2,561 markers in the database — showing 1,441–1,500.
Cheltenham Township, PA · est. 1974
Near here stood "Roadside," the home of Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), a Quaker minister whose moral force helped drive some of the century's great reform movements. A tireless abolitionist, she helped organize the 1848 Seneca Falls convention and championed women's rights, temperance, and peace. Her faith and eloquence made her a leader when few women spoke publicly at all.
Lewisburg, PA · est. 1954
Ludwig Derr laid out Lewisburg in 1785, in the first years of the new republic, choosing a spot along the Susquehanna's West Branch where a trading post and a grist and saw mill could anchor a settlement. His log house still survives, folded into the walls of a later structure on this site. Derr died the same year he founded the town, but the community he planned took root and grew.
Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1982
Formed in 1786 from Northumberland County and named for the French nobleman Chevalier de la Luzerne, an ally of the American Revolution, Luzerne County has long been a place shaped by conflict and coal. Its seat, Wilkes-Barre, was settled in 1769 amid the Yankee-Pennamite Wars — bitter contests between Connecticut and Pennsylvania claimants over the same Wyoming Valley land. More than a century later the region became a flashpoint again during the great Anthracite Strike of 1902, a landmark clash between miners and coal operators.
Williamsport, PA · est. 1981
Carved from Northumberland County in 1795 and named for a creek bearing a Delaware Indian word, Lycoming County rose on the wealth of the surrounding forests. By the mid-1800s Williamsport stood among the greatest lumbering centers in the nation, its sawmills feeding a booming young republic. A very different kind of fame arrived later when the county became the birthplace of Little League Baseball.
Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 2000
From his base in Wilkes-Barre, Lyman H. Howe ran six touring companies that carried the new marvel of motion pictures to small towns and rural audiences across America. Billing his programs as "high class," he paired films with coordinated sound effects and captured world and local events alike—including President Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 visit to the city. For many Americans, a Howe show was their very first movie.
Coudersport, PA · est. 1947
The first settlement in this rugged region took root in 1808, planted by Major Isaac Lyman, a land agent and veteran of the Revolutionary War. Around his pioneer holding grew the essential institutions of frontier life: the area's first saw and grist mills, its first post office, and its first court. Lymansville became the seedbed from which the wider settlement of the county followed.
Cumberland Township, PA
This War Department tablet records the service of the Madison (Mississippi) Light Artillery, Ward's Battery, on July 3, 1863. Its Napoleon guns took part in the tremendous cannonade that preceded Longstreet's assault — the charge remembered as Pickett's Charge — before withdrawing to a position nearby. The marker notes that the battery's howitzer was held in the rear and saw no action that day.
Frackville, PA · est. 2007
To move mountains of anthracite out of the Mahanoy Valley, engineers built an inclined-plane railroad that hauled loaded coal cars up the steep face of Broad Mountain to Frackville. Opened in 1862 within the Reading Railroad system and enlarged in the early 20th century, it grew into an engineering marvel capable of meeting national demand for hard coal. After lifting hundreds of millions of tons, it fell silent in 1932, leaving only partial ruins behind.
Carlisle, PA · est. 1949
During the Revolution, Carlisle held British prisoners of war far from the fighting on the coast. For a short time in 1776, Major John Andre and Lieutenant Despard were detained in a tavern on this site. Andre was later exchanged, returned to service, and after his involvement in Benedict Arnold's treason was captured again and executed as a spy.
York, PA · est. 1949
When the Continental Congress fled to York in the fall of 1777, this quiet Pennsylvania town briefly served as the seat of a young nation at war. Major John Clark, who lived on this site, was a trusted Revolutionary officer who served as aide-de-camp to General Nathanael Greene and later as an auditor of the Continental Army — one of the many soldiers and administrators whose unglamorous labor kept Washington's army supplied and solvent.
Erie, PA · est. 2015
In the summer of 1813, with British warships massing on Lake Erie, seven Erie women stayed behind while others fled south and stitched the battle flag Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry would fly at the Battle of Lake Erie. Led by Margaret Forster Steuart and her sister Dorcas, the seamstresses emblazoned it with the dying words of Perry's friend James Lawrence: "Don't Give Up the Ship." The banner survives at the U.S. Naval Academy Museum in Annapolis, and its motto endures across the Navy.
Blacklick Township, PA · est. 1994
In a working-class stretch of Cambria County in 1898, a coal-country boy named Malcolm Cowley was born who would go on to define how America remembered its own artists. After serving in World War I, he joined the expatriate writers of the 1920s and later chronicled them in Exile's Return, giving the "Lost Generation" its enduring literary portrait. His verse in Blue Juniata carried this Pennsylvania landscape into American letters, and for a decade he led the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
East Huntingdon Township, PA · est. 2000
On January 27, 1891, an explosion tore through the Mammoth No. 1 Mine of the H.C. Frick Coke Company, killing 109 coal miners in one of the deadliest disasters the bituminous fields had ever seen. Seventy-nine of the dead — many of them immigrant laborers — were laid together in a mass grave in nearby St. John's Cemetery. The catastrophe shocked Pennsylvania into strengthening its mine-inspection laws, part of the long, hard-won struggle for safety in the coal country that powered American industry.
Straban Township, PA · est. 1954
Surveyed in 1766 and named for an English estate, the Manor of Maske was one of the great reserved tracts the Penn family set aside for themselves in colonial Pennsylvania — roughly six miles wide and twelve long, reaching south to what became the Mason-Dixon Line. This marker stands near its eastern boundary, a reminder of how the proprietors mapped and held vast blocks of land even as settlers pressed in around them. It was the second largest of the Penns' reserved estates in the colony.
Franklin Township, PA · est. 1954
Surveyed in 1766 and named for an estate in England, the Manor of Maske was a sprawling tract — some six by twelve miles — that the Penn family reserved for itself, its southern edge running along what became the Mason-Dixon Line. This marker stands near the manor's western boundary, one of two that trace the outline of the second largest reserved Penn estate in Pennsylvania. Together they map the reach of proprietary landholding on the eve of the Revolution.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2017
The composer and lyricist Marc Blitzstein was born here in 1905 and went on to reshape American musical theater by bringing everyday, working-class speech to the stage. His fiercely political The Cradle Will Rock and his enduring English adaptation of The Threepenny Opera pushed the boundaries of what a musical could say. Trained at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, he became a mentor to the young Leonard Bernstein.
New Cumberland, PA · est. 2001
Marcus A. Reno, whose farm lay near here, is remembered for one of the most scrutinized moments in American military history. As a major in the 7th U.S. Cavalry, he led a battalion at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in June 1876; while George Armstrong Custer and the men with him were annihilated, Reno and most of his command dug in and survived. Earlier, during the Civil War, he had helped defend this stretch of Pennsylvania against Confederate incursions.
Marcus Hook, PA · est. 1947
Marcus Hook sits on the Delaware River just below Philadelphia, where the earliest European traders learned that any ship bound upriver had to reckon with it first. Swedes were the first to settle the spot in the 1600s, but it was the Dutch who fixed a name to the place — Marreties Hoeck — during their brief mid-century control between 1655 and 1664. The tangle of Swedish, Dutch, and finally English claims here mirrors the whole contested history of the lower Delaware, a corner of North America that changed flags three times in a single generation.
Greene Township, PA · est. 1961
Born on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1751, Margaret Cochran Corbin followed her husband into the Continental Army and was beside him at the defense of Fort Washington in November 1776. When he was killed at his cannon, she took his place and kept firing until she too was gravely wounded. Congress later granted her a soldier's pension and a place in the Invalid Regiment, and she was buried with honor at West Point.
Doylestown, PA · est. 1996
Long before she became the most famous anthropologist in America, Margaret Mead grew up in this Doylestown house and graduated from the local high school in 1918. Her fieldwork among Pacific island peoples produced the 1928 bestseller "Coming of Age in Samoa," which challenged American assumptions about adolescence, gender, and culture. Through decades of writing and public life she brought the study of human societies to a mass audience.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 1993
Marian Anderson's extraordinary contralto carried her from singing as a child in this Philadelphia church to concert halls across Europe and America. When the Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from Constitution Hall, she sang instead at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter 1939 before a crowd of 75,000—a moment that became a landmark in the struggle for civil rights. In 1955 she broke the color barrier at the Metropolitan Opera, and in 1958 she served as a delegate to the United Nations.
Marianna, PA · est. 2019
On November 28, 1908, an explosion tore through the Marianna coal mine and killed 154 men — the worst disaster in Washington County's history and among the deadliest in American mining. Coming amid a string of catastrophic mine explosions in that era, the tragedy fueled a public outcry for safety reform. Within two years Congress created the U.S. Bureau of Mines, whose research into safer explosives and the control of gas and coal dust helped make the mines less lethal.
Carlisle, PA · est. 2002
The poet Marianne Moore spent her formative childhood and school years in Carlisle, living here from 1896 to 1916. Known for her precise eye, wit, and fiercely independent voice, she went on to become one of America's most honored modern poets — an editor and essayist as well — winning the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the National Book Award. Her distinctive style helped define 20th-century American verse.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 1993
In the early 20th century this South Philadelphia neighborhood was a dense Italian-American enclave, and it was here that a boy named Alfredo Cocozza first fell under the spell of grand opera. Rechristened Mario Lanza, he rode the era of radio, records, and Hollywood musicals to international fame, capped by his celebrated turn as the title character in 'The Great Caruso' in 1951. His soaring tenor introduced operatic singing to millions of Americans who had never set foot in an opera house.
Marion Township, PA
Small townships across Pennsylvania have long set aside a place to honor their own who answered the nation's call to arms. A memorial like this gathers the service of local men and women across generations into a single act of public remembrance, the kind of civic gesture that turns private gratitude into something permanent and shared. It belongs to the deep American tradition of town-square war memorials that took root after the Civil War and spread to nearly every community in the country.
Hanover, PA · est. 1954
From 1815 to 1872 a market house stood on Hanover's central square, doing the many jobs a young American town asked of one building. Farmers sold produce beneath its roof, a jail occupied one end, firefighting equipment was stored inside, and fairs and public gatherings filled it with life. Such market houses were the beating heart of civic and commercial life in early Pennsylvania towns.
Harrisburg, PA · est. 1953
From the town's founding in 1785 until 1889, this square was Harrisburg's beating commercial heart. Farmers rolled in from the surrounding countryside to sell produce from open market sheds and straight off their wagons at the curb, while inns crowded the edges of the square to serve travelers and traders. For over a century it was where the city fed itself and did its business.
Mercersburg, PA · est. 1953
Chartered in 1836 and housed in the local theological seminary building, Marshall College brought serious scholarship to the small town of Mercersburg. Its first president, Frederick A. Rauch, was a German-trained scholar whose textbook on psychology introduced European philosophical ideas to American students. In 1853 the college moved to Lancaster and merged with Franklin College—the origin of today's Franklin & Marshall.
Middle Smithfield Township, PA · est. 2023
On June 26, 1964, a burning tractor-trailer parked along the road here suddenly exploded, killing six people—among them three Marshalls Creek volunteer firefighters who had rushed to the blaze—and injuring thirteen more. Investigators later found the truck had been hauling explosives with no placards to warn responders of the danger. The tragedy fed a national push for reform that helped bring about the 1974 Transportation Safety Act and its stricter rules for shipping hazardous materials.
Middle Smithfield Township, PA · est. 2016
Twelve thousand years ago, as the last Ice Age loosened its grip, mastodons browsed the spruce forests and bogs of what is now eastern Pennsylvania. In 1968 workers cutting peat near Marshalls Creek uncovered the remarkably complete skeleton of one of these elephant relatives, an animal that had died and settled into the bog millennia before. Now housed in the State Museum in Harrisburg, it remains one of the finest mastodon finds on the Atlantic seaboard.
Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2008
Born near this spot in 1894, Martha Graham grew up to shatter the conventions of dance. Rejecting the airy grace of ballet, she built a raw, grounded vocabulary of contraction and release that gave modern dance its own language. Works like "Frontier" and "Appalachian Spring" turned American themes into movement, and the school she founded in 1927 trained generations of dancers.
Manor Township, PA · est. 1925
Martin Chartier was a French adventurer from Canada who had served at La Salle's Fort St. Louis in the Illinois country before leading a band of Shawnee eastward, first to Maryland and then, by 1697, to the Susquehanna at Pequea Creek. Settling on a tract granted him by William Penn, he became one of early Pennsylvania's most important Indian traders and interpreters, and an agent in Penn's treaties with the Susquehanna nations. His son Peter, born of his Shawnee wife, carried on the trade after him.
Chambersburg, PA · est. 2003
Educated in Chambersburg as the son of a free mother and an enslaved father, Martin Delany became one of the most formidable Black voices of his century. He published the antislavery newspaper The Mystery, joined Frederick Douglass in the abolitionist cause, and in 1865 became the first African American commissioned as a field officer in the United States Army. Physician, editor, and activist, he pressed for freedom on many fronts.
Smithfield Township, PA · est. 1948
Born near this spot in 1862, Martin G. Brumbaugh rose to become one of Pennsylvania's most influential educators before entering public life. He twice served as president of Juniata College and led the state as governor from 1915 to 1919, the years America was drawn into World War I. He rests in Valley View Cemetery in the same countryside where he began.
Penn Township, PA · est. 1949
Born near this spot in 1862, Martin G. Brumbaugh rose from a county schools superintendent to become one of Pennsylvania's most notable educators before serving as governor from 1915 to 1919. He twice led Juniata College as its president and spent his career championing public education. His life bridged the classroom and the statehouse in an era when both were rapidly modernizing.
Solebury Township, PA · est. 2000
Born here in Bucks County in 1819, Martin Johnson Heade grew up above his family's store and took his first lessons from the local Quaker painters Edward and Thomas Hicks in nearby Newtown. He went on to help pioneer American "luminism," a style prized for its still, glowing light over marshes and coasts, and became famous for jewel-like studies of hummingbirds and floral still lifes. His long career carried him across the Americas in pursuit of his subjects.
Chester, PA · est. 1984
Before he became the towering figure of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. spent three formative years in the Chester area as a divinity student, mentored by the Rev. J. Pius Barbour and graduating from Crozer Theological Seminary in 1951. Here he honed the theology and preaching that would carry him to national leadership. A little over a decade later he helped lead the 1963 March on Washington and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
Upland, PA · est. 1992
As a young student at Crozer Theological Seminary, Martin Luther King, Jr. earned his Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1951. These three formative years sharpened the philosophy of nonviolent resistance that would guide the civil rights movement. A little more than a decade later, that work earned him the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize.
West Lampeter Township, PA · est. 1959
In this modest shop, built in 1719, a Pennsylvania gunsmith helped perfect one of early America's defining tools. By the 1740s the long, accurate flintlock later mislabeled the 'Kentucky Rifle' was taking shape here, its grooved barrel and slim stock ideal for frontier hunting and warfare. German and Swiss craftsmen in Lancaster County refined the design that would carry settlers—and armies—westward.
Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1991
From an office near this spot in Pittsburgh, Martin R. Delany published The Mystery, an early African American newspaper, and became a leading voice for Black self-determination and emigrationist thought decades before such ideas were widespread. He studied briefly at Harvard Medical School, practiced medicine in the city, and during the Civil War was commissioned a major—among the first Black field officers in the U.S. Army.
Harborcreek Township, PA
In 1948, Mary Behrend gave her family's Glenhill Farm estate to Penn State so the university could put down permanent roots in northwestern Pennsylvania — the seed of what grew into Penn State Behrend. This monument, designed by students, honors that act of generosity.
Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2004
Born near here in 1844, Mary Cassatt left Pittsburgh to study art in Europe and settled in Paris, where the Impressionist master Edgar Degas became her friend and mentor. A gifted painter, printmaker, and etcher, she became renowned for her tender, unsentimental depictions of women and children. She stands as one of the few Americans — and fewer women — at the heart of the Impressionist movement.
Homestead, PA · est. 2003
By 1919 Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was already a legend of the American labor movement, a fearless organizer who called herself the miners' angel. Arrested and jailed in Homestead that year for addressing striking steelworkers, she met a judge's demand for her speaking permit with defiance, invoking Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams as the only authority she needed. Her wit turned a courtroom rebuke into a ringing claim that the right to speak was as old as the Republic itself.
Coaldale, PA
Mary Harris "Mother" Jones was among the most fearless labor organizers of her age, and in October 1900 she led a march of some 2,000 women from McAdoo to Coaldale to bolster a strike the United Mine Workers had called that September for higher wages, union recognition, and a grievance process. Many mineworkers joined the walkout and the union. The pressure helped set the stage for the great anthracite coal strike of 1902.
Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1996
A child prodigy who grew up on Pittsburgh's streets and attended its Lincoln School in the early 1920s, Mary Lou Williams became one of jazz's great composers and pianists. She played for Andy Kirk's band in the 1930s and went on to arrange for Duke Ellington and other giants of the era, shaping the sound of American music across decades. Her ambitious works, from the "Zodiac Suite" to her sacred "Mary Lou's Mass," carried jazz into the concert hall and the cathedral alike.
Manheim Township, PA
The Mason-Dixon Line began as the peaceful settlement of a long and bitter boundary quarrel between the Penn family of Pennsylvania and the Calverts of Maryland. Between 1763 and 1767 the English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon ran the line westward with remarkable precision, setting stone markers as they went; at every fifth mile they planted an ornate "crownstone" carved with the coats of arms of the two proprietary families. A crown marker like this one, re-dedicated in 1984, honors that painstaking survey and the famous boundary it fixed across the York County countryside.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2013
In 1763, English astronomers Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon set their instruments near Philadelphia's southernmost point to settle one of colonial America's most stubborn quarrels — a boundary dispute between the Penn and Calvert families that had simmered for generations. Their painstaking measurements of a degree of latitude set a new standard for professional surveying, though Indian conflicts and harsh weather to the west delayed the line's completion until 1768. The border they traced would one day take on a meaning far beyond property: the symbolic divide between North and South.
Chambersburg, PA · est. 1964
Raised in 1823-1824 as the Cumberland Valley was settling into the young republic, this hall was built expressly for Masonic fellowship and has served that purpose ever since — a rare continuity for an early American fraternal lodge. Its most dramatic hour came in July 1864, when Confederate cavalry put much of Chambersburg to the torch after the town refused to pay a ransom, yet this building was left standing amid the ruins.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2007
Completed in 1873, Philadelphia's Masonic Temple rises near City Hall as one of the great monuments to American Freemasonry. Home to the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, its interior unfolds as a tour of architectural styles, with lodge rooms evoking Egyptian, Gothic, Renaissance, and other themes, all wrapped in acclaimed stonework. Its scale and prominent setting reflect the fraternity's deep influence in the civic and social life of nineteenth-century America.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2014
Mathew Carey emigrated from Ireland to Philadelphia in 1784 and built one of the young nation's most influential publishing houses, operating his print shop on this site for two decades. A prolific writer and political economist, he championed American manufacturing, protective tariffs, and a strong national bank. In 1793 he helped found the Hibernian Society, which aided newly arrived Irish immigrants.
Lancaster, PA · est. 2000
From 1740 to 1771 the gunsmith Mathias Roeser worked here in Lancaster, at the heart of colonial Pennsylvania's craft economy. His shop was central to the development of the Pennsylvania rifle, the long, accurate frontier firearm that became famous in American hands. Family members and his apprentice William Henry, Sr., went on to lead the trade and supply arms to the patriot cause during the Revolution.
Beaver, PA · est. 1949
From his base in Beaver, Matthew Stanley Quay climbed steadily through Pennsylvania's local and state offices before reaching the United States Senate. From 1887 until his death in 1904 he was one of the dominant figures of the Republican Party, a master organizer whose influence reached from Harrisburg to Washington. His career embodied the tightly run party machines that ran American politics in the Gilded Age.
Harrisburg, PA · est. 2010
For nearly a quarter century, Maurice K. Goddard served five Pennsylvania governors as the state's leading steward of its forests, parks, and waters. He dramatically expanded the state park system—famously pursuing a goal of a park within twenty-five miles of every resident—set aside natural and wild areas, and brought professional standards to environmental management in state government. His influence in air and water resource protection reached well beyond Pennsylvania's borders.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2015
Maxfield Parrish, trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and under illustrator Howard Pyle at Drexel, became one of the most popular American artists of the early 20th century. His luminous fantasy scenes and the deep 'Parrish blue' made him a pioneer in blending fine art with commercial illustration and advertising. In 1915 he collaborated with Tiffany Studios on the shimmering Dream Garden glass mosaic located here.
Jackson Township, PA · est. 2018
In 1778, as the Revolution reached the Pennsylvania frontier, Col. William McAlevy — a pioneer settler and Revolutionary War officer — raised a blockhouse near this spot to shelter early settlers from raids. Decades later, in the 1840s, the entrepreneur Robert McBurney founded a village here and spent the following years developing it. Nearby 19th-century ironworks and mills fueled the community's growth, layering an industrial chapter atop its frontier origins.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2022
In 1796, in a young republic still importing most of its fine goods, John McAllister Sr. opened what is remembered as America's first optical shop near this Philadelphia site. His shop grew into a multigenerational dynasty of innovators: a son who became a pioneering hospital optician, a grandson who first taught the science of refraction to eye physicians, and a great-grandson who helped found a national professional body in 1898. For over a century the McAllisters helped turn eye care from craft into profession.
Hanover, PA · est. 1954
Along the old Monocacy Road, Richard McAllister raised a two-story log building and opened a store and tavern that helped seed the settlement that became Hanover. In 1755 Benjamin Franklin, then organizing supply and communication for the frontier during the French and Indian War era, stopped as a guest. The original building stood until it was razed in 1950.
Cumberland Township, PA · est. 2012
On the eve of the Civil War era, the McAllister family's grist mill on Rock Creek in Adams County became a haven for people escaping slavery. James McAllister and his family sheltered hundreds of freedom seekers as part of one of the earliest Underground Railroad networks carrying them north. On July 4, 1836, the site hosted a gathering of abolitionists that gave birth to the influential Adams County Anti-Slavery Society.
York, PA · est. 1949
For roughly nine months in 1777–1778, York stood in for Philadelphia as the capital of the United States after the British seized the larger city. Archibald McClean, who surveyed lands for the Penn family and served as a county officer, was a committed patriot whose home is remembered as a place where the fledgling nation's treasury was kept during that anxious interlude.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997
The house at 912 Walnut Street sheltered two remarkable George McClellans. The father, a physician, founded Jefferson Medical College and lived here until his death in 1847. The son, raised here as a boy, grew up to command the Army of the Potomac in the Civil War's early years and to run for president against Abraham Lincoln in 1864.