Civil War

Cumberland Township, PA

This memorial tablet honors the U.S. Signal Corps for its service at Little Round Top on July 2–4, 1863, and across the battlefields of the Civil War. From the heights, signal officers used flags to relay observations of enemy movements, giving Union commanders a crucial view of the field. The Signal Corps was then a young branch, and Gettysburg showcased the value of rapid battlefield communication.

East Donegal Township, PA · est. 1951

Simon Cameron was born in 1799 in a log house that once stood on this site, rising from modest beginnings to become one of the most powerful figures in Pennsylvania and national politics. A U.S. Senator and shrewd party organizer, he served briefly as Abraham Lincoln's first Secretary of War at the outbreak of the Civil War before a diplomatic posting to Russia. He died in 1889 at nearby Donegal Springs, having shaped his state's political machine for a generation.

Surfside, TX

The Canadian-owned sidewheel steamer Acadia set out on her maiden voyage in December 1864, running the Federal blockade to carry food, hardware, and clothing to hard-pressed Texans. In heavy fog on February 6, 1865, she grounded in sticky clay just offshore here; her crew and cargo reached the beach safely. When the fog cleared, Union guns shelled the stranded ship, but Confederate cavalry on shore kept the enemy from boarding and burning her, and the wreck became a coastal landmark.

Waxahachie, TX

Erected in 1862 by William Rowen, this Confederate powder mill was part of the South's scramble to manufacture its own munitions after war cut it off from Northern industry. On April 29, 1863, the volatile works blew up, killing Rowen and a man named Joshua G. Phillips. The blast is a stark reminder of the dangers borne by those who supplied the Confederate war effort far from any battlefield.

Anderson, TX

On this spot from 1861 to 1865 stood a Confederate munitions factory, turning out cannon, cannonballs, guns, pistols, swords, sabers, bayonets, and gunpowder for the Southern war effort. Marked by the State of Texas in 1936, it recalls the improvised industrial base the Confederacy raised far from the front lines.

Des Moines, IA

This marker records the site of Camp Burnside, a Civil War rendezvous where Iowa volunteers mustered before joining the Union Army between 1861 and 1865, including men of the 23rd and 39th Infantry regiments. Training camps like this ringed the North, gathering farm boys and townsmen into regiments bound for the front. From this Des Moines ground, Iowa sent its soldiers into the war.

Brady vicinity, TX

From 1862 to 1864, Captain W. G. O'Brien's company of mounted volunteers was stationed here as part of the Frontier Regiment, a Texas force raised to guard the settlement line against raids while the Civil War drew men and resources east. In 1864 the regiment was folded into the Confederate Army as the Forty-sixth Texas Cavalry. The camp reflects the double burden Texans carried during the war — fighting for the Confederacy while defending an exposed frontier.

Sherman, TX

Founded in 1871 as the Sherman Private School but known to all as "The Cap'n's," this school for boys was run by former Confederate captain John H. LeTellier. A demanding teacher who drilled his pupils in English, spelling, and math, he also joined their games, told war stories, and played guitar at upstairs dances. The school held high standards and turned out many future community leaders until it closed at his death in 1913.

Clifton, TX

R.G. Grant built a water-powered wooden mill on the Bosque River here in 1857, and during the Civil War the building served as a commissary and storehouse for the Confederate Army. Under later owner William Kemp, a new stone mill supplied flour and cornmeal hauled by ox cart to frontier settlements and forts across West Texas, and former governor and U.S. senator Richard Coke once held an interest in it. Rebuilt with a distinctive mansard roof and cupola, the mill later became an electric power plant before it was demolished in 1915.

Lancaster, TX

In 1862, with the Confederacy scrambling to arm itself, a partnership of Dallas-area men set up a small factory here to manufacture pistols for the State of Texas. Frontier Texas had little heavy industry, so improvised arms works like this one were vital to supplying troops far from the Southern manufacturing centers of the East.

Bastrop, TX

In 1862, as the Confederacy scrambled to arm itself, N. B. Tanner established a factory at Bastrop to manufacture guns and bayonets for the war effort. It operated until the Confederacy's collapse in 1865. Such small, improvised arms works reflected the South's chronic struggle to supply its armies.

Lakeside, TX

As Civil War veterans aged into the twentieth century, communities across the South built spaces to honor and care for them. Fort Worth businessman Khleber Van Zandt organized a large United Confederate Veterans camp in 1889, and by 1901 it had chartered a 373-acre park for the "recreation, refuge and relief" of old soldiers and their families. The grounds hosted picnics and statewide reunions for two decades before the dwindling ranks of survivors led the association to dissolve in the 1920s.

Houston, TX

A Buffalo Bayou shipping warehouse on this site was pressed into service during the Civil War as a compound for Union prisoners of war, holding some 350 Federals captured in early 1863 by General John B. Magruder's Confederate forces. Houston was a vital Confederate center, home to training fields, hospitals, foundries, and rail lines, and served as headquarters for the Military District of Texas. The city's several prison compounds were part of that wartime machinery.

Sabine Pass, TX

At Sabine Pass in September 1863, a small Confederate garrison in the unfinished earthwork Fort Griffin — built of railroad iron and ship's timbers, and manned largely by Irish immigrants from Galveston and Houston — repulsed a Federal fleet carrying thousands of invasion troops. Lt. Richard W. Dowling directed the guns, holding fire until the ships were in range and then wrecking the assault in a lopsided victory. The pass itself was a vital artery for blockade-running that carried Confederate cotton out and medicines and arms back in.

Navasota, TX

Ira M. Freeman built this two-story pine inn in 1856 as a way station and hotel for passengers on the several stage lines threading through Navasota. Travelers of every sort lodged here — among them Sam Houston — and during the Civil War it hosted officers and important visitors, while Freeman's barns sheltered the coaches and teams.

San Marcos, TX

In 1847, San Marcos settlers raised a rough log house of elm, cedar, and cypress on this spot — dirt floor, split-log benches, and a single room asked to be everything at once. It served as the young county's courthouse after Hays County was organized in 1848, hosted the first Presbyterian and Baptist congregations, sat beside a stagecoach stop, and later became a drill headquarters for Confederate recruits. Fallen into disuse, it burned in 1874.

Jefferson, TX

Captain George T. Todd came to the Republic of Texas as a boy and grew into one of Marion County's most consequential men. He fought with the celebrated Hood's Texas Brigade in the Civil War, famously taking command at Chickamauga after General Hood was wounded, then rode with Lane's Partisan Rangers in the war's final year. In peacetime he served in the legislature and as a UT regent, but he is best remembered as the district attorney who spent seven years prosecuting the sensational 'Diamond Bessie' murder case.

Daingerfield, TX

This factory built the machinery that kept Texas agriculture running: gin saws to strip seed from cotton and grist mills to grind corn into meal. When the Civil War cut off imports, such local works became vital, letting Texas process the cotton that served as the "money of the Confederacy"—traded across the Mexican border for ammunition, medicine, and other goods. The war spurred a whole network of Texas plants making wagons, guns, powder, shoes, and cloth.

Fairfield, TX

A Fairfield lawyer, judge, and newspaper founder, John Gregg helped lead Texas out of the Union at the 1861 Secession Convention and served in the Confederate Congress before raising a Texas infantry regiment. As a general he fought near Vicksburg and at Chickamauga and commanded the famed Texas Brigade at the Battle of the Wilderness, until he was killed near Richmond in October 1864. His widow braved the battle lines by wagon to bring his body home.

Houston, TX

Texas statesman Francis Richard Lubbock ran a 1,300-acre ranch near here from 1846 to 1861, building large cattle herds that grazed between the Brazos and Trinity and were shipped by steamer from Sims Bayou to New Orleans. The ranch even hosted forty army camels in 1858 before they were driven west for the War Department's desert-transport experiment. Lubbock went on to serve as Texas' Confederate governor during the Civil War and later as an aide to Jefferson Davis, with whom he was captured in 1865.

Independence, TX

On this spot in August 1861, Captain J.B. Robertson raised Company I of the Fifth Texas Infantry, known as "The Texas Aides," for what became Hood's Texas Brigade. The unit fought in many of the Civil War's fiercest eastern battles — Gaines' Mill, Second Manassas, Antietam, Gettysburg, and the Wilderness — and Robertson rose to brigadier general, succeeding Hood in command. When the brigade surrendered at Appomattox in 1865, only about twelve percent of its enlistees remained.

Newton, TX

In the settlement era of the early 1800s, this Sabine River crossing was one of only four main gateways for pioneers entering Texas from Louisiana, letting families bring their stock and household goods across the border. Known first as Hickman's Ferry and later for Dr. Timothy Burr — a second cousin of Vice President Aaron Burr — it also anchored "the Old Beef Trail," over which thousands of cattle were driven to Alexandria for shipment to New Orleans. By the Civil War the site was strategic enough that Confederates dug breastworks and cleared timber to guard against Federal invasion.

Comanche vicinity, TX

W. A. Gill, son of a San Jacinto veteran, settled this Comanche County land in 1874 after fighting in the Civil War and serving as a captain in the Texas Rangers. His sons E. V. and Fleet lived here for many years on the family farm. In 1964 the remains in the family plot were reinterred a mile north at Buffalo Cemetery.

Houston, TX

Houston Academy opened in 1856 and quickly felt the Civil War's pull, losing most of its young men to the Confederate army and serving as a military hospital in 1864–65. In 1867 the building held the lying-in-state of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, the Texas Republic secretary of war and career soldier killed at Shiloh. The school was later reborn as Clopper Institute and, within Houston's public system, as Central High and Sam Houston High School.

Cleburne, TX

With its wood and water, this shaded ground served the community around Camp Henderson for public gatherings after 1854. When the settlement became the county seat in 1867, men at a Fourth of July picnic here chose the town's name — Cleburne — in honor of the Civil War commander whom many local veterans had served under.

Owensville, TX

Owensville served as Robertson County's third county seat from 1855 to 1869, on land donated by D. H. Love and named for pioneer county clerk Harrison Owen. Sitting on the Houston-to-Waco mail, stage, and freighting road, the town drew officials, doctors, lawyers, and merchants, and during the Civil War it armed and dispatched soldiers. When the Houston & Texas Central Railway bypassed it in 1868, the county records moved to Calvert and the town faded, leaving only its cemetery to mark the site.

Anderson, TX

By 1850 the sulphur springs near Anderson had drawn health-seekers to Piedmont Springs, where bathhouses and drinking pavilions let guests take the waters. A grand four-story, hundred-room hotel built around 1860 became the social heart of the region — billiards, poker, horse races, and, by legend, a minuet danced by Sam Houston himself. War transformed it in 1865 into a hospital and headquarters for John G. Walker's Confederate "Greyhound Division," and financial panic shuttered it in the 1870s.

Bonham, TX

Gideon Smith, an Alabama native, moved to Fannin County in 1851 and bought a 3,000-acre tract, later sharing half with his brother John, who came to practice medicine. Gideon served a term in the Texas Legislature and went to war as a Confederate colonel, while both brothers built one of the area's earliest large plantations. Part of that land has stayed in continuous grain and cattle production since 1851.

Beaumont, TX

From 1862 to 1864, Colonel A. W. Spaight's Battalion of the 2nd Texas Infantry camped on Spindle Top Hill, its ranks drawn from Jefferson, Liberty, and Chambers counties. Their presence helped guard this stretch of the Texas coast against Federal invasion during the Civil War. The state erected this marker in 1936.

Marshall, TX

Business leader George B. Adkins built a fine three-story brick hotel on this Marshall site in 1857, and "Adkins House" quickly became a stage depot serving the southern branch of the Butterfield Overland Mail. During the Civil War, the exiled Confederate governor of Missouri met here with the Confederate governors of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, making the hotel a quiet crossroads of Confederate wartime politics. Later renamed "The Capitol," it hosted celebrities for decades before its first floor turned to shops and the building was finally razed in 1971–72.

Marshall, TX

With Texas nearly devoid of factories when it joined the Confederacy in 1861, Marshall became a hub of wartime manufacturing and, by 1863, headquarters for Confederate operations west of the Mississippi. In the basement of a dwelling here, some forty workers blocked and finished high-quality fur-felt military hats and stitched blankets to outfit Texas soldiers. The site later passed through generations of the Edmund Key family before becoming a memorial park.

Corpus Christi, TX

As Corpus Christi worked to become a deepwater port in the late 1850s, the U.S. Lighthouse Service bought this site in 1857 and built a brick lighthouse to guide approaching vessels. The Civil War halted the harbor plans, and Confederate forces turned the tower into a powder magazine — until a band of young Confederate loyalists, fearing Federal capture in 1863, secretly packed a butter churn with gunpowder and tried to blow it up. The blast scorched the tower but spared the powder store; the battered beacon limped on until it was dismantled as a nuisance around 1878.

Edna, TX

On this ground in February 1837, two generals of the young Republic of Texas' army, Albert Sidney Johnston and Felix Huston, settled a bitter dispute over command in the era's brutal fashion — a pistol duel that left Johnston seriously wounded. Johnston survived to become one of the Confederacy's most senior generals, only to be killed leading the attack at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862.

Cleburne, TX

This reliable spring drew explorers, soldiers of the Confederate Camp Henderson, and early settlers who traveled many miles to wash, haul water, and visit. Enterprising boys "toted" buckets to town merchants at a nickel apiece, and though the brick-lined pool was often dipped dry, the spring always refilled it. It supplied Cleburne until the town's first city well finally tapped the same source.

Fulton, TX

Founded in 1838 and named for Mirabeau B. Lamar, the second president of the Republic of Texas, this coastal town on the Aransas Bay was made a port of entry in 1839 during the heady early days of Texan independence. Its fortunes never rose far, and Union troops sacked the settlement in February 1864 during the Civil War. Though it clung to life until 1914, Lamar quietly faded into one of the Gulf Coast's many vanished towns.

Galveston, TX

In January 1847, seven Ursuline nuns arrived from New Orleans at a bishop's request and opened a convent and girls' academy in a former judge's home in Galveston, beginning with twenty-five students. Through hurricanes and repeated yellow fever epidemics the sisters sheltered orphans and, during the Civil War, nursed wounded soldiers from both sides. Later generations knew the towering Gothic academy designed by architect Nicholas Clayton, which stood as a place of refuge in storms until Hurricane Carla forced its end in 1961.

Center Point, TX

Dr. Charles De Ganahl built this home in 1856 and named it Zanzenberg after his family's ancestral seat in the Austrian Tyrol. A signer of the Texas Articles of Secession in 1861, he went on to serve as a surgeon for the Confederacy. The house also held Kerr County's first post office, established in 1857 with his wife Virginia serving as the county's first postmaster.

Dinwiddie County, VA

In the darkness before dawn on April 2, 1865, Union forces launched a massive assault on the Confederate lines defending Petersburg, Virginia. The Sixth Maryland Infantry charged across this ground, with a portion of the regiment under Major Clifton K. Prentiss breaking over the Confederate earthworks at heavy cost. This breakthrough was part of the final collapse of Lee's defenses that forced the evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, leading to the surrender at Appomattox just a week later.

Clark County, AR

This marker recalls a small Civil War engagement fought near the site on April 1, 1864, during a period when Union and Confederate forces skirmished across south-central Arkansas. That spring saw the Union's Camden Expedition push through the region, sparking numerous clashes as troops maneuvered through the countryside. Such skirmishes, though modest in scale, shaped the war's course far from its famous battlefields.

Boone County, KY

During the Confederate invasion of Kentucky in 1862, cavalry under Gen. Basil W. Duke probed for routes toward Cincinnati. On September 25, more than 500 Confederates attacked a Union camp here commanded by Brig. Gen. Quincy A. Gillmore. Captured Federal soldiers were marched to Falmouth and shipped to Lexington, then the Confederacy's regional headquarters.

Tyler, TX

This burial ground grew from land granted to Mary M. "Polly" Long by the State of Texas in 1846, part of which her son preserved as a cemetery when he sold the tract in 1881. In use as early as 1857, it holds the graves of local settlers, many of them Long relatives and neighbors, including early county commissioner William Green and Civil War veterans. Its name honors the many members of the Smith family laid to rest among the pioneers here.

Tyler, TX

During the Civil War, Smith County became a major hub of Confederate activity in East Texas. Near Tyler stood the largest ordnance plant west of the Mississippi, turning out "Tyler Rifles," while Camp Ford held the biggest prisoner-of-war compound in the western Confederacy and salt works produced thousands of pounds of that vital commodity daily. On the home front, women, children, the elderly, and enslaved people raised the cotton and grain that fed the army and improvised clothing, hats, and coffee substitutes from what little they had.

Ozona, TX

A Louisiana-born Confederate cavalry veteran, Samuel Theodore Smith came to Texas in 1872 and settled in Ozona in 1891, where he became a builder of the young town's institutions — its first school, first courthouse, and Baptist church among them. He married Alice Crimm in 1876 and raised three children. His hammer and saw quite literally framed the civic life of frontier Crockett County.

North Richland Hills, TX

This cemetery began in the early 1870s when Eli Smith — the namesake of Smithfield, who came from Missouri to Texas around 1859 — gave part of his farm for a burying ground. Its oldest marked grave, an infant's, dates to 1872, and more than seventy-five graves come from that first decade, including Smith's own. Among those laid to rest here are pioneer physician Lilburn Howard Colley, for whom Colleyville is named, and Civil War veterans from both Union and Confederate armies.

Needville, TX

The headstones here read like a roster of the Snake Creek community that farmed this stretch of Fort Bend County from the mid-1800s. Among them lie two veterans of the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, Emory H. Darst and John P. Gill, alongside several Confederate soldiers, binding the site to both Texas independence and the Civil War. Land for the graveyard was granted in the 1850s by William Cole and Peter L. West, and a nearby community church served residents until a 1932 hurricane destroyed it.

Weatherford, TX

Confederate soldiers are said to have camped by this inviting spring during the 1860s, and in 1890 veterans returned to hold their twenty-fifth reunion here. The following year, 55 acres were set aside as Soldier Spring Park, which went on to host Chautauqua programs, circuses, reunions, and even a public hanging in 1908. After decades of neglect—serving as the city dump and then a caliche mine—the grounds were reclaimed as a park in 1973.

Hermon, ME

This monument in Hermon, Maine, was raised by local Civil War veterans in memory of the townsmen who defended the Union between 1861 and 1865. Like hundreds of New England villages, Hermon sent a share of its young men into the war, and returning survivors later gathered to honor the fallen with a lasting stone — a common ritual of remembrance in the war's aftermath.

Peoria, IL

Rising in downtown Peoria, this Soldiers and Sailors Monument was raised in the classic civic tradition of the late 19th century, when communities across the North built granite tributes to the men who fought to preserve the Union. Its inscription—"We write on page of granite what they wrought on field of battle"—casts the monument itself as a permanent record of their sacrifice. Monuments like this stood at the heart of Memorial Day observances for generations.

Warren, PA

In the decades after the Civil War, towns across the North raised "Soldiers' and Sailors'" monuments to the local men who had marched off to preserve the Union. Warren County, in Pennsylvania's northwestern oil-and-timber country, honored its own with this granite tribute, its verses drawn from Theodore O'Hara's famous elegy "The Bivouac of the Dead." The lines about silent tents on "fame's eternal camping ground" became a fixture of American war memorials, binding a small county's grief to a national vocabulary of mourning.

New Haven, CT

The dates 1861–1865 mark the span of the Civil War, and this monument gathers the memory of New Haven's men who died defending the Union. A bustling Connecticut port and manufacturing city, New Haven sent thousands into federal service, and many never came home. The memorial stands as the community's collective headstone for that generation.

Town of Belfast, NY

This monument in the small town of Belfast honors the local men who served in the Civil War, listing some of the conflict's most brutal engagements: the Wilderness and Cold Harbor of Grant's 1864 Overland Campaign, the decisive 1865 battle at Five Forks that helped break the Confederate lines near Petersburg, and the pivotal 1863 clash at Gettysburg. Like countless towns across the North, Belfast sent its sons into these distant fields, and after the war it gathered to remember them in stone. The carved battle names served as a roll call of sacrifice familiar to every veteran and grieving family in the community.

Pottsboro, TX

Sophia Porter settled in 1839 at Glen Eden, a fine home her husband Holland Coffee built beside the Red River, where they welcomed U.S. Army officers—among them future generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant—in the years before the Civil War. During the war, legend holds she wined and dined passing Federal scouts, discovered they hunted the Confederate frontier defender Col. James Bourland, and slipped away to swim her horse across the icy Red River to warn him. Her daring is said to have helped turn back a Federal thrust into North Texas.

Sour Lake, TX

Sour Lake was an early health resort whose waters, long used by Native peoples, drew Texans including Gen. Sam Houston to its baths. During the Civil War, one spring's high sulphuric-acid content was used to prime telegraph batteries—vital work when the Confederate line ran only from Shreveport to Marshall to Houston and on to Galveston and Orange. In February 1865 a 20-word telegram from Shreveport to Houston cost $36.

Richmond, VA

Across the James River from Richmond, the independent city of Manchester served the Confederate war effort as one of the region's many hospital sites, where sick and wounded men were carried far from the battle lines. Among those treated were soldiers from South Carolina, more than a hundred of whom died of their wounds or of disease between 1861 and 1865 and were laid to rest here, hundreds of miles from home. In 1939, the Elliott Grays Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy set this stone to mark the common resting place of those men. It stands as one of countless local efforts, decades after the war, to name and remember the ordinary dead of a conflict that touched every Southern community.

South Portland, ME

Dedicated in 1897, this memorial honors the South Portland men who served the Union as soldiers and sailors between 1861 and 1865. Maine sent a remarkable share of its sons to the Civil War, and its coastal towns supplied the navy as readily as the army. A generation after the guns fell silent, the community raised this tribute to fix that sacrifice in stone.

Lake Charles, LA

This is one of the South's many Confederate memorials, raised generations after the Civil War during the era when Lost Cause organizations erected monuments to Confederate soldiers across the region. Standing in Lake Charles, the 'South's Defenders' monument honored those who fought for the Confederacy. In 2020 Hurricane Laura's winds toppled the statue from its perch, leaving the column and plinth behind — a reminder of how weather, time, and public debate have reshaped these contested landmarks.

Southbridge, MA

In 1914, the town of Southbridge raised this monument to honor its sons who had marched off to the Civil War half a century earlier. Like hundreds of New England mill towns, this Worcester County community sent its young men to fight for the Union between 1861 and 1865, and many never returned. The early twentieth century saw a wave of such memorials go up across the North as aging veterans and their communities sought to fix the war's meaning—the preservation of the Union—in bronze and granite before that generation passed.

Sabine Pass, TX

Ashley W. Spaight's 11th Battalion of Texas Volunteers—the "Swamp Angels"—grew out of the Sabine Pass Guards militia of 1861 and served the Confederacy defending the Texas Gulf Coast and the Louisiana border against Federal raids. Many of its men died not in battle but in the yellow fever epidemic that swept Sabine Pass in 1862. Those who survived went home to become community and business leaders across southeast Texas.

Mount Olive, NJ

A cenotaph is a monument that honors the dead whose remains lie elsewhere — often on distant battlefields — giving a community a place to grieve and remember when there is no grave to visit. This one in Mount Olive frames that remembrance as a prayer, commending "the souls of the valiant" to God and casting the fallen not merely as casualties but as figures of courage worthy of the sacred. Memorials like it turned local grief into shared public ritual, a quiet fixture of New Jersey's towns.

Dawson, TX

The oldest community in Navarro County grew up around springs that had watered Native peoples for centuries. Dr. George Washington Hill built a trading post here in 1838 — the year a surveying party skirmished with Kickapoo Indians nearby — and after serving as Republic of Texas Secretary of War he returned to practice medicine. Spring Hill flourished into the 1870s with mills, stores, and saloons, hosted a Confederate training camp during the Civil War, then declined after the railroad bypassed it in 1881.