143 markers in the database — showing 1–60.
Harford County, MD
This marker commemorates the Bush Declaration, proclaimed here in March 1775 when Harford County's elected representatives pledged resistance to British measures more than a year before the national Declaration of Independence. It also records that this spot served as the county seat from the county's founding in 1774 until 1783. The inscription claims it as the first declaration of independence adopted by a duly elected body of the people.
Towson, MD
This monument speaks in the quiet, elegiac language of American memorial tradition, dedicating itself "to our absent brothers" — the comrades who did not return. Such stones were raised across the country in the decades after the nation's wars, when veterans' groups and communities gathered to fix in granite the memory of men lost far from home. Standing in Towson, the Baltimore County seat, the marker turns a public square into a place of remembrance, where a passerby is asked to pause for the missing.
Frederick County, MD
In the summer heat of the Civil War, Confederate forces pushed north through Maryland in a bold drive aimed at the lightly defended Union capital. Along the Monocacy River outside Frederick, outnumbered Union troops—among them the 10th Vermont Infantry—made a hard stand to slow that advance. Though the defenders were eventually forced from the field, the day they bought gave Washington time to rush reinforcements into its fortifications. Vermont later raised this monument to mark exactly where its sons stood in the fighting.
Harford County, MD
William Paca was one of Maryland's four signers of the Declaration of Independence, born in 1740 on a Harford County plantation just south of this spot. A lawyer and patriot during the Revolution, he went on to serve as governor of the new state of Maryland and later as a federal judge before his death in 1799. This monument was placed in 1930 by the Daughters of the American Revolution chapter that bears his name, marking the countryside where a future Founder spent his earliest years.
Kensington, MD
This memorial is built around a twisted length of steel recovered from the point of impact at the World Trade Center. It honors the 2,976 people killed on September 11, 2001, in the coordinated attacks on New York City, the Pentagon, and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Fragments of the towers like this one were distributed to communities across the country so that the day would be remembered close to home.
Aberdeen, MD
Aberdeen Proving Ground opened in 1917 as the U.S. Army's premier weapons and ordnance testing site on the Chesapeake Bay, soon joined by the neighboring Edgewood Arsenal, which became the center of the nation's chemical warfare research. For more than a century the soldiers, civilian scientists, and contractors stationed here have tested artillery, armor, and munitions—demanding and often dangerous work that has cost lives across generations. This monument gathers all of them—uniformed and civilian alike—into a single act of remembrance.
Saint Mary's County, MD
St. Mary's County holds Maryland's oldest colonial roots, and African Americans—first enslaved, later free—helped build its tobacco economy, churches, schools, and towns across nearly four centuries. This monument, dedicated on July 29, 2000, was raised by the Unified Committee for Afro-American Contributions to make that long and often overlooked story visible in the public landscape. It stands not for a single event but as a standing reminder of a community's role in the county's growth and development.
Dundalk, MD
This monument honors Aquila Randall, a young Maryland militiaman who fell on September 12, 1814, at the Battle of North Point—the land engagement east of Baltimore during the War of 1812. As British forces marched toward the city, Randall and his fellow citizen-soldiers of the local militia met them on the road through the Patapsco Neck, buying time and blood for the defense that would hold at Fort McHenry the very next day. The elegant classical inscription, opening with a line drawn from Joseph Addison's tragedy Cato, frames his death in the language of Roman virtue that the young republic so admired.
Westminster, MD
In the first days of July 1863, the roads of northern Maryland filled with the men and horses of the Union Army of the Potomac as it raced to intercept Robert E. Lee's invasion of the North. This tablet marks the movements of the army's cavalry on July 3 — the climactic day at Gettysburg, just across the Pennsylvania line — as brigades of the First Cavalry Division shifted from Taneytown and Emmitsburg toward the fighting, while Westminster served as a vital supply and staging hub along the army's rear. These War Department itinerary tablets, placed to trace exactly where each command marched, turn quiet crossroads towns into legible chapters of the campaign.
Baltimore, MD
In the years just after American independence, the fast-growing port of Baltimore needed organized ways to keep order along its wharves and crowded streets, and the inscription traces the department's founding to an act of the Maryland Legislature in 1784. That makes it one of the earliest formal municipal police forces in the young United States. Erected by the department as a "living memorial," the monument honors generations of officers who served the city, including those who died in the line of duty.
Baltimore, MD
Across the United States, towns and city neighborhoods raised memorials like this one to the local men and women who left home for military service in World War II, the vast global conflict that consumed the nation from 1941 to 1945. The plaque's language frames that sacrifice in the war's own terms—a fight to see that freedom and justice would endure against Axis tyranny. Simple community tributes such as this turned an abstract world war into something rooted in a single Baltimore block, honoring neighbors by name or by the streets they came from.
Towson, MD
This section of the Baltimore-Harrisburg Expressway was completed in 1954 by the Maryland State Roads Commission. Its construction was part of the mid-century surge of limited-access highway building that reshaped how Americans moved between cities. The plain marker records a small piece of that postwar road-building boom north of Baltimore.
Montgomery County, MD
Long before the Washington suburbs reached this far, the rolling land of Montgomery County was worked as farmland, and the Beall family were among the region's established early landholders. Interpretive sites like this one recall the era when dairy farming anchored the county's rural economy — herds grazing the Piedmont pastures, milk hauled to market, and daily life keyed to the rhythms of the barn. The homestead preserves a glimpse of that agricultural world, which shaped the county for generations before development transformed it.
Baltimore, MD
This fragment of the Berlin Wall once stood near the Lichterfelde district before being broken free on November 11, 1989, days after East Germany opened its borders. Brought to Baltimore and dedicated to all who crossed — and those who died trying — it is a tangible piece of the barrier that divided a city and the Cold War world.
Queen Anne's County, MD
The Blue Star Memorial Highway program originated in 1945 with New Jersey garden clubs honoring World War II troops through memorial plantings, and it soon became a national tradition marked by the blue-star emblem of the wartime service flag. This Queen Anne's County marker, sponsored by the Federated Garden Clubs of Maryland with the State Highway Administration, dedicates a stretch of Maryland roadway to the armed forces that have defended the country.
Brunswick, MD
This memorial in Brunswick, a Maryland railroad town that grew up around the Baltimore & Ohio's sprawling rail yards, honors the community's veterans of every generation. Its inscription deliberately pairs "peace and war" — recognizing not only those who served in combat but also those who wore the uniform during peacetime and stood ready. Small towns across America raised such memorials on courthouse lawns and in town squares, turning a shared sense of duty into a permanent civic landmark.
Bel Air, MD
Built in 1898 at the height of the Gilded Age, Liriodendron was the elegant Palladian-style summer retreat of Dr. Howard A. Kelly — one of the celebrated founding physicians of the Johns Hopkins Hospital — and his wife. Named for the tulip poplar, the mansion reflected the era's taste for classical symmetry and country estates for the well-to-do. Today the house has a second life as a historical, cultural, and educational center serving Harford County.
Baltimore, MD
This memorial wall carries a line drawn from General John J. Pershing's tribute to America's war dead — "Time will not dim the glory of their deeds" — words that became a standard epitaph on veterans' memorials across the country in the twentieth century. Standing near Baltimore's Camden Yards, a district rooted in the old Baltimore & Ohio Railroad's Camden Station, the wall gathers a busy modern crossroads into a moment of remembrance for those who served and sacrificed. Because the inscription names no single battle or war, it speaks broadly for all who gave their lives in the nation's conflicts.
Baltimore County, MD
By the spring of 1968 the Vietnam War had split American consciences, and on May 17 nine Catholic activists walked into the Selective Service office in Catonsville, carried out hundreds of draft records, and burned them in the parking lot. Among them were the brother-priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, whose faith-rooted defiance turned their federal trial into a nationally watched drama about war, conscience, and the limits of the law. Convicted and imprisoned, the 'Nine' became folk heroes of the antiwar left and a template for symbolic direct action.
Kent County, MD
In the late summer of 1814, as British forces raided the Chesapeake in the closing months of the War of 1812, a landing party came ashore in rural Kent County on Maryland's Eastern Shore. On the night of August 31, American militia under Colonel Philip Reed met the raiders in the darkened farm fields near Caulk's house and turned them back. The British commander, the young and celebrated Royal Navy captain Sir Peter Parker, was mortally wounded in the fighting — a rare local victory won by citizen-soldiers defending their own countryside.
Baltimore, MD
Colonel Charles Marshall served as military secretary and aide-de-camp to General Robert E. Lee, and was at Lee's side at Appomattox Court House in April 1865. He helped prepare Lee's farewell address as the Army of Northern Virginia laid down its arms.
Calvert County, MD
In 1925, biologist Reginald V. Truitt set out to study the fish, oysters, and crabs of the Chesapeake Bay, and the laboratory he founded on Maryland's western shore became one of the earliest marine research stations on the East Coast. By 1931 the state's Conservation Department had taken up its support, joined by a remarkable consortium of universities and colleges — Johns Hopkins, Goucher, St. John's, and others — pooling scholars to turn the great estuary into a living classroom. From this modest waterside outpost grew a tradition of Bay science that would inform how a nation cares for its coastal waters.
Baltimore, MD
This 1926 plaque from the City of Baltimore records the mayor, engineers, and contractors behind a Jazz Age public improvement, erected during the administration of Mayor Howard W. Jackson. Marked with the names of the highways engineer and consulting firms, it captures the confident municipal building of the 1920s.
Baltimore, MD
Baltimore sisters Claribel and Etta Cone traveled to Paris in the early 20th century and began buying the work of then-controversial modern painters like Matisse and Picasso, long before American museums took them seriously. They filled two adjoining apartments here with one of the finest private collections of modern art in the country. That collection now anchors the Baltimore Museum of Art's Cone Wing.
Oakland, MD
Oakland grew up in the mid-19th century as a mountain town in far western Maryland's Allegheny highlands, and this building has watched much of that history pass by. Since 1859 it has worn many hats — a cobbler's workshop, a lodging house known first as the New Glades House and later the Central Hotel, and by 1908 the site of Dr. M.C. Hinebaugh's hospital. As one of the town's oldest surviving structures, it packed trade, travel, and medicine under a single roof.
Harford County, MD
This marker compresses nearly a century and a half of Maryland's founding story into a few lines. In 1634 the colony was chartered as a proprietary grant to Lord Baltimore, and in 1649 its Assembly passed a landmark act of religious toleration for Christians. The lines trace forward through the surveying of the Mason-Dixon Line, colonial defiance of the British Stamp Act, and the "Peggy Stewart" tea-burning at Annapolis on the eve of the Revolution.
Sykesville, MD
Across the decades when Maryland's public schools were racially segregated, Black communities were served by separate "colored" schoolhouses — often small, locally built and locally sustained buildings that became the heart of African American education and community life. A schoolhouse like this one near Sykesville would have taught generations of children in one or a few rooms, typically on limited public funding and outsized community effort. Such buildings stood as proof of Black families' determination to secure learning for their children under Jim Crow.
Baltimore, MD
War memorials dedicated to "the men and women of this community who served their country in all wars" became a fixture of American towns and neighborhoods in the twentieth century, especially in the decades after World War I and World War II, when communities wanted a permanent, public way to honor local service and sacrifice. Framing the tribute "to the glory of God" reflects the sacred, often church-adjacent tone many such memorials carried, treating military service as a solemn civic and moral duty. Its explicit inclusion of women who served marks the broadening of who a community recognized as having answered the nation's call.
Howard County, MD
During the Gettysburg Campaign of June 1863, Confederate cavalry under General J.E.B. Stuart swept through central Maryland on the long ride that separated him from Lee's main army. At Cooksville on June 29, Stuart's troopers brushed aside a body of Maryland militia and pressed on toward Hood's Mill and Westminster. The brief clash was one of many skirmishes marking the army's march toward Pennsylvania.
Baltimore, MD
This plaque honors two very different Baltimore figures. Curt Richter, longtime head of the psychobiology laboratory at Johns Hopkins, did pioneering research on the body's internal "biological clock." Beside him is remembered Garry Moore, the genial host of 1950s and 1960s television variety shows.
Silver Spring, MD
This plaque marks the spot where one of the original boundary stones of the District of Columbia was set in 1791–1792. The stones were placed at intervals to mark out the ten-mile-square federal district for the new national capital. Together they form some of the earliest federal monuments in the country.
Baltimore, MD
Daniel Coit Gilman was the first president of Johns Hopkins University and the first director of its hospital, positions from which he reinvented American higher education. Championing original research and graduate study, he built an institution modeled on the pursuit of new knowledge rather than rote instruction. His example reshaped universities across the country.
Silver Spring, MD
For three weeks in October 2002, the Washington, D.C. region lived under siege as a pair of snipers shot people at random—at gas pumps, in parking lots, while mowing a lawn or loading a car. The killers, later identified as John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, struck across Maryland, Virginia, and the District, and the ten who died were an ordinary cross-section of the metro area: commuters and retirees, a cab driver, a landscaper, immigrants and native Washingtonians alike. This memorial gathers the names of those victims so that people going about the most everyday errands are not forgotten.
Calvert County, MD
Screwpile lighthouses like this one were an ingenious answer to the soft, shifting bottoms of the Chesapeake Bay, where a traditional masonry tower could never stand. Rather than pouring a foundation, builders threaded wrought-iron piles into the muddy floor by hand and perched a hexagonal cottage atop them, so the keeper and family lived directly above the water they guarded. Installed in 1883 at the mouth of the Patuxent River, this light marked the passage into one of the bay's busiest tributaries for nearly eighty years, guiding oyster boats, steamers, and freight through the shoals until it was retired in 1962.
Cecil County, MD
On May 30, 1947, an Eastern Air Lines flight bound down the East Coast went down near this stretch of the upper Chesapeake country, killing everyone aboard in one of the deadliest U.S. air disasters of its day. The crash came during the postwar boom, when commercial aviation was expanding faster than the safety rules meant to govern it. This quiet memorial marks the ground where that loss came to earth.
Baltimore, MD
This building, erected in 1836 for the Washington Medical College, is where Edgar Allan Poe spent his final hours. Brought here ill and semi-conscious on October 3, 1849, the author and poet died four days later under circumstances that remain one of literature's enduring mysteries. The structure later became part of Church Home and Hospital and survives as the east building of the complex.
Baltimore, MD
This simple memorial marks a house connected to the final chapter of Edgar Allan Poe's life in Baltimore in 1849. The city holds several sites tied to the author's last days, reflecting how closely his memory is bound to it. Poe had lived and written in Baltimore in the early 1830s, a formative period for his craft.
Baltimore, MD
In October 1833, three of Baltimore's literary gentlemen — John Pendleton Kennedy, James H. Miller, and John H. B. Latrobe — met in this house to judge a contest run by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. Their unanimous choice was "MS. Found in a Bottle," written by an unknown, penniless newcomer named Edgar Allan Poe. The fifty-dollar prize, the recognition, and Poe's lasting friendship with Kennedy helped set the struggling writer on his path.
Baltimore, MD
The Hamilton sisters each left a lasting mark. Edith Hamilton became one of America's most beloved interpreters of the ancient world as author of The Greek Way, while her sister Alice Hamilton essentially founded the field of industrial medicine, exposing the dangers of lead and other toxins to American workers.
Baltimore, MD
Edward J. Gallagher (1864–1933) came of age as Baltimore was booming outward from its old harbor core, and the phrase "Pioneer Builder" marks him as one of the developers who gave the city its signature look: block after block of brick and Formstone rowhouses with marble stoops. In the decades around the turn of the century, builders like Gallagher raised whole neighborhoods of affordable, ground-rent homes that housed the city's growing working and middle classes. A memorial like this honors not a single dramatic event but a lifetime of quiet, cumulative work that literally shaped the streets Baltimoreans still live on.
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.
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.
Baltimore, MD
While living in Baltimore in the 1930s, F. Scott Fitzgerald—already famous for 'The Great Gatsby'—produced some of his most searching later work. Here he published the novel 'Tender Is the Night' and the essays later gathered as 'The Crack-Up,' written as his own life grew troubled. The city marks this difficult but productive chapter of his career.
Baltimore, MD
Fells Point was founded in 1726 by Lancashire shipbuilder William Fell, and its deepwater shoreline quickly made it one of early America's great shipbuilding centers. From colonial times through the Civil War, more than six hundred vessels slid down its ways, including the frigate USS Constellation and the swift, raking-masted Baltimore clippers that made the port famous. The neighborhood grew into a bustling maritime community at the heart of Baltimore's rise.
Baltimore, MD
Florence Rena Sabin broke barriers as the first woman to hold a full professorship at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she advanced the study of living cells and the lymphatic system. In retirement she returned to Colorado and led a sweeping reform of the state's public-health laws. Her statue represents Colorado in the U.S. Capitol.
Baltimore, MD · est. 1914
A cannon here marks the site of Fort Babcock, one of the small waterfront batteries that helped defend Baltimore during the British assault of September 1814. Manned during the bombardment that failed to break the city, it formed part of the layered defenses that held the line. The marker was erected in 1914 for the centennial.
Towson, MD
Fort Garrison was built in 1693 as a frontier defense in colonial Maryland, part of the network of fortified strongpoints raised to guard scattered settlers in an uncertain borderland. This stone garrison house stood watch over the edge of English settlement, and was marked in 1973 by the Colonial Dames of the XVII Century.
Baltimore, MD
This iron bomb was hurled from a British warship during the two-day bombardment of Fort McHenry on September 13-14, 1814, and fell inside the fort's walls. A defending officer later gave the spent shell to Michael Keyser as a relic of the battle that saved Baltimore. That same bombardment inspired Francis Scott Key to write the verses that became "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Takoma Park, MD
In 1883, real-estate developer Benjamin Franklin Gilbert bought farmland straddling the District of Columbia line and laid out Takoma Park as one of Washington's earliest railroad commuter suburbs, its lots strung along the B&O Railroad's Metropolitan Branch. Gilbert marketed the wooded, hilly retreat as a healthful escape from the crowded capital, and the community that grew up around the depot became known for its shady streets and Victorian cottages. This monument, raised by residents and dedicated on Independence Day 1939, marks the spot where that founding vision took root.
Baltimore, MD · est. 1976
On May 9, 1911, a small group of physicians gathered in Baltimore to found the American Psychoanalytic Association, dedicated to advancing the then-radical ideas of Sigmund Freud in the United States. Its founders included the neurologist James J. Putnam as president and the Welsh analyst Ernest Jones as secretary, alongside pioneering American figures like Adolf Meyer. The plaque was dedicated in 1976 during the association's 65th annual meeting.
Baltimore, MD
Franklin P. Mall was a pioneering anatomist and embryologist and one of the principal architects of the Johns Hopkins Medical School. Working around the turn of the twentieth century, he helped build a rigorous, research-driven model of medical training. His influence helped make Baltimore a center of modern American medicine.
Towson, MD
In the years after World War II, Scouting boomed across America, and troops relied on donated land and dedicated camps to teach woodcraft, self-reliance, and citizenship to a rising generation of boys. This 1946 tablet marks Camp Cone, a Boy Scouts of America camp set aside in memory of Frederic W. Cone so that others could enjoy and benefit from the outdoors. Memorial camps like this one were a common way for communities to honor a departed benefactor while turning private generosity into lasting public good.
Saint Mary's County, MD
This monument was given to Maryland in 1934 to mark three centuries since the colony's founding in 1634, when English settlers came ashore in this region to plant a settlement conceived — unusually for its time — as a refuge of religious toleration. In an age of bitter sectarian strife, Maryland's early promise of liberty of conscience set it apart among the American colonies. The tercentenary gift from the state's counties honors that founding ideal.
Baltimore, MD
Born Thomas Garrison Morfit in Baltimore, Garry Moore became one of the friendly faces of early American television, hosting popular variety and panel programs like I've Got a Secret and The Garry Moore Show. In the 1950s and 1960s, as TV entered living rooms across the country, his easygoing style helped define the new medium.
Washington County, MD
On the morning of September 14, 1862, the Maryland Campaign reached the wooded slopes of South Mountain, where Confederate forces fought to hold the gaps against advancing Union columns three days before the carnage at Antietam. In the fighting around Fox's Gap, Brigadier General Samuel Garland, Jr.—a young Lynchburg lawyer turned brigade commander under D. H. Hill—rode among his North Carolinians to steady their line and was struck down, dying of his wound that day. His loss was one of several among senior officers in a battle that bought the Army of Northern Virginia precious hours but could not stop the Federal push through the passes.
Baltimore, MD
On the morning of September 14, 1964, at the peak of Beatlemania, Beatle George Harrison toured Baltimore's Mercy High School. It is remembered as the only known visit by a member of the band to an American high school during that frenzied first year of their U.S. fame.
Baltimore, MD
Gerald W. Johnson (1890–1980) was a Baltimore journalist, historian, and biographer whose political commentary reached readers in print and viewers on early television. His independence of mind led Adlai Stevenson to call him a 'critic on conscience of the nation.' He stands among the influential public writers of twentieth-century America.
Harford County, MD
This roadside marker along the old Post Road honors William Paca, born nearby in 1740, who rose to sign the Declaration of Independence and later served three terms as governor of Maryland. The Post Road itself, noted here as established in 1666, was one of the colonial arteries binding the Atlantic settlements together long before the Revolution. Paca went on to help shape Maryland's early state government and its constitution.
Baltimore, MD
The Grand Army of the Republic was the great fraternal order of Union veterans who had marched home from the Civil War, and by the 1930s their ranks were thinning fast as the old soldiers passed into memory. This sundial was placed in Baltimore in 1933 not by the veterans themselves but by their descendants — the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, a heritage society formed to keep faith with the men of 1861–1865. A sundial makes a fitting tribute: a quiet instrument marking the passage of time over a generation that was slipping away.
Baltimore County, MD
For more than a century the village of Granite—first called Waltersville after the family that opened the industry around 1820—shipped some of North America's finest building stone. Its Waltersville and Fox Rock quarries employed hundreds of stonecutters whose granite went into the Baltimore & Ohio's pioneering railroad, the Thomas Viaduct, and landmark buildings including the Library of Congress and the inner walls of the Washington Monument. The workers' homes still cluster nearby, and the district was placed on the National Register in 1994.