Search Markers

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, who lived at this site, rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most acclaimed concert singers of the 19th century. Dubbed the "Black Swan" for her extraordinary vocal range, she won praise across the United States and in England, where she performed before Queen Victoria. She broke barriers as a Black woman commanding the concert stage in an era of deep racial prejudice.

Elizabethton, TN

In the mountains of East Tennessee, this memorial honors the men and women of Elizabethton and Carter County who served in the nation's wars. The county's military tradition runs deep — frontier riflemen mustered nearby at Sycamore Shoals during the Revolution before their march to Kings Mountain. The memorial gathers that long record of service into a single place of remembrance.

Axtell, TX

Martin and Elizabeth Harper arrived from Tennessee with their five children in 1855, joined by other Scots-Irish families from the American South, and built a cabin, a schoolhouse, and a farm that gave the settlement its first name, Harper's School House. Czech and German immigrants began arriving around 1885, opening a cotton gin and reshaping the community, which took the name Elk when its post office was established in 1894. Over the years Elk boasted stores, a blacksmith, a gristmill, and fraternal lodges, and St. Joseph's Catholic Church, founded in 1925, still stands at the heart of this Czech and German farming community.

Ridgway, PA · est. 1982

Created in 1843 from parts of McKean, Clearfield, and Jefferson counties, Elk County was named for the great herds that once ranged its densely wooded hills. Its seat, Ridgway, dates to a settlement begun in 1824 in this rugged corner of the Pennsylvania Wilds. In 1920 the county became home to the first State Game Lands in Pennsylvania, an early milestone in American wildlife conservation.

Elk Rapids, MI

The brick ruin beside this marker is the surviving hearth of the Elk Rapids furnace. During the 1870s this northern Michigan works ranked among the nation's greatest producers of charcoal iron, smelting ore with charcoal drawn from the region's vast hardwood forests.

Elkhart, TX

Shaded by oak, pine, and crepe myrtle, this Elkhart burial ground took its first grave in 1887 but was not formally established until the Fuller family donated two acres in 1906. Among those resting here is E.V. Douthit — Civil War veteran, town postmaster, and co-owner of Elkhart's first store — alongside veterans of every American conflict from the Civil War to Desert Storm. A cemetery association organized in 1962 has cared for the grounds ever since.

Elkhart, TX

Myrtle Springs Cemetery is the last visible trace of an early Anderson County farming community that grew up around a church, a school, and the myrtle-fringed springs that gave it its name. The land traces to John A. Box, an original settler of David G. Burnet's colony who received his grant from the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas in 1835. Deeded to a cemetery association in 1927, its graves — the oldest dated 1903 — hold generations of the county's settlers, veterans, and community leaders.

Brownwood vicinity, TX

This burial ground began in 1876, the year pioneer minister Noah T. Byars helped found Live Oak Baptist Church and Civil War veteran Silas H. Wood settled his family here from Mississippi. Wood deeded the graveyard to the church in 1884, and it grew alongside a community known first as Gholson and later Elkins. Interments paused during World War II when Camp Bowie displaced the town, then resumed after the camp closed in 1947.

Elko, NV

Elko was born of the railroad at the very end of 1868, when Central Pacific crews staked out lots that filled almost overnight, and within two years thousands of people made it a bustling freight and passenger gateway to the mining country north and south. It even hosted the University of Nevada from 1874 until the school moved to Reno in 1885. By the 1870s Elko had become the marketing heart of northeastern Nevada's vast rangelands, home to cattle barons and governors alike, and it remains the region's economic hub and host of the celebrated Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

Elko, NV

On an April morning in 1926, Varney Air Lines pilot Leon Cuddeback set his little Curtiss Swallow biplane down at Elko with a single sack of mail, completing the first scheduled airmail flight in the United States. The ninety-horsepower plane had lifted off from Pasco, Washington, refueled at Boise, and covered some 460 miles to reach Nevada under a fresh federal contract. Varney's modest venture proved the commercial promise of flying the mail; the company was later sold to Boeing and folded into United Airlines.

Marshall, TX

Designed by prominent East Texas architect Cornelius Granville Lancaster, the 1903 Elks Building was conceived as a showpiece of Marshall's downtown shopping district. It served as headquarters for Elks Lodge 683, which had organized in 1901 at Newman Hall, and hosted the lodge's meetings and events until 1953. The building remains a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Berkeley, CA

Designed by architect Walter H. Ratcliff, Jr. and completed in 1913, this Classical Revival and Beaux-Arts building housed Berkeley's Elks lodge, chartered in 1905 just in time to aid those displaced by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The fraternal order later assisted wartime survivors and needy children. Sold to a church group in the 1990s, the building was acquired in 2008 by the Tibetan Nyingma Meditation Center.

Del Rio, TX

In 1916 the local chapter of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks raised this meeting hall to plans by builder Martin Brauer, replacing an earlier structure on the site. Its Prairie Style influence shows in the low hipped roof, overhanging eaves with exposed rafters, paired French doors, and a balcony on brick piers. For decades the hall hosted lodge meetings, dances, and community gatherings until the Elks built a new home in the 1980s.

Littleton, NC

Ella Baker spent decades as a strategist behind the civil rights movement, and in April 1960 she helped young activists found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Shaw University in Raleigh. Preferring grassroots, participatory leadership to charismatic figureheads, she mentored a generation of organizers. Her childhood home stands a quarter mile east of this marker.

Chicago, IL

Labagh Woods honors Ella Labagh, remembered as a pioneer in establishing the forest preserves around Chicago. In the early 20th century, Cook County built one of the nation's first large forest preserve systems, and advocates like Labagh helped set aside green space amid rapid urban growth.

Fredericksburg, TX

Frederick Ellebracht brought his family from Germany to Texas in 1845, joining the wave of German immigrants settling the central Texas Hill Country, and in the early 1850s they built a home of one large log room with a loft. The house stayed in the family until 1891, when stonemason Joseph Moritz bought it and added two rough limestone rooms before 1907, layering German building traditions onto the original cabin.

New York, NY

From 1919 to 1946, Ellen Biddle Shipman lived and worked at 21 Beekman Place, running one of the most sought-after landscape design practices in the country. Celebrated in her lifetime as the 'dean of women landscape architects,' she shaped gardens for elite clients while championing women in her profession. Her studio here produced designs that carried her reputation nationwide.

Bryson City, NC

Ellen Black Winston built a career reshaping how America cared for its most vulnerable. From 1944 to 1963 she led North Carolina's Board of Public Welfare, then broke new ground as the first Commissioner of Welfare for the United States, a federal post created in the era of expanding social programs. A trained social worker, she brought professional rigor to public assistance at the national level.

Canadian, TX

Also known as Prairie Dell Cemetery, this burial ground has served eastern Hemphill County since 1895, when the infant Dora Calhoun was laid to rest on land donated by George W. Little. Later owners continued to allow the community to use the grounds until the Eller Flat Cemetery Association bought the property in 1912. A nearby schoolhouse, built in 1917, tied the cemetery to the everyday life of the Prairie Dell settlement.

Jones Creek, TX

John Greenville McNeel came to Texas in 1822 as part of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred," and near this site rose Ellerslie, one of the region's largest sugar plantations. Its 21-room brick mansion, immense sugar mill, hospital, and slave cabins were built with bricks made by enslaved people, whose forced labor powered the whole enterprise. After McNeel's 1876 death the property passed to relatives, and fire, storm, and time erased the buildings one by one, the last lost in 1983.

Baltimore County, MD

In 1772 three Quaker brothers from Bucks County, Pennsylvania — the Ellicotts — settled this steep granite valley on the Patapsco River and built flour mills that helped transform the surrounding farmland from tobacco to wheat. To move their flour to market they cut a road down to Baltimore, knitting the young port to its hinterland. Nearly six decades later, on May 20, 1830, the pioneering Baltimore & Ohio Railroad reached this very spot, making the milling town one of the first railroad destinations in the nation.

Houston, TX

Ellington Field opened in November 1917 after the Houston Chamber of Commerce lobbied for a World War I air base, named for a young Army aviator killed in a 1913 crash. Nearly abandoned by the 1930s, it roared back to life in World War II as a major pilot, navigator, and bombardier training center — so busy that one in ten Army pilots trained here in the war's first two years. Through the Cold War it remained an active Air Force base for navigator training, and today its grounds are shared by the National Guard, NASA, the Coast Guard, and a city airport.

Van Alstyne, TX

David Elliott, born in Tennessee in 1817, went to sea young on the Mississippi and rose to riverboat captain before his ordination as a Baptist minister. In 1847 he settled in southern Grayson County, where he found unmarked pioneer graves in sandstone foreign to the area; when his daughter Virginia died in 1855 he buried her nearby, and the plot grew into a public cemetery. Maintained for decades by Pilgrim's Rest Baptist Church, which Elliott helped organize, it holds early teachers, longtime residents, and military veterans.

Rankin, TX

George Elliott pushed onto the wide-open West Texas range in 1880, building near the old Butterfield Stage Road and hauling water fifty miles from the head of the Concho. His ranch house served as the first polling place of the county that formed in 1887 and later anchored the vast Halff-brothers 'Quien Sabe' and Circle Dot cattle operations. As Upton County organized, it did double duty as a mail station, salt house, and cowboy bunkhouse.

Bay City, TX

Before highways bridged the lower Colorado River, Texans relied on flat-bottomed ferries to cross its wide, muddy channel, and Elliott's Ferry was one such crossing in the coastal-prairie country of Matagorda County. In an era when rivers were both lifelines and barriers, a licensed ferry keeper connected farms, cattle drives, and travelers moving toward the Gulf. Bay City grew up around this stretch of the river as settlement thickened through the nineteenth century.

Houston, TX

Vermont-born Ellis Benson fought in the Black Hawk War before Captain Amasa Turner recruited him in New Orleans for the Texas Army in 1835. Arriving in early 1836, he marched with Sam Houston's army and helped work one of the 'Twin Sisters' cannons that proved decisive at the Battle of San Jacinto. He kept soldiering afterward — wounded on the south Texas frontier in 1839 — before settling in Houston as a carpenter and local officeholder.

Red Oak, TX

Ellis County was created in December 1849 from Navarro County and organized the following August, with Waxahachie as its seat. It honors Richard Ellis (1781–1846), a Virginia-born jurist and Alabama statesman who came to Texas in 1825 and presided over the 1836 Constitutional Convention that declared Texas independence, later serving in the Congress of the Republic. The county's founding reflects the rapid organization of Texas government in the years just after statehood.

Waxahachie, TX

Rising from Texas granite, limestone, and marble between 1895 and 1897, the Ellis County Courthouse is a soaring example of Romanesque Revival design by noted architect J. Riely Gordon. Local legend holds that a sculptor carved the face of a beautiful local woman he admired above the east door — a romantic flourish on one of the era's grandest civic buildings.

Waxahachie, TX

Ellis County went through three modest courthouses — cedar logs in 1850, then buildings in 1853 and 1874 — before commissioning San Antonio architect James Riely Gordon to design this fourth one in 1894. Its cornerstone laid on July 4, 1895, the courthouse was built of Central Texas granite and Pecos River red sandstone, with entrances oriented to the true compass points and faces carved by European stonemasons. Gordon's Richardsonian Romanesque masterpiece set a new standard for public buildings across Texas.

Waxahachie, TX

Sometimes called the Pauper Cemetery, this fenced plot was one of perhaps three burial grounds on old Ellis County farm land set aside for the poor. Officials bought some 450 acres between 1893 and 1895 to create a county farm for the support and employment of the needy. The earliest recorded death there was Albert Estes in 1890 and the last Dave Madison in 1946; iron pipes once marked the graves of the 73 individuals named in county records.

Waxahachie, TX

Built in 1925-26 on land deeded by Quincy Davis Getzendaner, the Ellis County Woman's Building answered a very practical need: a place where rural women who came to town on market days could rest. Funded by the city, county, and local women's clubs, the Tudor Revival building included an auditorium called Davis Hall and stood as a memorial to Mrs. Getzendaner's parents. It gave women a public space of their own in the courthouse town of Waxahachie.

Texarkana, TX

Built in 1893 for realtor and loan agent Gaither Booker Ellis and his wife Mary, this two-story Victorian rose in a Texarkana still riding the growth of a young railroad city. Local builder Charles R. Korn gave it an asymmetrical plan, a tower later removed in the 1920s, and porches trimmed with jigsawn brackets on both stories. It survives as a designed expression of Gilded Age domestic taste.

New York, NY · est. 1965

In the great hall, arrivals were inspected, questioned, and — for nearly all — admitted to begin new lives. Ellis Island became the symbol of America as a nation of immigrants.

Alto, TX

Peter Ellis Bean led one of the most improbable lives on the early Southwestern frontier. Arriving with Philip Nolan's mustang hunters in 1800, he was captured by Spanish troops, imprisoned in Mexico, then freed to fight—first for royalists, then for the Mexican rebels under Morelos. He even joined Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans before returning to Mexico, later serving as an Indian agent in Texas and settling near this site.

Gorman vicinity, TX

James Madison Ellison built the first cabin in this part of Eastland County in 1858 and was permanently disabled defending frontier homes in a militia company against Indian raids. He opened this graveyard after his mother—a Georgia-born midwife—died in 1876, and though meant for family, it always welcomed neighbors and strangers, including an unknown child from a westering family who died on his land. Twenty-six graves rest here, and after prospering in the county's 1918 oil boom and moving south, Ellison too was brought back to lie among them.

Gorman vicinity, TX

These springs were used for centuries by Indigenous people before James Madison Ellison built the first cabin nearby in 1858. During the Civil War, frontiersmen formed militia companies for defense, and on August 9, 1864, a dozen scouts were attacked here and took refuge in Ellison's cabin—Captain Singleton Gilbert and "Button" Keith were killed and Ellison was disabled for life. Once the raids ceased, the springs became a gathering place for picnics, camp meetings, and a Baptist church, a social hub for the scattered settlers.

Palm Beach County, FL

This plaque honors Ellison Wilson and Donald Ross among the 'honored sons of Palm Beach County,' local figures from the pioneering decades when this stretch of southeast Florida was still being carved out of frontier. Their names endure on the roads and landmarks of the county they helped build in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The marker gathers their memory as part of the community's founding story.

Port Arthur, TX

Built in 1900 as a winter home for Isaac L. Ellwood, a principal developer of barbed wire, this classic-revival villa was designed by Chicago architects Nimmons and Fellows with a raised Roman Doric portico. Its nickname, the Pompeiian Villa, came from a planned but never-executed series of Bacchanalian frescoes evoking ancient Pompeii. Port Arthur pioneer G. M. Craig made it his home from 1903 to 1950.

Bardwell, TX

The vanished community of Elm Branch once centered on a school, a Methodist church founded in 1886, and this cemetery, serving the scattered farm families of the area. Its earliest documented burial dates to 1877, and its graves hold veterans spanning from the Civil War to the Vietnam War. Though the church moved to nearby Bardwell in 1909, the cemetery remains active as a link to Ellis County's early settlers.

Granbury, TX

This cemetery began in November 1877 when Thomas and Elizabeth Wells buried two young sons near their family cabin, and it soon served the whole rural community of Elm Flat. Among those laid to rest here is Lucinda Wells, a freed slave who stayed with the family after emancipation and was buried in 1889. Before leaving the area, Elizabeth Wells deeded the land to the county, and the graveyard remains active today.

Denton, TX

Built in 1922 by the Denton Construction Company, the Elm Fork Bridge crossed the Trinity River's Elm Fork to serve the surging automobile traffic of the 1920s. At 250 feet it was then the county's longest bridge, its main span a 100-foot Pratt through-truss flanked by Warren pony-truss approaches — and, unlike the one-lane iron bridges before it, engineered for two-way traffic. It carried the Sherman Highway until 1990 and now serves walkers as part of the Ray Roberts Lake State Park Greenbelt.

Belton, TX

Elm Grove Baptist Church traces its roots to a 1911 revival held at the Elm Grove School near Belton, a building that had hosted several congregations for some twenty years. When the school closed in 1915 the Baptists kept meeting there until 1999, sustaining a ministry marked from the start by outreach — collecting clothing and toys for needy children and supporting a local food pantry and clinic. The congregation has also long served as a training ground for ministerial students.

Mabank, TX

Community leader Anthony Hyde first set aside this land in 1881 for a school and church, but grief redirected its purpose when his own grandchild was buried here in 1883. Hyde added more acreage in 1886, and by 1895 a committee and caretaker were tending the grounds. As the burial place of pioneer families from the Elm Grove and Roddy settlements, the cemetery became a quiet record of the people who built these rural communities.

Westminster, TX

The Roland family, natives of Alabama, settled here in the 1830s on land granted by the Republic of Texas in recognition of John Roland's military service, cut short when he was killed in the Texas Revolution. His brother Ezekial, himself a veteran of the revolution, set aside this parcel as a public cemetery, and its first burial was his own in 1859 at age 35. The graveyard also served the Seven Points community, later renamed Westminster, home to an early Methodist school and a later Baptist academy, and it still holds well over a thousand graves.

Ponta, TX

Elm Grove was a Freedmen's community — settled by formerly enslaved people after emancipation — and by 1884 it had a place in the Cherokee County school system. Classes first met in a local church and in homes until the 1890s, when residents built a one-room schoolhouse on land donated by R.B. and Caroline Wood, raising it with their own donated materials. A 1917 merger swelled enrollment and the interior was divided into three rooms, until the school closed and consolidated with Rusk in 1957.

Mabank, TX

This East Texas congregation traces its roots to a log building raised in 1875 on settler Anthony Gray Hyde's land, where church, school, and community all gathered under one roof. After the school moved and took the name Elm Grove, the church settled here and has since been shared by Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist congregations who worship separately but run a joint Sunday school.

Elm Springs, AR

The spring that still bubbles up here gave Elm Springs its name and its early gathering place, but the marker's deeper story is the winter of 1861–62, when the tents of the 16th Arkansas Infantry blanketed the grounds of the local academy near the head of Brush Creek. Northwest Arkansas was a strategic corridor in the war's Trans-Mississippi theater, and small towns like this one repeatedly saw troops encamp, drill, and move on toward the contested ground around Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove.

Elm Springs, AR

In 1861 newly recruited Confederate troops gathered at Elm Springs to train, and the crossroads later changed hands as Union pickets moved in after pushing Confederates from their winter quarters at Cross Hollows. Sitting in the contested northwest Arkansas corridor near Pea Ridge, Elm Springs saw the constant back-and-forth of camps, pickets, and cold-weather bivouacs that defined the war in this borderland region. The marker traces how a small community became a way station for armies maneuvering across the Ozark frontier.

Longview, TX

This East Texas congregation grew out of Sunday School classes that Pine Tree Cumberland Presbyterian Church began holding in the Spring Hill Schoolhouse in the late 1880s. Organized in the 1890s under its first resident pastor, the church took its name from Elmira Castleberry, matriarch of a prominent pioneer family whose sons served as founding elders and donated land and materials for a combined school and church building in 1897-98. The congregation remained active in community and missionary work for generations.

Bowie, TX

Settler James W. Stallings donated the first land for this cemetery in 1880, two years before the town of Bowie was platted nearby along the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad. Willie B. Nelson, a settler's young son, was the first burial, and Stallings would soon lay several of his own family here. Over the decades the grounds grew, gained a native-stone wall built by Civilian Conservation Corps crews in the 1930s, and became the resting place of veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Mineral Wells, TX

When Mineral Wells needed a proper burial ground, landowners donated acreage to the city in 1883, and the graves from an earlier spot known as The Cove were carefully relocated here the next year. Among those laid to rest are the town's founder, James A. Lynch, his wife Arminda, and a generation of pioneer citizens who built the young West Texas town. First simply the City Cemetery, it took the softer name Elmwood after the ladies of the civic league planted elm trees across the grounds in 1913.

Elroy, TX

Swedish and German immigrants began putting down roots in this stretch of Travis County in the 1890s, drawn by land suited to cotton. By 1918 some seventy families supported a school, four cotton gins, a blacksmith, a general store, and three Swedish churches with their own cemeteries. Decline set in during the 1930s as the school consolidated and congregations disbanded, but renewed settlement began breathing life back into the area in the 1970s.

Austin, TX

Elvira Davis grew up in rural east Travis County and married into a family whose quarry helped supply stone for the 1853 Texas Capitol. Widowed and raising six children, she bought this lot in 1896 and had a home built by 1904 whose porch columns, balustrade, and bay windows capture the moment when Victorian taste gave way to classical revival. She lived here until her death in 1918.

Tupelo, MS

In a two-room house his father built in East Tupelo, Elvis Aaron Presley was born in January 1935 into a poor family during the Depression. From those modest Mississippi beginnings he rose to reshape American popular music, fusing regional sounds into a style that reached a national and then global audience before his death in Memphis in 1977. The preserved birthplace anchors the story of how far he traveled from small-town Lee County.

Memphis, TN

At a small studio at 706 Union, Sam Phillips ran Sun Records, recording local artists both Black and white in the early 1950s. In July 1954 Sun released Elvis Presley's first record, fusing blues, gospel, and country into a sound that within two years made him a global celebrity. The same studio launched Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, and Howlin' Wolf, seeding rock and roll's family tree.

Tupelo, MS

This two-room shotgun house is where Elvis Presley was born in 1935, in a working-class corner of Tupelo. After Elvis rose to fame he funded a park here with proceeds from a 1957 hometown concert, and the women of the East Heights Garden Club took on the restoration — scrubbing, painting, and furnishing the rooms with period pieces donated by local residents so it could open to fans in 1971. Their volunteer hostesses often met travelers outside town to guide them in.

Tupelo, MS

This restored sanctuary recreates the First Assembly of God church that a young Elvis Presley and his family attended in Depression- and wartime-era Tupelo. In these small Pentecostal congregations, services ran long into the evening and were filled with fervent gospel singing — the sound that first stirred the boy who would remake American popular music. Moved and restored beside the Presley birthplace, the building lets visitors sit in on a 1940s-style service.

Bladen County, NC

Since 1905 the Elwell Ferry has carried travelers across the Cape Fear River in rural Bladen County, pulled along a cable strung from bank to bank. Once dozens of such ferries stitched together eastern North Carolina, where bridges were scarce and the rivers wide. Today it is among the last inland cable ferries still running in the state.

Midway, TX

This Methodist congregation traces its roots to the 1840s, when the settlement was known as French and worshippers gathered in a log cabin raised by James Blair Durham. They later met in a frame building near the cemetery before completing the present sanctuary around the turn of the century. The adjacent cemetery, with its lone grave of a young girl, keeps the memory of the rural community's earliest families.

Ector vicinity, TX

Civil War veteran Levi Wells Ely and his wife Laura came from Georgia in 1882 and farmed land that soon drew other settlers to this fertile, rail-served cotton country. The little community of Ely grew up around their farm, gaining a general store, cotton gin, blacksmith, barber, churches, and a post office. As often happened, the town faded: the post office closed in 1905 and the school consolidated away in 1949.