Civil War

Brenham, TX

Scottish-born Thomas Affleck (1812–1868) was among the 19th century's most influential writers on agriculture, and from 1858 he ran a 3,500-acre plantation near here with celebrated nurseries and experimental fields. An early champion of conservation farming, he surrounded his Glenblythe mansion with gardens, greenhouses, mills, and workshops, and during the Civil War his workshops built wagons and ambulances and fed a Confederate legion training nearby. After the war he worked to rebuild Texas farming and even traveled to Europe to recruit new settlers.

Santa Fe County, NM

In March 1862, Union and Confederate forces clashed at Glorieta Pass in the mountains southeast of Santa Fe, in a fight remembered as the "Gettysburg of the West." When Union troops destroyed the Confederate supply train, Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley's campaign to seize the Southwest and its route to California collapsed.

Aledo, TX

On land the Goforth family settled in 1857, a small family burial ground holds four graves, among them a two-year-old boy laid to rest in 1863 while his father was away serving in the 18th Texas Cavalry. Neighbors from the Chadwick family shared the plot as well. It is a quiet record of how sparse frontier settlement and Civil War service shaped early Parker County life.

Athens, TX

Named for a pioneering family that migrated from Alabama in the 1850s, Goodgame Cemetery has served Henderson County since the Civil War era, its first recorded burial a young girl who died in 1863 while her father was away at war. Floyd Crockett Goodgame's sons became Confederate officers, and one, a schoolteacher, returned to teach and help found the community of Turkey Creek. The ground was formally deeded in 1901 and holds veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Korea, marked by Woodmen of the World stones and family curbing.

Tyler, TX

Begun in 1857 as a home called "Bonnie Castle," this Tyler landmark was bought after the Civil War by Dr. S. A. Goodman and enlarged by his son, Major W. J. Goodman, a surgeon in the 13th Texas Infantry of the Confederate army. Passed down and remodeled across generations, it was willed to the city in 1939 and has housed the Smith County Historical Society Museum since 1960.

Gorham, ME

Erected in 1866 by Honorable Toppan Robie, this monument honors the sons of Gorham who died in the Civil War, then still fresh in memory as "the Great Rebellion of 1861." Maine sent a remarkably high share of its men to the Union cause, and towns like Gorham paid dearly in the war's battles. Raised just a year after Appomattox, it is among the earliest generation of Civil War memorials.

Hopkinsville, KY

Born near Bardstown and trained at Transylvania University, Charles S. Morehead built a long public career—state legislator, attorney general, U.S. congressman, and governor of Kentucky from 1855 to 1859. As the nation fractured, he joined the 1861 Washington Peace Conference in a last effort to avert war; though he stayed officially neutral, his sympathy for the Confederacy and criticism of Lincoln led to his arrest and months of imprisonment. Warned of a second arrest, he fled abroad and died at his Mississippi plantation in 1868.

Austin, TX

Andrew Jackson Hamilton, an Alabama-born lawyer nicknamed "Colossal Jack" for his stature and eloquence, settled in Texas around 1846 and rose through its legal and political ranks. A staunch Unionist alongside his friend Sam Houston, he fled Texas in 1862 as the secession crisis deepened, and Abraham Lincoln named him a brigadier general and military governor. He returned to serve as provisional governor during the turbulence of Reconstruction before losing the office in 1869.

Austin, TX

Edmund J. Davis (1827–1883), a Florida-born lawyer and judge, became one of Reconstruction Texas's most polarizing figures. During the Civil War he commanded a regiment of Texas Unionists and rose to brigadier general, then led the Radical Republicans and won the governorship in 1870 as Texas rejoined the Union. His controversial term — praised for backing free public education, condemned over the state police and corruption charges — ended in the 'Coke-Davis' standoff of 1874, when Davis occupied the Capitol's first floor before President Grant declined to intervene and he left peacefully.

Marshall, TX

Edward Clark, the son of a Georgia governor, settled in Texas in 1842 and rose through its politics as legislator, secretary of state, and lieutenant governor. In 1861 he became the state's first Confederate governor when Sam Houston was removed for opposing secession, and in his brief term he raced to mobilize Texas for war — organizing camps of instruction, converting resources to arms, and sending some 20,000 troops to the Confederacy. He then raised and led the 14th Texas Infantry, was wounded and commended at the Battle of Pleasant Hill in 1864, and returned to law and business after the war.

Marshall, TX

Born in Georgia in 1815, Edward Clark came to Texas in 1842 and climbed its political ladder from state representative and senator to secretary of state and lieutenant governor. In 1861 he became governor, then raised and led the 14th Texas Infantry through the Red River campaigns of the Civil War, taking a wound at the Battle of Pleasant Hill. He returned to law and business after the war until his death in 1880.

Austin, TX

Elisha Marshall Pease came to Texas from Connecticut in 1835 and fought at the Battle of Gonzales that opened the Texas Revolution before building a career in law and government. As governor in the 1850s he helped establish a permanent school fund and Texas's first free public schools, expanded railroads, and moved his family into the new Governor's Mansion. A committed Unionist, he later returned as a Reconstruction-era provisional governor and resigned in protest in 1869.

Bastrop, TX

Joseph Draper Sayers moved to Bastrop as a boy in 1851 and won distinction in the Civil War, rising to adjutant general of the Confederate Army through his battlefield valor. A Mason, Methodist layman, and lawyer, he built a long political career: state senator in 1873, lieutenant governor from 1879, U.S. congressman from 1885 to 1899, and governor of Texas from 1899 to 1903.

McKinney, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1825, James W. Throckmorton came to the Texas frontier as a boy in 1841, served as a young hunter and scout, and fought in the Mexican War before turning to law and politics. Though he defended the right of secession, he was one of only seven delegates to vote against leaving the Union in 1861, then served the Confederacy during the war. Elected governor in 1866, he was removed the next year by General Philip Sheridan as 'an impediment to Reconstruction,' and later returned to serve in the U.S. Congress.

Marble Falls, TX

Oran M. Roberts presided over the 1861 convention that took Texas out of the Union, served as a Confederate officer, and after the war rose to be governor of Texas from 1879 to 1883. Leaving office, he taught law at the University of Texas and built this modest cottage for his retirement in Marble Falls. Later owners moved the house and dressed it up with Victorian touches, but it remains tied to one of the era's central figures.

Weatherford, TX

Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham volunteered at fifteen and fought through the Civil War before settling in Texas, teaching school, and rising through the law to become a five-county district attorney and then a long-serving U.S. congressman for West Texas. His fame took root in 1871 with his fiery prosecution of Kiowa chiefs after the Warren Wagon Train Massacre. As the last Confederate veteran to serve as governor of Texas, from 1903 to 1907, he championed reforms in taxes, child labor, uniform textbooks, and honest elections — and died at this home in Weatherford.

Bastrop, TX

Joseph D. Sayers built this Greek Revival home in Bastrop in 1868 for his bride, Ada Walton, having come to Texas from Mississippi as a boy and served as a Confederate officer in the Civil War. Returning to teach school and practice law, he rose through Texas politics as state senator, lieutenant governor, and U.S. congressman before serving two terms as governor from 1899 to 1903. The house stands as a physical anchor to one of the more consequential political careers of the post-Reconstruction South.

Russellville, KY

This corner was home to John J. Crittenden from 1811 to 1818, early in a career that made him one of Kentucky's most distinguished statesmen. He served in the War of 1812, sat in the legislature, became the state's fifteenth governor, and was U.S. Attorney General under three presidents and a five-time senator. He is best remembered for the Crittenden Compromise of 1860, a last, failed attempt to hold the Union together on the eve of the Civil War.

Paducah, KY

Founded in 1848 in a private home, Grace Church raised its first sanctuary from lumber cut in Louisville and floated down the Ohio to the Paducah riverfront, consecrating it in 1851. During the Civil War the federal government seized the property and pressed it into service as a hospital. The present Gothic church was begun in 1873 to serve a growing river city, and later survived the devastating 1937 flood.

Hopkinsville, KY

Organized in 1831 by Hopkinsville laymen with help from an early missionary who became its first rector, Grace Episcopal grew alongside the young town of western Kentucky. Its first sanctuary rose around 1850, and in 1875 the parish welcomed Jefferson Davis—an Episcopalian and Christian County native—to worship. The present church was built in 1883–84 and became a hub of the community's social and cultural life, surviving a tornado that toppled its tower in 1978.

Irene, TX

When William and Sarah Graham came from North Carolina to settle here in 1856, they brought a household that included enslaved people, some of whom are believed to be buried in and around this ground. The oldest marked grave belongs to their six-year-old granddaughter, buried in 1866. The site is bound up with Abe Mason, a Tennessee-born Confederate veteran wounded at Shiloh who married into the family and became one of Hill County's largest landowners.

River Forest, IL

This memorial honors the men who "wore the blue" in the Union Army during the Civil War of 1861–1865. It was dedicated in October 1930 by the Past President's Club of the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, one of the heritage societies that carried the memory of the Grand Army of the Republic into the twentieth century. It stands in River Forest as a tribute to those who preserved the Union.

Bellingham, WA

The Grand Army of the Republic was the great fraternal organization of Union veterans of the Civil War, a powerful force in American civic life from the 1860s into the twentieth century. This memorial was dedicated in 1931 by the Woman's Relief Corps, the Sons of Veterans and their auxiliary, and the schoolchildren and citizens of Bellingham — a community gathering to honor the aging and dying generation that had fought to preserve the Union. By that date the last Union soldiers were passing into memory.

Reno, NV

In 1890 the General O.M. Mitchel Post 69 of the Grand Army of the Republic — the great fraternal organization of Union veterans — bought seventeen lots in Reno's Hillside Cemetery as a final resting place for its Civil War comrades. Among those buried here are Nevada volunteers who served across their own state and the neighboring West from 1861 to 1866. After decades of neglect and vandalism, the Daughters of Union Veterans and local citizens began restoring the plot in 1963.

Judsonia, AR

"In Memory of the Defenders of the Union, 1861–1865" marks the Grand Army of the Republic — the powerful fraternal order of Union Civil War veterans — in Judsonia, Arkansas. Though Arkansas joined the Confederacy, thousands of its men, white and Black, fought instead for the Union, and this memorial honors that loyal service.

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.

Reno, NV

This tree was planted in soil gathered from Civil War battlefields and dedicated in June 1913 by the national commander-in-chief to honor the Grand Army of the Republic, the great fraternal order of Union veterans. In 1969 it was rededicated by the Sons and Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War in Reno, keeping the memory of those soldiers alive into the 20th century.

Grand Saline, TX

The great salt deposit at Grand Saline, first worked by Native peoples and developed into salt works by 1854, became a strategic source of salt for the Confederacy during the Civil War. When owner Sam Richardson went to war, his wife ran the operation until the Confederate government took over production, exempting salt workers from the army and drawing brine through hollowed gum-log pipelines to iron evaporating kettles that yielded over 10,000 pounds a day. With salt the only means to preserve meat and cure leather, it grew so scarce that women dug up smokehouse floors to reclaim it.

Corsicana, TX

Grange Hall Cemetery served the small farming community of Cryer Creek and likely took its name from the Grange, the farmers' organization that was a powerful force in rural life. Burials began here as early as 1872, five years before pioneer Samuel Wilson donated the land for a Methodist church and churchyard. Among those at rest are Civil War veterans, pioneer families, and members of a colony that migrated from Meridian, Mississippi, in 1870.

Monroe Township, OH

This cast-iron nameplate is a surviving relic of the original Grant Memorial Bridge, a steel truss span erected between 1925 and 1927 during the great era of American road-building, when reinforced steel and concrete were replacing the wooden and iron crossings of the previous century. The bridge carried its name in honor of Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War general and president who was born just a short distance away at Point Pleasant in Clermont County. When the original structure was eventually retired, this nameplate — one of two — was preserved and set into the walkway so that travelers could still touch a piece of the old bridge.

Paige, TX

German immigrants settled the Grassyville community in the 1850s and organized a Methodist church, and many of this cemetery's gravestones are lettered in German script. The two earliest burials date to 1871, and among those resting here are seven Confederate veterans who served in a Texas artillery battery during the Civil War. Though the village itself has vanished, the burial ground remains in use.

Sherman, TX

During the Civil War, Grayson County served as a Confederate military, defense, and supply hub on Texas's northern frontier. Cavalry regiments raised here captured federal forts in Indian Territory and manned a defensive line along the Red River, while Sherman depots gathered clothing and food for troops and soldiers' families. Even the notorious guerrilla William C. Quantrill camped nearby in 1863–64 before fleeing Confederate arrest.

Port Lavaca vicinity, TX

The community of Green Lake grew up beside its namesake tidal lake in the late 1840s, given fresh impetus around 1849 when wealthy Kentucky planters arrived with their families and enslaved workers to raise cotton. They built grand homes and a private school, but the Civil War upended everything: after Texas seceded, Federal troops camped nearby awaiting transport ships. With its economy resting on slave labor, Green Lake declined once the war ended and most original settlers had left by 1875.

Chester, PA · est. 1954

"Green-Bank" was the name given to a house built on this site in 1721 by David Lloyd, a leading figure in colonial Pennsylvania. In later years it was home to the distinguished Porter naval family and a place the celebrated Admiral David Farragut is said to have visited, until the house was destroyed in 1882 by the disaster remembered as the "Jackson Explosion."

Galveston, TX

A Virginia-born physician who came to Texas in 1853, Dr. Greensville S. Dowell served as a Confederate army surgeon in Galveston during the Civil War before building a lasting mark on Texas medicine. He helped found the Galveston Medical Society, the Texas Medical College and Hospital, and the state's first medical journal. A gifted surgeon, he designed his own instruments and became a leading authority on the treatment of yellow fever, the scourge of Gulf Coast port cities.

Greenville, TX

Created in 1846, Hunt County set its seat at a spot donated by surveyor McQuinney Howell Wright and named it Greenville for Texas independence veteran Thomas J. Green. Unusually for north central Texas, the county voted for secession, and Greenville endured hardship, violence, and federal occupation through the Civil War and Reconstruction. The arrival of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas railroad in 1880 transformed the town into a cotton-shipping powerhouse, complete with banks, streetcars, and Texas's first municipally owned electric utility.

Longview, TX

Laid out in 1877 just beyond Longview's limits and beside a new railroad subdivision, this burial ground became the resting place for the town's founding generation. Its rows hold a War of 1812 veteran, dozens of Confederate soldiers, victims of the 1894 Dalton Gang bank robbery, and a family lost in the 1900 Galveston hurricane, alongside civic fathers like O.H. Methvin, called the father of Longview. Renamed Greenwood in 1905 when the city grew to enclose it, the cemetery reads almost as a directory of the region's past.

Marshall, TX

Begun in 1840 as the private burial ground of the Van Zandt family and formally dedicated in 1881, Greenwood Cemetery holds many of early East Texas's founding figures. Among them are Isaac Van Zandt and James Harper Starr, each honored with a Texas county named for him, and Confederate brigadier generals Matthew Duncan Ector and Alexander Travis Hawthorne. Even a grandson of Sam Houston rests here, tying the ground to the first generation of the Texas Republic.

Longview, TX

Created and organized in 1873 from parts of Rusk and Upshur counties, Gregg County was named for General John Gregg, a delegate to the Secession Convention and the Provisional Confederate Congress who died as a Confederate officer in 1864. Longview serves as the county seat.

Rusk, TX

Built in 1847-48 from local pine in the classic dog-trot style—two rooms flanking an open central passage that caught the East Texas breeze—this is among the oldest houses in Rusk. Three of its early owners served as Confederate captains during the Civil War, and the Gregg family, community leaders, have held it since 1876. Modernizations in 1919 and 1935 kept the old home in use across the generations.

Liberty, TX

Jackson Hawkins Griffin arrived in Liberty in 1835 and fought at the Siege of Bexar during the Texas Revolution, later opening his home as a boarding house for newcomers. When one of his lodgers died in 1846, Griffin set aside land for a burial ground that still bears his name. Griffin himself enlisted in the Confederate Army and fell at the Battle of Franklin in 1864, and the graveyard passed through Dr. James Cooke to the Methodist church before a 1981 restoration reopened it to the public.

Jacksonville, TX

Benjamin Franklin Grimes came to Cherokee County in 1852 with his parents, married Mary Jane Wallace in 1859, and raised ten children while running freight wagons and serving in the Confederate army. In 1883 he buried his daughter Cassandra Gabriella on the family's land, beginning what became the Grimes Cemetery. Still in use, it holds more than 80 graves, including those of a dozen veterans.

Anderson, TX

The ground here carries layers of Texas history: a road used in 1690 by Spanish explorer Alonso de León, the 1821 arrival of settler Andrew Millican, and Henry Fanthorp's inn and post office of the 1830s. The town took its name from Kenneth Anderson, the Republic of Texas's last vice-president, who died at Fanthorp's inn in 1845. Organized in 1846 and named for Declaration signer Jesse Grimes, the county even ran a gun factory and supplied troops during the Civil War.

Anderson, TX

Densely settled and richly agricultural, Grimes County threw itself behind the Confederacy, voting for secession 907 to 9 and sending nine companies to the army. Its ordnance works at Anderson turned out cannon, cannonballs, firearms, swords, and gunpowder, and a military telegraph line crossed the county on its way from Houston to Marshall. In a darker episode, five men accused of treason were held in the Anderson jail in 1864 under the suspension of habeas corpus before being deported to Mexico.

Seguin, TX

This marker recounts Guadalupe County's Confederate years, opening with the tense February 1861 standoff at the U.S. Arsenal in San Antonio, where local volunteers under Ben McCulloch forced the surrender without a shot. The county voted overwhelmingly for secession, its newspapers renamed to declare their loyalties, and its men trained at nearby Camp Clark, with Company D of the 4th Texas Infantry fighting through the war in Hood's Texas Brigade. The reverse honors the Tennessee-born McCulloch brothers, Ben killed at Pea Ridge and Henry defending the Texas frontier as a Confederate general.

Cambridge, OH

This monument honors the men of Guernsey County, Ohio, who marched off to fight in the Civil War—here remembered in the era's own language as the "War of the Rebellion." Between 1861 and 1865, counties across the Union sent thousands of volunteers into regiments raised locally, and Ohio contributed more soldiers per capita than nearly any other state. Memorials like this one rose in courthouse squares across the North in the decades after Appomattox, as communities gathered to grieve their dead and enshrine the service of the living.

Fredericksburg, TX

Cut off from Northern factories by war, the Confederacy improvised its arms wherever it could—including this Fredericksburg workshop, where gunsmith E. Krauskoff and silversmith Adolph Lungkwitz built machinery to roll copper thin and stamp out percussion caps. They charged the caps with saltpetre from nearby bat caves and quicksilver smuggled through Mexico or past the coastal blockade. Their tiny caps fed rifles and pistols made in a scatter of Texas towns across the interior.

Paducah, KY

Gunsmith Ferd Hummel arrived in Paducah in 1861 and set up a small frame shop that soon served the Federal soldiers occupying the town, who brought their firearms to him for repair. When Confederate raiders looted his shop in March 1864, he had already hidden his best arms at home. He carried on his trade for years, earning a patent for a breech-loading firearm in 1881.

Blum, TX

Gus Bailey led the band of Hood's Texas Brigade during the Civil War, while his wife Mollie smuggled notes and quinine past enemy lines hidden in her hair. Bailey is credited with writing "The Old Gray Mare" on the eve of Second Manassas, after a spooked mare bolted through camp trailing tin pans. After the war the couple settled their large family and a traveling circus in Blum, playing scores of Texas towns and admitting ex-Confederates free.

Houston, TX

At sixteen, Gustav August Samuelson left Forserum, Sweden, and arrived in Houston in November 1848 with a party of Scandinavian immigrants met by the pioneering Swedish Texans S.M. Swenson and Swante Palm. Renaming himself Forsgard for his home village, he clerked, farmed, and helped run an informal agency guiding new Swedish arrivals into Texas life. During the Civil War he served with Texas forces building fortifications to defend Galveston, and later became a civic leader in banking, church, and Masonic circles.

San Augustine, TX

Haley Blount Bush, born into slavery in Shelby County in the 1860s, donated land in 1889 from her husband's grant to create this cemetery on the San Augustine county line. Among its 300-plus marked graves is Isom Biggers, a well-known African American Civil War veteran whose service was vouched for by neighbors also thought to rest here. The burial ground holds many people born into slavery and veterans of every war from the Civil War through Vietnam, cared for today by a cemetery association.

Rio Vista, TX

Thomas Haley reached Johnson County by 1852, built a race track along the Nolands River, and bred fine horses before serving as a captain in Parson's mounted volunteers during the Civil War; he died in 1865 of battle wounds, and his is the oldest marked grave here. The cemetery also holds Leonard Fisher, another Civil War veteran, and John Hubble, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence, among the county's pioneers. Since the 1990s a cemetery association has cared for the small burial ground.

Port Lavaca, TX

Built in 1858 at the southern tip of Half Moon Reef in Matagorda Bay, this three-story hexagonal lighthouse guided ships trading at Port Lavaca and nearby Indianola. During the Civil War, Confederate troops disabled its light to hamper Federal efforts against blockade runners, and it was restored in 1868. It served until 1943 and was moved to Port Lavaca in 1979.

Hamilton, TX

Organized in 1858, Hamilton County counted just 489 people when the Civil War came, yet its 1861 secession vote ran 86 to 1. Sixty farmers formed the part-time Hamilton County Minutemen while others marched to Vicksburg and Shiloh, and those left behind lived a spare frontier life of log homes, homemade tools, and eggshell lamps. The war also bred hardship at home — cattle feuds, two men fleeing to join the Federals, and deserters living by theft along the creeks.

San Antonio, TX

Hamilton P. Bee was a fixture of early Texas public life, serving as secretary of the first state Senate, a legislator, and Speaker of the House in the 1850s before commanding troops in campaigns on the frontier. He fought as a cavalry lieutenant in the Mexican War, then rose to Confederate brigadier general, guarding the vital cotton road to Mexico and leading a brigade in the 1864 Red River Campaign, where he was wounded. His career threads through nearly every conflict of mid-19th-century Texas.

Teville, TX

John J. Handley, a Confederate veteran who had lived in Georgia and elsewhere in Texas, settled in this West Texas country in 1892 and gave the land for its cemetery. He lived long enough to watch farming rise to rival ranching on the plains, and the tiny community of Teville—named for a road junction—rose and faded with him, its post office open only from 1906 to 1910. Four generations of the Handley family and their neighbors now rest in the ground he provided.

Donna, TX

Thomas J. Handy came to the lower Rio Grande as a Union cavalryman during the Civil War and stayed to build a life on the border. In 1866 he married Angelita Cavazos at her family's ranch along the old military highway, and together the couple became substantial landowners, joining an Anglo newcomer's fortunes to a rooted Tejano ranching family. Handy farmed, ranched, and served as a U.S. Customs inspector, and the family's holdings shaped the land around present-day Alamo for nearly a century.

Hanover County, VA

Standing near the Hanover County courthouse in Virginia, this monument honors the county's men who fought for the Confederacy and the women who supported the war effort on the home front between 1861 and 1865. Like hundreds of similar monuments erected across the South in the decades after the Civil War, it reflects the "Lost Cause" memorial movement that sought to commemorate Confederate service. Hanover County itself saw significant fighting, including the Battles of Hanover Court House and Cold Harbor nearby.

North Codorus Township, PA · est. 1953

In November 1863, this rural railroad junction in York County was where Abraham Lincoln's train changed lines on his way to dedicate the national cemetery at Gettysburg. Months earlier the same junction had funneled wounded men from the battlefield onward to distant hospitals, and it served as a key relay on the military telegraph network that carried war news north and east. What looks like an ordinary spot where two rail lines met was, for a season, a nerve center of the war in Pennsylvania.

Cobb County, GA

In June 1864, as Sherman's armies pressed toward Atlanta, Confederate forces under General William J. Hardee dug in along a line of North Georgia creeks and ridges to slow the Union advance. This marker notes the position of Hardee's Corps along the Mud Creek line, one link in a chain of entrenchments during the grinding Atlanta Campaign. The fighting here was less a single pitched battle than a deadly war of maneuver and earthworks in the Georgia summer.