Civil War

Independence, TX

A grandson of Moses Austin, whose 1821 contract opened Texas to Anglo-American settlement, Moses Austin Bryan came to Texas in 1831 and worked alongside his uncle Stephen F. Austin. He fought at San Jacinto in 1836, served the Republic as a diplomatic secretary, joined the 1842 Somervell Expedition, and rose to major in the Confederate army during the Civil War.

Rockdale, TX

This family burial ground dates to the 1850s, on land formally set aside in 1902 "to be used exclusively as a burying ground." It is named for Matthew Moss—a Virginia-born War of 1812 veteran and Red River steamboat man who brought his family to Milam County around 1845—and his son-in-law James Ragsdale, a veteran of the Texas Revolution and the first person buried here. Several Confederate veterans and members of the extended Moss family lie nearby, close to the vanished townsite of San Andres.

Palestine, TX

The earliest marked graves here date to the late 1850s, though the Mound Prairie community—home to a Baptist college known as Mound Prairie Institute—was settled considerably earlier. As the town declined late in the nineteenth century, this cemetery became one of its few surviving reminders. Many pioneer settlers and their descendants lie here alongside several Confederate veterans, some beneath rock cairns or hand-hewn stones.

Apple Springs, TX

Mount Zion Cemetery once served a scattering of vanished rural communities—Crib Creek, Trevat, Helmic, Centralia, and others—in the piney woods of Trinity County. Its earliest marked stone, that of Sarah A. Womack, dates to 1856, and among its graves are veterans of the U.S.–Mexico War and the Civil War. Tied to a Baptist church whose members deeded the land in 1894, the cemetery has been maintained by a community association since 1973.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2000

From January 1863 to May 1865, this Philadelphia hillside held Mower General Hospital, described as the largest U.S. Army hospital of its era, designed by architect John McArthur, Jr. Spread across 27 acres with some 3,600 beds arranged in radiating pavilions, it treated more than 20,000 sick and wounded Union soldiers over the course of the Civil War. Like many wartime hospitals, it was razed once the fighting ended, its purpose gone with the peace.

Lost Prairie, TX

Born in Georgia in 1828, Mary Ellephan Hawkins married William Jay Reeves in Alabama in 1847 and moved with their young children to Texas around 1855. When her husband went off to serve in Company F of the 15th Texas Cavalry during the Civil War, she held the family together at home, shouldering the hard work of a wartime household. Her descendants went on to become physicians, lawyers, bankers, and citizens in many walks of life.

Milano, TX

Originally the Watson family burial ground, this site passed to the trustees of Mt. Homer Baptist Church in 1866, its church building doubling as a schoolhouse. Its earliest marked grave, dated 1863, belongs to Zachary Williams, mortally wounded at the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia, and family diaries record that local African American residents were buried in the southeastern section. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2004, it preserves the intertwined histories of white and Black Milam County families.

Fairfield, TX

Early settlers raised the first Mt. Zion church—a simple log building—in 1854 near Doddy Hollow, with the Reverends G. W. Walker and Timothy Green among its founders. Over the following decades the congregation moved twice as families donated fresh tracts, at one point sharing a structure with a school and a Grange hall. Its cemetery, given by J. C. James and A. P. Vaughn, became the resting place of many Confederate veterans.

Port Aransas, TX

Mustang Island, one of seven Texas barrier islands, took its name from the wild horses descended from shipwrecks and Spanish expeditions, and was long frequented by the nomadic Karankawas. Robert Ainsworth Mercer settled here in 1855 with his family, founding the El Mar Rancho, but the small community scattered during the Civil War when the USS Arthur blockaded Aransas Pass and shelled the island after settlers fired on Federal sailors in 1862. Ranchers returned after the war, and by the 1920s tourism had become the island's economic mainstay.

Delavan, WI

Across from Delavan's train depot stands a bur oak more than two centuries old, the same sturdy tree where Civil War volunteers assembled as they were mustered in for the journey to camp. The depot and the oak together marked the threshold between hometown life and the war beyond.

New Summerfield, TX

Begun in the 1860s on land deeded by pioneer Thomas Garrison, this burial ground served the vanished town of Lone Star and scattered East Texas homesteads, its earliest marked grave that of young Martha Wallace in 1866. At least fifteen Civil War veterans rest here, some beneath hand-cut sandstone markers now worn to bare initials. Though Lone Star became a ghost town, the cemetery endured, tended by a community association chartered for perpetual care in the 1960s.

Stonington, CT

This monument honors the young men of Mystic who marched off to the Civil War — the "war of the rebellion" — between 1861 and 1865 and did not return. Like hundreds of New England mill and shipbuilding towns, Mystic sent a generation of its sons into the Union ranks, and the community raised this memorial to mark their sacrifice. The dates alone carry the weight of four years of national bloodletting.

Grapevine, TX

Established in 1859 by Kentucky migrants Thomas Jefferson Nash and his wife Elizabeth, this 450-acre farm is one of the last surviving nineteenth-century agrarian sites in North Texas. During the Civil War the Nash brothers left to serve with Confederate troops while Elizabeth and the children kept the farm; all returned to expand their holdings. The 1869 I-house, a crib barn, cistern, and family cemetery still stand, and in 1888 the Nashes gave right-of-way to the Cotton Belt Railroad that spurred the region's growth.

Jefferson, TX

Built by Jefferson S. Nash after he arrived in 1846, this was the first iron furnace in Texas, exploiting the region's abundant ore, hardwood for charcoal, and molding clay. Workers poured charcoal and ore down the stack from a ridge behind the furnace, then cast the molten iron into farm tools, cooking pots, and smoothing irons—and, during the Civil War, cannonballs and possibly firearms. Nash struggled constantly for machinery, labor, capital, and transport, yet his works helped launch an East Texas iron industry that grew to at least sixteen operations.

Corsicana, TX

When Texas joined the Confederacy, roughly 87 men from Navarro and neighboring counties enlisted at Corsicana in July 1861 as the Navarro Rifles, led by county founder Clinton M. Winkler. Formally Company I of the 4th Texas Infantry, they marched east to Virginia and fought under the celebrated Texas general John Bell Hood. From their baptism of fire at Yorktown to Hood's bayonet charge at Gaines' Mill outside Richmond, the company earned a fierce reputation, closing the war with 19 dead, 59 wounded, and 10 captured.

Dallas, TX

Marie Isabella "Belle" Boyd became one of the Confederacy's most celebrated spies, beginning her career at just seventeen when she reportedly shot a Union soldier who had threatened her mother. Charming Federal officers into revealing secrets that reached Confederate hands, she endured several imprisonments and eventual exile before reinventing herself as a lecturer and dramatic reader. In the 1880s she lived in a stately mansion near this Dallas site with her third husband before selling the house in 1887.

Tyler, TX

Founded in 1862 by gunsmiths J. C. Short and William Biscoe with Col. George Yarbrough, this Tyler plant contracted to arm Texas troops with thousands of rifles before the Confederate government bought it out in 1863. Staffed by 150 to 200 men—tanners, blacksmiths, carpenters, and draftsmen alongside the gunsmiths—it turned out .54-caliber rifles, cartridges, and canteens by the hundreds of thousands. Its output helped keep Confederate forces west of the Red River supplied against a feared Federal invasion of Texas.

East Columbia, TX

Brothers J. H., George, and David Dance opened a shop on the Brazos River in 1850 that would become one of Texas's few native arms makers. During the Civil War the shop produced revolvers to help arm the Confederacy, prized for their precision. In peacetime the Dances also built machinery for grist mills, cotton gins, sugar refineries, and sawmills.

Tyler, TX

Before the waters of Lake Palestine swallowed it, the Neches Saline was a salt lifeline for East Texas—Spanish missionaries recorded its brine springs as early as 1765, and settlers boiled water from shallow wells to harvest the salt a frontier economy could not do without. Local salt-making faded in the 1850s as cheaper English salt arrived, but the Civil War's Federal blockade revived it: one operator was reported to run twelve furnaces here, turning out about a hundred bushels a day for the Confederacy.

Austin, TX

Master builder Abner Cook raised this Greek Revival mansion of hand-cut limestone around 1853 in the young capital of Austin, using a mortar famously bound with pig bristles. In its early decades it served as Texas's first Institute for the Blind and, in 1865, as a hospital for Civil War soldiers, before becoming home to Republic of Texas figure Col. Andrew Neill and later Judge Thomas B. Cochran. Its walls trace Austin's growth from frontier town to state capital.

New Braunfels, TX

Founded in 1845 during the days of the Republic of Texas by Prince Karl of Solms-Braunfels, New Braunfels became the focal point of German immigration into central and western Texas. During the Civil War the town sent men and supplies to the Confederacy. Today it is a historic and recreational hub, home to Landa Park, the Sophienburg Museum, and the Comal, billed as the shortest large-volume river in the country.

Mineola, TX

New Hope Cemetery grew alongside the New Hope Baptist Church, organized in 1864, with its earliest surviving gravestone dating to 1875. Sold to the church for a single dollar in 1917, the ground carries the customs of its people — rock cairns, a tabernacle, and graves once kept as bare mounded barrows. Confederate and Union veterans lie here together, alongside educators, leaders, and neighbors, tended still by descendants who gather yearly.

Paulding County, GA

In the spring of 1864, the hills of Paulding County became a battleground as Union armies drove south toward Atlanta and Confederate forces dug in to slow them. The fighting around New Hope Church was close, wooded, and brutal, and many of the dead were laid to rest here where they fell, their names lost to the chaos of the campaign. This stone stands over those unknown soldiers, marking a place where a war's grand strategy came down to men buried by neighbors and comrades in a country churchyard.

Newton, TX

During the Civil War, remote Newton County became a vital Confederate supply corridor, guarding against Federal attempts to push up the Sabine River and into Texas. Confederates threw up breastworks and kept an arsenal at Burkeville, while "The Old Beef Trail" drove thousands of Texas cattle eastward as far as Mobile—its ferries fitted with pens and ox-led swimming herds. Towns like Farrsville tanned leather, ground corn, and made boots for the army, and the county, which had voted 178 to 3 for secession, sent some 400 men to fight.

Banquete, TX

Born in 1835 in Alsace, Nicholas Bluntzer came to Texas at nine with the Alsatian families led by empresario Henri Castro. He rode as a scout on Robert E. Lee's 1856–57 expedition against the Comanche, fought for the Confederacy at Palmito Ranch—the war's last battle—in 1865, and afterward became an influential South Texas rancher and cotton grower, lending his name to the settlement of Bluntzer.

Dallas, TX

Nicholas Henry Darnell arrived in Texas in 1838 and was almost immediately swept into public life, winning election to the Republic of Texas Congress and serving as Speaker of the House. He was a delegate to the 1845 convention that brought Texas into the Union and later served again as Speaker in the state legislature. In 1863 he resigned to lead the 18th Texas Cavalry, and after the Civil War he returned to office and helped draft the state's 1875 constitution.

Sherman, TX

About a thousand mounted volunteers from a cluster of North and East Texas counties gathered at Brogdon's Springs in October 1861 to form the Ninth Texas Cavalry under Colonel William B. Sims. The regiment fought across Indian Territory and at Pea Ridge before joining Lawrence S. Ross's celebrated cavalry brigade, which saw near-constant action through Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. Worn down to barely a hundred men, its survivors surrendered in Mississippi in May 1865.

Portsmouth, VA

Founded in 1767 on the Elizabeth River, the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia, is one of the oldest and largest shipyards in the United States. Despite its name, the yard sits in Portsmouth, and over two centuries it built, repaired, and outfitted vessels through the American Revolution, the Civil War — when the ironclad CSS Virginia was rebuilt there from the burned USS Merrimack — and both World Wars. This marker was unveiled in 1967 to commemorate the yard's 200th anniversary, dedicated by senior Navy officers including the Commander in Chief of the Atlantic Fleet.

Charlotte, NC

Opened in 1859 with future Confederate general Daniel Harvey Hill as its first superintendent, this Charlotte military academy trained young men in the tense years before the Civil War. When war came, the campus was pressed into service as a Confederate hospital, and after the conflict the building served as a public school from 1883 to 1950. It stood near this spot.

Suffolk, VA

This boundary marker stands where two of America's foundational colonies meet, each summarizing its origin story on stone. Virginia points to Jamestown in 1607, the first permanent English colony, while North Carolina reaches back to the ill-fated 1585–87 Roanoke ventures before its own permanent settlement around 1650. The marker also notes North Carolina's Halifax Resolves of April 1775, when it became the first colony to formally authorize its delegates to vote for independence.

Groveton vicinity, TX

North Cedar Community took root in 1856 as pioneers like Abner Womack and the Burke family carved farms from the East Texas woods—some reportedly sleeping in tree houses for fear of animals while their cabins were built by enslaved laborers. After the Civil War it became a small enclave of Confederate supporters, many fleeing the ruined states of the Deep South, and slowly gained a church, a cemetery, and Womack School. Lumber companies, then the Civilian Conservation Corps, shaped its later years, but by the twenty-first century only a few scattered houses remained.

Milam County, TX

Settlers from Alabama began arriving at North Elm in 1867, among them John George Lagrone, whose 1870 stone is the oldest here. Land was deeded for the cemetery beginning in 1883, with later additions. The graves include fourteen Confederate soldiers and two Texas Rangers, brothers Ellzey and James Perkins—a roll of the pioneers and veterans who settled the area.

Salado, TX

Built about 1872 by Edward R.A. Buckles, this two-story Salado house pairs Doric columns below with Victorian turned woodwork above. Confederate veteran Colonel Nimrod Lindsay Norton bought it in 1873; a member of the Capitol Building Commission, he donated Burnet County granite for the state capitol's exterior. In 1882 it passed to educators John and Kate Orgain, who taught at Salado College and area schools and left their own mark on the town.

Cumberland Township, PA

New York sent more men to Gettysburg than any other state, and this monument was raised by the State of New York to honor its corps, division, and brigade commanders not already commemorated elsewhere on the field. In July 1863 those officers helped direct the Union defense across the three-day battle. The monument fills the gaps among Gettysburg's many memorials, ensuring New York's leaders were remembered.

San Marcos, TX

Built in 1878, this ornate Victorian home became the residence of O. T. Brown, a Georgia native who had served in the Confederate army and endured captivity as a prisoner of war before rebuilding his life in Reconstruction-era Texas. In San Marcos he became a respected attorney and civic leader, marrying into the prominent Belvin family. The house stayed with his descendants until 1967.

Felicity, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, the Ohio River formed the border between slavery and freedom, and Clermont County sat squarely on the paths that freedom seekers followed north out of Kentucky. Oliver Perry Spencer Fee turned his Felicity store into a quiet refuge, feeding and clothing escapees while sending pursuing slave-hunters off in the wrong direction. Small, deliberate, and dangerous acts like his formed the human network later remembered as the Underground Railroad.

Lampasas, TX

Hartwell Fountain sold ten acres to the City of Lampasas in 1872 to create what was first called City Cemetery, renamed Oak Hill in 1908. For more than half a century the ground was tended by the Ladies Cemetery Association, a group of local women who cared for it from 1891 until the city took over in 1948. Buried here are pioneers, prominent citizens, and veterans reaching back through the Civil War to the Texas Revolution.

Somerville, TX

This Burleson County cemetery began in 1900 when J. W. Lauderdale bought land to bury his two-year-old son, and was renamed Oaklawn in 1913. Among its more than two thousand graves are 22 Civil War veterans, a cluster of children who died in 1900–1905, and victims of a 1903 typhoid epidemic. When the Somerville dam was built in 1963, sixteen people were reinterred here from other graveyards.

Raleigh, NC

Oakwood Cemetery, a few blocks east, holds some of North Carolina's most consequential dead, including governors Aycock, Bragg, Fowle, Holden, Swain, and Worth, alongside Confederate soldiers and other notables. Established in the Civil War era, it became a resting place for the state's political and military figures. Its grounds read like a roll call of North Carolina history.

Tyler, TX

Tyler's Oakwood Cemetery began in the 1840s as Lollar's Cemetery on land first used for burials before Texas was a decade into statehood. It holds a raised section of Confederate dead from the Civil War, a separate Jewish Beth-el Cemetery, and the graves of many leading citizens, including a Texas Supreme Court justice and Governor Richard B. Hubbard, who later served as U.S. Ambassador to Japan. WPA crews expanded and improved the grounds in the 1930s.

Comanche, TX

When Texas redrew Comanche County in 1858 and moved its seat, land developer Captain John Duncan donated 200 acres in 1859 for a new townsite, setting aside ground for a graveyard, churches, and schools. Named Oakwood for its stand of oaks, the cemetery's earliest marked grave is a one-year-old boy who died in 1861, and it has since gathered pioneers, civic leaders, and veterans of every conflict from the Republic of Texas onward — including both Union and Confederate dead of the Civil War. The city has owned it as a community burying ground ever since.

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth pioneer John Peter Smith — later a mayor, civic leader, and philanthropist — founded this cemetery in 1879 with a gift of 20 acres, since grown to 100. Bringing together the Oakwood, Calvary, and Trinity grounds, it holds many of the city's and county's notable dead, with plots held by lodges, unions, and churches, and separate tracts for Union and Confederate soldiers. Its chapel dates to 1914.

Perryton, TX

Ochiltree County, in the Texas Panhandle, was carved from Young and Bexar territories, created in 1876 and formally organized in 1889. It honors William Beck Ochiltree (1811–1867), a Texas Supreme Court justice, treasury secretary, and the last attorney general of the Republic of Texas who later served in the legislature, backed secession in 1861, and became a Confederate colonel. The county seat moved from Ochiltree to Perryton in 1920.

Sherman, TX

Built in 1875, this Odd Fellows Hall was the third home of a Sherman lodge organized in 1854, and it doubled as the town's civic heart — opening a 74-student school a decade before Sherman had a public one. Its Civil War story is striking: at a June 1862 meeting, every member but one aging brother left to join the Confederate army, and the lodge kept that meeting formally 'open' until the war ended. From its ranks came three Grand Masters of Texas and a Sovereign Grand Master of the World.

Valley Mills, TX

Tennessee-born pioneer John Odle brought his family to this Bosque County country in 1856 and about 1860 raised a cabin of oak logs, living in it until he could build a sturdier rock house for his thirteen children. During the Civil War he rode with a frontier ranger company charged with guarding the settlements, fighting at the Battle of Dove Creek against the Kickapoo in January 1865. The surviving cabin is a rare relic of frontier homebuilding.

Waco, TX

This marker recalls the vanished community of Old Harrison, named for Confederate General James E. Harrison—kin to President William Henry Harrison and a confidant of Jefferson Davis. A South Carolina–born planter and political leader, Harrison helped push Texas toward secession and, as an adopted son of the Chickasaw, led Confederate missions into Indian Territory during the Civil War. His donation of right-of-way and a station site for the Waco Tap Railway briefly turned this spot into a working town of stores, gins, gristmills, churches, and a school.

Schulenburg, TX

Built before 1857 by carpenter and blacksmith William B. Anderson, this is considered the area's oldest occupied house. Anderson wore many hats—postmaster, justice of the peace, notary, and sergeant of the Lyons Riflemen—and his family reportedly watched Confederate military drills from the second story during the Civil War. Later owners included Louis Schulenburg, the town's namesake, and railroad investor T. W. Pierce.

Denison, TX

Built in the 1850s by Dr. R. L. Bullock, this dog-run house was among the finest of early North Texas homes—reportedly the first in the county to boast glass windows. From 1867 it was home to Confederate Col. T. C. Bass and his descendants, including daughter Nettie, who was born under its roof in 1868 and lived there for nearly a century.

Texas City, TX

This ranch was established by Guy M. Bryan (1821–1901), nephew of Stephen F. Austin and one of the couriers who carried William B. Travis's famous appeal for help from the Alamo. Bryan went on to a long public career, serving in the Texas Legislature as Speaker of the House and in the U.S. Congress. During the Civil War he was a colonel and an aide to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Raleigh, NC

In 1863, by order of Governor Zebulon Vance, earthen breastworks were thrown up around Raleigh to guard the capital against Federal cavalry raids during the Civil War. The fortifications ringed the city as the tide of war turned against the Confederacy. Remnants of these earthworks survive a third of a mile to the west.

Sherman, TX

Settled in 1848 by Grayson County pioneers who reclaimed land from wilderness amid Indian raids and frontier hardship, Old Cedar quickly needed a cemetery—still holding some 400 graves, including one Union and eighteen Confederate veterans. As the community took root it built Cedar Academy in 1871, where students learned to make ink and split goose-quills alongside their lessons, and organized the Cedar Methodist Church the same year. Camp-ground revivals under brush arbors drew families from miles around each summer.

Paris, TX

On land once owned by George Washington Wright, founder of Paris, this was the town's primary burial ground from 1845 to 1865, its oldest grave said to be that of a free Black man who worked for Wright. When the newer Evergreen Cemetery opened in 1866, many graves were moved, yet Wright himself was buried here in 1877, and a granite marker honors soldiers of the 9th Texas Infantry, C.S.A., who died in a measles epidemic in 1862. Of roughly 325 graves, about a hundred stones survive, most from 1870 to 1910.

Weatherford, TX

Formally established by Weatherford's town council in 1863, this cemetery gathered earlier burials that had been scattered in the town's unmarked streets. By the 1920s a civic league and cemetery association—led notably by its women members—had beautified and secured the neglected grounds. Among its estimated thousand graves rest Civil War Medal of Honor recipient Chester Bowen, famed trail drivers Oliver Loving and Bose Ikard, and Texas Governor S. W. T. Lanham.

Gilmer, TX

A ferry crossing on Big Cypress Bayou, Coffeeville grew into a bustling 1850s East Texas town with an academy, churches, stores, doctors, a hotel, and a Masonic lodge. During the Civil War it lived up to its name by selling coffee when scarcity emptied other towns' shelves. It also hosted one of Upshur County's three Confederate camps of instruction, established at local citizens' expense after Governor Edward Clark's 1861 call, where infantry and cavalry trained for the fight.

Kyle, TX

David Alexander Young came to Texas from Tennessee in 1857 and was among 179 Hays County men who fought in the Civil War, wounded while serving in Woods' 32nd Cavalry. When the International & Great Northern Railway reached Kyle, Young moved from Mountain City and in 1881 raised the town's first permanent store. The surviving building was given to the city of Kyle in 1936 by rancher M. G. Michaelis, Sr.

Lexington, NC

Completed in 1858, this Classical Revival courthouse anchored Lexington through the Civil War. Its interior burned in 1865 as the conflict reached the Carolina Piedmont, and it was rebuilt about 1867 during the early years of Reconstruction. The restored building remains a fine example of the antebellum public architecture that once dominated Southern county seats.

Willis, TX

In the young timber town of Willis, a carpenter named Sid Inglet raised a thirteen-room house in 1872 for Dr. William P. Powell, a Confederate veteran who had married Mary Eugenia Thompson in Waverly nine years earlier. Powell was the country doctor of the old school, making his rounds by horse and buggy and turning his own home into an office and makeshift hospital until he died in 1915. Six of his twelve children were born beneath its roof, and later owners even hosted more than a hundred weddings there.

Fort Davis, TX

For a brief, dramatic span in 1861–62, this frontier outpost on the San Antonio–El Paso military road served as a Confederate supply point, held by Texas Mounted Rifles after the U.S. Army withdrew. Troops passed through en route to the ill-fated campaign to seize New Mexico and Arizona — and the Pacific gold routes — while Apache warriors ambushed a patrol under Lt. Mays in the Big Bend that August.

Mason vicinity, TX

Built of stone quarried from the post hill beside a spring long used by Native peoples, Fort Mason helped guard the Texas frontier against raids. Colonel Robert E. Lee commanded the post from February 1860 until February 1861 — and it was here, as the Union began to fracture, that he wrestled with the choice that would define his life. Vowing he would draw his sword only in defense of his native Virginia, Lee left Fort Mason on February 13, 1861, and rode toward the coming war.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 1975

Built in 1818 in restrained Georgian style, the Franklin County Jail served Chambersburg for 152 years—among the borough's oldest surviving buildings. Its stone walls stood through one of the Civil War's boldest raids: in July 1864 Confederate cavalry, demanding a ransom the town could not pay, put much of Chambersburg to the torch. The jail endured while blocks around it burned.