Search Markers

Slaton, TX

Representing the Santa Fe Railroad, W.B. Storey, Jr. bought the future townsite of Slaton on April 15, 1911, with plans for a roundhouse, switch lines, depot, and Harvey House that would make it a hub of West Texas rail traffic. Rail workers and settlers filled the town so quickly that it incorporated in 1912, the same year residents opened this cemetery with the burial of an infant. Among its thousands of graves are unmarked burials in a potter's field and veterans of wars dating to the Civil War.

English, TX

In 1852 Oliver English and his uncle Simeon brought several families and thirty enslaved people from Missouri to open a large plantation, and Oliver built a home and store at the center of the community that took his name. The English Store became a regional trading hub and one of the county's oldest businesses before burning in 1983. The cemetery here, also called Williams Chapel Cemetery, holds generations of residents, including veterans from the Civil War through the Vietnam War.

Cuero, TX

From 1877 to 1894 this stock-financed academy served as the first school in Cuero, a young town on the DeWitt County prairie. Reflecting the community's mixed Anglo and German heritage, it taught in both English and German. It stands as a marker of how immigrant settlers built bilingual learning into the earliest institutions of their new home.

Kingsville, TX

More than half a century before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth, three English sailors trekked through South Texas in 1568. They were survivors of Sir John Hawkins's ill-fated trading voyage, put ashore near Tampico after a Spanish attack and left to walk north through unknown country. Of the twenty-six who headed north, only Richard Browne, David Ingram, and Richard Twide are said to have reached Europe again—Ingram later describing to Queen Elizabeth's secretary the coastal peoples, the grasslands of the Rio Grande, and the prickly pear that kept them alive.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2000

In 1946, in a lab at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly unveiled ENIAC — a room-filling machine of some 18,000 vacuum tubes originally built to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army. Programmed by rewiring and setting switches, it could perform thousands of operations per second, dwarfing every mechanical calculator that came before. From this first general-purpose electronic digital computer descended the machines that now sit on every desk and in every pocket.

Colmesneil, TX

Benjamin Enloe, an 1837 settler, bought this Tyler County land in 1849 and built a water-powered mill on Billums Creek where the inflow of Belts Creek turned the wheel. Three generations of Enloes ground cornmeal, sawed lumber, and ginned cotton for settlers across a wide region — it even supplied the boards for Woodville's first frame courthouse in 1852. Traffic to the mill wore in one of the area's main roads, later Boone's Ferry Road, tying the settlement to the Old Spanish Trail.

Enloe, TX

This Methodist congregation first gathered as a full station in the early 1870s under the Rev. W. P. Reed, moving through several communities — Thomas Chapel, Liberty, Unitia — before settling in the young town of Enloe in 1896. The Texas Midland Railroad arrived the next year, and Enloe boomed to 400 residents with banks, stores, cotton gins, and the Clem Lumber Company's headquarters. After the church burned on Easter Sunday 1919, the members rebuilt that same year and worshipped in the structure into the next century.

Ennis, TX

Designed in 1915 by Ennis's leading architect, Hix McCanless, this Classical Revival building brought city offices, police, and fire departments under one dignified roof — its pedimented entrance and brick pilasters announcing a growing town's civic ambitions. A Tennessee native who also worked as a surveyor and city engineer, McCanless shaped much of early-20th-century Ennis, and the building still holds its original jail.

Ennis, TX

Erected in 1883 for the newly founded Ennis National Bank under its first president, businessman Joseph Baldridge, this Classical Revival building anchored the town's commercial life. The bank occupied the first floor and leased offices above until moving out in 1917, after which a parade of businesses filled its rooms beneath the distinctive corner turret, corbeled brick parapet, and original cast-iron storefront.

Berkeley, CA

Built in 1923 for Harvey and Marie Ennor during a burst of downtown Berkeley development, this reinforced-concrete building with a brick facade grew out of a small sandwich shop into an elegant restaurant, banquet hall, grocery, butcher shop, bakery, and confectionery. Over the following decades it housed a cafeteria, World War II government offices, a furniture store, and a cinema. Its builder, John Brennan, later opened his own beloved West Berkeley restaurant.

La Porte, TX

Enoch and Eliza Brinson came to Texas in 1824 among Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists, settling a league of land overlooking San Jacinto Bay. Enoch opened a blacksmith shop and, unable to serve as a soldier because of a disability, supplied labor and goods to the Texian cause during the Revolution. His plantation grew to hundreds of cattle and improved acreage worked in part by an enslaved person, and after his death in 1861 his widow Delilah ran the estate before dividing the land among their children.

Von Ormy, TX

Enoch Jones, an Ohio-born engineer, bought this land — part of an 1808 Spanish colonial grant to Ygnacio Perez — in 1837 and settled permanently in Texas by 1846, becoming a prominent San Antonio merchant. Around 1856 he began raising a stone house, barn, and outbuildings quarried on site, the core of the estate later nicknamed the "Castle on the Medina." After Jones's death the place passed through many hands, including a Prussian count whose adopted name, Von Ormy, stuck to the surrounding community.

Enochs, TX

Enochs Cemetery was established in 1936 to serve the small farming community of Enochs on the South Plains of Bailey County. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2006, it preserves the resting place of the area's settlers during the hard years of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Such rural burial grounds are often the enduring heart of communities that time has otherwise scattered.

Enochs, TX

This cemetery has served the community of Enochs since the early twentieth century, after land speculator and sheep rancher Isaac C. Enochs, Jr. donated ground for a townsite and burial place in 1924. The oldest marked grave is that of Julia M. Brown from 1936, and residents organized a cemetery association in 1947 as their trading community grew on the South Plains. Reorganized in 1986, the association still maintains the grounds as a reminder of the area's pioneers.

Gilmer, TX

Enon Baptist Church was organized in 1848 in the home of charter member M. S. Long, gathering a handful of pioneer families in the East Texas settlement around Gilmer. The congregation first met in a log building and called J. M. Griffin as its first pastor. The present sanctuary was raised in 1934, nearly a century into the church's life.

Edna, TX

In 1856 the Rev. Joseph I. Loudermilk arrived in Jackson County and organized Enon Baptist Church, the first congregation of that faith in the county, serving as its pastor until his death. In 1858 John and Clarissa Andrews gave five acres for the church and cemetery, and the first burial came in 1862 during the Civil War. Still open for burials, the small graveyard marks the site of a frontier congregation's earliest years.

Houston County, TX

Enon Cemetery grew up in the late 1880s alongside Enon Baptist Church, whose one-room building doubled as a public school. Fire destroyed the church in 1890, and a tabernacle served worshippers until the turn of the century. The earliest burial was a child, Becky Freeman, whose long-unmarked grave finally received a headstone in 1960.

Marlborough Township, PA · est. 2014

From his print shop in Marlborough Township, Enos Benner served the region's large Pennsylvania German population as teacher, author, editor, and printer. His weekly newspaper, Der Bauern Freund (The Farmer's Friend), ran from 1828 to 1858 and survives complete—an unusually rich record of political and social life in the Jacksonian era as seen through German-speaking eyes. Benner and his descendants kept the shop running for a century.

San Antonio, TX

Enrique Esparza was an eleven-year-old boy when he sheltered inside the Alamo during the 1836 siege, where his father Gregorio, an Alamo defender, was killed. Hidden in a pile of hay, he witnessed his father fall, saw the death of James Bowie on his sickbed, and watched the bodies of the fallen Texans burned afterward. As one of the few survivors, Enrique lived until 1917, and the eyewitness account he gave in later years became an invaluable record of the battle.

Bethany Beach, DE

Ensign Henry Clay Drexler, who grew up in Bethany Beach as the son of a Delaware state senator, died aboard the USS Trenton on October 24, 1924, when he tried to save shipmates during a gun turret explosion. For his sacrifice he was awarded the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross. This marker honors a local son's peacetime heroism.

Ottawa County, OK

This spot marks the historic edge of Indian Territory, the vast region set aside in the 1830s where the United States forcibly resettled the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole, and later many other nations. For most of the 19th century a traveler crossing this line left the states behind and entered lands governed by tribal nations rather than a U.S. state — until Indian Territory was folded into the new state of Oklahoma in 1907. Ottawa County, in the territory's northeast corner, took in nations removed from the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley.

Dunham Township, OH

When Ephraim Cutler reached Marietta in 1795, the Ohio Country was a raw frontier at the edge of the young United States, freshly organized under the Northwest Ordinance. As a delegate to Ohio's 1802 constitutional convention at Chillicothe, Cutler championed the clause in Article VIII that barred slavery from the new state — language that reportedly carried by a single vote. Nearby Veto Lake keeps his name on the southeast Ohio landscape he helped shape.

Fort Worth, TX

Canadian-born and Indiana-raised, Ephraim Merrill Daggett traded with Native people at Fort Dearborn before coming to the Republic of Texas in 1838, where he was caught up in the East Texas Regulator-Moderator feud and later served as a captain in the Mexican War. Settling in the frontier post of Fort Worth in 1854, he bought up large tracts of Tarrant County land and used his political influence to help make Fort Worth the county seat and to bring the Texas & Pacific Railroad in 1876. His work developing the young city earned him the title "The Father of Fort Worth," and his likeness graced the city's first seal.

Ephrata, PA · est. 1947

In 1732 the mystic Conrad Beissel founded a community of Seventh Day Baptists at Ephrata, a cloister of celibate brothers and sisters and married householders who kept the Sabbath on Saturday. They became famous for their austere medieval-style buildings, their haunting original hymns, and their printing and Fraktur calligraphy — one of colonial America's most remarkable experiments in communal religious life.

Ephrata, PA · est. 1947

In 1732 the mystic Conrad Beissel founded a community of Seventh Day Baptists at Ephrata, a cloister of celibate brothers and sisters alongside married householders who observed a Saturday Sabbath. Their stark medieval-style buildings, original a cappella hymns, and pioneering printing and Fraktur work made the settlement one of colonial America's most distinctive religious communities.

Ephrata, PA · est. 1948

In the 1730s the mystic Conrad Beissel drew German-speaking followers into a Pietist community of celibate ascetics and married householders on the banks of the Cocalico. Between 1735 and 1749 they raised the steep-roofed medieval-style buildings that still survive, living a spare, disciplined life of worship, manual labor, and remarkable creative output — original a cappella hymns, illuminated Fraktur calligraphy, and one of colonial America's busiest printing presses. Kept as the Seventh Day Baptist ('Solitary') brethren, the settlement was among the earliest and most unusual communal societies in the colonies.

Ephrata, PA · est. 2022

In the 1740s, within the austere religious community of Ephrata Cloister, a remarkable group of women composed original hymns for their congregation's worship. Sister Föben, Sister Ketura, and Sister Hanna wrote both intricate melodies and sacred texts at a time when few women anywhere were credited as composers. Their music was woven into the daily devotional life of one of colonial America's most distinctive spiritual settlements.

Shamrock, TX

When the vast Rocking Chair Ranche was subdivided in the 1880s, English settlers from Suffolk began arriving in the Texas Panhandle, among them Constance Fanny Aldous, who came with her Book of Common Prayer and a determination to plant an Anglican church. Over years of sporadic services she solicited relatives back home for funds — recorded in pounds, shillings, and pence — until Bishop Garrett consecrated St. Michael and All Angels as a mission in July 1909. Small and never served by a resident priest, the congregation endured on faith and neighborly outreach.

Luling, TX

Luling's very first church building rose from the frontier energy of a brand-new railroad town founded in 1874. The area's first Episcopal bishop held his inaugural service in the missionary district inside a railway passenger car in Luling that December, and within a few years the Rev. Nelson Ayres arrived as vicar and built this chapel largely with his own hands, leading its first service in 1877.

Gonzales, TX

Growing out of early missionary work, the Episcopal Church of the Messiah was organized in Gonzales in 1855, and by 1881 its congregation had completed a Gothic Revival sanctuary on land granted by the city. A native stone bell tower replaced the original wooden belfry in 1928, and the interior still features walnut woodwork cut from trees along the Guadalupe River.

Decatur, TX

Decatur's oldest original church building, this Episcopal chapel was erected facing Main Street in 1889 and consecrated by the pioneering missionary bishop A.C. Garrett. Known as "The Little Church with the Crosses," it fell into disrepair by 1912 but was restored and moved, then sold in 1940 and briefly used as a mattress factory before being rescued that same year. In its final move the sanctuary was placed symbolically toward the east and Jerusalem.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1949

In 1751, when Carlisle was still a raw county seat on Pennsylvania's western frontier, the Penn family set aside this square for the Church of England, and the first church building rose the following year. St. John's Episcopal congregation has worshipped on the ground ever since, an unbroken thread of community life stretching back before the Revolution. The grant reflects the proprietors' careful planning of Carlisle as an ordered outpost of colonial society.

Bowling Green, OH

Epsilon Pi Tau was founded in 1929 as an international honor society for professions in technology, education, and the industrial arts, and it made its home at what became Bowling Green State University. This stone marks the society's 75th anniversary and honors Ernest N. Savage, a dean emeritus of the College of Technology who helped shape technical and vocational education there. Dedicated in 2005, the rock ties together a scholarly organization and the long-serving educator who advanced its mission of professional excellence.

Lufkin, TX

This slip-tongue, high-wheel cart, built in 1950 for the lumber firm W.T. Carter & Brother, was among the last of its kind, drawn by oxen or mules to skid logs from the forest to the railroad. Replaced by tractor-powered equipment just a year later, it stands as a relic of the labor-intensive methods that defined early East Texas logging. Preserved and marked in 1972, it recalls the industry that shaped the Piney Woods economy.

Era, TX

Settled in the 1870s in a fertile farming belt, the village of Era was platted by merchant J. N. Gist and got its post office in 1881, named for a young girl, Era Hargroves, who had recently died. It soon bustled with a blacksmith, cotton gin, hotel, stores, and three churches, and chartered the Era Institute in 1897 offering classes from primary through college level. Among its notable sons was Robert E. Thomason, later a U.S. congressman and federal judge.

San Antonio, TX

Erasmo Seguin (1782–1857), born in San Antonio, was a Tejano civic leader who helped found the city's first public school and served as its postmaster under Mexican rule. He escorted Stephen F. Austin's colonists to Bexar in 1821 and became a lifelong ally of the Anglo-American settlers. When Santa Anna turned dictator, Seguin joined the protests, aided the patriots in the 1835 siege of Bexar, lodged David Crockett, and provisioned the Alamo—before persecution by newcomers drove him to retire to his ranch, where he died in 1857.

Troup, TX

Dr. Erasmus M. Hanna, one of the founders of Troup, built this cypress-and-pine Victorian home about 1872 while pursuing a career that ranged well beyond medicine—into East Texas railroads, clay industries, and the town's first hotel. His wife, Virginia Morris Hanna, came from a pioneering East Texas family. Five generations of Hanna descendants have since lived beneath its beaded bay windows and high-arched gables.

Richmond, TX

Erastus "Deaf" Smith was the most celebrated scout of the Texas War for Independence. A New Yorker who settled in San Antonio in 1821 and married into a Tejano family, his years trading and traveling across the province made him an invaluable guide for the Texian army. At San Jacinto in 1836 he carried out Sam Houston's order to destroy Vince's Bridge, then raised the battle cry that sealed the Texians' retreat-cutting victory. He died in 1837 at a friend's home in Richmond.

China Spring, TX

Erath was one of McLennan County's earliest settlements, serving as a voting precinct by 1850 as settlers were drawn to fertile land between the Brazos and Bosque rivers. Named for surveyor and legislator George B. Erath, who laid out Waco in 1849, the community grew to hold churches, a school, cotton gins, a gristmill, and shops. Its post office closed in 1907 and its school consolidated away in the 1920s; by the time Waco annexed the area in the 1980s only a Baptist church remained.

Stephenville, TX

Stephenville grew from a mid-1850s settlement and became the seat of newly formed Erath County in 1856. When the railroad arrived in 1889 it touched off an economic boom, and county leaders commissioned rising architect J. Riely Gordon to design this limestone Romanesque Revival courthouse, completed in 1892. Its central clock tower has dominated the town square ever since.

Stephenville, TX

Acting on a state mandate to care for the destitute, Erath County opened a poor farm in 1881, where paupers and petty offenders lived and labored raising cotton and peanuts, with a cemetery set aside on the grounds. The farm ran for more than fifty years until New Deal relief programs made it obsolete, and its unnamed dead lay unmarked until Boy Scouts and volunteers began restoring the graves in the 1980s.

Cooper, TX

Delta County takes its name from its triangular shape between the forks of the Sulphur River. Before Texas independence, a United States Indian commission oversaw Caddo, Delaware, Quapaw, and Seminole people living here, and after 1836 families from Kentucky, Tennessee, and elsewhere settled the fork. Residents petitioned for their own county, and the Texas Legislature created Delta County in 1870, naming its new county seat for legislator Leroy Cooper.

Gruene, TX

Built in the 1880s by town founder Henry D. Gruene, this trim vernacular cottage housed Erhardt Neuse, the field foreman who oversaw Gruene's sprawling cotton operations. The Neuse family lived here until the 1930s, when Gruene itself slid into decline as the cotton economy faltered. Its board-and-batten siding, angled bay, and milled porch brackets are hallmarks of late-19th-century rural Texas building. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1987.

Millcreek Township, PA · est. 1946

Pennsylvania's only outlet to the Great Lakes came through the Erie Triangle, a wedge of shoreline the state secured in 1792 to gain a harbor on Lake Erie. Surveyors Andrew Ellicott and William Irvine laid out the town in 1795 on ground that had already carried French, British, and American forts. In 1813 Oliver Hazard Perry built his fleet in this sheltered harbor before sailing out to win the Battle of Lake Erie.

Summit Township, PA · est. 1946

Pennsylvania's only Great Lakes port grew out of the Erie Triangle, a strip of Lake Erie shoreline the state acquired in 1792 to gain a harbor. Andrew Ellicott and William Irvine surveyed the town in 1795 on a site layered with earlier French, British, and American forts. Here in 1813 Oliver Hazard Perry assembled the fleet that would sail to victory in the Battle of Lake Erie.

City of Rochester, NY

In the heart of Rochester, the Erie Canal once crossed the Genesee River on a great stone aqueduct — a water bridge carrying boats over a river. The 1842 structure marked here replaced an earlier, smaller aqueduct from the 1820s, reflecting the canal's enormous traffic and the city's explosive growth as the nation's first inland boomtown. Powered by the river's falls and the canal's commerce, Rochester earned its nickname as the "Flour City" by milling grain shipped along this waterway. The aqueduct later carried the city's subway and today underlies Broad Street downtown.

Erie, PA · est. 1981

Erie County was carved from Allegheny County on March 12, 1800, taking its name from Lake Erie and, through it, from the Erie Indians who once lived along its shores. The county seat, laid out in 1795, grew into a bustling Great Lakes port and became a city in 1851. During the War of 1812, ships of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry's fleet were built here before winning the decisive 1813 Battle of Lake Erie.

Buffalo, NY

This memorial in Buffalo honors the men and women of Erie County, New York, who served in the United States Armed Forces. As one of the state's most populous and historically industrial counties, Erie County sent generations of residents into military service across the nation's wars, from the World Wars through later conflicts. The monument frames their sacrifice as a striving for peace and goodwill, casting wartime service as a hope for a more secure world.

Sharpsville, PA

The Erie Extension Canal carried boats and cargo across northwestern Pennsylvania from 1840 to 1871, linking the Pittsburgh region toward the Great Lakes in the era before railroads reshaped American commerce. Its slack-water channels and locks floated the iron, coal, and goods that fed the growing furnaces of the Shenango and Mahoning valleys. Lock #10, a surviving guard lock at Sharpsville, is a rare physical remnant of that vanished waterway.

Hermitage, PA · est. 1946

For three decades before the railroads swallowed its traffic, the Erie Extension Canal carried boats, iron, and goods across western Pennsylvania between Pittsburgh and the Great Lakes. Opened around 1840, it was a lifeline for the region's early iron industry, floating raw materials and finished metal along a slender ribbon of engineered water. By 1871 the age of rails had made it obsolete, and today a single surviving lock at Sharpsville stands as its stone memorial.

West Salem Township, PA · est. 1947

In the canal-building fever of the early nineteenth century, Pennsylvania cut the Erie Extension to link its interior with Lake Erie. The Shenango Line, running from New Castle toward Conneaut Lake, formally opened to Greenville in August 1840. A private company ran the waterway from 1844 until 1870, but railroads soon made it obsolete and it closed in 1871—its channel still traceable across the landscape today.

Sadsbury Township, PA · est. 1948

This channel was part of the ambitious Erie Extension Canal, which in the 1840s stitched northwestern Pennsylvania into the era's booming inland-waterway network. Engineers raised Conneaut Lake nine feet above its natural level so it could feed water into the canal at its highest point, where the Shenango and Conneaut lines met. The whole system carried boats and cargo from 1844 until 1871, when railroads finally rendered it obsolete.

West Fallowfield Township, PA · est. 1948

To keep the Erie Extension Canal supplied with water, builders diked off part of the great Pymatuning Swamp with a three-mile bank, creating a 600-acre reservoir along the canal's western edge. The state began the work in 1838 and the Erie Canal Company finished it in 1843–44, an early exercise in the large-scale water management that canal engineering demanded. The reservoir was one link in a system that moved goods across northwestern Pennsylvania for nearly three decades.

Sadsbury Township, PA · est. 1948

Beside the later railroad, the faint bed of the Erie Extension Canal still traces where boats once floated through this corner of Crawford County. Nearby the Shenango Line running up from New Castle joined the Conneaut Line coming down from Erie, part of a waterway that tied Lake Erie to the Ohio country. In use from 1844 to 1871, the canal was eventually eclipsed by the very railroads that now run alongside its remains.

Platea, PA · est. 1948

The town now called Platea began life in 1839 as Lockport, named for the remarkable staircase of locks—28 of them packed into just two miles—that stepped canal boats down toward Erie and Lake Erie. The Erie Extension Canal carried traffic here from 1844 until 1871, when the railroad that replaced it was laid partly along the old channel. Traces of that abandoned waterway can still be seen beside the tracks.

Millcreek Township, PA · est. 1948

This stretch of the Erie Extension Canal was part of a system meant to connect New Castle with Erie and the Great Lakes. The Conneaut Line, running from Erie to Conneaut Lake, was begun by the state in 1838 but left unfinished until a private company led by Erie's R.S. Reed completed it in 1843–44. A surviving section of the canal still lies at the foot of the nearby slope.

West Salem Township, PA · est. 1948

From 1840 to 1871, the Erie Extension Canal carried boats and cargo between Pittsburgh and the Great Lakes, part of the ambitious canal-building era that briefly bound the young nation together by water. Mules towed freight along its towpaths until railroads made the slow waterway obsolete. Its old bed can still be traced through Clarksville and for several miles along the road toward Mercer.

Erie, PA · est. 2004

In 1818 a beacon rose over Presque Isle Bay at Erie—the first lighthouse to shine on the Great Lakes—guiding the ships that were beginning to knit the young nation's inland coast into a commercial highway. The unstable ground beneath it forced repeated rebuilding: a brick tower in 1858, and the sandstone tower of 1867 that was the third erected here. Its light marked the growth of Great Lakes shipping.

Hughestown, PA · est. 1997

Near this spot in 1934, Harry Tompkins was walking along the tracks when he was struck and badly hurt by a door swinging from a passing Erie Railroad train. His injury lawsuit climbed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1938 issued one of the most cited decisions in American law: in disputes between citizens of different states, federal courts must apply state common law rather than an invented "general" federal common law. The ruling cost Tompkins his case but reshaped how the nation's courts operate.

Baltimore, MD

For four decades Ernest Stebbins led the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, training generations of specialists who carried public-health work around the globe. He helped found the American Board of Preventive Medicine and advised the young World Health Organization as it took shape after World War II.