to a diversified economy.

Edna, TX

Elijah Stapp, born in Virginia in 1783, put his name to the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, joining the founders who severed the young colony from Mexico. He lived out his final years in Jackson County, where he died in 1843. Though the marker records only the barest outline of his life, it fixes his place among the signers of a new nation.

Seguin, TX

This marker honors Elijah Valentine Dale, a veteran of the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto—the decisive fight in which Texian forces under Sam Houston secured independence from Mexico in a stunning eighteen-minute rout. Born in Georgia in 1807, Dale was among the settlers who tied their fortunes to the young Republic of Texas, and he lived on into the 1890s in Seguin alongside his Ohio-born wife, Jane. Their shared gravestone quietly binds a family's story to the founding of a nation-state.

Austin, TX

Elisabet Ney was already a celebrated sculptor of German royalty and European statesmen before she ever saw Texas. Born in Westphalia in 1833, trained at the Munich academy, and married to the Scottish-born philosopher Dr. Edmund Montgomery, she settled in Texas in 1872, drawn by its vastness and love of freedom. In 1892 she built this studio, "Formosa," where she carved the statues of Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston that now stand in the State Capitol, along with the recumbent figure over Albert Sidney Johnston's grave.

Hamilton, TX

Elise Waerenskjold left Norway for Texas and spent half a century writing home about the opportunities of her adopted land. Her letters and articles drew waves of Norwegian settlers, and her home stood open to the newcomers she inspired. Known as the Lady with the Pen, she and her husband raised three sons and left many descendants.

Hamilton, TX

Born Elise Tvede in Norway in 1815, Waerenskjold became an influential promoter of Norwegian emigration to Texas. After John Reiersen founded the first Norwegian settlement in the state, she edited his periodical on Norway and Texas, and her articles inspired many to follow. She moved to Texas herself in 1847, settling in Van Zandt and Hamilton counties, where she and her husband welcomed newcomers and preserved their people's history.

Euless, TX

Elisha Adam Euless left Tennessee for Tarrant County in 1867 and became one of the men whose enterprise shaped its rural map. A successful cotton-and-corn farmer and elected constable and later sheriff, he bought land around a two-story grange hall whose lower floor served as school and church, and later acquired a tract with a cotton gin. The community that grew up around the gin and grange took his name, and a post office opened as Euless in 1886.

Bartlett, TX

A Louisiana native who came to the Texas coast as a boy, Elisha Allen joined the revolutionary army and fought at the Siege of Bexar in December 1835. He later explored the frontier with a survey party, raised a family of eight, and helped build a church and schoolhouse in Bell County—a pioneer whose life spanned Texas's transformation from Mexican province to settled statehood.

Crockett, TX

The son of an American Revolution veteran, Tennessee-born Elisha Clapp came to Texas in 1822 and served in a cavalry company at the Battle of San Jacinto during the Texas Revolution. He captained mounted rangers on the frontier and, in 1837, was among the petitioners who organized Houston County, later receiving a captain's commission from President Sam Houston. He also helped found and served as an early trustee of Trinity College in the Alabama community before moving on to Leon County, where he died in 1851.

Winona, TX

Elisha Everett Lott came to Harrison County in 1840 and was elected to the Congress of the Republic of Texas in 1842, working to open East Texas to settlement. After moving to the area in 1845, he helped organize Smith County in 1846 and choose Tyler as its seat, promoted steamboat navigation on the Sabine River, and won a state senate seat in 1853. A Confederate veteran, he died at his Starrville home in 1864.

Lincoln, MA

This marker honors the colonial-era homestead where the Garfield family — ancestors of James A. Garfield, the twentieth president of the United States — settled around 1758. The waters of what is now Stony Brook offered power that turned local saw and grist mills, the kind of small waterside industry that anchored early New England towns. It links a president's lineage to the everyday economic life of a Massachusetts settlement.

Maysville, KY

Born into slavery in Bourbon County and raised at the "Glen Alice" farm near Maysville, Elisha Green purchased freedom for himself and part of his family and became an influential Baptist minister. He helped organize African American Baptist churches in Maysville and Paris and, believing freedpeople needed land, joined a white landowner to found a Black community near Paris. Politically active, he was chosen a vice president of the Kentucky Negro Republican Party at an 1867 Lexington convention and remained a force in Baptist life until his death in 1889.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2016

Born in Philadelphia in 1820, Elisha Kent Kane became one of America's first celebrity explorers, venturing into the frozen Arctic in the 1850s in search of a lost British expedition. His vivid published accounts shaped how scientists and everyday readers imagined the polar world, and the route he charted later guided Robert Peary toward the North Pole. So beloved was Kane that when he died young, his body traveled in a two-week funeral procession across the country before its burial here.

Hanover Township, PA · est. 1947

Elisha McCurdy was a leading Presbyterian revivalist of the frontier, serving this congregation for forty-six years and lying buried where he preached. In November 1802 he helped lead the great camp-meeting revivals at Cross Roads and Upper Buffalo, drawing thousands from far and near. These gatherings were part of the sweeping religious awakening that swept the western settlements in the early republic.

Palm Beach, FL

Elisha Newton Dimick (1849–1919) was among the earliest settlers of the Lake Worth region that became Palm Beach, arriving when southeast Florida was still a remote frontier. Remembered here as legislator, developer, and friend, he helped turn a wilderness shoreline into one of the nation's celebrated resort communities. The memorial honors a pioneer whose public service shaped the town's early growth.

Waco, TX

The first Elite cafe opened in downtown Waco in 1919 and was taken over by the Greek immigrant Colias family a year later. In 1941 the Colias brothers built this location on "The Circle," a traffic hub laid out on Waco's growing suburban edge, in an eye-catching Spanish Colonial style. It survives as one of the region's best examples of mid-20th-century roadside architecture.

Round Mountain, TX

Born in Virginia in 1830, Elitha Smith Martin came to Texas in 1856 and, widowed in 1869, moved to Round Mountain with her younger children and built a two-story hotel, a livery stable, and a general mercantile store. Appointed postmaster in 1879, she kept the post office in her store and served in that role for nearly seventeen years.

Richmond, NH

This monument in the hills of Cheshire County marks the birthplace of Eliza Ballou, born here in 1801, who would become the mother of James A. Garfield, the 20th President of the United States. Widowed young, Eliza raised her children in frontier poverty on an Ohio farm, and her son's rise from a log cabin to the White House became one of the era's celebrated 'self-made man' stories. When Garfield was sworn in as president in 1881, Eliza became the first mother to witness her son's presidential inauguration. Small New England towns like Richmond often took quiet pride in the native sons and daughters whose lives reached far beyond their borders.

San Marcos, TX

Eliza Pitts came to Texas from Georgia as a girl in 1842, married James Lafayette Malone in 1850, and raised sixteen children while helping build the life of early San Marcos as a charter member of its First Methodist Church. When the Civil War took the men away, she ran the family's thousand-acre farm and sewed for Confederate soldiers; decades later, in her eighties, she knitted socks for American troops in World War I. Widowed, she and her daughter built this home in 1909.

Elizabeth, WV

This West Virginia town traces its beginnings to 1796, when William Beauchamp settled here in the years just after the Revolution and named the place for the wife of David Beauchamp. But the ground held older significance: in 1752, the frontier scout Christopher Gist passed through on behalf of the Ohio Company, a land venture that dreamed of planting British colonies across the trans-Allegheny west. That dream collided with French claims on the same territory, and the resulting French and Indian War froze the company's plans before they could take root.

Elizabeth, PA · est. 1946

In the early republic, the town of Elizabeth on the Monongahela became a busy cradle of boatbuilding for America's western rivers. At the yards of John and Samuel Walker, shipwrights turned out vessels sturdy enough for long voyages — one launched here in 1793 made its way down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans and on to Philadelphia. These river craft carried settlers and goods into the opening trans-Appalachian frontier.

New York, NY

This chapel stands on the site of the home where Elizabeth Ann Seton lived with her family from 1801 to 1803 and where her daughter Rebecca was born. A wife, mother, and educator, Seton went on to found the Sisters of Charity, the first American congregation of religious sisters. In 1975 she was canonized as the first native-born citizen of the United States to be declared a saint.

Fort Worth, TX

As Fort Worth's oil wealth swelled in the early 1900s, developers laid out fashionable residential districts for its new elite. Elizabeth Boulevard, named for the wife of developer John C. Ryan, was the showpiece first phase of Ryan Place, opened with elaborate entry gates and its first house in 1911. Building peaked in 1920 before the decade's downturn slowed it, and the street's grand homes, in a mix of period revival styles, housed many of the city's leading oilmen and businessmen.

Roanoke, TX

Settled in the early 1860s, the town of Elizabeth grew into a trade center with stores, churches, a school, and a Masonic lodge. Tradition holds that William Perry Harmonson donated the acre-and-a-half graveyard in 1867 upon his mother Anna's death. When the Texas and Pacific Railroad bypassed the town in 1881 it began to fade, and today the cemetery — enlarged in 1949 and holding nearly 400 graves — is all that survives of the once-thriving village.

Caldwell, TX

The first Methodist congregation in Burleson County began as a Sunday school in the home of early settler Isaac Addison and later met at the home of Mrs. Elizabeth Scott. Organized around 1839 by the pioneer minister Robert Alexander, it soon raised a small hand-hewn frame building named for Mrs. Scott, whose son Phillip deeded the church and cemetery land in 1878. Membership peaked at 165 in 1885 before the congregation merged with the Cooks Point church around 1907.

Elizabeth City, NC

Elizabeth City State University began in 1891 as a state-supported normal school to train Black teachers, part of the wave of institutions founded across the South after Reconstruction to educate a rising generation of African Americans. It grew into a four-year college by 1939 and attained university status in 1969, tracing the long arc from segregated teacher-training school to full public university.

Acton, TX

This stone marks the grave of Elizabeth Crockett, second wife of frontier legend David Crockett, who died at the Alamo in 1836. Widowed by his sacrifice, she came to Texas years later to claim the land granted for his service, settling near Acton where she lived out her days. Her simple gravestone, at what is said to be the smallest state historic site in Texas, honors a pioneer woman who followed her husband's legacy to the frontier.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2019

In a Philadelphia rowhouse, the Quaker matron Elizabeth Drinker kept a diary for nearly half a century, from 1758 until her death in 1807. Her entries are one of early America's richest personal records — she watched the British march into the city during the Revolution's 1777 occupation and set down the texture of ordinary life amid founding-era upheaval. As a woman of means, faith, and unusual persistence, she chronicled a world that official histories rarely captured.

Hillsborough, NC

Elizabeth Keckly was born into slavery around 1820 and, as a young woman, lived among the Burwell family in Hillsborough. A gifted seamstress, she eventually bought her own freedom in 1855 and rose to become a celebrated Washington dressmaker and confidante to First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. Her 1868 memoir gave a rare, unflinching view from inside the Lincoln White House.

Newburyport, MA

A decade before the more famous Salem hysteria, Elizabeth Morse of Newbury was accused of witchcraft, tried, convicted, and imprisoned between 1679 and 1681 before winning a reprieve. Rather than hang, she was confined to her husband William Morse's small house lot beside Market Square, where she lived out her days under a shadow of suspicion. Her case is a stark reminder that witchcraft panic haunted Puritan New England well before 1692.