Civil War

Washington, NC

Consecrated in 1829 one block east of here, St. John the Evangelist was the first Roman Catholic church in North Carolina, a landmark for a tiny Catholic community in an overwhelmingly Protestant region. Its life was cut short during the Civil War, when Federal troops burned it in 1864. The church stood as a rare marker of Catholic faith on the antebellum Carolina coast.

Gulfport, MS · est. 2013

Organized as a mission parish in 1846, St. Mark's began as a simple frame building with twin front doors and grew over the decades before being moved inland from the beachfront in 1925. Among its members was Jefferson Davis, who spent his last years nearby on the Mississippi coast. Battered by Hurricane Camille in 1969 and destroyed by Katrina in 2005, the congregation relocated inland.

Cheltenham Township, PA · est. 1992

Consecrated in 1861, St. Paul's is the oldest church building in Cheltenham Township, founded by Jay Cooke, the banker whose bond-selling campaigns earned him the nickname "financier of the Civil War." Its cemetery, laid out in 1879 and enlarged in 1905, holds Cooke's mausoleum among the graves of prominent residents. The original design by Sidney & Merry was later expanded by the celebrated Gilded Age architect Horace Trumbauer.

Clarksville, TX

During the Civil War the Donoho Hotel and stage stand operated across from the old Clarksville courthouse, a busy hub as soldiers arriving from Arkansas, Indian Territory, and beyond caught coaches for home. Many stopped to share news with the Clarksville "Standard," one of fewer than twenty Texas papers to publish throughout the war and prized by families for its personal notes from the camps. From here stagecoaches ran on grueling schedules to Marshall, Waco, and beyond, part of the 31 stage lines that kept Confederate Texas connected to mail, rail, and steamboat routes.

Rio Hondo, TX

During the Civil War the ferry at Paso Real, on the Arroyo Colorado, sat astride the "cotton road"—the Confederacy's overland lifeline to neutral Matamoros, Mexico. With Union blockades sealing Southern ports, cotton wagons and stagecoaches funneled through here to trade for guns, medicine, cloth, and shoes, drawing diplomats, agents, bandits, and deserters into a corridor of wartime intrigue.

Elkhart, TX

This hillside graveyard is the resting place of the family of Texas pioneer John Starr and his descendants. Starr, who died in 1872, lies beside his wife Susannah, with six of their eight children interred nearby — including two sons who served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. The family's ancestral home still stands on nearby Starr Hill.

Marshall, TX

Dr. James Harper Starr served as a government official under both the Republic of Texas and the Confederacy while building a career as a physician and businessman. In 1870 he and his son James Franklin Starr moved their land and banking agency from Nacogdoches to Marshall, buying this land for their homes. Frank Starr and his wife Clara built "Maplecroft," a Greek Revival house that stayed in the family until 1976, when it was deeded to the State of Texas.

Winona, TX

Starrville grew up along the Dallas–Shreveport road, becoming a stop by 1849 and taking its name from Reverend Joshua Starr, who bought the land and sold town lots in 1852. During the summer of 1862 it served as the encampment of Confederate General Henry McCulloch's army before its march toward Little Rock. When townspeople blocked the railroad in the 1870s, the community drifted toward Winona, but its 1927 schoolhouse endured—hosting classes, plays, reunions, and elections—and survives today as a community center kept up by local volunteers.

Austin, TX

Founded in 1851 when Texas Revolution hero Gen. Edward Burleson was buried here, this ground became the resting place for the honored dead of Texas, including Stephen F. Austin, nine governors, and figures from every era of state history. Confederate officers were interred here beginning in the 1860s, and small white headstones now mark some 1,583 soldiers and their families. Through the efforts of state official Louis W. Kemp, the remains of more than a hundred prominent Texans were reinterred here after 1930, among statuary by sculptors Elisabet Ney and Pompeo Coppini.

Cumberland Township, PA

At Gettysburg in July 1863, soldiers from across the Confederacy fought in the largest battle ever waged in North America. This memorial, raised by the State of Alabama, honors the Alabamians who served on that field, its call to "Alabamians!" paired with the promise that their names are "inscribed on Fame's immortal scroll." It stands among the many state monuments that turn the sweeping battlefield into an open-air record of the war.

Cumberland Township, PA

Georgia's memorial on the Gettysburg battlefield honors the state's Confederate soldiers who fought here in July 1863. Its spare, elegiac inscription — men who came when duty called and died when their country called — is among the most quoted lines of any monument on the field. It stands amid the Confederate positions of the great three-day battle in Pennsylvania.

Cumberland Township, PA

This is the State of Mississippi's memorial on the Gettysburg battlefield, one of the many state monuments raised across the field to honor the soldiers who fought and died here in July 1863. Its inscription speaks in the elegiac language of sacrifice and honor common to Confederate commemoration, marking ground where Mississippi troops made their stand. Such state memorials were dedicated long after the war as former combatants and their descendants sought to enshrine the memory of the men who fell.

Cumberland Township, PA

This is South Carolina's state memorial on the Gettysburg battlefield, where in July 1863 the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia met the Union in the war's largest and bloodiest battle. Its inscription frames the state's soldiers through the Lost Cause language of states' rights and heritage that shaped Southern remembrance in the decades after the war. It marks ground where South Carolina troops fought and died during the three-day engagement.

Cumberland Township, PA

Texas sent several regiments to Gettysburg as part of Hood's Division, and on July 2–3, 1863 they joined some of the battle's fiercest fighting on the Confederate right. Erected by the State of Texas in 1964, this memorial remembers "the valor and devotion of her sons" who served the Confederacy on this ground. It is one of the many monuments added decade after decade to the Gettysburg battlefield.

Huntsville, TX

During the Civil War, the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville ran a textile factory where inmates, enslaved people, and free men together wove millions of yards of cloth and yarn. Its osnaburgs and uniforms became a main source of cloth for the Confederate Southwest, clothing state troops, the Confederate army, and needy soldiers' families as the Union blockade tightened. Worn machinery and financial strain eventually slowed the plant's wartime output.

Oglesby, TX

Established in 1856 beside a Methodist Episcopal church, Station Creek Cemetery opened with the burial of 28-year-old Robert Morris, whose mother would join him twenty years later. Most of its forty headstones predate 1890, and among the graves are numerous Confederate soldiers and two brothers, W.R. and J.M. Green, hanged by a vigilante mob as accused horse thieves. When the congregation moved to McGregor in the 1880s, the cemetery was left to the wider community.

Lincolnton, NC

A West Point graduate from Lincolnton, Stephen D. Ramseur rose to become a Confederate major general while still only 27, one of the youngest to hold that rank. He was mortally wounded at the Battle of Cedar Creek in Virginia in 1864; his grave lies two blocks north.

Fountain Hill, PA

In a house on this Fountain Hill hillside in 1898, the writer Stephen Vincent Benét was born into a literary family that would produce several published authors. He grew up steeped in books and history, and by the 1920s and '30s had become one of America's most celebrated poets and storytellers. His verse epic of the Civil War, "John Brown's Body," won wide acclaim for the way it wove ordinary soldiers, statesmen, and everyday Americans into a sweeping national portrait. He died in 1943, still in his prime, having spent his final years urging his countrymen to hold fast to their founding ideals.

Heath, TX

Virginia-born Sterling Rex Barnes brought his family to this area from Mississippi in 1846, settling the community of Black Hill, now Heath. A charter member of a local Masonic lodge and the area's justice of the peace, he operated a toll bridge over the east fork of the Trinity River at a site now beneath Lake Ray Hubbard. Five of his sons and a son-in-law went on to serve the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Commerce, TX

John and Ellen Stewart settled here about 1843, and John is credited with building the first pioneer home in eastern Hunt County during the Republic of Texas era. The family later sold land to the founder of nearby Commerce. The earliest legible marker is a child's grave from 1863, and the cemetery holds Confederate veterans — including the Stewart sons — as well as victims of an early-1900s epidemic.

Clarendon, TX

Stockton P. Donley came to Texas from Kentucky in 1846 and built a legal career before the Civil War. He enlisted as a private in 1861, was captured with his regiment after the hard fight at Fort Donelson, and endured months as a prisoner at Camp Douglas; his broken health afterward kept him from the front. Elected to the Texas Supreme Court in 1866, he was removed the next year by federal military authority for his Confederate service, and the county later erected here bears his name.

Clarksville, TX

Parson Amos M. Stone, a New York–born Cumberland Presbyterian minister, moved his large family from Tennessee to the Clarksville area in 1857 and soon founded a church on ground near this cemetery. During the Civil War he served in a Confederate home guard while at least three of his sons joined the Confederate cause, and his 1862 death made his the first known grave here. His church later merged away and the nearby Cherry School faded, but the cemetery endures as a record of the settlers he served.

Statesville, NC

In the closing days of the Civil War, Union General George Stoneman led a sweeping cavalry raid through western North Carolina, striking at railroads, supplies, and towns. On April 13, 1865, his troopers occupied Statesville, days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox. The raid brought the war's destruction to a corner of the state that had largely escaped it.

Blowing Rock, NC

In the closing weeks of the Civil War, Union Major General George Stoneman led a sweeping cavalry raid across western North Carolina to wreck Confederate supply lines and rail infrastructure. On March 28, 1865, part of that force under General Alvan C. Gillem passed through this vicinity near Blowing Rock, one stop on a fast-moving campaign through the mountains. The raid met little organized resistance as the Confederacy collapsed in the war's final month.

Morganton, NC

During Union General George Stoneman's raid through western North Carolina in the last weeks of the Civil War, his cavalry skirmished with Confederate defenders near Morganton on April 17, 1865. Coming just days after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, the clash was one of the scattered final fights of a collapsing Confederacy in the Carolina mountains. The raiders pressed on through Burke County, targeting supplies, railroads, and remaining Confederate resistance.

Salisbury, NC

On April 12, 1865, Union cavalry under General George Stoneman occupied Salisbury and set about destroying its value to the dying Confederacy. His troopers burned warehouses and supplies and wrecked the notorious Confederate prison, where thousands of captives had suffered and many had died. The raid came just after Lee's surrender, as the Confederate war effort disintegrated.

Rowan County, NC

In the closing days of the Civil War, Union General George Stoneman led a sweeping cavalry raid through western North Carolina, tearing up railroads and supply lines. On April 12, 1865 — days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox — his troopers skirmished with Confederate defenders near this spot. The Confederacy was collapsing, but scattered fighting continued as word of the war's end spread slowly.

Spring, TX

The Strack brothers emigrated from Feudingen, Germany, beginning with Herman and Heinrich in 1848 and followed by their kin over the next decade. In 1863 Herman bought land here that already held a burial ground, and the plot came to be known as Strack Cemetery, with veterans' graves reaching back to the Civil War. Today the family's descendants care for the site through an association.

Sturbridge, MA

Six years after Appomattox, the town of Sturbridge joined a wave of New England communities in raising a permanent monument to its Civil War soldiers. Memorials like this one, dedicated in 1871, went up on greens and in cemeteries across the North as the generation that had lived through the war sought to honor its dead and fix their sacrifice in the town's collective memory. That the monument was formally rededicated in 2002 shows how a small community kept faith with that memory across three centuries, tending and renewing the marker long after the last veteran had passed.

Midway, KY

After John Hunt Morgan's death in September 1864, Jerome Clarke—notorious under the name 'Sue Mundy'—formed his own guerrilla band and raided Midway that November, killing a resident named Adam Harper. Union forces executed four Confederate prisoners in reprisal. In February 1865, Clarke returned alongside the infamous William Quantrill, burning the depot and stealing fifteen horses, a reminder that Kentucky's guerrilla war raged on to the conflict's very end.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 1969

This Federal-era house, built around 1807, later served as the home of Dr. Jacob Suesserott, a well-regarded physician and surgeon. Its place in history was sealed on July 30, 1864, when Confederate cavalry under orders to extract a ransom set fire to Chambersburg; the flames that consumed much of the town were halted at this point. The burning of Chambersburg remains the only major Northern town destroyed by Confederate forces during the Civil War.

Beckville, TX

Settlement here reaches back to Elijah Wyatt, who came to Texas in 1838 and is thought to lie in this ground, though the earliest marked grave belongs to a man who died in 1861. Set aside alongside a meeting house in the 1850s, the plot grew into a community cemetery holding scores of marked and unmarked graves. Its rows include veterans of both the Civil War and World War II, spanning a century of local life.

Sugar Land, TX

Founded in 1853 and named for the sugar mill and plantation that B. F. Terry and W. J. Kyle bought with fortunes made in the California Gold Rush, Sugar Land grew into the home of Texas's only cane sugar refinery. Its founders raised Terry's Texas Rangers, one of the Confederacy's famed cavalry units, at the start of the Civil War. In later years the surrounding land became known for its prison farms.

Washington, DC

In the winter of 1864–65, as the Civil War ground toward its end, this three-story brick house on H Street was run as a boarding house by Mary Surratt. Here John Wilkes Booth and a small circle of Confederate sympathizers gathered to scheme first the kidnapping of President Lincoln—hoping to ransom him for Confederate prisoners—before the plot hardened into the April 1865 assassination. The house's connection to the conspiracy made Surratt one of four people hanged that July, the first woman executed by the United States government. The building still stands, its ground floor long since given over to shops.

San Antonio, TX

After Texas seceded in early 1861, the state moved to expel some 2,600 federal troops. Frontier fighter Ben McCulloch led 400 volunteers into San Antonio, and on the night of February 15 slipped men into Alamo Plaza to train guns on the federal garrison while hundreds more entered the city. Under mounting pressure, aging Gen. David E. Twiggs surrendered on February 18, handing over more than $3 million in ordnance, wagons, supplies, and a chain of frontier forts—an act that brought him dismissal for treachery, even as he had repeatedly and vainly begged Washington for orders.

Jonesville, TX

Founded by civil engineer and planter Peter Swanson, Swanson's Landing was a bustling Caddo Lake port from the 1830s to the 1860s, shipping cotton and pelts toward New Orleans and receiving settlers' goods in return. In the 1850s it anchored the first railroad in East Texas, a line built to Marshall and rerouted during the Civil War to move Confederate troops toward Louisiana. The port's story darkened in 1869 when the steamer Mittie Stephens burned nearby with the loss of 69 lives.

Ballinger, TX

Sylvester Adams came to Texas as a young man and threw himself behind the Confederate cause, serving at Galveston during the Civil War. Afterward he helped organize Runnels County and became its first county judge, serving in the 1880s. When drought struck in 1886–1887 he worked to arrange relief, even as many proud residents refused what they saw as charity.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1986

Born in Harrisburg in 1834, T. Morris Chester lived a life that ranged across three continents. He taught in Liberia, recruited Black soldiers for the Union, and reported from the front as one of the only African American war correspondents of the Civil War. Afterward he raised aid for the freedpeople in Europe, was admitted to the English bar, and held prominent offices in Reconstruction-era Louisiana before returning home to die in 1892.

Comanche vicinity, TX

This burial ground began beside the Concord Primitive Baptist Church, organized before 1881 in the pioneer country north of Comanche, with its earliest marked grave that of F. M. Warren in that same year. Warren's father, Posey W. Warren, was a deacon and likely founder of the church, and the surrounding land belonged to large settler families like the Browns, one of whom was a Confederate veteran. When a Methodist congregation formed here in 1901 on land from Alabama native James "Hood" Taylor, the site took on the name Taylor's Chapel Cemetery.

Ennis, TX

The first grave here belonged to the Rev. William J. Kirkpatrick, a Cumberland Presbyterian minister who died in 1867; a congregation soon organized in his honor and built a church nearby. The surrounding land came from the plantation of Confederate veteran Major Henry Pannill, who buried his own son here in 1867 before deeding the ground to the church's trustees. The village of Telico grew up around the site, then withered after 1900 as families drifted to the railroad town of Ennis, and the cemetery—holding more than 300 graves, nearly half of them children—fell into neglect until a caretaking association formed in 1937.

Sanderson, TX

Terrell County was carved from Pecos County in 1905, part of the wave of new counties organized across West Texas as railroads and ranching pushed settlement into the arid Trans-Pecos. It was named for Alexander Watkins Terrell (1827–1912), a Confederate officer who went on to serve sixteen years in the Texas Legislature. The town of Sanderson, a stop on the Southern Pacific line, became its seat of government.

Brownfield, TX

Carved from Young and Bexar territories and created in 1876, Terry County was not formally organized until 1904, when settlers finally arrived in numbers to work its farmland. It honors Colonel Benjamin Franklin Terry, the planter who raised the celebrated Terry's Texas Rangers cavalry regiment and fell early in the Civil War in 1861. Brownfield became its county seat at the heart of this farming country.

Yoakum, TX

Founded in the 1850s and named for the family of county judge James D. Terry, Terryville raised a cavalry company for the Confederate Army and had a post office by 1869. In the 1880s the post office and most residents relocated about 2.5 miles away, and the original office closed in 1907. Today an old cemetery marks the first townsite while a Baptist church survives at the second.

Austin, TX

Lincoln's 1860 election set off a secession crisis across the South, and Texas was swept along despite Governor Sam Houston's refusal to convene the legislature. Secession leaders organized their own convention in Austin in early 1861, adopted an Ordinance of Secession, and then — unusually — put the question directly to voters, who ratified it. When Houston would not swear loyalty to the Confederacy, the convention removed him and installed his lieutenant governor.

Austin, TX

Facing a Federal blockade of the Gulf coast, Texas created a single new wartime agency — the State Military Board — to arm and supply itself. Trading state bonds and, above all, cotton, the board ran goods through neutral Mexico and past the blockade by fast runners, buying guns, powder, and cloth and seeding local factories for cannon and percussion caps. Chronic shortages of money and transport blunted its reach, but it helped earn Texas its nickname as the Storehouse of the Confederacy.

Benjamin, TX

Pleasant C. Sams came to Texas from Arkansas as a boy in the 1850s and was left in charge of the family mills at sixteen when the Civil War broke out, ordered by his father to give the flour to Confederate widows. After serving in a Confederate frontier regiment and famously slipping through enemy lines to reach his bride, he settled in West Texas and became a founding cattleman, merchant, and banker at Benjamin. He led the Benjamin Commercial Company and the town's First National Bank.

Jacksonville, TX

In 1863 the Chapel Hill Manufacturing Co. built an ironworks on this site to make farm and kitchen tools the Confederacy badly needed, smelting native East Texas iron ore with Cherokee limestone and charcoal from nearby hardwoods. A crew that included 100 enslaved workers from Louisiana fed ore down the hillside into the furnaces, where molten iron was cast into molds. By the 1880s at least sixteen ironworks operated across East Texas.

Alpine, TX

Brewster County honors Henry P. Brewster, a South Carolinian who came to Texas in 1836 and served as state attorney general before throwing himself into the Confederate cause. When the South seceded he helped gather arms and matériel from Texas and served as adjutant and inspector general under General Albert Sidney Johnston, later on special duty with General John Bell Hood. At his own request he was buried at sea in the Gulf of Mexico; the state raised this memorial to Texans who served the Confederacy in 1963.

Brenham, TX

During the Civil War, Texas county commissioners courts—a chief justice and four commissioners—became engines of the Confederate war effort, arming and clothing troops, aiding war factories, and distributing scarce medicine, salt, and cloth to soldiers' families. They organized patrols and home guards and raised money through bonds, scrip, and a special war tax. Prosperous Washington County financed hospitals, contracted army uniforms, printed its own scrip, and ran a camp of instruction and a soldiers' home in Brenham.

Alpine, TX

Lawrence Sullivan "Sul" Ross rose from private in 1861 to brigadier general by 1863, leading a largely Texan cavalry brigade through hard fighting in Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. Tradition holds he had five horses shot from under him across 135 engagements. The State of Texas erected this memorial in 1963, and a college bears his name.

Linden, TX

Dr. M. D. K. Taylor, an Alabama physician who came to Texas in 1847, represented Cass County in the legislature for 24 years and was reckoned the ablest parliamentarian of his day. As a speaker of the Texas House during the Civil War, he helped pass laws to raise, arm, and supply some 90,000 Texas soldiers and to defend the state's long frontier and coast. With the Union blockade choking imports, the legislature he led established plants to make guns, powder, cloth, and salt, taxed property, and levied tithes of produce to meet the crisis.

Austin, TX

Opened in 1908, this Austin home cared for the aging wives and widows of Confederate veterans, women left without support in their final years. Organized and funded largely by the United Daughters of the Confederacy before being turned over to the state, it grew to include dormitories, a parlor, and a hospital. Over more than half a century it sheltered thousands of women until it closed in 1963.

New Braunfels, TX

When Texas voted on secession in 1861, ten heavily German counties opposed leaving the Union, an unusual dissent in a Confederate state—though Comal County broke the other way. Many German Texans had only recently taken naturalization oaths and found the doctrine of states' rights hard to parse; some avoided service out of concern for their families while others slipped away to join U.S. units. Still, the majority backed the Confederacy, and three companies from Comal County earned praise for their discipline and morale.

Austin, TX

During the Civil War, Texas sent some 90,000 men to fight for the Confederacy, yet still had to defend 2,000 miles of coastline and frontier against Federal forces, Native raids, and outlaws. That burden fell largely on the state Adjutant General, who filled troop requisitions while organizing the Frontier Regiment's chain of forts from the Rio Grande to the Red River—and doubling as inspector, quartermaster, ordnance, and commissary officer. Five men held the demanding post between 1861 and 1865.

Austin, TX

When Texas joined the Confederacy in 1861, a minority of Texans—many of them immigrants, Northerners, or Unionists—refused to follow. Some crossed the Rio Grande to organize the 1st Texas Cavalry (U.S.) under Col. E. J. Davis, while others formed the nucleus of a second Union regiment in New Orleans; the two merged in 1864. Captured Confederates could win release as "galvanized Yankees," sent to fight on the frontier rather than against former comrades, though some Union Texans did face old neighbors in the Red River campaigns.

Fort Worth, TX

From the end of the Civil War until World War I, Confederate veterans dominated economic and civic life across Texas, gathering yearly in United Confederate Veterans camps in nearly every community. Unlike Union soldiers, who drew federal pensions, ex-Confederates relied on state aid—land grants in the early 1880s, then pensions approved in 1899—and on homes for veterans, wives, and widows built in Austin. By 1965 Texas had spent more than $71 million on these benefits.

Austin, TX

The Civil War devastated Texas journalism: the state's newspapers shrank from 82 titles with a combined circulation of 100,000 to fewer than 20 by early 1862 as editors enlisted or ran out of ink and paper. Surviving papers printed on wallpaper, tissue, straw paper, and brown wrapping, often shrinking to half a page, while editors scavenged months-old letters and clippings for news. The 'State Gazette' even kept a pony express rider at the Brenham railhead to rush in Houston papers just 18 hours old.

Tomball, TX

By 1861, Harris County sat at the hub of nearly 500 miles of Texas railroads, with lines fanning out toward Orange, Galveston, the Brazos, and beyond, stitched together with stagecoach links to reach Austin. During the Civil War, Confederate troops guarded and maintained some lines while others were torn up to deny them to Union invasion. Overtaxed and unable to replace worn track and rolling stock, seven roads were ruined, and by 1865 only two still ran trains.

Fredericksburg, TX

Edmund Kirby Smith, born in Florida in 1824, graduated from West Point, fought in the Mexican War, and commanded frontier camps in 1850s Texas. Resigning from the U.S. Army in 1861, he rose to lead the Confederacy's vast Trans-Mississippi Department, where Texas cotton financed his army and sheltered his family amid threats from Union forces and the French in Mexico. After the war he taught mathematics to young Texans at the University of the South until his death in 1893.

Galveston, TX

After the pirate Lafitte was driven from Galveston, West Indian settlers arrived and the island grew into the chief port of a rising Texas, declared a port of entry by Mexico in 1825. It briefly served as capital of the Republic when President Burnet's cabinet fled the interior during the 1836 San Jacinto campaign, and Michel B. Menard soon bought the townsite for $50,000. During the Civil War, Confederate forces evacuated the city in 1862 but retook it in 1863 under General John Bankhead Magruder, capturing Union ships and troops and holding it to the war's end.