Civil War

Hempsted, TX

Edwin Waller lived on this Hempstead-area property, acquired during the Republic, from 1846 for many years. His public life bracketed the era's great turning points: a member of the 1835 Consultation and a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, he went on to serve as the first mayor of Austin. In 1861 he sat as a member of the Secession Convention, tying his long career to Texas's entry into the Civil War.

Pleasant Grove, TX

Shaded by live oaks along Simms Creek, Pleasant Grove was settled after the Civil War by veterans of both the Union and Confederate armies, who put their old enmities aside to build a community. The cemetery opened in 1876 with the burial of Tom Berry's young daughter, and alongside it stood a Methodist church and a school; today more than 400 graves, many unmarked, hold the area's early settlers.

Nevada, TX

This burial ground, also known as South Church Cemetery, grew up beside Pleasant Hill Baptist Church, formed after a congregation near Lavon and Farmersville split in 1882. The Gooch family sold the land for both church and graveyard, and among those laid to rest are veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War. The church disbanded in 1947, and by 1950 the cemetery had ceased active burials.

Silverton, TX

Civil War veteran Pleasant Lafayette Crawford built this Queen Anne home, with its inviting wraparound porch, in 1904 on the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle. He had come from Arkansas in the late 1880s to buy ranch land and open a mercantile store, and his family followed by covered wagon to join him. One of Silverton's founders, Crawford opened the town's first hotel in 1894, and his family kept the house until 1917.

Pleasanton, TX

Founded in 1858 and named for early settler John Pleasants, this town became the seat of Atascosa County at the junction of the Atascosa River and Bonita Creek. During the Civil War local men mustered here to form a Confederate cavalry company, but the town's lasting fame came from cattle: set amid Longhorn country, it grew into a cattlemen's capital where drovers gathered before pushing huge herds north to Kansas railheads. In the spring of 1873 alone, cowboys drove 43,000 county cattle up the trail.

Port Isabel, TX

After Texas joined the Confederacy, the U.S. Navy blockaded this Gulf port in late 1861, choking off commerce and driving customs offices and civilians away. The old lighthouse became a watchtower for blockade runners who used Laguna Madre as a haven, and the port changed hands repeatedly — Federal forces occupied it in 1863, Confederates drove them out in 1864, and in 1865 Union General Lew Wallace, later author of "Ben Hur," met Confederate officers here to discuss peace. Mexican lighters even ran Confederate arms ashore in defiance of both French and U.S. patrols.

Grand Saline, TX

During the Civil War, families fleeing the war's front lines settled unattended land here, forming a community that became Poletown, perhaps for the poles used in building homes. In 1895 Tom Alexander laid out the town of Rhodesburg to honor populist Jacob C. Rhodes, who organized the Socialist Party of Texas and hosted its first state convention. Socialist encampments met west of Grand Saline for over a decade, and the party drew thirty percent of Van Zandt County's vote in 1912 before fracturing.

Livingston, TX

During the Civil War, Polk County was a stretch of piney woods, farms, and thickets that included an Alabama-Coushatta reservation. Though it counted only 600 voters in 1860, it sent some 900 soldiers into the Confederate Army, furnishing four companies to Hood's famed Texas Brigade and organizing several other infantry units; twenty-one Alabama-Coushattas enlisted in an Indian cavalry company. On the home front, old men, women, children, and enslaved people raised food and cotton, while the county's ferries and river landings moved troops and supplies until Livingston became headquarters for the federal Army of Occupation in 1867-68.

Ponchatoula, LA

Ponchatoula's first depot went up about 1854 for the New Orleans, Jackson & Great Northern Railroad, later part of the Illinois Central. Union forces burned it when they captured the town in March 1863, and it was rebuilt around 1865. The present depot dates to 1894, remodeled in the 1920s, and was placed by the state tourism department in 1982.

Montgomery, TX

Among the 1850s settlers here were John W. Pool and his wife Joannah, whose son William deeded about two acres in 1885 to the Union Grove Baptist and Methodist churches, which also housed a school. The cemetery began that same year with the burial of a young child, John C. Montgomery, and later gifts of land expanded the grounds. Among those interred are Confederate soldiers Henry E. Williams and John Randolph Stovall, and the Pool's Cemetery Association still maintains the historic graveyard today.

Port Lavaca, TX

Burials began in this coastal cemetery in the 1840s, with several mass graves left by an 1849 cholera epidemic. Pioneer families, state and local officials, and at least one veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto are buried here, along with soldiers of both the Union and the Confederacy. Expanded over the years, the graveyard now covers eight city blocks.

Mesquite, TX

John and Martha Potter, citizens of the Republic of Texas, bought a farm near the Haught's Store community in 1860, and when their young son died the following year he became the first burial on this ground. John enlisted in the Confederate Army that same month and, after the war, served as justice of the peace over a landholding approaching a thousand acres. Most of the family's nine children lie here, in a cemetery whose last recorded burial came in 1947.

Chilton, TX

When John Powell was buried here in 1889, his family set the land aside as a burial ground shared among a cluster of pioneer families who had settled this part of Falls County. Among those laid to rest is Thomas Marion Tull, a Confederate veteran who had served in the Arkansas legislature and as a justice of the peace before coming to Texas. Descendants still tend the site, which reads as a record of the families who put down roots here.

Brenham, TX

Prairie Lea Cemetery holds graves dating from the 1840s, though the Brenham Cemetery Association did not formally establish it until 1871, spurred by the yellow fever deaths that were filling the older Masonic burial ground. Among those interred are veterans reaching back to the Texas Revolution, prominent Giddings brothers, Methodist founders of early colleges, and Confederate General John David McAdoo. German-inscribed tombstones and the 1897 Rest Chapel reflect the area's deep immigrant heritage.

Bellefonte, PA

This bronze dedication marks a gift to Bellefonte from one of the borough's most distinguished sons, James A. Beaver. A Union officer who rose to brigadier general and lost a leg to battle wounds in the Civil War, Beaver returned home to practice law and later served as Governor of Pennsylvania from 1887 to 1891. In 1910, near the end of a long public life, he presented this to his community—one of many civic gifts from a man who also helped shepherd the young Pennsylvania State College as a trustee.

Navasota, TX

Primus Kelly was enslaved by the wealthy Grimes County planter John W. S. West, who in the Civil War sent Kelly to accompany his three sons into Terry's Texas Rangers. According to the inscription Kelly took up arms alongside them and twice carried a wounded son home to Texas and back to the front. After emancipation he bought a small farm nearby, raised a family, and prospered until his death in the 1890s. The marker itself, erected in the era of Confederate memory-making, frames his story through the 'faithful slave' language of its time.

Camp Wood, TX

This grave near Camp Wood holds Private Frank Marshall, a 29-year-old from Harrison County who died in June 1861 while serving in the W.P. Lane Rangers. He stands for the Texans who fought in the Confederacy's ambitious 1861–62 campaign to seize Arizona and New Mexico and reach the Pacific, supported by a chain of frontier posts stretching from San Antonio westward. Early victories like Valverde raised hopes, but overstretched supply lines forced the ragged army's retreat back to Texas.

Washington County, MD

This granite infantryman—known affectionately as "Old Simon"—stands watch over Antietam National Cemetery near Sharpsburg, Maryland, where thousands of Union dead from the Battle of Antietam are buried. On September 17, 1862, the fighting here became the bloodiest single day in American history, with more than 22,000 men killed, wounded, or missing. Dedicated in 1880, the towering figure of a common private at parade rest was meant to honor not the generals but the ordinary soldiers who filled the ranks. The cemetery grew out of the battle's staggering toll, gathering the fallen from the surrounding fields into ground set aside for their rest.

Orange, TX

A New York native, Putnam B. Curry moved to Galveston in 1860 and enlisted in the Confederate army, seeing action along the Texas Gulf Coast during the Civil War. After the war he married Eliza Ann Ochiltree and settled in Orange, where he opened a mercantile firm and later ran a hotel and published a newspaper. A leader in the local business community, he remained active until his death in 1910.

Temple, TX

Born to a wealthy Missouri plantation family, Raleigh R. White defied his father to join the Confederate army at 21, serving under Nathan Bedford Forrest and rising to acting colonel. A religious conversion after the war redirected his life: ordained a Baptist minister in 1873, he moved his large family to Texas in 1882 and became an influential itinerant preacher, active in seminaries, missions, and Baptist work among African Americans. His son later founded the Temple hospital that grew into Scott & White.

Mansfield, TX

Ralph Sandiford Mann came to Texas from South Carolina in the 1850s and, with his brother-in-law Julian Field, founded the town of Mansfield — its name a blend of their own. Their steam-powered grist mill supplied grain to the Confederacy during the Civil War and later fed U.S. troops at frontier forts Belknap and Griffin. About 1866 Mann built the log core of this home, later expanded in brick, and gave land for the town cemetery where he rests.

Halifax, NC

The Confederate ironclad ram CSS Albemarle was fitted with its machinery and guns at Halifax before steaming down the Roanoke River into action in 1864. Ironclads like the Albemarle briefly challenged Union control of North Carolina's rivers and sounds during the Civil War. This marker recalls the inland shipyard work that sent her into battle.

Castroville, TX

Charles De Montel came from Europe to Texas in 1838 and made himself a frontiersman of many roles—helping found Castroville, organizing Medina County, and serving as county judge, Texas Ranger captain, and a Navy commander for the Confederacy during the Civil War. A co-founder of Bandera as well, he married Justine Pingenot in 1847 and built this home between 1848 and 1850. His life traces the arc from immigrant newcomer to pillar of the young Texas frontier.

Canyon, TX

Carved from Young and Bexar territories, Randall County was created in 1876 and organized in 1889, with Canyon as its seat. It honors Horace Randall (1821–1864), a Confederate officer who was killed leading his brigade in battle. The naming reflects how Texas, in the decades after the Civil War, memorialized its Confederate dead across the map of the settling Panhandle.

Canyon, TX

Created in 1876 and named for Confederate general Horace Randall, this Panhandle county was settled in 1877 by rancher Leigh Dyer, brother-in-law of the famed cattleman Charles Goodnight, who brought the first cattle to the region. Organized in 1889 with Canyon as its seat, it later became home to West Texas State University and the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum. Its founding weaves together open-range ranching and the memory of the Civil War.

Decatur, TX

Born into slavery near Savannah, Georgia, in 1832, Randolph Vesey served as body servant to Confederate General William Lewis Cabell during the Civil War. In 1868, living on the Montague-Wise County line, he was captured by Indians and taken to Kansas, then ransomed by the Black frontier scout Brit Johnson with horses donated by Texas friends. A gifted violinist, Vesey played at local dances, married Missouri 'Zoe' Light, and raised two children.

Decatur, TX

Randolph Vesey (1832–1908) was a Black Texan, born in Georgia, known across Wise County as a champion pioneer fiddler who played the frontier forts and was once ransomed from Indian captivity in Kansas. The marker records that he accompanied Confederate general W. L. Cabell to war as a body servant, and it uses his life to frame a broader, contested claim about enslaved and free Black people who labored for the Confederacy. Vesey lived out his years as a respected homeowner and is buried in Decatur's Oaklawn cemetery.

Plymouth, NC

During the final Confederate push at the Battle of Plymouth on April 20, 1864, General Matt Ransom's North Carolina brigade formed its line of battle near this spot. Ransom's men were part of the broad assault that overwhelmed the Union defenses guarding the Roanoke River port. Within hours the entire garrison capitulated.

Lancaster, TX

The Rawlins family settled this stretch of Dallas County in 1845, and in 1855 Roderick A. Rawlins — who had married his teacher, Virginia Bledsoe, daughter of Lancaster's founder — began building here. After serving as a Confederate officer during the Civil War, Captain Rawlins rebuilt his home in the fashionable Greek Revival style. Standing halfway between Dallas and Waxahachie, the house became a welcome stop where travelers drew water and camped by the well.

Big Lake, TX

Reagan County was carved from Tom Green County and organized in 1903 as ranching and, later, oil pushed settlement across the West Texas plains. It honors John H. Reagan (1818-1905), an Indian fighter, surveyor, and long-serving Texas congressman who became Postmaster General of the Confederacy and later a founding force of the Texas Railroad Commission. The county seat moved from Stiles to Big Lake in 1925.

Nocona, TX

Established in 1861 near a major buffalo and Indian crossing, Red River Station was a Civil War frontier outpost where local soldiers, families, and Texas Frontier Regiment cavalry guarded the settlement's edge against raids and possible Union incursion from Indian Territory. Chronically short of supplies, its Confederates and state rangers patrolled a vast frontier line, and after the war the crossing became a key point on the cattle trails north.

Pecos, TX

Carved out of Pecos County in 1883 and organized the following year, Reeves County took shape as railroads and settlers pushed into far West Texas. It was named for George Robertson Reeves, a Confederate colonel who also served in the Texas Legislature, and the town of Pecos became its seat. Markers like this, erected in 1936 for the Texas Centennial, fixed the young county's origins in public memory.

Caldwell, TX

Built before the turn of the twentieth century by Caldwell merchant and banker William Reeves, this ornate late-Victorian home passed in 1907 to Capt. Mansell Lewis Womack, a Civil War veteran, former county sheriff, and civic leader. His family held the house until 1957, and its intricate Eastlake detailing still marks it as a showpiece of the era.

Laredo, TX

A descendant of Laredo's 1755 founder Tomás Sánchez, Refugio Benavides was a pillar of one of the border city's leading families. He served as alderman and mayor before the Civil War, then rose to captain in the 3rd Texas Cavalry, commanding a company that defended the Rio Grande frontier and helped keep the valley open as a Confederate cotton-export route. After Reconstruction he returned to the mayor's office for three terms, improving schools, sewers, and the city charter.

Williamsport, PA · est. 2017

Founded in Williamsport in 1831 and named for its cherished director Daniel Repasz, the Repasz Band is among the oldest community bands in America. It reportedly played at Lee's surrender at Appomattox in 1865, marched in the inaugural parades of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft as the band of the 12th Pennsylvania National Guard, and performed at the dedications of Grant's Tomb a century apart. Its signature "Repasz Band March" is still played the world over.

Montgomery, TX

Born in Appomattox County, Virginia in 1829 and educated at Randolph-Macon College, Reuben Jonathan Palmer came to Texas in 1856 and made Montgomery his home as a lawyer. He served in the state's Ninth Legislature and, in 1861, sat in the Secession Convention that carried Texas out of the Union on the eve of the Civil War. He died in 1868, leaving a wife and three children.

Graford, TX

Alabama-born Reuben Vaughan migrated to Texas in 1852 and in 1854 brought his family to this area as the first permanent settlers in present Palo Pinto County, raising a cabin of cedar and stone. A farmer and stock raiser who kept friendly relations with the region's Indian tribes, he served in a frontier battalion protecting settlements during the Civil War and lies buried in this family cemetery.

Lander County, NV

This modest stone store, opened in 1863, became the launching point for one of the Civil War's most remarkable fundraising stunts. Merchant Reuel Colt Gridley lost an 1864 election wager and, honoring it, auctioned a sack of flour for the Sanitary Fund—the wartime forerunner of the American Red Cross. Resold again and again across Nevada, California, and finally at the St. Louis Sanitary Fair, the single sack raised roughly $275,000 for wounded Union soldiers, even as Gridley himself died nearly penniless six years later.

Fairfield, TX

A self-made North Carolinian who rafted timber at 21 to pay for schooling, George Washington Baines became a noted Texas Baptist leader—pastor to Sam Houston, founder of the state's first Baptist newspaper in 1855, and president of Baylor University during the hard Civil War years of 1861–63. He founded churches across the South and led congregations in wartime relief and prayer in Confederate Texas. One of his great-grandsons was Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the United States.

Clearfield Township, PA · est. 2004

When the Civil War came, Richard C. Christy left this parish to serve as chaplain of the 78th Pennsylvania Volunteers, ministering to a regiment that was overwhelmingly not Catholic. In an age thick with anti-Catholic suspicion, he won over the soldiers with plain courage under fire, earning the nickname the "Fighting Chaplain of the Army of the Cumberland." He returned to his pastorate after the war, and hundreds of veterans came to bury him in 1878.

Tyler, TX

Richard Bennett Hubbard, a Georgia-born lawyer, settled in Tyler in 1853 and became a leading voice of the Texas Democratic Party. He raised a battalion at the Civil War's outbreak—it became the 22nd Texas Infantry, which fought at the 1864 Battle of Mansfield—then turned to railroad building when Reconstruction hemmed in his law practice. Elected lieutenant governor in 1873, he became governor in 1876 and later served as U.S. minister to Japan.

Robert Lee, TX

Richard Coke (1829-1896) was a Virginia-born Texan who backed secession, served as a Confederate captain in the Trans-Mississippi campaigns, and later sat briefly on the state supreme court before Reconstruction authorities removed him. His 1873 defeat of Governor E. J. Davis, and Davis's grudging departure, is often marked as the political end of Reconstruction in Texas. Coke went on to serve nearly two decades in the U.S. Senate; this memorial was erected by the state in 1963 to Texans who served the Confederacy.

Sabine Pass, TX

On September 8, 1863, Lt. Richard W. Dowling and forty-seven men of the Davis Guards held a small mud fort at Sabine Pass against a Union flotilla and hundreds of federal troops. Firing with cool precision, the tiny Confederate garrison crippled the attacking gunboats and captured hundreds of prisoners without losing a man. The lopsided victory turned Dowling and his largely Irish-immigrant company into enduring Texas legends.

Fredericksburg, VA

On the bloody slopes below Marye's Heights, during the December 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg, Confederate sergeant Richard Rowland Kirkland of the 2nd South Carolina is remembered for an act of mercy amid carnage. As wounded Union soldiers lay crying out between the lines, Kirkland reportedly gathered canteens and crossed into the open ground to bring them water, exposing himself to fire from both armies. The monument, set near the stone wall and Sunken Road where Federal assaults were repulsed, honors him as the "Angel of Marye's Heights."

Lometa, TX

Richard S. Stokes came of age in the divided South, enlisting as a Confederate private in 1861 and rising to lieutenant before the war's end. Like thousands of Southerners, he headed west afterward, settling in Lampasas County, Texas, in 1868 to ranch, farm, and raise a large family. His most remarkable moment came in 1911, when at age 73 he pulled three young people from the Colorado River at Chadwick's Mill—an act of courage that earned him a Carnegie Hero Medal.

Jefferson, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1833, Richard Waterhouse served in the U.S. war with Mexico before becoming a Texas businessman and, in the Civil War, colonel of the 19th Texas Confederate Infantry. He was commended for gallantry at Milliken's Bend during the Vicksburg Campaign and fought at Mansfield and Pleasant Hill in the Red River Campaign, rising to brigadier general. He died in 1876.

Reagor Springs, TX

John I. Richardson, a county surveyor and Mason who rode with the 12th Texas Confederate Cavalry, married Ann Elizabeth Reagor in 1865, both descendants of the family that gave Reagor Springs its name. The graveyard began with the 1879 burial of a Richardson cousin and was formally deeded for use as a cemetery in 1890. Holding about thirty graves, it became the resting place of the Richardsons and other early Ellis County families before the couple left the area near the turn of the century.

Sulphur Springs, TX

In 1872, as new farming settlements spread across Northeast Texas, a Baptist congregation and a country school took root at Richland, and the burying ground beside them became the community's enduring anchor. Its graves hold the area's early families and more than a dozen Civil War veterans, with reinterments carrying the record back to the early 1870s. The church and school are long gone, but caretakers have tended the cemetery through societies formed in 1922 and 1962.

Fredericksburg, TX

This modest vernacular home went up in 1909 in the German settlement of Fredericksburg, built by Franz Stein for the Riley family. In 1912 it passed to Charles Enderlin, a German immigrant and Civil War veteran who reshaped the house to fit his large family and kept it in Enderlin hands for more than seventy years. Its side-gabled roof, shed-roof porch, and distinctive pair of front doors reflect the plain, practical building traditions of the Texas Hill Country.

Rio Grande City, TX

During the Civil War, this booming border town on the Rio Grande served as a Confederate port of entry and customhouse — a key terminus of the "cotton road" that funneled Southern cotton to neutral ships in the Gulf and returned with European arms, medicine, and supplies. Blockaded on every ocean coast, the Confederacy depended on this frail international lifeline through Mexico. Federal troops seized the town in 1863, and it changed hands again in 1864 amid raids, smuggling, and cross-border intrigue.

Asheville, NC

Riverside Cemetery, laid out in the 1880s on a hillside above the French Broad River, became the resting place for some of North Carolina's most celebrated figures. Among them are novelist Thomas Wolfe, whose 'Look Homeward, Angel' immortalized his native Asheville, and short-story master William Sydney Porter, better known as 'O. Henry.' They lie near Zebulon B. Vance, the Civil War-era governor, and two men who served the state in the U.S. Senate, Thomas L. Clingman and Robert R. Reynolds. This marker points the way to a quiet green acre where literature and statecraft share the same ground.

Dare County, NC

Established in 1863 by Union troops, the Freedmen's Colony on Roanoke Island was the first refugee community for formerly enslaved people in North Carolina. On land nearby extending to the south, thousands of freedpeople built homes, schools, and churches as they made the first fragile steps into freedom. The colony endured until 1867, when the government returned the land to its prewar owners.

Terrell, TX

Robert Adams Terrell wandered from Tennessee through Kentucky, Missouri, and Louisiana before reaching the Republic of Texas around 1840. As a surveyor he located headright land grants across North Texas—paid in vast tracts of land—served in Republic expeditions, and enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861. The town of Terrell rose on land he had surveyed and took his name.

Salado, TX

Arriving in Bell County around 1853, Georgia-born Robert B. Halley helped turn a frontier settlement into a working community, running a liquor distillery and a flour-and-grist mill on the Lampasas River. He served as county commissioner and a state Democratic convention delegate, then recruited and captained a volunteer cavalry company during the Civil War. Elected county sheriff in 1874, he died in office the following year.

Chico, TX

Robert Calvin Mount came from Tennessee to Texas in 1855 and helped organize the brand-new Wise County, winning election as its first tax assessor-collector in 1856. During the Civil War he served as a first lieutenant in Blythe's militia, and in 1874 he built a fort-like rock house near Chico as protection on a still-dangerous frontier. He is remembered as one of the county's founding pioneers.

Dallas, TX

On land once part of a Republic-era grant, a streetcar company opened Oak Lawn Park in 1903, luring weekend riders and prospective buyers out on a nickel fare. The City of Dallas bought the leafy grounds in 1909, and in 1936 the Dallas Southern Memorial Association placed a bronze statue of Robert E. Lee here, unveiled by President Franklin D. Roosevelt; a scaled replica of Lee's Arlington home followed in 1938. The park long remained one of the city's most popular retreats.

Leming, TX

Robert E. Neill came to Texas as a small boy in the 1830s and, though a childhood accident crippled his left arm, went on to soldier through three of the era's conflicts. He served in the U.S. Army during the Mexican-American War of 1847, rode with the Texas Rangers on frontier duty, and closed his military life fighting for the Confederacy. Afterward he returned to ranching in Atascosa County, where he raised five children and died in 1878.

Lincolnton, NC

Robert F. Hoke of Lincolnton became one of the Confederacy's youngest major generals, promoted after his victory at the Battle of Plymouth in 1864, and led troops through the campaigns of Virginia and North Carolina. His home still stands just east of this marker.

Cornish, NH

Colonel Robert Gould Shaw commanded the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, one of the first Black regiments raised in the North during the Civil War. On July 18, 1863 (the inscription's July 23 marks his death and burial in the aftermath), Shaw led his men in the doomed but valiant assault on Fort Wagner guarding Charleston Harbor, and fell at the parapet alongside scores of his soldiers. Confederate troops buried the young officer in a common grave with his Black troops, an insult his abolitionist family embraced as an honor. This memorial in Cornish echoes the celebrated Saint-Gaudens relief that immortalized Shaw and the regiment.

Boston, MA

This memorial honors Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, one of the Union's first Black regiments raised in the North during the Civil War. In the summer of 1863 the regiment led a desperate twilight assault on Fort Wagner, a Confederate stronghold guarding Charleston harbor in South Carolina; Shaw, a young Boston officer who had volunteered to command them, was killed at the parapet alongside scores of his men. Though the attack failed to take the fort, the courage of the 54th under fire became national news and helped open the ranks of the U.S. Army to Black soldiers.