Historic Markers in Pennsylvania

Neville Township, PA · est. 1995

On this island in the Ohio River just below Pittsburgh, the Dravo Corporation turned a peacetime engineering firm into one of the arsenal of democracy's most unlikely powerhouses. Its inland shipyard mass-produced Landing Ship Tanks—the ungainly, flat-bottomed LSTs that carried tanks, trucks, and troops straight onto hostile beaches. Using assembly-line techniques Dravo pioneered, this yard and four others hundreds of miles from any ocean built two-thirds of the Navy's entire LST fleet, floating them down the rivers to the sea. More than 16,000 workers here produced 145 of the vessels between 1943 and 1945.

Bethlehem, PA

This inscription belongs to the old tradition of the wayside fountain—a public spring or basin set beside a road to refresh travelers, and often carrying a few carved lines of welcome. Bethlehem grew from a Moravian settlement founded in 1741, a community shaped by faith and by a steady stream of visitors, and its stone fountains and springs long offered cool water to those passing through. The single surviving line, addressed directly to the 'Pilgrim,' turns an ordinary drink of water into a small moment of hospitality and reflection.

East Drumore Township, PA · est. 1921

This stone monument gathers the memory of four notable early Americans tied to the Drumore neighborhood of Lancaster County. Among them, Dr. David Ramsay won fame as a physician and one of the young nation's first historians, while Colonel Archibald Steele was remembered for his part in the Revolutionary era's daring frontier and Canadian campaigns. Together the four represent the Scots-Irish stock that filled Pennsylvania's southern townships and supplied leaders to the Revolution and the early republic.

Willistown Township, PA · est. 2004

In August 1832, fifty-seven Irish immigrants, newly landed and desperate for work, were digging railroad line for a contractor named Duffy when cholera swept through their camp. Feared as carriers of disease and scorned as Irish Catholics, they were largely left to die, and their bodies were buried together in a hidden trench. The mass grave nearby holds them still.

Brownsville, PA · est. 1991

Spanning Dunlap's Creek along the National Road at Brownsville, this 80-foot cast-iron span was built between 1836 and 1839 as the first metal arch bridge in the United States. It replaced a string of earlier crossings on the site, including an 1809 Finley suspension bridge, and was fabricated under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with Capt. Richard Delafield and Lt. George W. Cass overseeing the work. It carried the young republic's great westward highway on a structure that pointed toward the age of iron.

Duquesne, PA · est. 1997

The steel works at Duquesne began in 1886 and quickly fell into the empire of Andrew Carnegie, who acquired it in 1890 before it passed to the newly formed U.S. Steel in 1901. Generations of workers here pioneered advances in rolling mills and blast furnaces before World War I and later in pollution control, tending as many as six blast furnaces at the plant's height. The mill fed the nation's appetite for steel until it finally went cold in 1984.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1978

Duquesne University began in 1878 when Holy Ghost Fathers from Germany opened a small Catholic school in Pittsburgh. Chartered in 1882 as Pittsburgh Catholic College, it grew into a full university and took the name Duquesne in 1911. From the start it welcomed students of many faiths into both liberal arts and professional training.

Durham Township, PA · est. 1947

Built in 1727, Durham Furnace was one of colonial Pennsylvania's early ironworks, smelting local ore into iron through more than six decades of blast until 1789. In the colonial wars and again during the Revolution it cast cannon and shot for the fight, turning frontier iron into weapons of war. Among its owners were the prominent colonial statesman James Logan and George Taylor, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Middletown Township, PA · est. 1988

This weathered stone once told riders exactly where they stood: one mile to Newtown. Set in place before 1741, it survives as one of only two remaining milestones along the 43-mile colonial road that ran from Bristol to the ironworks at Durham Furnace. Newtown, an important waypoint on that route, served as the Bucks County seat for most of the eighteenth century.

Reading, PA · est. 1951

This winding road from City Park up to Reading's landmark Pagoda takes its name from Charles E. Duryea, an automobile pioneer who used its slopes from 1900 to 1907 as a proving ground for his cars. Duryea built one of America's first successful gasoline automobiles, and the hill let him test the machines' power against the very grades that stymied early motorcars.

Middle Smithfield Township, PA · est. 2000

Long before Pennsylvania's roads and railroads, Dutch colonists pushed inland from the Hudson River valley toward the Delaware, following the rugged trace known as the Old Mine Road. Crossing at Walpack Bend, these early settlers opened up this corner of the Pocono region, making the route the oldest road in Monroe County. Their arrival marked the first sustained European presence in a landscape then largely shaped by Native peoples.

Gettysburg, PA · est. 1994

In the spring and summer of 1918, a young Army captain named Dwight D. Eisenhower lived in this Gettysburg house with his wife Mamie and their infant son while commanding nearby Camp Colt. There he trained American soldiers in the new weapon of the First World War, the tank, on the very fields where the great Civil War battle had been fought. Decades later he would return to Gettysburg as a five-star general, Supreme Commander in Europe, and President of the United States.

Clinton Township, PA · est. 2001

Here in Lycoming County, farmers organized Eagle Grange No. 1 on March 4, 1871, making it Pennsylvania's very first local chapter of the Patrons of Husbandry. Part of a national movement founded in 1867, the Grange gave isolated rural families a way to fight back against high railroad rates and middlemen through cooperative buying and collective advocacy, and it championed rural free mail delivery. Notably progressive for its time, the order granted women full and equal membership. The community built its Grange hall on this spot in 1887.

Boggs Township, PA · est. 1947

Around 1810 Roland Curtin began making iron at nearby Curtin, launching an enterprise that would outlast nearly all its peers. Remarkably, the last old-style charcoal furnace in the entire United States stood here, remaining in blast until it finally went cold in 1922. The site is a living bookend to more than a century of American iron-making tradition.

Duquesne, PA · est. 2024

Born in Duquesne, Earl 'Fatha' Hines revolutionized the way the piano was played in jazz, developing a bold 'trumpet-style' approach that freed the instrument from a purely rhythmic role. In 1921 he became one of the first Black musicians to perform on American radio, and his big band went on to launch the careers of countless jazz greats. His orchestra served as an early incubator for the bebop revolution that reshaped American music.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1950

This modest one-and-a-half-story house, dating from about 1730, represents the everyday architecture of Lancaster's earliest settlers. Plain and practical, such homes were the common dwelling type across the growing town — the marker notes that most local houses were still built in this style as late as 1800. It offers a glimpse of ordinary colonial domestic life, far from the grand Georgian mansions of the wealthy.

Somerset, PA · est. 1954

In 1813, in a log cabin on this spot, printer Charles Frederick Goeb produced what is remembered as the first Bible printed west of the Allegheny Mountains. Getting a printing press — and the paper, type, and skill to run it — across the mountains was no small feat on the early frontier, where books were scarce and precious. A Bible off a local press meant a community had crossed a threshold from raw settlement toward established cultural life.

Titusville, PA · est. 1954

In the hills around Titusville, the modern petroleum industry was quite literally being invented. The inscription marks where one of the region's earliest crude-oil refineries rose in 1860, just after Edwin Drake's famous 1859 well nearby, with its first run of refined oil following in 1861. It also nods to Samuel Kier, who had been distilling Pennsylvania crude in Pittsburgh years earlier, turning a nuisance seepage into lamp oil and medicine.

Lower Merion Township, PA · est. 1972

Opened in 1704 and known by a string of colonial names, this roadside inn served travelers on one of the region's key routes for well over a century. It was familiar to Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, and shortly after the Revolution it was renamed to honor General Anthony 'Mad Anthony' Wayne, who had lodged there. Taverns like this were the social and political hubs of colonial and Revolutionary America, where news traveled and plans were laid.

Mount Joy Township, PA · est. 1947

Along this railroad right-of-way ran the first commercial telegraph line in the United States, strung between Lancaster and Harrisburg and completed in 1845 — barely a year after Samuel Morse's famous demonstration. The first message clattered through in January 1846 with a very human impatience: "Why don't you write, you rascals?" It was a small joke carrying an enormous idea — that words could now outrun the fastest horse.

Philadelphia, PA

In the Philadelphia neighborhood of East Falls, a mill and riverside community strung along the Schuylkill, residents raised this monument in 1949 through the East Falls War Memorial Association to honor the local men and women who had gone off to fight. Its inscription reaches all the way back to 1776, tying the neighborhood's sacrifice to every American conflict from the Revolution onward. Erected in the years just after World War II, it reflects the postwar impulse of countless towns and city neighborhoods to gather their veterans' service into a single lasting tribute.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1996

Rising between 1822 and 1836 to John Haviland's dramatic radial design, Eastern State Penitentiary tried to reinvent punishment itself. Its "Pennsylvania System" isolated each prisoner in silence, pairing solitude with moral and vocational instruction in the belief that reflection could reform a soul. The experiment was studied and copied by more than 300 prisons around the world before the great fortress-like prison finally closed in 1971.

Easton, PA · est. 1947

Set where the Lehigh joins the Delaware, Easton grew at the ancient Forks of the Delaware, long a meeting ground before Europeans arrived. Surveyor William Parsons laid out the town in 1752 for the Penn family, and its councils drew colonial officials and Native delegations to negotiate the uneasy terms of frontier life. In the following century it became home to Lafayette College, cementing its place as a hub of travel, trade, and learning.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1993

Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett bridged the worlds of education and diplomacy in the Reconstruction era. For more than a decade he led Philadelphia's Institute for Colored Youth, one of the nation's premier schools for Black students. In 1869 President Grant appointed him U.S. minister to Haiti—making Bassett the first African American to hold a diplomatic post, a barrier-breaking role he filled through 1877 before settling here for his final years.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2008

When it rose in the 1850s, the Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion was a showpiece of Victorian taste—Gothic points and a Second Empire mansard roof announcing the fashions of a prosperous new age. It stood in the Tulpehocken Station district, one of the country's earliest railroad suburbs, where trains let city dwellers build homes beyond Philadelphia's crowded core. A grassroots preservation effort in the 1950s and 60s saved the house just as Americans were beginning to value Victorian architecture.

Foster Township, PA · est. 2015

Founded in 1854 as Fillmore and soon renamed for mining engineer Eckley Coxe, this village was built to house the workers who dug anthracite coal from the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania. Many were European immigrants, and their tight rows of company houses made Eckley a classic 'coal patch' town of the late 1800s. When the collieries faded by the 1950s the community nearly vanished, only to be preserved after it served as a filming location for the 1970 movie 'The Molly Maguires' and became a state historic site.

Moosic, PA

In the anthracite country of northeastern Pennsylvania, small towns like Moosic built much of their community life around the local ball diamond. This field is dedicated to Ed "Shovels" Kobesky, a Moosic native who made his career in minor league baseball as both a player and a manager. In the decades before television, clubs like the Redwings were the beating heart of a town's summer, drawing neighbors out to the bleachers on warm evenings.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2021

Ed Bradley grew up in Philadelphia and got his start in broadcasting at WDAS radio not far from this spot before rising to the top of American journalism. He reported from the battlefields of Vietnam and Cambodia, became the first African American television correspondent to cover the White House, and spent 26 years as a fixture on CBS's 60 Minutes. Along the way he collected 19 Emmys, a Peabody, and a lifetime achievement award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

New Kensington, PA

New Kensington's Eddie Adams grew from a high school yearbook photographer into one of the most celebrated photojournalists of his time. His 1968 image "Saigon Execution" won the Pulitzer Prize and helped turn American public opinion against the Vietnam War. Over a career centered in New York, his work filled the nation's leading newspapers and magazines, earning him more than 500 awards.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2014

Eddie Gottlieb discovered basketball as a student in this Philadelphia neighborhood in 1914, when the sport was still young. 'The Mogul' coached the famed SPHAS for decades and, in 1946, helped found the Basketball Association of America, forerunner of the NBA. He led the Philadelphia Warriors to the league's first championship and shaped the pro game for years as its longtime schedule maker and rules chairman.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1995

Born Salvatore Massaro in 1902, Eddie Lang grew up in this part of Philadelphia and grew into the musician often called the "Father of Jazz Guitar." A gifted soloist, he brought the guitar forward as a serious jazz voice, working alongside violinist Joe Venuti, bandleader Paul Whiteman, the Dorsey brothers, and others in the freewheeling music scene of the 1920s and early '30s. He was serving as Bing Crosby's accompanist when his sudden death in 1933 cut short a brilliant career.

Gettysburg, PA · est. 2000

"Gettysburg Eddie" Plank turned a small-town Pennsylvania upbringing into one of the greatest pitching careers of baseball's dead-ball era. Born in Gettysburg and schooled at Gettysburg Academy, he compiled a remarkable 326-194 record from 1901 to 1917, mostly for Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics, winning twenty or more games eight times and helping the A's to six pennants and three world championships. He returned home to Gettysburg, where he died, and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946.

Eddystone, PA · est. 2019

When the guns of the First World War fell on Europe in 1914, an arms plant rose on the Delaware River at Eddystone to turn out Enfield rifles for Britain. After the United States entered the war, the factory retooled to make the American Model 1917 — and became the single largest rifle producer in the nation, employing some 15,000 workers, a fifth of them women. Its lines fabricated more than a million rifles, nearly half of the country's entire wartime output.

Edinboro, PA · est. 1968

Chartered as a state normal school in 1861, Edinboro was among the first teacher-training institutions west of the Allegheny Mountains, part of a 19th-century movement to professionalize American education. Normal schools existed to turn out qualified schoolteachers for a rapidly expanding public system. Over the following century it grew from a normal school into a teachers college and then a full state college.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2006

Edmund N. Bacon led Philadelphia's city planning from 1949 to 1970, the postwar decades when American cities were remaking themselves for a new age. His vision reshaped the fabric of a colonial-era city, restoring the historic townhouses of Society Hill while opening modern civic spaces like Penn Center and the beloved LOVE Park. Time magazine put him on its cover as the face of a national urban-renewal movement.

Plains Township, PA · est. 2004

The hard-coal towns of the Wyoming Valley turned out more than their share of major-league ballplayers, and Plains-born "Big Ed" Walsh was among the greatest. Pitching for the Chicago White Sox, he averaged 24 wins a year across 1906–12 and, in his astonishing 1908 season, won 40 games with 11 shutouts—including both ends of a doubleheader. Master of the spitball, he retired with a career earned-run average of 1.82, still among the lowest ever, and entered the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946.

Rayne Township, PA · est. 1996

Edward Abbey, one of America's fiercest literary defenders of wild country, was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, in 1927 and grew up around the village of Home. Though he made his name writing of the desert Southwest in Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, works like Appalachian Wilderness and The Journey Home return to the green hills of his native county, where he first learned to love the natural world. He moved west in 1948 and died in Tucson, Arizona, in 1989.

Washington, PA · est. 1953

Edward Goodrich Acheson was born in this distinctive round-cornered house in 1856 and went on to become one of America's most inventive industrial chemists. Working with the intense heat of the electric furnace, he discovered carborundum—an abrasive nearly as hard as diamond—and a method for producing artificial graphite, both of which won him medals and reshaped modern manufacturing. His inventions became indispensable to grinding, machining, and electrical industries worldwide.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2002

The paleontologist and zoologist Edward Drinker Cope lived and worked in this Philadelphia neighborhood in his later years, producing a torrent of scientific papers that described hundreds of fossil and living species. He is best remembered for the "Bone Wars," his fierce, decades-long rivalry with Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale to unearth and name new dinosaurs. Their competition, however bitter, dramatically expanded American knowledge of prehistoric life.

Conshohocken, PA · est. 1976

Edward Hector served as a private in the Continental artillery and fought at the Battle of Brandywine in 1777, one of the largest engagements of the Revolutionary War. He made his home in what is now Conshohocken. His marker honors him as a stand-in for the many Black soldiers whose service filled the Continental ranks but whose race went unrecorded in the muster rolls.

Newtown, PA · est. 1997

On this Bucks County street lived one of America's most beloved folk painters, a self-taught Quaker who supported himself lettering coaches and signs while creating art that would outlast him. He returned again and again to a single vision of peace drawn from the prophet Isaiah, painting dozens of versions of animals and children resting together in harmony. A preacher as well as a painter, he wove his faith and his craft into images that still hang in major museums.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2024

Trumpeter Edward Lee 'Lee' Morgan came up through the demanding schools of the Dizzy Gillespie band and Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, becoming one of the defining voices of hard bop. As a bandleader he recorded more than thirty albums, and his infectious 1963 tune 'The Sidewinder' crossed over into the pop charts and became a jazz standard. He played this very spot at the Aqua Lounge, one of the Philadelphia clubs that nurtured the postwar jazz scene.

Portland, PA · est. 1948

Edward Marshall was one of the fast walkers hired to pace off the 1737 Walking Purchase, the land grab that stripped the Lenape of vast territory in the Delaware Valley. He later settled in this frontier area, where in 1757, amid the raids of the French and Indian War, his wife and eldest son were killed—by some accounts in reprisal for his role in the notorious survey. Marshall eventually withdrew to the safer settlements of Bucks County.

Springfield Township, PA · est. 2025

Edward Piszek co-founded Mrs. Paul's Kitchens in Philadelphia in 1946, and his frozen seafood—especially the fish cakes that earned him the nickname "Fishcake King"—soon filled freezers across the country. A trip to his family's Polish homeland in the 1960s turned him into a devoted patron of Polish culture and causes. He founded the Copernicus Society, helped save the Kosciuszko House with historian Edward Pinkowski, and bankrolled an anti-tuberculosis campaign.

Oil Creek Township, PA · est. 1946

Edwin L. Drake drilled the world's first commercially successful oil well near Titusville in 1859, proving that petroleum could be pumped from underground in quantity and igniting the modern oil industry. He is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery beneath sculptor Charles Niehaus's bronze figure "The Driller," and the site of his pioneering well is preserved today as a state park a mile and a half south of town. The valley he opened became the cradle of a global energy business.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 1959

Edwin L. Drake changed the modern world in 1859 when he drilled the first successful oil well at Titusville, proving petroleum could be pumped from the ground in commercial quantity. His breakthrough touched off an oil rush across northwestern Pennsylvania and launched an entirely new industry. Drake spent his final years, 1873 to 1880, in this Bethlehem house; in 1902 his remains were reinterred beneath a memorial at Titusville.

Connellsville, PA · est. 1992

Born in Connellsville, Edwin S. Porter became one of the pioneering figures of American cinema at the dawn of the twentieth century. Working in the earliest days of the medium, he helped develop the grammar of film itself—editing, the screenplay, and narrative technique. His 1903 landmark "The Great Train Robbery" thrilled audiences and pointed the way toward modern storytelling on screen.

Waverly Township, PA · est. 1948

Born in Connecticut in 1775, Elder Miller joined the stream of New England settlers who pushed into northeastern Pennsylvania's Abington region around 1800. On his own farm he hosted the township's first church and its first school, serving his neighbors as both preacher and teacher until his death in 1857. His homestead became the seedbed of community life on a raw frontier.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2016

Elfreth's Alley is one of the oldest continuously inhabited residential streets in America, its brick rowhouses raised between the 1720s and 1830s. Its first residents were the tradespeople of a growing colonial port—blacksmiths, cabinetmakers, and other artisans—followed in later years by working-class immigrants who labored in nearby industries. When demolition threatened in 1934, the alley's own residents banded together to save it.

Kelly Township, PA · est. 1968

Eli Slifer (1818–1888) lived in this house during the crisis years of the Civil War, serving as Pennsylvania's Secretary of the Commonwealth. As a close aide to the state's wartime governor, Andrew Curtin, he helped organize the enormous task of raising troops and marshaling supplies for the Union effort. A veteran state legislator and treasurer, he was one of the administrative hands behind Pennsylvania's war machine.

Brookville, PA · est. 2005

In 1835, decades before the Civil War, Brookville judge Elijah Heath joined others in freeing two men, Charles Brown and William Parker, from those who would return them to slavery. A Virginia slaveholder sued him and he was fined, yet Heath kept working the Underground Railroad through western Pennsylvania. His willingness to defy the law and pay the price marks the moral courage that antislavery convictions could demand.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2016

Born in Philadelphia in 1820, Elisha Kent Kane became one of America's first celebrity explorers, venturing into the frozen Arctic in the 1850s in search of a lost British expedition. His vivid published accounts shaped how scientists and everyday readers imagined the polar world, and the route he charted later guided Robert Peary toward the North Pole. So beloved was Kane that when he died young, his body traveled in a two-week funeral procession across the country before its burial here.

Hanover Township, PA · est. 1947

Elisha McCurdy was a leading Presbyterian revivalist of the frontier, serving this congregation for forty-six years and lying buried where he preached. In November 1802 he helped lead the great camp-meeting revivals at Cross Roads and Upper Buffalo, drawing thousands from far and near. These gatherings were part of the sweeping religious awakening that swept the western settlements in the early republic.

Elizabeth, PA · est. 1946

In the early republic, the town of Elizabeth on the Monongahela became a busy cradle of boatbuilding for America's western rivers. At the yards of John and Samuel Walker, shipwrights turned out vessels sturdy enough for long voyages — one launched here in 1793 made its way down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans and on to Philadelphia. These river craft carried settlers and goods into the opening trans-Appalachian frontier.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2019

In a Philadelphia rowhouse, the Quaker matron Elizabeth Drinker kept a diary for nearly half a century, from 1758 until her death in 1807. Her entries are one of early America's richest personal records — she watched the British march into the city during the Revolution's 1777 occupation and set down the texture of ordinary life amid founding-era upheaval. As a woman of means, faith, and unusual persistence, she chronicled a world that official histories rarely captured.

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.

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.

Emmaus, PA · est. 1966

Long before European settlers, the Lenape knew this place as "Macungie," the feeding place of the bears. Settlement began in the 1730s, and a sturdy Shelter House went up in 1734 to protect the community. In 1761 Moravians organized a close-knit congregational village here—a "Gemein-Ort"—and gave it the biblical name Emmaus.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2005

Established in 1871 as one of 22 companies in the new Philadelphia Fire Department, Engine Company No. 11 became a segregated African American unit in 1919. Its firefighters earned distinction through skilled, professional service during more than three decades of enforced separation, until the company was desegregated in 1952. Its history traces the long arc of Black service and the fight against segregation in a major city institution.

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.