Civil War

Nacogdoches, TX

Along the historic King's Highway, in use since 1691, passengers boarded stagecoaches at Nacogdoches throughout the Civil War, one of the best-served stage towns in Confederate Texas with three stands and three lines. A Waco-bound traveler left at 6 a.m. and rode nearly five days to arrive, connecting onward to San Antonio, Austin, and beyond. In all, thirty-one stage lines carried mail, soldiers, and civilians across wartime Texas, most linking to railroads or steamers for far-reaching travel.

Socorro, NM

In early 1862, Confederate forces from Texas pushed up the Rio Grande in an ambitious campaign to seize New Mexico Territory and open a path to the West. Near Socorro they clashed with Union troops at the Battle of Valverde, part of a short-lived Confederate bid for the Southwest that ultimately failed. This memorial recalls those Texas volunteers and the Civil War's often-overlooked western theater.

Dallas, TX

With some 90,000 Texas men away fighting for the Confederacy, the civilian labor of a whole society fell to the women left behind in a land of few factories and a tightening naval blockade. They ran farms, businesses, and newspapers; loaded shells and made gun caps; spun, wove, and dyed homemade cloth; brewed coffee from acorns and medicine from herbs; and faced raids and marauders along thousands of miles of coast and frontier.

Henderson, TX

On August 5, 1860, fire consumed the entire business district of Henderson, one of Texas's most prosperous towns. That summer, blazes across the state stoked a panic that abolitionists and enslaved people were burning Texas towns, and Henderson's fire fed the flames of secessionist fury. A committee of fifty-two citizens hanged Green Herndon and an enslaved woman for setting it, though evidence was never established. Secessionist Louis T. Wigfall seized on the disaster, and Texas delegates later listed the burning of Henderson first among the events leading to secession.

Kingston, GA

On April 12, 1862, a Union raiding party led by civilian scout James J. Andrews commandeered the locomotive "General" at Big Shanty in a daring bid to cripple the Western & Atlantic Railroad and sever the Confederacy's supply line to Chattanooga. Forced to lose time waiting out southbound traffic on the single-track line, the raiders pressed north—while conductor William A. Fuller and his crew gave relentless chase, first on foot and a push-car, then aboard the engines "Yonah" and "Wm. R. Smith." Kingston was a critical bottleneck in what became known as the Great Locomotive Chase.

Marietta, GA

In the spring of 1865, as the Confederacy collapsed, Union Gen. Henry M. Judah made his headquarters at the Archibald Howell Home in Marietta. Surveying a countryside stripped of crops by the 1864 fighting and an economy paralyzed by surrender, Judah proposed issuing corn and bacon to destitute local families until they could plant again. The approved rations helped stave off hunger and steady the region through the first hard months of peace.

Athens, GA

Designed by Athens gunsmith John Gilleland, a member of a home-guard unit of men too old or infirm for regular Confederate service, this double-barrelled cannon was meant to fire two chain-linked balls at once to "mow down" advancing enemies. Cast in a local foundry, it failed in testing because the barrels could not be discharged at precisely the same instant, sending the balls on wild, erratic paths. The gun survives in Athens as a beloved curiosity—one of a kind and famously ineffective.

Hinesville, GA

Built in 1839 by Mary Jane Bacon, widow of Major John Bacon, this Hinesville home is a fine example of the "plantation plain" style, its two-story front section still much as it was raised by the region's best craftsmen. Kept in the same family for generations, it survived a harsh visit from Sherman's troops in December 1864, who pillaged and burned the barn and outbuildings but spared the house itself. Careful later restoration returned the rear rooms to their 1839 character.

Port Lavaca, TX

Late in 1863 the Union Army pushed into Calhoun County, a rare thing in Texas, aiming to seize Fort Esperanza and control the mouth of Matagorda Bay. On December 26, some forty Texas Rangers tried to burn the Norris Bridge over Chocolate Bayou as roughly three thousand Union troops advanced. The Rangers scattered on horseback after their captain ordered a retreat, and the only death came when nervous Union gunners mistook a distant herd of cattle for the enemy and killed the cows instead.

Atlanta, GA

Between July and September 1864, Union and Confederate armies fought for control of Atlanta, the Deep South's great manufacturing and railroad hub. Four inconclusive battles—Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Ezra Church, and Utoy Creek—raged around the city before Union forces swept south and, at Jonesboro, cut the last railroad supplying it. Atlanta fell on September 2, 1864.

Shelby County, KY

During the Civil War, the border state of Kentucky was plagued by guerrilla bands and marauders who preyed on divided communities. In 1858 the townspeople built a small log blockhouse in the middle of the intersection, pierced with loopholes and manned whenever an alarm sounded. In August 1864 the guerrilla captain David "Black Dave" Martin tried to raid the courthouse for its stored guns, but townsmen drove him off, killing three raiders.

Albany, GA

At a crossing of the Flint River where an early ferry once ran, Albany founder Col. Nelson Tift built a toll bridge in 1857, its span raised by Horace of Columbus, a freed Black bridge-builder of wide renown. Tift's adjoining 'Bridge House' held the bridge keeper's quarters and Tift's own office below, and above them 'Tift's Hall,' a lavishly decorated theatre that drew touring actors and hosted the town's grand balls. During the Civil War its cellars were turned into packing houses, curing meat for the Confederate Navy.

Smethport, PA · est. 1949

When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Col. Thomas L. Kane rallied about 100 volunteers who gathered at Smethport on the 24th before marching off to Harrisburg. These backwoods marksmen pinned tails of buck deer to their caps as a badge of identity, giving rise to the celebrated nickname "the Bucktails." They formed the core of the famed 42nd Pennsylvania Regiment, which earned a reputation as some of the Union's finest sharpshooters.

Driftwood, PA · est. 1950

When the Civil War broke out in the spring of 1861, hardy woodsmen and hunters from Pennsylvania's northern mountains answered the call, famously pinning deer tails to their caps as a badge of their marksmanship. From this point along the Sinnemahoning they set off in April 1861 for Harrisburg to be mustered into service as the men who would become known as the Bucktails. A nearby monument, a state highway, and a state park all keep their name alive.

Darien, GA

On June 11, 1863, Federal troops from nearby St. Simons Island burned the largely deserted seaport of Darien, destroying churches, businesses, and nearly every home while most of its 500 residents had fled inland. The raiders included the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers under Colonel Robert Gould Shaw—among the first African American regiments to serve the Union—and the 2nd South Carolina under James Montgomery. The needless torching of an undefended town became one of the war's most controversial acts.

Covington, GA

As the Battle of Atlanta raged to the west in July 1864, Union cavalry armed with rapid-firing Spencer repeaters swept into the undefended town of Covington. In the violence that followed, a resisting citizen and a furloughed Confederate soldier were killed, and the raiders destroyed or carried off supplies useful to the Confederacy before riding on toward Oxford.

Marietta, OH

Completed in 1855, this Gothic Revival mansion — known locally as The Castle for its castellated tower — was built for attorney Melvin C. Clarke. When war came, Clarke joined the Union army and was killed in 1862 at Antietam, the bloodiest single day of the Civil War. The house later passed to the Nye and Bosley families and today serves as a museum of period woodwork, furnishings, and changing exhibits.

Fredericksburg, TX

Christian Kraus began this stone home in 1859 after he and his wife Anna Maria settled in the German community of Klein Frankreich, or 'Little France,' near Fredericksburg. Kraus farmed and taught school, and the family raised not only their own seven children but also the seven orphaned children of Peter Burg, who was killed by the Haengebrande, the vigilante band that terrorized Unionist Germans during the Civil War. A pillar of the community, Kraus helped build Fredericksburg's St. Mary's Catholic Church and expanded his vernacular stone home in 1879.

Columbus, TX

When the state's pioneering Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado railroad routed its Houston-to-Austin line through nearby Alleyton and bypassed Columbus in the 1850s, local planters and merchants fought back by chartering their own Columbus Tap Railway in 1860 to connect the two. The Civil War intervened; though the Confederacy found the line useful and even impressed labor to work its roadbed in 1863, it went unfinished during the fighting. Completed after the war, it eventually folded into the Southern Pacific system.

Paducah, KY

When Confederate forces occupied nearby Hickman and Columbus in the summer of 1861, hopeful Paducahans raised a large Confederate flag to welcome a Southern army they believed was on its way. Instead, General Grant's Union troops, backed by gunboats, moved to occupy Paducah on September 6. As seizure loomed, Mrs. Emily Jarrett rushed to save the banner, having a boy climb the pole to drop it to her, and hid it from searching Union soldiers—keeping it until it was buried with her decades later.

Yellow Springs, OH

In the second year of the Civil War, as the future of slavery hung in the balance, the abolitionist minister Moncure Conway did something few Southern-born sons of slaveholding families ever attempted: he arranged for the people his family held in bondage in Virginia to travel north to freedom. Their destination was the countryside near Yellow Springs, Ohio, a corner of the state already known for its reform-minded, antislavery convictions. Guided by Dunmore and Eliza Gwinn, the group made a long and dangerous overland journey to build new lives as free people while the war still raged around them.

Bluff Dale, TX

Alfred W. Denny came to Texas in 1853 and, during the Civil War, served in a Ranger company based at Stephenville that guarded the state's exposed western frontier. In 1867 he bought 320 acres that would become both his home and his final resting place. The family cemetery holds seventeen known graves, among them his wife Mary Elizabeth and an infant grandson, and it was carefully restored in 1982.

Denison, TX

George S. Fitzgerald moved his family from Virginia to Texas in 1857 and cut the building timber for this house on his own 800-acre farm in 1859. Interrupted by service in the Confederate army, he finally raised the pegged-oak house in 1866 and went on to prosper as a respected Grayson County commissioner. Its sturdy 20-foot rooms and twin staircases reflect the substance of a rebuilding postwar household.

Kennesaw, GA

On April 12, 1862, a party of Union soldiers and civilians led by James J. Andrews seized this locomotive at Big Shanty (now Kennesaw) and steamed north, tearing up track and cutting telegraph wires in a daring bid to cripple the Western & Atlantic Railroad linking Atlanta to Chattanooga. Confederate crewmen gave chase — first on foot, then by handcar and other engines — in what became known as the Great Locomotive Chase, running the raiders down before they could do lasting damage. The General survived the war and became one of the most celebrated relics of the conflict, later preserved and displayed as a monument to that famous railroad pursuit.

Navasota, TX

Beside the Houston & Texas Central Railroad depot, German immigrant R. H. Giesel and his German-born wife Fannie built this three-story stone building in 1860 to house a restaurant and hotel, fronted by a two-story frame porch. A Confederate veteran, Giesel served as temporary mayor in 1867 when yellow fever swept Navasota. Fannie renamed her restaurant "The Good Morning John" and ran the business until her death in 1881, after which later owners kept the hotel going under new names.

Glenville, WV

In the mid-19th century, communities across the rugged mountains of western Virginia raised their own volunteer companies, and the Gilmer Rifles was one such locally organized unit drawn from Gilmer County. When the Civil War came, this region was torn by fiercely divided loyalties, with neighbors and even families choosing opposing sides — the very tensions that soon carved the new state of West Virginia out of Virginia in 1863. A company like the Gilmer Rifles carried the name of its home county into a war that reshaped both the nation and the map beneath its feet.

Paducah, TX

Around 1885, Civil War veterans of both the Gray and the Blue drifted into western Texas to tame the wilderness, grazing cattle on drought-parched grass and living in dugouts. Old adversaries refought the war verbally on the courthouse square yet built Cottle County together in peace—some 85 percent of early pioneers had worn Confederate gray, though Union men like Prussian immigrant William Frederick Liedtke, a former Nebraska state auditor, settled here too as respected officials. By the 1890s the uniform that mattered was a cowman's regalia, worn by Americans looking forward rather than back.

Gainesville, TX

In the anxious first years of the Civil War, North Texans feared invasion from the north and a Unionist uprising within. Alarm over a rumored "Peace Party" of Union sympathizers led Confederate-loyal citizens to make mass arrests around Cooke County in October 1862, convening an extralegal "Citizens Court" at Gainesville. Forty-one men were hanged after summary trials, and two more were shot, in one of the deadliest episodes of vigilante violence in American history.

Petty, TX

Before the Civil War, a lone grove of persimmons stood as the only trees on a hundred-square-mile Texas prairie, a natural gathering spot where settlers swapped news and livestock. When secession came in 1861, Methodist lay minister and Mexican War veteran James Hill organized a cavalry company here and drilled his men beside the grove. When militia law barred the unit from leaving Texas, they reorganized as Company E of the 9th Texas Infantry and went on to fight at Shiloh, Murfreesboro, and Chickamauga.

Kingsville, TX

In 1853 Rio Grande steamboat captain Richard King bought two Spanish land grants on Santa Gertrudis Creek and began building what became the legendary King Ranch. Through drought, cattle thieves, and the Civil War—when the ranch funneled Confederate cotton to Mexico—King and his heirs bred longhorns into fortunes, pioneered the Santa Gertrudis cattle breed, and expanded the ranch to nearly a million acres.

Eagle Pass, TX

Built before 1875 as quarters for an ordnance sergeant on the Texas frontier, this stone building takes its name from Robert E. Lee, who visited the area in 1860 as commander of the U.S. 2nd Cavalry, Department of Texas, before his later career as a Confederate general. The Maverick County Historical Society leased it in 1948, and after restoration it was dedicated during the Eagle Pass Centennial in 1949 for use as a museum and meeting hall. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1968.

Leechburg, PA

In 1864, as the Civil War raged, the people of Leechburg embraced the era's "Rural Cemetery Movement"—a mid-19th-century reform that moved burials out of crowded churchyards and town lots into landscaped, park-like grounds meant for quiet reflection. Land obtained from John Klingensmith and Addison Leech (whose family gave the town its name) became the new resting place, and the remains from the original cemetery along 2nd Street were relocated here. The grounds also became home to the John A. Hunter Post #123 of the Grand Army of the Republic, the fraternal order of Union Civil War veterans, tying the site directly to the generation that fought the war.

Salado, TX

Built in the early 1870s in the symmetrical Greek Revival style, this house was the home of Archibald Johnson Rose, a former Confederate officer who prospered as a farmer after the Civil War. Rose became a leader in the Grange, the farmers' movement that swept the Reconstruction-era South and West, and worked to improve public education. His family kept the house for more than a century.

Matagorda, TX

In late 1863 Union forces pressed along the Texas coast to choke off the ports supplying the Confederacy, and in December they landed on the Matagorda Peninsula backed by gunboats. Confederate naval officer Capt. James R. Marmion answered with his own gunboats and cavalry, and on December 30 the two sides exchanged fire across the narrow strip of land. When Marmion called Capt. Edward S. Rugeley's Company D of Brown's Regiment to stage a night amphibious assault, a brutal norther swamped the small boats within sight of safety, drowning 22 men and touching nearly every family in Matagorda. The Union force eventually withdrew, leaving the Confederates in control of the peninsula.

San Antonio, TX

The Matamoros Road ran some 330 miles from San Antonio to the Rio Grande, a route so old it was worn by Indians and Spaniards before Anglo settlers ever arrived. A journey of six to eight weeks across a bandit-haunted, water-starved land, it taught teamsters to hide gold in grain sacks and bored-out axles. During the Civil War it became the great "cotton road," the Confederacy's lifeline: ox-drawn carts hauled bales south past cotton snagged in the mesquite and returned laden with guns, ammunition, and cloth that ran the Union blockade.

Richmond, TX

Isaac McFarlane left Scotland for Texas, rode with Terry's Texas Rangers during the Civil War, and afterward built a prosperous mercantile trade in Richmond. In the early 1880s local builder Thomas Culshaw raised this house for the family, dressing it in fashionable Italianate style with molded window hoods and decorative metal cresting along the roof ridge. The McFarlanes kept the home for nearly a century, holding it until 1979.

Burkeville, TX

By 1840 the Beef Road had become a vital artery across the Sabine River borderlands, replacing the earlier Zavala Road and taking its name from the cattle driven along it from the Huntsville and Liberty regions toward Louisiana markets. Near this spot it forked into three branches, each heading to a different crossing and destination, with "beef pens" set along the way to corral cattle overnight. During the Civil War it served as a Confederate supply route until Union control of the Mississippi in July 1863 choked off the eastern drives, and the postwar rise of the Kansas railheads finished its decline.

Westminster, MD

This Westminster landmark went up in 1845 as a hall for the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, one of the fraternal lodges that anchored civic life across small-town America in the early republic. Doubling as an "opera house" and community center, it hosted the performances, lectures, and gatherings that passed for a town's cultural heart for the better part of a century. During the Civil War, with Maryland a divided border state and armies crisscrossing the region around Gettysburg, the building reportedly served Union troops.

Richmond, TX

Col. P.E. Peareson, a Civil War veteran and lawyer whose firm practiced in Richmond for nearly a century, moved this dignified house to the site in 1869, where his relatives lived until 1931. It then passed to Thomas Blakely Winston, a great-great-grandson of Jane Long, remembered as the "Mother of Texas." Fittingly, the home stands on land granted to Mrs. Long in 1827, tying the property to the earliest days of Anglo settlement in the region.

Tivoli, TX

This cypress, oak, and Florida-pine house rose in 1868 on land first granted in 1834 to Nicholas Fagan, an Irish-born colonist who fought in Texas's war for independence. His son Peter Henry Fagan, a Confederate veteran of campaigns in New Mexico and Galveston, returned home in 1865 and built the home, which soon doubled as a way-station on the road between Refugio and Victoria. Travelers rested here, and visiting priests celebrated neighborhood masses under its roof.

Corpus Christi, TX

In 1859 circus-promoter-turned-civic-leader Henry Alonzo Maltby launched a four-page weekly newspaper in Corpus Christi that mixed editorials, poetry, recipes, and a register of local cattle brands. When war came, the Maltby brothers threw the paper behind the Confederacy; William was captured defending Mustang Island while Henry fled with his press to Mexico and then Brownsville, where a Union colonel briefly suppressed it. After the war the Ranchero kept up its defiant opposition to federal military rule until Maltby sold it in 1870, the year Reconstruction-era occupation of Texas ended.

Exeter, NH

In the churning politics of the early 1850s, the old party system was breaking apart under the strain of the slavery question, and anti-slavery men from rival factions were groping for common cause. According to local tradition, it was here in Exeter that Amos Tuck—a former Free Soil congressman—gathered such men and helped fix upon the name that a new coalition would carry. Within a few years that name belonged to a national party powerful enough to elect a president and reshape the country.

Crockett, TX

Born in South Carolina in 1813, John C. Woolam served in the Florida Indian Wars before reaching Texas in 1838 and taking up Methodist preaching in 1840. Over fifty years he ministered to thirty-four churches across East and Southeast Texas and served as a Confederate chaplain during the Civil War. As chaplain of the Texas Veterans Association he offered the dedicatory prayer at the opening of the State Capitol in 1888.

Sherman, TX

Born in Mississippi in 1840 and educated in Georgia, John Silliman Moore was wounded three times during the Civil War, at Seven Pines, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. After the war he trained for the ministry at the Presbyterian seminary in Columbia, South Carolina, and served churches across East Texas before settling in Sherman, where he led the First Presbyterian Church from 1879 until his death in 1903. As a longtime trustee of Austin College, he helped move the school from Huntsville to Sherman.

New York, TX

Thomas Hunt Hall followed his father and grandfather into the Methodist ministry, then answered a different call when the Civil War began, enlisting in the 14th Texas Cavalry of the Confederate Army. A Georgia native who reached Texas in 1854, he later took up medicine and spent decades serving Smith and Henderson counties as both preacher and physician, settling in the New York community in 1895.

Charleston, SC

In the harbor city of Charleston, where the Civil War's first shots rang out in 1861, the salvaging of a heavy gun from the water was no small matter. This marker honors Adolphus W. and James C. Lacoste, who together with others managed to recover a cannon that trained engineers of both the Federal and Confederate armies had declared impossible to raise. Their feat turned a written-off relic into a lasting piece of the city's wartime memory.

Watertown, MA

This Egyptian-revival sphinx stands at Mount Auburn Cemetery near Watertown, America's first great garden cemetery, and was raised in the years after the Civil War to honor the Union's survival and the abolition of slavery. Its inscription frames the war's outcome in monumental terms — a nation preserved and human bondage ended through popular sacrifice. Choosing the ancient form of the sphinx, its creators cast a distinctly American triumph in the timeless language of Old World monuments.

Sugar Land, TX

Sugar cane came to Fort Bend County with Stephen F. Austin's colonists in the 1820s, and by the 1840s the Williams brothers were boiling it in open kettles on Oakland Plantation. Successive owners — Kyle and Terry, then Cunningham after the Civil War, and finally Kempner and Eldridge in 1907 — grew a horse-powered mill into the Imperial Sugar Company, which named the town Sugar Land. One early partner, Benjamin Terry, raised the Confederate cavalry unit Terry's Texas Rangers and died in the war.

Burkesville, TX

Founded on land William Williams surveyed under an 1834 Mexican grant, 'The Survey' drew settlers who built the community's first frame house in 1847 from lumber hauled from Alexandria, Louisiana. Farming and later lumbering sustained the families named Booker, Mattox, Cobb, and others, and at least sixteen residents fought for the Confederacy. Shifting population after the 1940s consolidated the school, closed the post office, and disbanded the church, leaving cemeteries and old buildings tended by a local association.

Marshall, TX

Merchant George Gammon Gregg built this frame house in Marshall in the early 1850s, and family tradition holds that Confederate veteran James Turner won title to it in an 1866 poker game. Turner went on to become a noted lawyer and served four years as the town's mayor, while his son Robert added the Victorian porch columns in 1890. The Turner family kept the residence for more than a century.

Milwaukee, WI

Erected in 1898 and sculpted by John S. Conway, this dramatic bronze honors the Wisconsin soldiers who fought 'in the War for the Union,' 1861–1865. Cast in Rome and set in Milwaukee, it captures the fury of a Civil War infantry charge, a fitting tribute in a state that sent tens of thousands of men to preserve the nation. It remains among the city's most powerful public monuments to that generation's sacrifice.

Concord, MA

Across the North after 1865, towns like Concord raised monuments to their Civil War dead—the conflict they knew as the War of the Rebellion. This memorial gathers the names of local men who marched off to preserve the Union, and its inscription tenderly notes that Concord was to them a birthplace, a home, or a final resting place. In a town already famous as the cradle of the American Revolution, the stone bound a new generation's sacrifice to the older story of liberty.

Matagorda, TX

A leading Gulf port, Matagorda thrived on cotton shipped down the Colorado River, and during the Civil War it became a busy channel for Confederate blockade runners slipping past Union ships. That same wartime traffic likely carried the Aedes aegypti mosquito into the wetland port, and in the fall of 1862 the yellow fever it spread ravaged the town. From late September to late November, the epidemic is estimated to have killed as much as a third of the population, filling Matagorda Cemetery and claiming enslaved residents and soldiers whose names largely went unrecorded.

Brownsville, TX

These weathered pilings mark two separate military supply roads a generation apart. The cypress piles are remnants of a floating bridge Gen. Zachary Taylor threw across Boca Chica Inlet in 1846 during the Mexican-American War; the palmetto pilings are what remains of a railroad crossing begun by Gen. Francis Herron in 1864 and finished by Gen. Philip Sheridan in 1865 to move Union supplies at the close of the Civil War.

Charleston, SC

This heavy artillery piece recalls the long Union effort to capture Charleston, the very city where the Civil War began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter in 1861. A thirteen-inch mortar was among the largest siege weapons of its day, lobbing massive explosive shells in a high arc to reach fortifications that ordinary field guns could not touch. From 1863 to 1865, Federal forces pressed a grinding campaign against the harbor's defenses, and weapons like this one hammered the batteries ringing the city until Charleston finally fell in early 1865.

Cooper, TX

Thomas A. Lambeth joined the Confederate Army at sixteen and served as a captain in the escort of General John B. Magruder, commander of the District of Texas. Elected sheriff of Delta County in 1879, he served six years in which the jail was set afire twenty-five times without a single escape, broke up horse-thief relay stations, and cleared the county of cattle rustlers. Remembered as an exacting lawman who taught Sunday School, he shot only one man in all that time.

Brenham, TX

Scottish-born Thomas Affleck emigrated in 1832 and became one of America's best-known agriculturalists, championing scientific farming through his widely read "Affleck's Southern Rural Almanac," published yearly from 1845 to 1861. In the late 1850s he established Glenblythe, a large, highly organized Washington County plantation that even ran a wagon factory turning out wagons and ambulances for the Confederacy. After the Civil War he worked to rebuild Texas's economy, traveling to Britain to encourage investment and emigration before his death in 1868.

East Brandywine Township, PA · est. 1948

Thomas Buchanan Read, born in this corner of Chester County in 1822, won fame in the 19th century as both a painter and a poet. He is best remembered for "Sheridan's Ride," a galloping verse that immortalized a Union general's dramatic dash to rally his troops during the Civil War. Read spent much of his life abroad in Europe before dying in New York and being laid to rest in Philadelphia.

Edenton, NC

Thomas C. Manning (1825–1887) began his career teaching at Edenton Academy before moving to Louisiana, where he served as that state's Confederate adjutant general from 1863 to 1865. After the war he became chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court and later U.S. Minister to Mexico. This marker notes the North Carolina home where his remarkable public life began.

Ennis, TX

Georgia-born Thomas C. Neel brought his family to Texas in 1854 and to Ellis County in 1855, founding a cotton-and-wheat plantation he called "Will's Town" for his wife Willia—later shortened to Wilton. As secession loomed he was named a delegate to the 1861 Secession Convention, then won election to the Texas House and later the Senate, but fell ill and died in 1863 before he could take his seat. His plantation post office served both U.S. and Confederate governments.