Civil War

Whitewright, TX

Emanuel and Rachel Everheart reached this stretch of Grayson County in 1848 and within two years held more than 3,300 acres. The oldest graves in the cemetery's northwest corner are believed to be those of people the family enslaved, buried before 1853, while later markers name Confederate soldiers and a county sheriff turned deputy U.S. marshal. Church congregations came and merged on Everheart land, and pioneer families filled the plots, making this one ground that holds both the enslaved and those who enslaved them.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1970

Purchased by Pennsylvania in 1858, this Harrisburg site held the state's first official governor's residence during a pivotal stretch of the mid-nineteenth century. It sheltered only two chief executives—William Packer and, most notably, Andrew Curtin, the wartime governor who steered the commonwealth through the Civil War. The mansion was sold in 1864 once the state acquired a grander home known as "Keystone Hall."

Columbus, TX

Exum Philip Whitfield helped build the young town of Columbus into a commercial hub along the Colorado River, wearing the many hats common to ambitious men on the mid-19th-century Texas frontier — merchant, physician, farmer, and railroad president. His leadership of the Columbus Tap Railway from 1861 to 1866 tied a small Texas town into the region's expanding rail network, even as he twice enlisted in Confederate service during the Civil War. His long life spanned the boom decades that transformed Texas from republic to industrializing state.

Gainesville, TX

What began in 1854 as the Howeth family's private burying ground — first receiving two of their children after a tornado struck their cabin near Gainesville — grew into one of North Texas's great community cemeteries. Deeded to the county in 1868 and leased to the city a decade later, it set aside ground for freedmen and eventually absorbed an adjoining Jewish cemetery. Among its estimated 18,000 graves lie Civil War veterans, a San Jacinto soldier, victims of the 1918 flu, a centenarian former slave, and a U.S. senator.

Albany, TX

During the Civil War, with most able-bodied men away in Confederate service, the scattered families of the Texas frontier faced raids with little military protection. Encouraged by authorities, they "forted up" — crowding into hastily built stockades of dirt-floored log cabins linked by pickets, with a blockhouse for women and children during attacks. The best known nearby was Fort Davis on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, where some 120 people endured the war's last year on little food and long distances from help, yet still managed schooling, weddings, and worship.

Middlesex Township, PA · est. 1929

On the morning of June 28, 1863, Confederate cavalry probing the Cumberland Valley reached this farm — the farthest north any organized body of Robert E. Lee's army would advance. Learning that Union troops held nearby Sterrett's Gap, the outpost turned back toward the main force at Carlisle. Within days Lee concentrated his army eastward, and the campaign turned toward the fields of Gettysburg.

La Grange, TX

Though Fayette County voted narrowly against secession in 1861, it threw itself into the Confederate war effort once Texas left the Union, raising thousands of men and making La Grange the headquarters of the 22nd Brigade of Texas State Troops. Local citizens funded relief for soldiers' families and freighted stored cotton to Mexico on grueling months-long wagon hauls that ran the gauntlet of border bandits. County men like Gen. Tom Green—a hero of San Jacinto and the Mexican War—rose to prominence in Confederate campaigns from Galveston to Mansfield.

Livingston, TX

In 1857 Aaron and Sarah Feagin left Alabama for the Bear Creek community of the East Texas Piney Woods, paying $10,000 in gold for nearly 2,820 acres to build a home and store. Their descendants, the Handley family, carried on the settlement — securing a post office in 1891 that renamed the town Hortense for a young daughter, and deeding two acres of Feagin land for a public cemetery in 1905. The grounds hold more than 200 marked graves alongside many unmarked ones, most believed to be infants, a quiet record of how costly pioneer life could be.

Sabine Pass, TX

At the Battle of Sabine Pass on September 8, 1863, Lt. Richard W. Dowling and fewer than fifty Confederate Davis Guards repelled a Union naval assault, disabling the gunboats Clifton and Sachem and taking more than 300 federal prisoners. Many Union sailors died, some killed when the Sachem's boiler exploded, and Confederate crews aboard the Uncle Ben helped recover the dead. The victors buried a reported 28 Union troops in a long ditch near the Dorman Hotel, a site later confirmed by twentieth-century excavation though much of it has eroded away.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1990

Founded in 1849 as Congregation Mikveh Israel's second cemetery, the Federal Street Burial Ground holds some of the most notable figures of nineteenth-century American Jewish life. Among them are the publisher Abraham Hart, the soldier and engineer Alfred Mordecai, the rabbi and educator Sabato Morais, and jurist Mayer Sulzberger, along with veterans of the Civil War. The ground is a quiet record of a Jewish community deeply woven into Philadelphia's civic, military, and intellectual life.

Moscow, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, the Ohio River was one of the most consequential borders in America — free soil on the Ohio bank, slavery on the Kentucky shore opposite. Moscow, a small river town in Clermont County, sat squarely on that dividing line, making it one of many crossing points where freedom seekers slipped north. According to local oral tradition, the home of Thomas Fee Jr. (1801–1862) served as one such refuge, a stop where people escaping bondage could find shelter on their way to safety. Like much of the Underground Railroad's history, the account survives through community memory rather than written ledgers, which by necessity were rarely kept.

Felicity, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, the free soil of southern Ohio sat just across the river from slaveholding Kentucky, making its small towns natural way-stations for freedom seekers heading north. Felicity, in Clermont County, lay within this borderland network, and the cemetery here holds the graves of Arthur Fee and Oliver Perry Spencer Fee, the latter remembered as an abolitionist who helped operate the Underground Railroad. Their work meant sheltering and guiding people escaping bondage — quiet, dangerous acts of conscience carried out by ordinary neighbors who believed slavery was a moral wrong worth risking their safety to resist.

Felicity, OH

In the 1840s, the question of slavery was tearing American churches apart from the inside. Nationally, antislavery Methodists broke away in 1843 to form the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, refusing to share communion with slaveholders; here in southern Ohio, just miles from the Ohio River and the slave state of Kentucky, that conviction took local form when forty members walked out of their congregation to found this church in 1847. Clermont County was already a stronghold of abolitionist feeling and Underground Railroad activity, and a congregation defined by its stand against slavery fit naturally into that landscape.

Colmesneil, TX

Near the Neches River community of Holly Fork, settlers began farming and shipping goods by river as early as the 1820s, and buried their dead at this ground well before its first dated stone in 1866. Deeded formally in 1914, the Ferrell (or Holly Fork) Cemetery holds generations of pioneer families—Rawls, Conner, Cowart, and others—alongside Confederate brothers John W. and Richard G. Rawls and veterans of later conflicts.

Fairfield, PA · est. 1951

On July 3, 1863—the climactic day of the Gettysburg campaign—Union and Confederate cavalry clashed just two miles north of here in the sharp fight at Fairfield. Afterward this church building became a field hospital, its pews and floor given over to the wounded of both the 6th U.S. Cavalry and the 6th Virginia Cavalry, C.S.A. In the aftermath of battle, sanctuaries like this one became places where the war's cost was measured in shattered bodies from both sides.

Poynor, TX

Fincastle grew up in the early 1850s as one of Henderson County's first settlements, when the area bustled with new plantations and farms. John Tindel bought more than a thousand acres in 1851 and platted the townsite, drawing farmers, tradesmen, and professionals. The town saw brisk activity during the Civil War as Captain William H. "Howdy" Martin raised troops and a Confederate commissary operated here, but by around 1900 most residents had drifted to the county seat at Athens, leaving a church, a pioneer cemetery, and Tindel's home as its only remnants.

Mt. Vernon, TX

Organized on October 5, 1849, under the Baptist missionary William M. Pickett, this congregation first gathered in a log building east of what is now the Franklin County Courthouse, only a year after the Mount Vernon post office opened. Originally called New Liberty, it took the name Mount Vernon Baptist Church in 1870. Its early roll included the Rev. Joshua F. Johnson, who would sit as a delegate at the 1861 Secession Convention in Austin.

Stinnett, TX

In the closing months of the Civil War, thousands of Comanche and Kiowa warriors — allied with the Confederacy — clashed with a Federal column of some 372 men led by the famed scout Col. Kit Carson near the ruins of an old trading post on the Canadian River. Though Carson mounted what he called the greatest fight of his career, the vastly outnumbered soldiers were forced to withdraw, making this one of the largest Indian engagements of the war. A decade later, some of the same warriors would face buffalo hunters at the 1874 Battle of Adobe Walls, a fight that helped open the Panhandle to settlement.

Shelbyville, TX

Founded before 1825 and first called Nashville, this settlement became the original seat of what is now Shelby County, its first courthouse standing on this spot. In the 1840s it became a flashpoint of the notorious Regulator-Moderator War, one of the bloodiest vigilante feuds in early Texas. The same ground later mustered troops for frontier defense, the Texas army, and, decades on, Confederate service.

Marshall, TX

Marshall grew into one of East Texas's leading towns before the Civil War, and its First Methodist congregation reflects that arc. Begun by circuit-rider Littleton Fowler in 1839 and organized in 1845, the church raised its brick sanctuary in 1861 with hand-molded bricks and a north gallery for enslaved worshippers. During the war its basement stored munitions and its bell was given to the Confederacy, later replaced by one taken from Federal forces; a wartime pastor, E. M. Marvin, went on to become a Methodist bishop.

Winnsboro, TX

Organized in 1859 as Winnsboro's first religious body, this Methodist congregation fell apart during the upheaval of the Civil War before being revived in 1869 with just fifteen members. It moved from borrowed quarters into its own sanctuary in 1880, then rebuilt in brick in 1904 and again in 1963. Across more than a century it anchored the town's spiritual and civic life.

Hopkinsville, KY

Organized in 1813—by tradition through the pioneer minister and Cherokee missionary Gideon Blackburn—First Presbyterian is among Hopkinsville's oldest congregations. Its sanctuary, built between 1848 and 1852, still stands. During the harsh winter of 1861–62 the building served as a hospital for Confederate troops encamped nearby under Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest, when disease swept the camp.

Georgetown, TX

Organized in 1854 at a Round Rock home, this Presbyterian congregation soon settled in Georgetown, where a donated lot held both its sanctuary and one of the town's first schools. The Civil War fractured the church as it did the nation: in 1866 the membership split into Northern and Southern congregations, a division that lingered until the Northern church disbanded and sold its building to the Southern one. Georgetown Presbyterians have worshipped in the present building since 1873, their denominations finally reunited in 1983.

Charleston County, SC

In the tense spring of 1861, Charleston Harbor became the flashpoint of a divided nation. Before dawn on April 12, a mortar round arced out from Fort Johnson toward the Federal garrison holding Fort Sumter across the water — the opening shot of a war that would consume the country for four years. Placed on the conflict's centennial, this marker fixes the spot where the long-feared rupture finally came.

Center, TX

Among the oldest cemeteries in Shelby County, this Methodist burying ground opened with the grave of a small child in 1861, as the Civil War was just beginning. Most of those laid to rest here were buried before 1900, including five Civil War veterans, thirteen Masons, a minister, a doctor, and R. L. Parker, remembered as the father of Center. Antique iron fencing and family plots still mark the ground, now softened with blooming plants and a flagstone walk.

Danville, KY

On May 23, 1864, nearly 250 Black men—most of them enslaved—left Boyle County to march to Camp Nelson and enlist in the Union army, enduring stones and gunfire from hostile onlookers along the way. When they arrived, a Union colonel at first refused them because no policy yet permitted the enlistment of enslaved men. Their acceptance helped force a change in policy, opening the army to able-bodied African American men and setting the stage for more than 5,000 troops to be recruited at Camp Nelson.

Benton, PA · est. 2009

In August 1864, rumors of draft resistance and Confederate sympathy in the Fishing Creek Valley brought 800 federal troops into this quiet corner of Columbia County. Peace Democrats — Northerners who backed the Union but opposed Lincoln's wartime policies — were interrogated near a church at this site, and 44 were arrested and jailed at Fort Mifflin without access to civil courts. Their ordeal fed a national debate that, in 1866, led the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that military trials of civilians were unconstitutional.

Dallas, TX

The Bast family journeyed from Kentucky to join the Peters Colony, and in 1859 Abraham Bast donated an acre for a nondenominational church, school, and burial ground beside Five Mile Creek. Neighbors James Horton and David King added land as well. Among the burials are area pioneers and two Confederate soldiers, and the cemetery — with hundreds of graves — remains in use today.

Dare County, NC

The USS Minnesota, a wooden steam frigate launched in 1855, served as flagship of the Atlantic Blockading Squadron under Flag Officer Silas H. Stringham. On August 28–29, 1861, she led seven Union warships in bombarding Forts Hatteras and Clark on the North Carolina coast, an early amphibious victory that tightened the naval blockade of the Confederacy.

Valdosta, GA

In the years after World War II, Korea, and amid Vietnam, American Legion posts across the country raised memorials to honor those who had served, and Valdosta's Post No. 13 was no exception. Dedicated on Veterans Day in 1969 as a gift to the city and Lowndes County, the Flame of Freedom stands not for a single battle but for the veterans of every American war. Its eternal-flame motif — popular in mid-century civic memorials — was meant as a perpetual reminder of sacrifice, a fixture of small-town South Georgia's public square.

Waco, TX

This burial ground began in 1868 with the grave of early settler Sample Carrigan and grew when Catherine Carrigan Fletcher set aside three acres as a public cemetery in 1873. It served the scattered farming communities of the McLennan and Falls County countryside, from Golinda to Satin. A number of Civil War veterans rest among its graves.

Livingston, TX

By 1905 Livingston's old city cemetery was full, so residents formed the Forest Hill Cemetery Association in 1906 and bought a hilltop south of downtown, where Arthur B. Garner became the first burial that November. Women organized the Ladies Cemetery Association in 1908 to beautify the grounds, and in the 1930s Marion Tew's stewardship even prompted the paving of Washington Avenue — Livingston's first paved street. Its stones mark thirty Confederate and one Union soldier alongside circus figures and acclaimed theatre director Margaret 'Margo' Jones.

Sanger, TX

William S. Forester drove his family from Tennessee to the Denton County frontier in the early 1850s and carved out a ranch on open range still contested with Native peoples, a danger that cost his teenage son Sol his life while herding cattle. His son Lock, a Confederate veteran, expanded the spread past 6,000 acres and made its "Two I Jinglebob" brand well known, before a third generation carried the ranch into the twentieth century. For over a century the Forester Ranch shaped the cattle country of North Texas.

Galveston, TX

Former Galveston mayor John S. Sydnor built an eight-room house on this site in 1857, but it was the German immigrant Samson Heidenheimer who transformed it into a landmark. Beginning with a $100 loan and building a fortune as a Confederate blockade runner and auctioneer, Heidenheimer enlarged the house to four stories and 37 rooms, crowning it with castle-like towers and turrets. Passed through many owners after his death, the fabled 'castle' burned in 1973 and was razed two years later.

Greenville, KY

Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his cavalry rode through Greenville three times on reconnaissance missions out of Hopkinsville during the winter of 1861–62. Here they captured Union arms and equipment, and in late December passed through on the way to a victory over a larger Federal force at nearby Sacramento. They returned in January to burn the Pond River bridges and slow the Union advance.

Madisonville, KY

In the late autumn of 1861, Confederate cavalry under Nathan Bedford Forrest passed through this area on a reconnaissance and foraging expedition toward the Ohio River. Riding with 300 horsemen, Forrest gathered hogs, horses, and cattle for the Confederate army as he ranged toward Caseyville and back to Hopkinsville. It was early work for a commander who would become one of the war's most feared cavalry leaders.

Providence, KY

Late in 1861, Confederate cavalry under Nathan Bedford Forrest passed near Providence during a reconnaissance and foraging sweep toward the Ohio River. Leading 300 riders, Forrest collected hogs, horses, and cattle to supply the Confederate army as he moved toward Caseyville and back to Hopkinsville. The expedition was among the first of the aggressive cavalry operations that made his name.

McCracken County, KY

After the Battle of Paducah on March 25, 1864, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his cavalry bivouacked about a mile southwest of this spot. The next day Forrest moved to Mayfield and paroled his men on a three-day furlough so they could visit their western Kentucky and Tennessee homes; every soldier rejoined him afterward at Trenton, Tennessee.

Paducah, KY

On March 25, 1864, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest raided Paducah with Kentucky and Tennessee brigades, but Union Fort Anderson held with the aid of gunboats on the Ohio. Forrest's men captured warehouse guards, burned part of the town, and carried off supplies as they withdrew. When a Union newspaper boasted that Forrest had missed a stock of horses, he sent General Abe Buford back to seize them—a stinging coda to the raid.

Cape Girardeau, MO

In 1861, as the Civil War reached the strategically vital Mississippi River town of Cape Girardeau, Union forces threw up four earthwork forts to hold the river and its approaches. Fort D, positioned to command the great southward bend of the Mississippi and the river road, is the only one of the four that survives.

Desdemona, TX

A few miles southwest stood Fort Blair, the largest of the far-western "family forts" that sheltered settlers through the Civil War years when regular troops were away. Started by C.C. Blair in 1857, its dozen log cabins were linked by pickets, and its families made their own candles, soap, food, and clothing from whatever the land offered while defending against Indian raids. After the war the site became the town of Desdemona, which boomed when oil was struck in 1918.

El Paso, TX

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Fort Bliss was surrendered to Texas Confederates on March 21, 1861, along with $20,000 and its property. From here the South launched its ambitious campaign to seize New Mexico and Arizona. When that drive collapsed, Confederates abandoned and destroyed most of the post—leaving only a hospital for their sick and wounded—before Federal troops reoccupied it on July 4, 1862 and held the trans-Pecos longer than any other part of Texas.

Martin County, NC

On the bluffs at Rainbow Banks above the Roanoke River, Confederate forces raised the earthen fortifications of Fort Branch between 1862 and 1863. Its guns guarded the vital railroad crossings and the upper Roanoke valley against Union gunboats probing inland from the coast. The well-preserved earthworks still crown the ridge three miles to the northeast.

Brownsville, TX

Established as Fort Taylor in March 1846 on the disputed Rio Grande, this post was soon renamed to honor Major Jacob Brown, killed defending it that May—among the opening actions of the Mexican-American War. Made permanent in 1849, Fort Brown was abandoned and reoccupied through the Civil War, held at different times by Federal and Confederate troops, and garrisoned by the U.S. Army into the twentieth century. It stands as the oldest permanent fort in Texas.

Brownsville, TX

General Zachary Taylor named this post during the Mexican-American War for Major Jacob Brown, who died defending its earthworks in 1846, and a permanent reservation was laid out in 1848. Its roster of young officers reads like a preview of the Civil War—Grant, Meade, and Thomas among the future Union generals, Longstreet, Bragg, and Kirby Smith among the Confederate ones, with Robert E. Lee serving here in the late 1850s. The fort changed hands repeatedly during the Civil War, was burned in 1863, and a new permanent post rose in 1867–69.

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.

Sandia, TX

Built as early as 1855, Fort Casa Blanca guarded a Confederate supply line that ran from Corpus Christi up the Nueces to Laredo, Brownsville, and back. With walls two to three feet thick, an escape tunnel from its well, corner parapets, and gun portholes, it warehoused arms, ammunition, and medicine while sheltering wagon drivers hauling cotton — the 'currency of the Confederacy' — toward the Rio Grande. Small boats slipped past Federal forces on Nueces Bay to keep it supplied; by the twentieth century the fort had vanished.

Bronte, TX

When Texas seceded, a company of the First Regiment of Texas Mounted Rifles occupied Fort Chadbourne — a stop on the old Butterfield stageline — to guard settlers against Indian raids and to watch for Union sympathizers heading west. Permanent troops withdrew in 1862 as the state pulled its frontier defense line more than fifty miles eastward, but Confederate and state scouting parties used the post intermittently until the war's end. Often supplying their own horses, guns, and provisions, these men held a thinly defended edge of the Confederacy.

Dare County, NC

In the opening months of the Civil War, the sandy barrier islands of North Carolina's Outer Banks guarded the shallow sounds behind them — and the shipping that fed the Confederacy. Forts Clark and Hatteras were thrown up to hold Hatteras Inlet, the deep-water gateway to those inland waterways. In August 1861 a Union fleet and landing force captured both forts, handing the North one of its first victories of the war and an early foothold on the Southern coast.

Lemoyne, PA · est. 1947

In the tense summer of 1863, as Robert E. Lee's army pushed north, defenders threw up earthen breastworks here to guard the approaches to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania's capital and a vital rail and supply hub. On June 29, Confederate scouts probed toward these works but pulled back, and days later the campaign's decisive fighting erupted at Gettysburg instead. These humble earthworks mark the farthest reach of the Southern advance on the Susquehanna.

Lemoyne, PA · est. 1953

In June 1863, as Robert E. Lee's army drove north toward the Susquehanna in the campaign that ended at Gettysburg, panicked authorities threw up earthworks on Hummel's Heights to shield the state capital at Harrisburg. Named for General Darius Couch, commander of the Department of the Susquehanna, these breastworks were part of a hasty defensive line manned by militia and emergency troops. The expected Confederate assault on Harrisburg never fell, as Lee recalled his forces to concentrate at Gettysburg.

Beaufort County, NC

Fort Hill was the site of Confederate batteries overlooking the Pamlico River, positioned to help besiege the Union-held town of Washington in the spring of 1863. From these works, Gen. D. H. Hill's forces pressed the Federal garrison during the campaign for the town. The site lies about five miles east.

Uvalde, TX

West of San Antonio the road forked toward El Paso and toward Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande, and travelers here "put on their guns" at the edge of contested country. During the Civil War, Fort Inge and Camp Dix anchored a thin Confederate and state defense line stretched a day's ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande, guarding against raids while wagon trains hauled cotton to Mexico in exchange for scarce goods. Though Uvalde County had voted heavily against secession, many local men served, and the war years brought hard times and renewed frontier attacks.

Ballard County, KY

After Confederate forces seized Columbus in September 1861, Union troops occupied nearby Fort Jefferson, one of the first Kentucky positions held for the Union. From this base along the Mississippi, General Ulysses S. Grant directed a demonstration against Columbus in January 1862, and troops staged here helped capture Fort Henry the following month. It was one of four area river ports serving as Union supply bases for the war's western theater.

Ozona, TX

When Texas seceded and U.S. forts along the frontier were surrendered at the start of the Civil War, Fort Lancaster became part of the Confederacy's thinly held far-western line, garrisoned by the 2nd Texas Cavalry. It guarded the supply route feeding the 1861–62 Confederate campaign into Arizona and New Mexico—an ambitious bid to stretch the Confederacy from ocean to ocean. Between escorting supply trains and watching for Indian raids, soldiers passed dull hours with a camp newspaper and by shooting at coyotes.

Austin, TX

In the winter of 1863-64, Confederate engineers threw up this L-shaped earthen fort near Congress Avenue, one of three planned to shield Austin from a feared Union thrust up from the coast. Named for Gen. John Bankhead Magruder, commander of Texas's Confederate forces, it was built by enslaved people supplied by citizens amid wartime labor shortages. When Union forces struck instead from Louisiana's Red River in early 1864, the never-tested fort was abandoned.

Sabine Pass, TX

During the Civil War, Confederate General John B. Magruder ordered this fort built on September 4, 1863—just four days before Dick Dowling's small company famously repelled a Union fleet at nearby Sabine Pass. When a September storm drove the Union coaling ship Mannahassett ashore, Confederates seized its cargo and even borrowed its name for the new fort. Designed by former Austrian officer Valery Sulakowski and engineered by Swiss-born Getulius Kellersberger, the five-redoubt fort guarded the Texas coast with ten cannons.

Mason, TX

When Texas seceded, Fort Mason and the newly established Camp Llano became links in a Confederate line of frontier posts, spaced a day's ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande. Occupied first by the First Regiment Texas Mounted Rifles and then the Frontier Regiment, these troops guarded scattered settlers against raids while the war raged elsewhere. Locals took shelter at Fort Mason, and even a lone mail carrier crept between the posts by night, dodging raiders to keep the mail moving.

Menard, TX

Twenty-one miles west of this marker stood Fort McKavett, occupied by Confederate cavalry after secession to guard the frontier against Indian raids, and in early 1862 used to confine Union troops trying to leave Texas. Permanent forces withdrew that April when the defense line pulled back eastward, but scouting parties of Confederate and state troops kept using the post—often supplying their own horses, guns, and food—to shield settlements. It formed one link in a chain of posts set a day's ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande, honored here by a 1963 state memorial.

Anson, TX

When Texas seceded, Confederate and state troops took over abandoned Fort Phantom Hill as an outpost guarding the frontier against Indian raids while the state's men were away at war. In 1862 the defense line was pulled back thirty miles east, but patrols kept ranging out—often on their own horses, guns, and provisions—to protect settlements and watch for Union incursion. The marker honors Texans who held a 2,000-mile line of coast and frontier with the few men the Confederacy could spare.