12 markers in the database.
Washington, DC
Standing near the Ellipse just south of the White House, the Boy Scout Memorial honors the founding and enduring mission of the Boy Scouts of America, which was chartered in 1910. Dedicated in 1964, the bronze grouping depicts a uniformed scout flanked by allegorical figures representing the ideals and traditions that guide him. The inscription reproduces the Scout Oath, the pledge every scout recites as a promise of duty, service, and personal character.
Washington, DC
From 1857 to 1959, this Washington, D.C. ground held the Columbian Harmony Cemetery, one of the capital's important burial places for African American citizens during an era when segregation extended even to the grave. Founded by a Black mutual-aid society, it became the resting place of many distinguished members of the city's Black community across more than a century. In 1959 the cemetery was closed and its occupants reinterred at the new National Harmony Memorial Park in Landover, Maryland, as the land was redeveloped.
Washington, DC
When the Civil War erupted, Washington, D.C., sat dangerously close to Confederate territory, and the Union scrambled to ring the capital with earthwork forts. Fort Bunker Hill was one of these defenses, thrown up in the fall of 1861 on high ground in the city's northeast. Armed with thirteen guns and mortars, it filled a key gap between Fort Totten and Fort Lincoln in the chain of fortifications guarding the seat of government.
Washington, DC
The Jefferson Pier Stone marks one of the earliest surveying reference points laid out in the young federal capital, first placed in December 1804 during Thomas Jefferson's presidency. It once anchored the city's prime meridian, an intended American counterpart to the world's reference lines, and stood near the planned axis linking the Capitol and the President's House. Lost over the decades, the marker was recovered and re-erected in 1889, preserving the original survey position on the National Mall.
Washington, DC
Rising at the western end of the National Mall, the Lincoln Memorial honors the sixteenth president who led the nation through the Civil War and preserved the Union. Designed by Henry Bacon as a Greek-style temple and dedicated in 1922, its central chamber holds Daniel Chester French's colossal seated statue of Lincoln, flanked by the carved words of the Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural. The famous dedicatory inscription above his head proclaims that Lincoln's memory is enshrined forever in this temple and in the hearts of the people he served.
Washington, DC
Standing in Washington's Lincoln Park, this bronze monument honors Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955), the educator, civil-rights leader, and presidential adviser who rose from a sharecropping family to found a school that became Bethune-Cookman University. Sculpted by Robert Berks and unveiled on July 10, 1974—the anniversary of Bethune's birth—it was the first monument to an African American woman erected on public land in the nation's capital. The statue depicts Bethune handing her legacy to two children, echoing her famous "Last Will and Testament," and was paid for by the National Council of Negro Women, the organization she founded.
Washington, DC
In the early decades of the republic, American leaders dreamed of fixing a national prime meridian through the capital city, freeing the young nation from reliance on Britain's Greenwich line. A series of meridian markers were placed in Washington to anchor this ambition, and the small stone here—inscribed simply "US Meridian 1890"—commemorates that effort to define longitude from American soil. Though the Greenwich meridian ultimately became the world standard, these quiet markers remain reminders of the country's push for scientific and geographic independence.
Washington, DC
In the spring of 1880, Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter were experimenting in Washington with the "photophone," a device that transmitted sound on a beam of light rather than a wire. On June 3, 1880, they sent an intelligible voice message between two Washington rooftops, a feat Bell himself considered his greatest invention. This marker stands at the building from which that wireless transmission was launched toward 1325 L Street.
Washington, DC
In the heart of wartime Washington, the H Street boarding house run by Mary Surratt became a quiet meeting place for John Wilkes Booth and his circle as they schemed against President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. What began as a plot to abduct the president ultimately gave way to the assassination at Ford's Theatre that April. The building still stands amid a much-changed neighborhood, a discreet brick survivor of one of the nation's darkest chapters.
Washington, DC
Towering nearly twenty feet over Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, the Big Chair has anchored the heart of Anacostia since the late 1950s, when the Curtis Brothers furniture company commissioned it as a giant advertisement and neighborhood curiosity. Once billed as the world's largest chair, it became a beloved meeting spot and an unofficial symbol of the Southeast Washington community. The 2006 re-dedication marked the chair's restoration and its enduring place in local identity long after the furniture store had closed.
Washington, DC
When the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912, more than 1,500 people died in the frigid North Atlantic, many of them men who stepped back so women and children could reach the lifeboats. In the years after the disaster, women across the United States raised funds dime by dime to honor that sacrifice. The resulting granite memorial, designed by sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, depicts a robed figure with outstretched arms and now stands along Washington's Southwest waterfront.
Washington, DC
Set just south of the White House on the Ellipse, the Zero Milestone was conceived as the point from which all distances on American highways would be measured, echoing the ancient Roman "Golden Milestone" in the Forum. Authorized by Congress in 1920 and dedicated in 1923, it rose during the early automobile age when good-roads advocates dreamed of a national network radiating from the capital. The U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey precisely fixed its latitude, longitude, and elevation, anchoring the small granite marker as a symbolic center of the country's road system.