Civil War

Cumberland Township, PA

This monument honors the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry — famed as "Rush's Lancers" for the long lances they once carried — and its service at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863. The inscription records 365 men engaged and their losses: three killed, seven wounded, and two missing. It marks the role Union cavalry played in screening and protecting the army during the battle's final day.

Hamiltonban Township, PA

In the fighting around Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, the regular-army 6th U.S. Cavalry pressed two local farmhouses — the Marshall and Culberson homes — into service as temporary field hospitals for its wounded. Regiments like the 6th bore hard duty in the campaign, and this marker in Hamiltonban Township remembers the grim work of caring for the injured once the guns fell silent.

Cumberland Township, PA

The 71st Pennsylvania Volunteers, nicknamed the "California Regiment," fought at Gettysburg under Colonel R. Penn Smith as part of the Philadelphia Brigade. This monument records that the regiment carried 24 officers and 307 enlisted men into action and suffered 98 casualties killed, wounded, and missing. Positioned near the center of the Union line, the regiment stood among the troops who met the Confederate assault of July 1863.

Cumberland Township, PA

This monument to the 76th New York Infantry, raised largely in Cortland County, marks where the regiment helped open the infantry fighting at Gettysburg on the morning of July 1, 1863. It records the unit's day-long ordeal — its first stand here, a second at the railroad cut, and a third on Culp's Hill over the following days. As one of the first Union regiments engaged, it paid a steep price to slow the Confederate advance until reinforcements could arrive.

Cumberland Township, PA

This monument marks the positions held by the 76th New York Infantry during the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863. As part of the First Corps, the regiment was among the first Union units to open fire on McPherson Ridge on the battle's opening morning, then fell back through the day's fighting to make later stands at the railroad cut and Culp's Hill. The inscription traces a single regiment's grueling path across the three-day battle.

Cumberland Township, PA

Erected by the State of Ohio, this monument marks the 82nd Ohio Infantry of the Second Brigade, Third Division, Eleventh Corps at Gettysburg. On July 1, 1863, the regiment stood in the Union line on the fields north of town, where Carl Schurz's German-American division fought to hold back the Confederate assault before retreating to the heights beyond Gettysburg. It was one of many Ohio regiments memorialized on the battlefield by their home state.

Cumberland Township, PA

On the afternoon of July 2, 1863, the second day at Gettysburg, the fight for Little Round Top became one of the most desperate contests of the battle as Union regiments raced to hold the Army of the Potomac's exposed left flank. This monument marks where the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry took position and beat back repeated Confederate assaults before helping press the enemy back. The regiment fought as part of the brigade that famously anchored that rocky hill under heavy pressure.

Plymouth, NC

This earthwork fort, thrown up by the 85th New York Regiment, anchored part of the Union defensive ring around Plymouth. On April 18, 1864, it fell in one of the fiercest assaults of the three-day siege. Its capture helped unravel the town's outer defenses ahead of the final Confederate attack two days later.

Cumberland Township, PA

This monument marks where the 88th Pennsylvania Infantry went into action during the Battle of Gettysburg, reaching the field in time to help throw back the Confederate assault of July 3, 1863 — the climactic third day of the fight. The regiment held its position here until the morning of July 6, when the Union army began following Lee's beaten forces south. Pennsylvania later raised such monuments across the battlefield to fix exactly where each of its regiments stood.

Paducah, KY

Paducah was the first Kentucky city where an African American regiment—the 8th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery—was officially organized and credited to the state, and enslaved men who enlisted earned their freedom in the ranks. Union soldiers here built the earthen Fort Anderson, and when Confederate troops assaulted it on March 25, 1864, the 8th helped repulse the attack. Other Black regiments also recruited in this river town.

Cumberland Township, PA

On the afternoon of July 2, 1863, the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the 99th Pennsylvania Infantry held this ground on the Union left, where the fighting swirled around Devil's Den and the rocky slopes below Little Round Top. As Confederate assaults threatened to turn the army's flank, regiments like the 99th fought desperately to keep the high ground in Federal hands. This granite monument, one of hundreds placed across the battlefield by veterans and their states, marks the line where these Pennsylvanians stood.

Cumberland Township, PA

Erected by a veterans' association and friends, this monument remembers the fallen of the 99th Pennsylvania Volunteers, who served in the Third Corps line during the fighting of July 2 and 3, 1863, at Gettysburg. The regiment was among the units drawn into the brutal combat on the army's left, where the second day's assaults tested the Union position to its limit. The dedication 'In memoriam our fallen comrades' reflects how survivors, years afterward, returned to consecrate the ground where friends had died.

Cumberland Township, PA

This monument marks a position of the 9th Massachusetts Battery under Captain John Bigelow on July 2, 1863, during the Battle of Gettysburg. Ordered to slow the Confederate advance of Barksdale's Brigade, the battery famously fought "by prolonge" — dragging its guns rearward while continuing to fire, without infantry to protect it — before making a desperate final stand near the Trostle farm. It commemorates one of the most celebrated artillery actions of the entire battle.

Cumberland Township, PA

This monument marks the first position of the 9th Massachusetts Battery, Captain John Bigelow's guns, along the Wheatfield Road late on July 2, 1863. From roughly 4:30 to 6:00 p.m. the battery held this ground during the Confederate assault on the Union left at Gettysburg before being forced to withdraw. It is one of several markers tracing Bigelow's fighting retreat across the battlefield.

Frankfort, KY

On November 2, 1864, near Frankfort, four Confederate prisoners were shot in reprisal for the murder of Robert Graham, a Union supporter from Peaks Mill. All four were Kentuckians—Elijah Horton, Thomas Hunt, John Long, and Thornton Lafferty—drawn from counties across the state and, the marker notes, innocent of the crime. Their executions reflect the brutal cycle of retaliation that consumed Kentucky as guerrilla warfare tore at the divided commonwealth.

Greenup, KY

In the autumn of 1862, Union Brigadier General George W. Morgan led 8,000 men on a grueling sixteen-day, 200-mile retreat from Cumberland Gap to the Ohio River, reaching Greenup on October 3. Confederate operations based at Barbourville had cut his supply lines, forcing the withdrawal even though his troops had held the Gap itself. Harassed all the way by John Hunt Morgan's raiders, the retreat to Camp Dennison in Ohio was hailed as a feat of endurance and command.

Beattyville, KY

After occupying strategic Cumberland Gap from June to September 1862, Union General George W. Morgan found himself cut off from supplies and forced into a daring 200-mile retreat. Searching for provisions, his 9,000-man command passed this way, finding a flour mill the Confederates had burned the night before. Harassed the whole way by Confederate raiders, Morgan brought his army safely to the Ohio River at Greenup in just sixteen days.

Belton, TX

This memorial recalls what the Civil War did to Texas schooling. Baylor University — including the 'Female Department' that became Mary Hardin-Baylor — had run at Independence for fifteen years when war came in 1861, and it suffered along with education statewide: state school funds stopped, many of the 1860's 2,416 college students marched off as soldiers, and numerous of Texas's 25 colleges closed. In the classrooms that remained, the old, the disabled, and women taught children who wrote on slates or in smoothed sand for want of paper.

Leander, TX

About 1866, in the years just after the Civil War, farmer and veteran Alpheus S. Mason raised this double-galleried home along Bagdad Road, a military and commercial artery threading through central Texas. Mason threw himself into the life of the region—church, business, Masonic lodge, and politics—helping the town of Bagdad grow before it faded into a ghost town and nearby Leander rose in its place. The Victorian-trimmed porch still speaks of a prosperous frontier farmer putting down roots on a well-traveled road.

Victoria, TX

Built before the Civil War with eight fireplaces and ten rooms, this Victoria home was owned from 1861 to 1881 by banker-merchant Abraham Levi, known for his charitable giving. In 1865 the U.S. Army of Occupation took it over as a Reconstruction headquarters, with a prison in the rear. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Los Angeles, CA

This monument honors Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president, who led the United States through the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation before his assassination in 1865. Statues of Lincoln became fixtures of American public space, cast as the preserver of the Union and 'the Great Emancipator.' Its placement in a Los Angeles civic setting reflects how deeply his memory was woven into the nation's shared identity.

Milwaukee, WI

This 1934 statue by sculptor Gaetano Cecere honors Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) as president, emancipator, and martyr, quoting the healing words of his second inaugural: "With malice toward none." Erected seventy years after his death, it reflects the enduring reverence for the leader who guided the Union through the Civil War and set emancipation in motion before his assassination. The monument stands in Milwaukee as a civic tribute to his memory.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1953

In the tense winter of 1861, as seven states had already declared their secession, President-elect Abraham Lincoln made his slow, whistle-stop journey east toward his inauguration. On February 22 — Washington's Birthday — he paused in Harrisburg at the Jones House hotel and spoke from its portico to a crowd packed into Market Square. Within days he would slip secretly through Baltimore amid assassination fears to reach the capital.

Hanover, PA · est. 1954

On November 18, 1863, a half block east of here, Abraham Lincoln paused during his journey to Gettysburg and spoke briefly to a gathered crowd from his special train. He was on his way to dedicate the National Cemetery there — the occasion for which, the next day, he would deliver the Gettysburg Address. This small trackside moment placed the wartime president, if only for a few minutes, among the ordinary townspeople of Hanover.

White Township, PA · est. 2009

Raised in the Indiana County countryside, Absalom Hazlett grew into a committed abolitionist and joined John Brown's small provisional army for the 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. The plan to arm enslaved people and spark their liberation collapsed, and Hazlett was captured, tried, and hanged for his part. Yet the raid electrified a divided nation and pushed it closer to open conflict.

Moscow, TX

This burial ground, now named for a former county commissioner, began as a family graveyard for the Lotts, who moved from Mississippi to the Republic of Texas in 1843. Their son Calvin farmed the land and served as a Confederate soldier and in the Texas State Troops during the Civil War; his 1884 grave is the oldest marked burial, though earlier unmarked graves are believed to lie here. Known over the years by several names, the cemetery preserves the memory of Polk County's pioneer families.

Gettysburg, PA · est. 1982

Established in 1800 and named for President John Adams, this county in Pennsylvania's rolling southern hills became known for its orchards and fruit harvests. Its seat, Gettysburg, was a quiet crossroads town until July 1863, when it became the site of the Civil War's bloodiest and most decisive battle. That autumn, President Abraham Lincoln came to dedicate the soldiers' cemetery and delivered the brief, immortal Gettysburg Address.

New York, NY

This monument marks the grave of David Glasgow Farragut, the U.S. Navy's first full admiral and one of the Union's most celebrated Civil War commanders. A career sailor who first went to sea as a boy, Farragut won lasting fame in the 1860s for his daring victories on the Gulf and Mississippi, running his fleet past shore batteries and mines to seize control of vital Confederate waters. Erected by his wife and son after his death in 1870, the memorial honors a man Congress created the rank of admiral expressly to recognize.

Washington, NC

During the 1863 siege of Washington, North Carolina, roughly 100 Black men took up arms to help Union forces hold the town. Their service came even before the formal organization of the 1st North Carolina Colored Volunteers, making them among the earliest African Americans to fight for the Union in the state. They defended a community and a cause that promised their own freedom.

Burnet, TX

Kentucky-born Adam Rankin Johnson came to Texas in 1854, rose to Confederate brigadier general during the Civil War, and afterward settled in Burnet County as a businessman and civic leader. In 1882 he gave land for the railroad that hauled Burnet County granite to build the Texas State Capitol, and around the same time raised this sturdy stone barn on his homestead. The barn is a rare surviving piece of his working estate.

Walker County, TX

This hill marked a landmark on the old Colony Road running between Huntsville and Ryan's Ferry on the Trinity River. It takes its name from Thomas Akin, a Mississippi native who came to Texas in 1853 with his wife Ruth and built a cabin at its base in the rural community of McGuire. During the Civil War Akin rode as a courier for Confederate General John B. Hood while his wife moved their family of seven children to safety farther east.

Houston County, TX

In 1857 Albert Holley left Alabama for Houston County, bringing the family's supplies overland by wagon along with 137 enslaved people while his relatives traveled by boat. He began homesteading this land with his wife Julia, served in the Civil War and endured captivity as a prisoner of war, then returned to farm and build a family home here in 1867. The property stayed in Holley hands until 1976.

Bonney, TX

Albert Sidney Johnston, a West Point graduate born in Kentucky in 1803, made Texas his home during the Republic era, rising to command its army and serving as secretary of war under President Mirabeau B. Lamar. He and his second wife settled at China Grove, his plantation on this site, in the 1840s, and he later fought in the Mexican War and patrolled the Texas frontier as a U.S. Army officer. When the Civil War came he resigned to become a Confederate general, and he was killed leading his troops at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862.

Bastrop, TX

This Bastrop County home rose in stages on land the Mexican government granted in 1831 to a colonist of Stephen F. Austin's second colony — a reminder that Anglo Texas began as Mexican Texas. Farmer John Aldridge built the first portion in 1852, and after the Civil War a Confederate captain and plantation owner, J. W. Fitzwilliam, added the two-story section around 1872, naming the place 'Wexford' for his Irish birthplace.

East Columbia, TX

Raised between 1837 and 1841 for farmer and landholder William Aldridge, this East Columbia house passed through several owners, including J. H. Dance and Co., a firm that manufactured arms for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Businessman Thomas Masterson Smith and his wife Mary leased the home from 1908 and bought it in 1917, keeping it in the Smith family for generations. The dwelling survives as a local landmark from the earliest years of Anglo settlement in Brazoria County.

Winters, TX

This grave holds a Civil War soldier, Alec Simmons, who came from the small settlement of Lemon Gap a few miles to the northwest and was laid to rest here in an unmarked grave before 1897. The spare record is itself telling—of a frontier region where many who served and died left little trace beyond a name and a place. The state recorded the site in 1967.

San Antonio, TX

Born in 1835, Alejo de la Encarnación Pérez was carried into the Alamo as an infant during the 1836 siege and lived to become its last known survivor. His long life bridged two Texas eras: he fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, then spent decades serving San Antonio as a police officer and city marshal. When he died in 1918 at 83, the living memory of the Alamo's defenders died with him.

Gilmer, TX

Alex Earp followed his father into law enforcement in Upshur County, becoming sheriff in the 1880s just as the booming East Texas timber industry drew a rough, transient workforce to the area. A former Confederate cavalry captain born in Alabama, he later served as county commissioner. The marker credits him with keeping order under difficult conditions during a raucous chapter of the county's growth.

Orange, TX

An Irish immigrant who reached America in 1846, Alexander "Sandy" Gilmer built ships in Orange with his cousin and ran a mercantile before the Civil War, when he served the Confederacy as a blockade runner trading local cotton and lumber for scarce supplies and took part in the 1863 Battle of Sabine Pass. After the war he turned to sawmilling, and though fires destroyed four of his mills, he became one of the region's leading lumbermen, with holdings that included the town of Remlig—his name spelled backward. He died in 1906 while on business in New York.

Dallas, TX

Alexander Harwood arrived in Dallas from Tennessee in 1844, when the settlement was little more than a river crossing, and spent the next four decades helping run it. Voters returned him as county clerk six times between 1850 and 1880, and he served the Confederacy as an assistant to Postmaster General John H. Reagan before representing Dallas County at the 1866 constitutional convention that followed the Civil War. His long public career threads through the town's rise from frontier outpost to established county seat.

Marshall, TX

Alexander Travis Hawthorn rose from Arkansas lawyer to Confederate brigadier general, leading troops at Shiloh and earning commendation for gallantry at the Battle of Jenkins' Ferry. After the war he turned from soldiering to business and then the pulpit, spending his final decades as a Baptist minister in Texas.

Salado, TX

During the Civil War, the William R. Alexander Distillery on this site met a pressing wartime need. Governor Francis Lubbock ordered Texas distilleries closed in 1862 to conserve grain, but army demand for medicinal liquor—used for opiates and stimulants—soon reopened a select few, Alexander's among them. Amid drastic shortages, Texans across the state improvised bandages, lint, and homemade remedies for the troops.

Graford, TX

Tennessee-born Alfred Lane came to Texas with his family in 1836 and settled in Robertson's colony before moving to the Black Springs area of Palo Pinto County in 1856, where he raised horses on the open range after marrying Elizabeth Goodnight. Brother-in-law to the famed cattleman Charles Goodnight, who called him "a splendid brave man," Lane scouted for the Texas Rangers during the Civil War and helped drive Goodnight's cattle west of Fort Belknap. He was killed by Indians while returning home and lies buried in nearby Crawford Cemetery.

N.Richland Hills, TX

Alfred M. Hightower arrived near Smithfield from Illinois in 1858 to ranch, and though he opposed secession, he cast his lot with the South once war broke out. As a Confederate mounted rifleman he fought at Elkhorn Tavern (Pea Ridge) in Arkansas, one of the largest battles west of the Mississippi. He tried Kansas in the 1870s before returning to ranch here until his death, leaving his name on a nearby street.

Crockett, TX

Episcopal worship reached Crockett in 1850, and All Saints was formally founded in 1864 by Bishop Alexander Gregg during the depths of the Civil War, its special ministry bringing many enslaved people into the parish. By 1867 the church building had been lost—possibly to fire—and the local economy lay in ruins from the war, leaving the faithful to gather in homes with occasional priests for decades. Reactivated in 1947, the congregation built a new church in 1958.

Lost Prairie, TX

Allan Jefferson Rogers, born in Alabama, came to Texas in 1856 and served as a sergeant in Company K of Bass's Regiment, the 20th Texas Cavalry, during the Civil War. His unit campaigned across Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and Indian Territory in the war's Trans-Mississippi theater, the vast and often overlooked western front of the conflict. This marker preserves the memory of one of the many Texans who fought far from the war's famous eastern battlefields.

Jefferson, TX

Built around 1851 by Daniel Nelson Alley, a founder of Jefferson, this Greek Revival house with its four-room central-hall plan stands among the earliest homes of Marion County. In 1884 it passed to Hector McKay, a Civil War veteran and one of the region's leading attorneys, whose family held it into the mid-20th century. The house survives as a rare antebellum landmark of a onetime riverport boomtown.

Columbus, TX

When war came, the little railhead of Alleyton became a vital artery of the Confederacy. As the terminus of the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railroad, it gathered cotton from Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas to launch it down the "Cotton Road" toward the Rio Grande. After Vicksburg fell in 1863 and the Mississippi was sealed, this route to neutral Matamoros, Mexico became the South's lifeline, exchanging cotton for guns, clothing, and medicine that flowed back through Alleyton.

Emory, TX

A Missourian by birth, Ambrose Fitzgerald settled in 1846 on land then part of Nacogdoches County, and as new counties were carved from it he became the first clerk for both Van Zandt and Wood counties. After serving in the Civil War he returned to hold nearly every clerical office in newly formed Rains County. A Baptist preacher as well as a public servant, he baptized James S. Hogg, who would go on to become governor of Texas.

Straban Township, PA

On the rolling farmland east of Gettysburg, this tablet marks where the Amherst (Virginia) Artillery — Kirkpatrick's Battery of Nelson's Battalion — was posted during the three-day battle of July 1863. Attached to the artillery reserve of Ewell's Corps in the Army of Northern Virginia, the battery went into action with a rifled gun and three smoothbore Napoleons in support of Lee's assaults on the Union line. Hundreds of such cast-iron tablets were placed across the field to record exactly where each unit stood.

Washington, TX

Amos Gates, born in 1799, was among the settlers of Stephen F. Austin's first colony, the "Old Three Hundred" generation that established Anglo-American settlement in Mexican Texas. This marker also remembers his son William C. Gates, born in 1834, who served in the Confederate army before his death in 1877. Together they span the colony's founding and the Civil War era at Washington, cradle of Texas independence.

Bartow County, GA

In the autumn of 1864, as Sherman's armies pressed through north Georgia, Confederate troops under General Samuel G. French stormed the Union-held gap at Allatoona Pass on October 5, trying to sever the railroad that fed the Federal advance. The fighting was close and brutal, and among the fallen was a soldier whose name was never recorded. For generations afterward, Southerners made their way to this solitary hillside grave to honor him.

Palestine, TX

Settled largely by families from the Deep South, Anderson County voted overwhelmingly—870 to 15—for secession in 1861, even as Governor Sam Houston pleaded against it on the steps of Palestine's Osceola Hotel. More than 1,100 local men filled a dozen Confederate companies, over 300 dying on battlefields from New Mexico to Pennsylvania. On the home front, factories and salt works supplied the war effort while a hotel served as a makeshift hospital; among the county's leaders was John H. Reagan, the Confederacy's postmaster general.

Leander, TX

Thomas Anderson, a Pennsylvania native, built this mill in 1863 in the Texas Hill Country, and during the Civil War it produced gunpowder for the Confederate armies. Small backcountry works like this one helped a South cut off from imported munitions supply its troops from local resources. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936.

Andersonville, GA

Incorporated in 1853 as a small farming village, Andersonville was thrust into history when Camp Sumter prison opened here in 1864 and its commandant, Capt. Henry Wirz, was tried and executed for the suffering of Union prisoners. Amid that misery, the Irish priest Father Peter Whelan — himself a former prisoner of war — came in June 1864 and tended the stockade's prisoners daily for four months, remembered by Union and Confederate men alike as a 'Good Samaritan.' The town today calls itself a 'Civil War Village,' honoring the dead of both sides.

Andover, ME

In the small western Maine town of Andover, this memorial honors the local men who served in the Civil War from 1861 to 1865. Like countless New England villages, Andover sent a disproportionate share of its young men to fill the Union ranks, and their absence and loss reshaped the community for a generation. The monument keeps their service in the town's collective memory.

Bellefonte, PA · est. 1950

On this site was born Andrew G. Curtin, Pennsylvania's Civil War governor. Elected in 1861, he steered the state through the conflict, organizing the celebrated Pennsylvania Reserve Corps and championing the soldiers of the Union. His legacy reached beyond the battlefield: he pushed for State Normal Schools to train teachers and secured funding for State Orphan Schools to care for the children of the war dead.

Austin, TX

Alabama-born Andrew Jackson Hamilton moved to Texas in the 1840s and rose through its politics, serving as state attorney general, legislator, and U.S. congressman by 1859. A staunch opponent of secession, he left Texas during the Civil War, then returned when President Andrew Johnson named him provisional governor in 1865. He later sat on the Texas Supreme Court and ran twice, unsuccessfully, for governor before his death in 1875.

Raleigh, NC

Andrew Johnson was born in humble circumstances near this spot in 1808, in a small kitchen dwelling that still survives. A self-taught tailor who never attended school, he rose through Tennessee politics to the vice presidency and then, after Lincoln's assassination in 1865, to the White House. His stormy presidency during Reconstruction ended in the first impeachment of an American president.

Felicity, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, the Ohio River was the great dividing line between slaveholding Kentucky and free-soil Ohio, and the moment a freedom seeker stepped onto the northern bank the most dangerous leg of the journey began. Felicity, a small Clermont County village a few miles inland, sat squarely on that escape corridor, and Andrew Powell turned his own prosperity into a tool of resistance. Rather than hide his passengers, he moved them in plain sight, using his distinctive and well-recognized private carriage as cover to carry fugitives inland from the river toward the next link in the network. It was a quietly audacious gamble that a respectable man's conspicuous coach would draw less suspicion than a covered wagon on a back road.