Historic Markers in Arizona

Sedona, AZ

This quiet memorial in Sedona keeps faith with a promise made across the nation after September 11, 2001: "we will never forget." On that morning, coordinated attacks struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and brought down a fourth plane in Pennsylvania, killing nearly three thousand people. In the years that followed, communities far from the attack sites raised their own markers so that neighbors could gather, remember, and reflect.

Pinal County, AZ

This memorial marks the Battle of Picacho Pass, fought April 15, 1862, near a jagged peak in the Arizona desert. A small clash between Union cavalry from California and a Confederate patrol from Texas, it is often called the westernmost battle of the Civil War. Though tiny in scale, it signaled how far the war's reach extended into the Southwest.

Florence, AZ

On the evening of October 3, 1926, University of Arizona student body president and quarterback John 'Button' Salmon was fatally injured in a car crash returning from Phoenix. Visited in the hospital by coach J.F. 'Pop' McKale, the dying young man sent a final message to his team: 'Tell them to bear down.' The Wildcats won their next game after hearing his words, and 'Bear Down' became — and remains — one of college athletics' most enduring rallying cries.

Mesa, AZ

This Blue Star Memorial in Mesa, Arizona, honors the men and women of the U.S. armed forces. The Blue Star program began during World War II, inspired by the blue-star service flags families hung for loved ones in uniform, and grew into a nationwide network of markers along highways and in gardens. Each one pays tribute to military service across all eras.

Santa Cruz County, AZ

This marker recalls Camp Crittenden, a U.S. Army post established in 1867 in the mountainous borderlands of what was then Arizona Territory. In the years after the Civil War, the Army planted a string of such camps across the Southwest to guard settlers, mail routes, and mines during the long Apache campaigns. Life at these remote posts was hard — disease, heat, and isolation took a heavier toll than combat — and Camp Crittenden was abandoned within a few years, leaving little but foundations and this commemoration.

Cochise County, AZ

Born in the depths of the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps put millions of young men to work from 1933 to 1942 planting trees, fighting fires, and building the trails, parks, and roads Americans still use today. In Arizona and across the country, these camps offered wages, discipline, and purpose to a generation with few prospects, earning the CCC its nickname as "the President's Tree Army." This memorial, raised by Arizona's CCC alumni, honors both the state's crews and the three million who served nationwide.

Gila County, AZ

Built between 1927 and 1928 and dedicated by President Calvin Coolidge himself in 1930, Coolidge Dam impounded the Gila River to create San Carlos Lake. The reservoir drowned the old San Carlos Apache settlement, whose people were relocated north to New San Carlos; when the water runs low, the foundations and a concrete marker over the old burial ground still emerge. It stands as both an engineering feat and a monument to displacement.

Cochise County, AZ

This monument marks a high point along a road across the Arizona desert, built in 1913–14 by convict labor under the state's Board of Control. Arizona had just become a state in 1912, and its young government — led by its first governor, George W. P. Hunt — put prison crews to work carving roads through rugged country to knit the new state together. The roster of officials chiseled into the stone reads like a snapshot of Arizona's fledgling government at work.

Sierra Vista, AZ

Established by the U.S. Army in 1877 in the rugged country of southern Arizona, Fort Huachuca was a frontier post in the final campaigns against the Apache during the Indian Wars. It later became a home of the famed Buffalo Soldiers, the African American regiments who served across the Western frontier, and it remains an active installation today—now a National Historic Landmark. Few army posts trace such an unbroken line from the frontier era into the modern age.

Santa Cruz County, AZ

In April 1539, the Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza passed through the San Rafael Valley, becoming by this marker's account the first European to enter what is now Arizona. Sent north from Mexico by the Spanish viceroy, he traveled ahead of the great expeditions in search of the fabled wealthy cities of Cíbola. His reports, however exaggerated, helped spur the Coronado expedition that followed the next year.

Mohave County, AZ

A few miles off this road lie the ruins of White Hills, a mining boom town that flared to life in 1892 and was largely gone by 1898. In just six years its mines yielded some twelve million dollars in gold and silver, with the original strike credited to a Native prospector. Today only foundations and scattered debris remain of the once-bustling camp.

Prescott, AZ

The Hotel St. Michael anchors Prescott's famous "Whiskey Row," rising on the site of the earlier Hotel Burke, which burned in 1900. The three-story replacement signaled Prescott's maturing as a territorial town, offering travelers accommodations to match its ambitions in Arizona's rugged interior.

Parker, AZ

This surviving building stood within the Poston site near Parker, one of the War Relocation Authority camps where the United States confined Japanese Americans during World War II. Beginning in 1942, tens of thousands of men, women, and children—most of them U.S. citizens—were removed from the West Coast and held behind barbed wire in remote desert camps solely because of their ancestry. Ordinary houses and barracks like this one were home to families who lost their freedom without charge or trial.

Coconino County, AZ · est. 1968

At this crossing of the Colorado River, the Mormon pioneer John D. Lee settled in 1871 and soon began a ferry that became the only practical wagon route across the river for hundreds of miles. After Lee's execution, the oar-driven boat was kept running by Warren Johnson for Emma Lee, then by the LDS Church and later operators, until Coconino County ran it into 1928. Lee's Ferry stitched together the isolated settlements of the Arizona Strip and the Mormon frontier.

Santa Cruz County, AZ

Arizona pioneer Johnny Ward established this ranch in 1858 in the contested borderlands of the far Southwest. In 1861 his stepson Felix was seized in a raid; U.S. Army officers wrongly blamed Cochise's Chiricahua Apaches, touching off the notorious Bascom Affair and years of war, though the Western Apache had in fact taken the boy.

Apache Junction, AZ

Erected in 1938 by the Dons Club of Phoenix, this monument commemorates the enduring legend of the Lost Dutchman Mine, a fabled cache of gold said to lie hidden in the Superstition Mountains. The tale drew countless prospectors into the rugged desert east of Phoenix in search of a fortune that was never found.

Yavapai County, AZ

The Lynx Creek Ruins preserve the remains of an ancestral Native American settlement in the central Arizona highlands near Prescott, part of the pre-contact cultural landscape often associated with the Prescott and Sinagua traditions. Along Lynx Creek, early inhabitants built masonry dwellings and farmed the drainage centuries before European arrival. The same creek later drew nineteenth-century Anglo prospectors during Arizona's gold rush.

Maricopa County, AZ

This memorial remembers the Oatman family, emigrants killed in March 1851 while crossing the Arizona desert on the trail west. The attack left young Olive Oatman a captive for years before her return—one of the most widely told frontier stories of its era.

Parker, AZ

This landmark marks the first jail of Parker, Arizona, a small Colorado River town that grew up in the early twentieth century. Frontier jails were often the first public building a young town could muster, and their thick walls and legends outlived the rough era that filled them. Local lore attaches a famous name to one of its inmates, the kind of tall-tale-tinged history that clings to Western boomtowns.

Navajo County, AZ

This site marks an early trading post at Piñon, on the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona, established as the community first took shape before it was formally organized. Trading posts were the commercial and social hubs of the reservation, places where Navajo weavers, silversmiths, and herders exchanged goods with traders and the wider market economy reached remote high desert country.

Yavapai County, AZ

These rocks mark where the Santa Fe, Prescott & Phoenix Railway once kept its buildings, part of the line that in the 1890s finally connected the isolated territorial capital of Prescott to the transcontinental network. The railroad ended the town's dependence on slow wagon freight and opened central Arizona's mines and ranches to national markets.

Florence, AZ

Charles Debrille Poston (1825-1902), often called the 'Father of Arizona,' lobbied during Lincoln's administration for the federal legislation that created the Arizona Territory in 1863, driven in part by his silver-mining interests. Over his career he served as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, U.S. Land Register at Florence, consul at Nogales, and Arizona's first congressional delegate. He dreamed of a temple to the sun on a nearby hill and was buried atop this butte, which now bears his name.

Seligman, AZ · est. 2001

When Interstate 40 bypassed the town, barber Angel Delgadillo organized to save the 'Mother Road.' His effort revived Route 66 as a nostalgic travel corridor across the Southwest.

Pinal County, AZ

In 1879 the Southern Pacific's mail and stage line built a one-room adobe station and mesquite corral here in the Arizona desert, a horse-changing and watering stop for travelers riding from the railroad at Picacho toward Florence and points beyond. In the years before automobiles, such humble stations were lifelines that kept passengers, mail, and commerce moving across the territory's vast dry distances.

Santa Cruz County, AZ

Juan and Juanita Telles began building this roadside shrine in 1941, fulfilling a vow to God made in exchange for the safe return of their sons serving in the war. A living example of the folk-Catholic devotional tradition of the Pimería Alta borderlands, it was re-dedicated in 1988 by the Pimeria Alta Historical Society.

Florence, AZ

Charles D. Poston, often called the "Father of Arizona," was a mining promoter and booster whose lobbying helped create Arizona Territory in 1863, and he became its first delegate to Congress. Fascinated by Persian sun-worship, he dreamed of a temple atop this butte near Florence, and after his death he was entombed here in a stone monument erected by the Territory in 1907. The pyramid-topped tomb crowns what is now called Poston Butte, overlooking the desert country he championed.

Tombstone, AZ

Built in 1882, this handsome Victorian courthouse was the seat of justice for Cochise County during Tombstone's raucous silver-boom heyday, when the town's fortunes rested on rich ore and its reputation on frontier lawlessness. From these rooms judges, sheriffs, and juries tried to impose order on one of the West's wildest boomtowns. Long since restored, the building now serves as an Arizona state historic park and museum.

Phoenix, AZ

Dedicated in 1939, this plaque honors William G. Hartranft, credited by grateful contemporaries with the vision and drive behind the creation of Phoenix's public park system. In the early twentieth century, as Phoenix grew from a small desert settlement into a rising Western city, civic leaders fought to set aside green space for a booming population.