Civil War

Columbus, TX

A Georgia-born doctor's son, Robert Henry Harrison earned his medical degree in 1846 and served as a Confederate colonel before settling in Columbus in 1869. From his office on the town square he became a founder and president of the State Medical Association, helped create Texas' Board of Health, wrote prolifically on medicine, and in 1880 built a hospital for railway workers.

Victoria, TX

This late-Victorian house was built in the 1890s for Robert Lewis Dabney (1820–1898), a Presbyterian theologian, teacher, and author who had served as chief of staff to Confederate General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson in 1862. After teaching in Austin and helping establish a school of theology there, Dabney and his wife settled in Victoria and built this home. In 1922 it passed to Dr. Oscar McMullen, Victoria's first city health officer, and remained in his family for generations.

Crowell, TX

Foard County honors Robert L. Foard (1831–1898), a Maryland-born lawyer who came to Texas in 1853 and served the Confederacy as a major in the 13th Texas Infantry. His regiment guarded the Texas coast against Union raiding parties and briefly campaigned in Louisiana in 1863, as the South fought to keep the Mississippi River open. The State of Texas erected this memorial in 1963 to Texans who served the Confederacy.

Robert Lee, TX

Established in 1891, two years after the town of Robert Lee was founded, this West Texas cemetery was sold for a token dollar by a land and cattle company to the local Masonic lodge for use as a burial ground. Already holding a few graves, it became the resting place of the community's founding families. Among them lie 34 Civil War veterans, along with soldiers of later American wars.

Tehuacana, TX

Robert M. Love was among the armed men who helped seat the 14th Texas Legislature in 1873 during the tense standoff when outgoing Governor E. J. Davis contested Richard Coke's election. A Confederate veteran of Ross' brigade, he went on to serve as Limestone County deputy sheriff and sheriff, president of the Texas Sheriff's Association, U.S. Marshal, and finally state comptroller from 1901 to 1903. His career threads through some of the sharpest political conflicts of Reconstruction-era Texas.

Stratham, NH

In the summer of 1860, seventeen-year-old Robert Todd Lincoln was boarding at Phillips Exeter Academy, cramming to make up for a failed Harvard entrance exam, while his father Abraham Lincoln campaigned for the presidency back in Illinois. During the town's Fourth of July celebration that year, the young man climbed atop this rock in Stratham and read aloud the Declaration of Independence to the gathered crowd. It was an ordinary holiday ritual made quietly extraordinary by who was reading and by the storm gathering over the country — within a year the nation would be at war and his father in the White House.

Marshall, TX

Robert W. Loughery, born in 1820, became one of East Texas' most influential newspapermen through his Harrison County papers, above all Marshall's Texas Republican. A fierce partisan, he used his columns to champion slavery, secession, and the Confederacy while lambasting his critics. After the war he wrote across the state, served briefly as U.S. Consul in Acapulco, and died in Marshall in 1894.

Cedar Hill, TX

A North Carolina native, Dr. R. A. Roberts (1837–1906) settled in Cedar Hill in 1859 and, after serving as a Confederate Army surgeon, returned to build a prominent medical practice. He helped bring the Grand Central and Santa Fe rail line through town, tying the community into the growing Texas rail network. In 1884 he built this late-Victorian home, notable for its jig-sawn porch work and stick-style gable brackets.

Waco, TX

A block south lie two of the Confederacy's rare father-and-son generals — the only such pair besides Robert E. Lee and his son. Jerome B. Robertson led Hood's famed Texas Brigade from 1862 to 1864 before settling in Waco, where he died in 1890; his son Felix, who served in the Army of Tennessee, followed decades later in 1928. Together their graves knit a single Waco family into the larger drama of the Civil War.

Franklin, TX

Robertson County grew from an 1822 colonization contract held by Sterling Clack Robertson, who recruited settlers from Tennessee and later signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. Created in 1837 and organized in 1838, the county shuffled its seat among a half-dozen towns before settling on Franklin in 1879. During the Civil War it sent five companies into Confederate service and turned its mills toward making cloth, flour, and supplies for soldiers' families.

Lovelady vicinity, TX

Benjamin Thomas Ellis, born in Alabama in 1825, came to Texas as a boy and by mid-century was farming the land around this site, where his family began burying its dead. Two of the men laid here—John Milliken and Ellis himself—served in the Texas militia during the Confederacy. In 1890 the family deeded the ground to a new Rockland Church, and by 1892 a combined church and school stood before the cemetery, serving as a community center until the school consolidated with Lovelady in the 1940s.

Nash County, NC

Begun in 1818 on the falls of the Tar River, Rocky Mount Mills was the second cotton mill established in North Carolina, harnessing water power to spin the region's cotton. Union forces burned the mill in 1863 during the Civil War, but it was quickly rebuilt and returned to production. The mill anchored one of the state's earliest industrial communities.

Kennedale, TX

Georgia native Thomas F. Rodgers and his wife Mary came to Texas from Kansas in the late 1850s, and he built a life as a successful farmer and stock raiser—service in the Confederate Army interrupting those years. He became one of Kennedale's leading landowners, and part of his property was set aside as this burial ground. Most who rest here are Rodgers family, though the earliest marked grave belongs to a neighbor's infant son.

Corsicana, TX

This Corsicana home was long the residence of Roger Quarles Mills, who came from Kentucky in 1852, served as a colonel in the Civil War, and then represented Texas in Congress and the U.S. Senate for 27 years. He began the house in 1856 using logs from an 1847 cabin on the site and finished it in 1875. Its broad verandas and carriage lamps recall the plantation era.

Jefferson, TX

Built in 1839, this is the oldest house in Jefferson, once a bustling riverport in East Texas. It was home to Gen. J. H. Rogers, a Civil War leader, and has served as a Presbyterian manse since 1903. Its long survival mirrors the town's own arc from antebellum boomtown to quiet historic community.

Del Rio, TX

Kentucky-born Roy Bean was mining in New Mexico when the Civil War broke out, and he joined Confederate forces under Gen. John R. Baylor as a spy and scout, later hauling cotton and smuggled war goods as a Confederate freighter. Decades afterward he followed railroad crews to the Rio Grande, set up a tent saloon, and had himself made justice of the peace—'Law West of the Pecos'—dispensing famously eccentric verdicts from Langtry. His obsession with British actress Lily Langtry, whom he never met, and his 1896 riverbank prizefight cemented his frontier legend.

Rusk, TX

Founded in 1846 and named for Republic of Texas statesman Thomas J. Rusk, this Cherokee County seat became an industrial center and Confederate supply depot during the Civil War. It later claimed the distinction of birthing two Texas governors, James S. Hogg and Thomas M. Campbell. The town and county remain dotted with historical sites open to visitors.

Town of Russell, NY

In small towns across the North Country of New York, communities have long set aside a place to record the names of their own who answered the nation's call to arms. Russell, a rural town in the St. Lawrence County foothills settled in the early nineteenth century, is one of many such places where a memorial gathers those names into a single roll of honor. Rather than commemorating one battle or one war, a hometown veterans memorial like this one binds together generations of local service — a permanent civic thank-you carved where neighbors pass every day.

Brownsville, TX

Built in 1877 for Judge William H. Russell, this eclectic Victorian home was bought in 1885 by Joseph James Cocke, a Virginian and Confederate veteran whose family lived there into the late 1940s. Its Italianate and Greek Revival details — classical massing, bracketed porch, and a striking pedimented dormer — made it a neighborhood landmark. Its 1975 restoration helped spark wider preservation efforts in Brownsville.

Cleveland, TX

Also called Ryan's Graveyard, this burial ground has served the ranching and farming community of Tarkington Prairie since at least the 1860s, its earliest marked grave belonging to a ten-year-old boy in 1863. It takes its name from Irish immigrant John Jacob Ryan, a prosperous storekeeper found shot dead on the nearby road in 1873 in a murder whose accused killers were acquitted. Veterans reaching back to the Texas Revolution and the Civil War, early Baptist church members, and Masonic lodge founders all rest here, drawing descendants to an annual memorial service.

Freedom Township, PA · est. 1997

David S. Stoner raised Sachs Covered Bridge across Marsh Creek in 1852, using the elegant lattice-truss design patented by Connecticut architect Ithiel Town to span 100 feet of water. Little more than a decade later, both Union and Confederate soldiers crossed its planks during the 1863 Gettysburg Campaign, giving the quiet farm bridge a place in one of the war's most famous chapters. Retired from traffic after 1968 and battered by a 1996 flood, it was lovingly restored by Adams County as a scenic landmark.

Coryell City, TX

Settlers, many from Tennessee, reached the Rainey's Creek area in the early 1850s in the community later renamed Coryell City. Chester Calhoun Sadler, a farmer, freighter, and Confederate veteran, set aside land for a cemetery serving his family and neighbors. His stepson Ira Bradford Sadler, a Confederate soldier and prisoner of war who became a lawyer and legislator, lies here among other Civil War veterans and pioneer families.

San Antonio, TX

Built on former Alamo lands, Saint Mark's grew out of an 1850 mission and was organized as a parish in 1858, with Col. Robert E. Lee — then stationed in San Antonio — active in its early affairs. The Civil War halted construction, which resumed only in 1873 and finished in 1875; designed by noted architect Richard Upjohn, the Gothic Revival church later served as a cathedral and cradle of Episcopal bishops.

Tomball, TX

This burial ground began as the Scherer family cemetery among the German immigrants who settled the Rosehill community of northwest Harris County beginning in 1846, arriving by way of the port of Galveston. The families who worshipped at Salem Lutheran Church laid their dead here, including three men killed in an 1864 powder-mill explosion and veterans reaching back to the Civil War. When George Scherer deeded the ground to the church in 1869, the cemetery took the congregation's name, and its German-language stones and obelisks still record the community's founding generation.

Salisbury, NC

The Salisbury Confederate Prison held Union captives on a 16-acre enclosure that at times crowded some 10,000 men behind its walls. Overcrowding, disease, and scarcity made it one of the war's deadliest prisons before Federal forces destroyed the site in 1865.

Refugio, TX

In Civil War Texas, the Confederacy was cut off from Northern goods and blockaded at sea, making the overland "Cotton Road" to Mexico a lifeline. Sally Scull ran freight wagons down that dangerous route, trading baled cotton for guns, ammunition, medicine, and everyday supplies. A crack shot who dressed in trousers, carried a rifle and two pistols, and bossed her own armed crews, she did wartime work few men would risk.

Montague, TX

Settlers began arriving in the Bethel community in the 1870s, opening the Salona School by 1881 and, in 1889, setting aside land for a burial ground. A Civil War veteran was among the first laid to rest here in 1890, followed by many more, and beginning in 1897 residents gathered each May to tend the graves and share a potluck—a Decoration Day tradition still kept on the first Sunday of May. As the school consolidated and the settlement faded, the cemetery remained the community's living memory.

Gilmer, TX

In the tense years before the Civil War, the aging hero of Texas independence returned to a spot along the old Cherokee Trace — ground he had known decades earlier while living among the Cherokee. Speaking here first as a U.S. Senator in 1857 and again as governor in 1861, Sam Houston warned his fellow Texans against leaving the Union, a stand that would soon cost him his office.

Marshall, TX

On May 23, 1857, during his first run for Texas governor, the Unionist Sam Houston came to Marshall—hometown of two of his fiercest secessionist critics—to debate his opponent Hardin Runnels. Speaking beneath an oak in overwhelmingly pro-secession country, Houston was so commanding that Runnels declined to answer. Houston lost the election but still carried nearly half the Harrison County vote.

Orange, TX

Born in northern Ireland in 1832, Samuel H. Levingston left home at fourteen and learned ship carpentry in Apalachicola, Florida, before moving near present-day Orange just before the Civil War. He served the Confederacy as a ship carpenter and blockade runner, then returned to build paddle-wheel boats hauling cotton down the Sabine. His son George later grew the family trade into the Levingston Shipbuilding Company, and the land the family once farmed became a city park.

Waco, TX

Born in Sweden in 1828, Samuel Johan Forsgard joined the first wave of Swedish immigration to Texas in 1855 and settled in Waco, where he opened a bakery, restaurant, and confectionery. He served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, then returned to business, patented farming equipment, and helped establish a sporting goods company. Over more than fifty years he became a well-known figure in the city's 19th-century growth.

Breckenridge, TX

Samuel P. Newcomb traveled alone from Connecticut to Texas at seventeen, settling by 1857 on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, where he taught school, held county offices, and served in a state ranger unit during the Civil War. What outlasted his brief life was his pen: his diaries vividly recorded frontier daily life, buffalo herds, and the fort where he lived, as did those of his wife Susan Reynolds. He died in 1870 at just thirty-one.

Corsicana, TX

Samuel R. Frost, born in Huntsville in 1846, grew up in Navarro County and enlisted in the Confederate army in 1863 as a teenager. After the Civil War he studied law, joined the bar in 1870, and built a long public career as county attorney, county judge, district judge, and state legislator. The nearby town of Frost was named in his honor, marking the imprint one dedicated jurist left on his corner of Texas.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2025

Samuel V. Merrick was one of Philadelphia's great early industrialists, helping found the Franklin Institute in 1825 to advance the mechanical arts and later bringing coal-gas street lighting to the city through the Philadelphia Gas Works. His Southwark Iron Foundry turned out steam engines, turbines, and ship machinery—work that supplied the Union navy during the Civil War. In 1847 he became the first president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, a line that would remake American commerce.

Orange, TX

Born in Alabama in 1847 and raised in the East Texas piney woods, Samuel Sholars served in the Confederate army before earning his medical degree in 1872. He built a full civic life in Orange — practicing medicine, founding a drugstore, sitting on the city council and school board, and helping lead the region's medical society. His helping organize a local volunteer militia company reflects how a country doctor often became a pillar of a small Gulf Coast town.

Weatherford, TX

Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham carried his life across the great fault line of 19th-century America: a South Carolina teenager who enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861 and was wounded at Spotsylvania, then a young lawyer who rebuilt in postwar Weatherford. From the Texas bench and the courtroom of the Warren Wagontrain Raid cases he rose to five terms in Congress and two terms as governor of Texas beginning in 1902.

Port Lavaca, TX

Chartered in 1850, the San Antonio & Mexican Gulf was among the very first railroads in Texas, built by San Antonio investors hoping to link the interior to Gulf trade. As tracks pushed west from Port Lavaca, wagons met the trains out on the open prairie to exchange freight. Confederates tore up the line in 1863 to deny it to Union forces; rebuilt and absorbed by larger companies, it later carried weekend beachgoers well into the 1930s.

San Antonio, TX

Organized in November 1862 and incorporated by the Texas Legislature the next year, the San Antonio Mutual Aid Association worked to hold down the price of wartime necessities—candles, flour, cloth, shoes, coffee—for a strained Confederate home front. Its capital included $8,000 the city subscribed to help the needy and the families of soldiers away at war, and it aided some 10,000 people. To buy goods, the group sold cotton in Mexico, a trade so vital that the Confederate army detailed soldiers to drive its wagons.

San Augustine, TX

This East Texas burial ground began as the private cemetery of the J. C. Anderson family, its oldest graves dating to the 1830s, when Texas was still winning its independence. Among those interred here is Col. Stephen William Blount, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, alongside a Confederate captain killed in the Civil War and a noted Episcopal clergyman-historian. The city bought the cemetery in 1911, and an association has cared for it since 1921.

Groesbeck, TX

Soon after the Civil War, a group of settlers from Mississippi — among them Dr. J. L. Sansom, P. K. McKenzie, and Allen Goodwin — came to this creekside spot on a tributary of the Navasota River and built a church and school, founding a community they called Mount Joy. Around 1870, Dr. Sansom donated two acres for a cemetery; its oldest marked graves date to 1873. The stones record area pioneers, several Confederate veterans, and a sobering number of infants whose short lives testify to the hardships of frontier settlement.

Banquete, TX

This ford on the Nueces River grew out of an 1804 Spanish land grant and the scattered ranch settlement of Santa Margarita. It became a strategic crossing on the Matamoros Road: Mexican forces fortified nearby Fort Lipantitlán, General Urrea defeated Texan troops here in 1836, and Zachary Taylor staged his army in the region in 1845 before advancing to the Rio Grande and touching off the U.S.-Mexican War. During the Civil War the same route served as the Confederacy's 'Cotton Road' to Mexico.

Laredo, TX

Born in Laredo in 1823, a great-great-grandson of the town's founder, Santos Benavides rose to become its mayor and Webb County's chief justice before the Civil War. He raised a cavalry company for the Confederacy, defeated Juan Cortina at the Battle of Carrizo in 1861, and in March 1864 held Laredo with just 42 men against a Union force of more than 200. The highest-ranking Tejano officer of the Confederacy, he later served in the Texas Legislature and as a state commissioner.

San Francisco, CA

This sarcophagus marks the resting place of Thomas Starr King, the Unitarian minister whose fiery oratory helped hold California in the Union during the Civil War. Designated California Registered Historical Landmark No. 691, the tomb stands in San Francisco, the city where King preached and rallied support for the Union cause and for the U.S. Sanitary Commission. He died in 1864, worn out at just 39, and was mourned across the state.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2003

During the Civil War, the Union Army needed hospitals on a scale the nation had never before contemplated, and Satterlee was among the largest and most complete. From 1862 to 1865 its long one-story wards and sprawling tent city treated thousands of sick and wounded soldiers across more than sixteen acres of West Philadelphia. Named for Gen. Richard Satterlee, the army's medical purveyor, it reflected a wartime revolution in military medicine and sanitation.

Marietta, OH

This handsome Marietta residence dates to 1868, the busy post-Civil War years when Ohio River towns were rebuilding and expanding with new brick and frame homes. Marietta, founded in 1788 as the first organized American settlement in the Northwest Territory, had by this era grown into a prosperous river port shaped in part by German and other immigrant families whose surnames — like Schmincke — still mark its streets. A house of this vintage reflects the confident domestic architecture of a settled, growing community along the upper Ohio.

Williamsburg, KY

In July 1863, Confederate Colonel John S. Scott led some 1,600 cavalry up from East Tennessee on a raid to wreck Union communications and seize livestock and arms. At Williamsburg on July 25, a hundred pickets of the 44th Ohio Infantry met his advance; after a sharp skirmish Scott drove them toward London before pressing on to Winchester and retreating into Tennessee with heavy losses. The raid was one of many mounted thrusts that made the Kentucky mountains a war of movement.

Snyder, TX

Scurry County was created in 1876 from older Texas territories and organized in 1884, with Snyder as its seat. It honors General William R. Scurry, a member of the last Congress of the Republic of Texas and a Confederate officer killed in 1864. The county's founding was part of the steady organization of West Texas as settlement pushed onto the plains.

Searcy, AR

Erected in 1917, this monument honors the Confederate soldiers of White County, Arkansas, who served in the Civil War (1861–1865). Arkansas seceded in 1861, and thousands of its men fought for the Confederacy; a half-century later, aging veterans and their descendants across the South raised memorials like this one during the era's wave of Confederate commemoration.

Mayfield, KY

In May 1861, delegates from the westernmost counties of Kentucky and Tennessee—the region known as the Jackson Purchase—gathered at Mayfield, frustrated by Kentucky's stubborn adherence to the Union and by Tennessee's slowness to leave it. Strongly sympathetic to the Southern cause, the convention voted to secede and form a new Confederate state. When Tennessee itself voted to secede in June, the separatist proposal was dropped.

Spotsylvania County, VA

On the morning of May 9, 1864, during the brutal Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Major General John Sedgwick—commander of the Union's Sixth Army Corps—was killed by a Confederate sharpshooter while positioning his artillery. Famously, moments before he fell he is said to have reassured nervous troops about the distant marksmen. This memorial, raised after the war by the soldiers who had served under him and their friends, marks the very spot where one of the highest-ranking Union officers to die in the Civil War lost his life.

Temple, TX

Established in the 1860s along the MKT rail line near Temple, this burial ground has gone by many names but is remembered today as Seven Star Cemetery — a reference to the North Star and the constellation traditions said to have guided people escaping slavery toward freedom. Though fewer than 100 of its roughly 500 graves keep their original markers, those buried here include formerly enslaved people and veterans of the Spanish-American War and World War I. The local Juneteenth Association tends the site.

Port Lavaca, TX

William Henry Barnes enlisted in the Union Army in early 1864, joining the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War. That September he was wounded storming the Confederate works at the Battle of New Market Heights in Virginia—valor that earned him the Medal of Honor. Promoted to sergeant and posted to the Texas border, he died of consumption in 1866 and was ultimately reinterred in the San Antonio National Cemetery.

Lampasas, TX

This house was raised during the Civil War era by Shadrick T. Denson, who served in Forney's Brigade of the Confederate Army. He later became sheriff of Lampasas County from 1870 to 1874, a lawman's post in a hard-fought frontier county wracked by deadly feuds, and he died from a wound suffered in the line of duty.

Winnsboro, TX

One of the oldest burial grounds in Wood County, Shady Grove served the pioneer community of the same name, whose leading settler Reuben Elledge arrived around 1845 and helped organize the county as a commissioner and judge. In 1850 he donated land for a school and Methodist church, and an acre was later set aside for this cemetery, where young Bobby Scoggins—drowned in 1855—may be the earliest burial. Rock cairns, obelisks, Woodmen of the World stones, and graves of Civil War veterans mark the site of early settlement.

Canton, TX

As the Confederacy collapsed in the spring of 1865, Gen. Joseph O. Shelby's First Missouri Cavalry refused to lay down arms. Marching by way of Clarksville, Grand Saline, and Canton, the command camped at Stone Point from late April into May while Shelby attended a Confederate conference at Marshall. Rather than surrender after Lee gave up in Virginia, these die-hards pressed on toward Mexico, keeping order in a devastated postwar Texas as they went.

Eagle Pass, TX

Three months after Lee's surrender, Confederate General Joseph O. Shelby led his un-surrendered Missouri cavalry brigade across Texas toward Mexico, unwilling to lay down arms. On July 4, 1865, at the banks of the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, his command gathered for a final ceremony: to drum and bugle, their battle flag was folded, weighted, and sunk into the muddy river. It is remembered as the last flag to fly over an organized Confederate force.

Madison County, NC

In the mountains of western North Carolina, the Civil War was often a brutal neighbor-against-neighbor conflict, and Madison County's Shelton Laurel valley became one of its darkest scenes. In early 1863, thirteen men and boys suspected of Union sympathies were rounded up and killed by Confederate soldiers, an atrocity that scarred the region for generations. The victims' graves lie about eight miles east of this marker.

Goldsboro, NC

After cutting through Georgia and the Carolinas, General William T. Sherman's army reached Goldsboro on March 21, 1865, making the rail town its chief objective in North Carolina. Here Sherman's forces rested and resupplied in the closing weeks of the Civil War. Within weeks the Confederacy's last major eastern army would surrender nearby.

Sutherland Springs, TX

The Shiloh community grew up along the Lodi–Sutherland Springs Road in Wilson County, and by 1886 landowners had formalized this burial ground already in use, later adding land for a Methodist church and a school. Its graves include Florence Price, buried in 1884, and James Madison Smith, a Confederate veteran of the 2nd Florida Cavalry, with the last known burial in 1939. Today the cemetery's mix of headstones and unmarked graves is one of the few surviving traces of the settlement.

Washington, NC

Union troops seized the port town of Washington in March 1862, and it remained a contested Federal outpost deep in eastern North Carolina. Confederate efforts to retake it failed in 1862 and again in 1863, and the Union army finally withdrew on its own in April 1864. The struggle for the town reflected the wider fight for control of the state's rivers and sounds.