Civil War

Athens, TX

This small family cemetery began with the 1877 burial of Mary Thomas Hall, who died young, likely in childbirth, on the family farm. Its patriarch, Jacob Thomas, was a planter born in North Carolina in 1800 who moved through Georgia, Alabama, and Arkansas before reaching Henderson County, Texas, by 1860. His son Sylvester volunteered for the Confederacy but died of influenza in training, leaving Jacob to raise his grandchildren. Generations of the family lie buried here on the hilltop above the creek.

Walker County, TX

This burial ground marks the site of the Thomas Plantation and its steamboat landing on the river, settled by Alabama native John R. Thomas in 1854. Thomas served in the Confederate army, was captured at the 1863 Battle of Arkansas Post, and died a month later as a prisoner at Camp Chase, Ohio; his mother and two brothers, one also a Confederate veteran, lie here as well. By 1883 a nephew had sold the land and moved on, leaving the cemetery as the family's last mark on the place.

Galveston, TX

This two-story Greek Revival home in Galveston dates to the 1850s and belonged to Commodore Thomas Chubb, a veteran of the Texas Revolution. During the Civil War, Chubb was captured by Union naval forces operating on Galveston Bay, and after the conflict he returned to serve as the city's harbor master. Later owners tied the house to Galveston's mercantile and political life, including a wholesaler and a district attorney.

Liberty, TX

This residence went up in the 1860s for Thomas Jefferson Chambers (1840–1929), a Virginia-born newspaper editor, Confederate veteran, and nephew of the Texas colonial leader of the same name. Over a long public life he served as state representative, justice of the peace, city councilman, and mayor. Known as the "octagon house" for its central chimney and unusual form, the home has since been reshaped by remodeling.

Kane, PA · est. 1980

Thomas L. Kane was one of 19th-century America's most fascinating idealists: a Civil War general who raised and led the famed "Bucktail Regiment" of Pennsylvania riflemen, and an outspoken friend of the persecuted Mormons when few others would defend them. He founded the borough of Kane in the northern Pennsylvania wilderness and was breveted major general in 1863. He died in 1883 and lies buried at the chapel he directed to be built here in the late 1870s.

Lampasas, TX

Thomas Pratt served as a captain in the army of the Republic of Texas in 1836 and, decades later, in the Texas militia and Confederate service during the Civil War. In private life he farmed and ranched land in Coleman and Lampasas counties, and his wife Susan belonged to one of the first Anglo colonies in Texas. Remembered as a kindly man, he left funds in his will to provide meat for poor and reputable widows.

Corpus Christi, TX

Philadelphia-born Thomas S. Parker came to Texas at twenty, and in 1839 he and his parents received large land grants near present-day Corpus Christi, where they raised cattle. He allied with trader Henry L. Kinney, and when Zachary Taylor's army camped near Kinney's post in 1845 — the staging ground for the war with Mexico — Parker won the contract to supply the soldiers' beef. "Col. Tom" went on to become the first sheriff of Nueces County, later a Texas Ranger and Confederate soldier, and finally Corpus Christi's city marshal, shaping the young city's commerce and law until his death in 1886.

Lake Creek, TX

Thomas Wilson Stegall was born in North Carolina in 1832, served as a Confederate private late in the Civil War, and moved his large family through Tennessee and Mississippi before settling in Delta County, Texas, in 1873. A Baptist preacher remembered for his kindness—he once cut a gap in his prized rose hedge just to give a neighbor a shortcut—he built a blacksmith shop that became the gathering place at the heart of the new town of Lake Creek. From that community nucleus a town grew.

Martins Mill, TX

Pioneer L. H. Hobbs settled this part of Van Zandt County around 1850 and let a grieving family bury their two-year-old daughter on his land, quietly founding a cemetery. The graveyard took the Tidmore name after John Tidmore—who died in 1866 of afflictions carried home from the Civil War—and his family came to own the ground and were laid to rest there in turn. Around the Tidmore and Hobbs graves gathered generations of a farming community, including a dozen Confederate veterans and later soldiers of both World Wars.

Paducah, KY

This was the Paducah home of Gen. Lloyd Tilghman (1816–1863), a Maryland-born West Point graduate who served in the Mexican War and helped build the New Orleans and Jackson Railroad, the first to reach Paducah. Living here from 1852 to 1861, he left to join the Confederate Army at the Civil War's outbreak and was killed by a shell at the Battle of Champion Hill near Vicksburg in May 1863. The marker was sponsored by the Tilghman High School Class of 1929.

Freeport vicinity, TX

During the Civil War, the tangled willow-lined waterways around this coastal island gave Confederate blockade-runners a place to hide. Captains like the shipbuilder H. C. Wedemeyer slipped cotton-laden vessels out on dark or stormy nights, sometimes towed to open water by men working from shore, evading the Federal ships watching from offshore. The cotton they carried overseas bought guns, powder, medicine, and cloth for a Confederacy short on manufacturing of its own.

Mt. Pleasant, TX

Organized in 1846 and named for pioneer road-builder Andrew Jackson Titus, this Northeast Texas county threw itself into the Confederate cause, voting 411 to 275 for secession and sending ten military companies to war. Its farms and mills supplied the Confederate commissary with beef, corn, leather, and lumber, while a transportation depot at Mount Pleasant kept blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and harness makers busy outfitting wagons and teams. The county's home front fed both its own tables of wild game and the armies in the field.

Saint Louis County, MO

This tender inscription imagines fallen soldiers reunited after death in their old army quarters — a note of longing and comradeship raised to the Confederate dead. Erected in the St. Louis region, it belongs to the wave of memorials that sought to honor those who died in the nation's costliest war.

Fort Mill, SC

Erected in the 1890s in Fort Mill's Confederate Park, this is one of the earliest and most striking monuments in the South to commemorate enslaved African Americans — though it does so through the lens of the 'Lost Cause,' framing the enslaved as loyal servants of the Confederate war effort. In reality, the roughly four million people held in bondage experienced slavery as coerced labor, family separation, and violence, and many thousands escaped to Union lines or took up arms for their own freedom. The monument's language of 'faithful' devotion reflects the memory its white patrons wished to preserve in the decades after Reconstruction, not the lived experience of the people it claims to honor.

Marshall, TX

This Marshall house grew in layers from before the Civil War through the early 20th century. Mary Britt bought the land in 1856 and married Judge William S. Todd, a signer of Texas's 1861 secession ordinance; a later owner, Gilchrist McKay, also signed the ordinance and died fighting for the Confederacy at the 1864 Battle of Mansfield. Victorian-era owners added the ornate two-story porch in the 1880s, and a railroad engineer expanded the house again in 1909.

Jefferson, TX

Built in the late 1850s in the Greek Revival style with a broad central hallway, this house was soon sold to District Judge William S. Todd, who took part in the 1861 Secession Convention. From 1869 to 1912 it was home to the family of Dr. Archibald A. Terhune, a popular local physician who added a small room for his office, while his wife Mary Frances earned a reputation as a noted gardener. The dwelling reflects the prosperity and social standing of Jefferson's leading families in the Civil War era.

Columbus, TX

Native Texan and Civil War veteran James A. Toliver, a civic and political leader in Columbus, is said to have built this house around 1870 using the finest pine and cypress from his own lumber yard. Its two-story wrap-around porch and jig-sawn woodwork mark it as a showpiece of the era; Sallie Cone bought it in 1916, and it stayed in her family until 1974.

San Angelo, TX

Thomas Green came to Texas from Tennessee in 1833 and fought at San Jacinto in 1836, helping man the celebrated "Twin Sisters" cannons that won Texas independence. He built a long public career as a court clerk and legislator, served in frontier Indian campaigns and the Mexican War, then rose to prominence as a Confederate cavalry commander. Leading the 5th Texas Cavalry and later his own division, he fought at Val Verde and in the campaigns to hold Louisiana before he was killed in 1864 at Blair's Landing during the Red River Campaign. The West Texas county where this marker stands bears his name.

Clinton, CT

The words carved here echo the most solemn line in American commemoration — the inscription of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, dedicated in 1921 to a nameless serviceman brought home from the battlefields of the First World War. The phrase 'known but to God,' borrowed from Rudyard Kipling's epitaph for the unidentified war dead, gave a nation a way to grieve the countless soldiers who fell without their names ever being recovered. Across the country, towns raised their own memorials in that same spirit, turning a distant tomb in Virginia into a place of remembrance on the village green. This monument in Clinton stands in that tradition, honoring the anonymous dead who gave everything and asked for no recognition in return.

Newcastle, TX

During the Civil War the Tonkawa people allied themselves with Texans, serving as scouts along the frontier defense line from the Red River to the Rio Grande and watching for both hostile raiders and Federal incursion. Commanders prized their skill so highly they sometimes fed the scouts at personal expense. The Tonkawa paid dearly for that loyalty: in October 1862 a devastating attack on their camp near present Anadarko killed 137 of about 300 people, and the survivors were later resettled near Fort Griffin before removal to Oklahoma in 1884.

Stockdale, TX

Fletcher S. Stockdale, a Kentucky-trained lawyer who came to Texas in the 1840s, rose through railroads and the state senate to sit on the committee that drafted Texas's Ordinance of Secession. He served the Confederacy as a military aide and staff officer and, as lieutenant governor, became the last governor of Confederate Texas in 1865 when Pendleton Murrah fled to Mexico. After the war he pioneered refrigerated shipping of Texas beef and helped lead the 1875 constitutional convention.

Bryan, TX

William Joel Bryan came to Texas in 1831 as a grandson of Moses Austin and nephew of Stephen F. Austin, placing him at the center of the family that founded Anglo Texas. He fought in the 1835 Battle of Bexar during the Texas Revolution and, upon Stephen F. Austin's death in 1836, inherited leadership of the influential Austin-Bryan clan. A lifelong planter near Peach Point, he later donated the land for the town of Bryan, which became the seat of Brazos County in 1866.

Calvert, TX

Calvert began as "Sterling" in Sterling C. Robertson's 1820s colony and became a rowdy, booming cotton-export and trade center — its inscription conjures ox-carts, saloons, and casino tables piled with gold. It served as a Civil War mustering and supply point, then moved two miles to meet the Houston & Texas Central Railroad in 1868, taking a new name from Judge Robert Calvert, a landowner descended from Lord Baltimore. The railroad cemented its place as a regional cotton hub.

Midway, AL

This granite boulder in Midway marks both the memory of Confederate soldiers and the route of the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway, a named road promoted in the 1910s by the United Daughters of the Confederacy as a coast-to-coast counterpart to the Lincoln Highway. Monuments like this one, placed decades after the Civil War, fused transportation boosterism with Lost Cause commemoration, planting Confederate memory along the emerging national road network. Its placement reflects the early automobile age as much as the war it names.

Paris, TX

Born in Alabama in 1836, Travis Clack Henderson moved to Paris, Texas, in 1856 to farm and joined the local militia in 1860. During the Civil War he served as a captain and staff officer with the 32nd Dismounted Texas Cavalry, was taken prisoner in 1864, and was released in 1865. Back in Lamar County he married, raised seven children, and went on to represent the area for twelve years in the Texas House and two in the State Senate.

Dallas, TX

A Georgia-born widower, Trezevant Calhoun Hawpe came to Dallas County with his young son and won election as county sheriff in 1850, later serving as justice of the peace and coroner. A prominent voice in the county's secession movement, he organized the 31st Texas Cavalry in 1862 and led it as its first colonel, helping secure a Confederate victory at Newtonia, Missouri. His life ended violently in 1863 when a friend stabbed him to death after a quarrel on the courthouse steps.

Clarksville, TX

Tennessee farmer Andrew Jackson Tuggle set aside this ground as a cemetery in 1864, after a mother and infant died, also reserving land for a church and school. Named for Tuggle and the nearby springs, the burial ground took in the area's settlers and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War. Since 1960 a cemetery association has cared for the site, with its Woodmen of the World markers and weathered grave slabs.

Salado, TX

Twelve Oaks is a Greek Revival mansion in Salado, its walls raised from stone quarried on the adjacent land for Dr. B.D. McKie, a Texas physician who served and was wounded in both the Mexican War and the Civil War. Generations later the house was restored by the family of Lt. Henry Clay de Grummond, Jr., and dedicated to his memory as a World War II combat hero. Named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964, the home links three eras of American conflict through the lives tied to its stone walls.

Brazoria County, TX

This Greek Revival frame house on the Brazoria County coast traces the long life of Ariadne Gautier, who came from Florida in 1841 and buried three husbands—one of them a Terry's Texas Ranger who died at Shiloh in 1862—before building the original house around 1872. It later passed to Frank Chilton, a captain in Hood's Texas Brigade, and then to Austin Bryan, grandnephew of Stephen F. Austin, whose family added a vernacular two-story wing. The Weems family held the home from 1919 until 2000.

Fayetteville, NC

Authorized by Congress in 1836, the U.S. Arsenal at Fayetteville was seized by the Confederacy in 1861 at the outbreak of the Civil War and became an important Southern munitions site. In March 1865, General Sherman's army destroyed it during the march that helped end the war, leaving ruins that still stand nearby. The arsenal's arc traces the whole span of the sectional conflict.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 2006

When the great "Grand Review of the Armies" paraded through Washington in May 1865, the United States Colored Troops who had fought and bled for the Union were pointedly left out. In answer, Black regiments from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts assembled here at State and Filbert Streets on November 14, 1865, for their own triumphant review. Grand Marshal T. Morris Chester led them through Harrisburg to Senator Simon Cameron's home, where leaders including Octavius Catto and William Howard Day honored their service.

Monroe Township, OH

In a modest one-story timber cottage in the Clermont County hamlet of Point Pleasant, the future general and eighteenth president of the United States entered the world in the spring of 1822, the first child of a tanner and his wife who had settled along the Ohio River only a year before. Named Hiram Ulysses at birth, the boy would grow up around his father's tannery trade before a clerical error at West Point permanently rechristened him with the initials that history remembers. The Ohio frontier of these years was a rising country of river commerce and small industry, and this humble house marks the starting point of one of the most consequential American lives of the nineteenth century.

Columbus, OH

During the Civil War, Columbus and its Capitol Square were a hub of the Union war effort, ringed by army camps where Ohio regiments were mustered and paid. Ohio sent nearly 320,000 men to the Union army and lost more than 35,000, but its most decisive contribution may have been leadership: Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and McPherson, along with cabinet officers Stanton and Chase, were all Ohioans. Their generalship and statecraft helped steer the Union to victory.

Chicago, IL

This boulder commemorates a tree planted by Ulysses S. Grant on December 6, 1879, shortly after the Civil War hero and former president returned from his celebrated two-year tour around the world. Grant, who led the Union armies to victory and served two terms in the White House, was greeted by adoring crowds on his homecoming. The simple planting captured the public's enduring affection for one of the era's most famous Americans.

Hempstead, TX

During the Civil War, the rail junction near Hempstead anchored several Confederate facilities, including Camp Groce, a prisoner-of-war stockade on Leonard Waller Groce's plantation. Union prisoners who died in captivity — many during a devastating 1864 yellow fever epidemic — were buried on the neighboring McDade Plantation. Union prisoner Aaron T. Sutton recorded more than 100 fresh graves here before his escape and long journey on foot to Beaumont; by the 1940s, land-clearing erased all surface trace of the cemetery.

Somerville, MA

During the Civil War, towns across the North set up recruiting stands to enlist local men into the Union Army, and Somerville was no exception. This spot in front of the building marked one such recruiting station, where volunteers signed up to serve in the great struggle to preserve the Union. Massachusetts was an early and enthusiastic supplier of troops, and neighborhood recruiting sites like this one turned ordinary street corners into gateways to the front lines.

Bellefonte, PA · est. 1992

Chartered in 1856 on ground already used for burials since 1808, this Bellefonte cemetery became the resting place of an unusual concentration of political power. Three Pennsylvania governors and their wives lie here, spanning the Civil War through the Gilded Age. Chief among them is Andrew Gregg Curtin, the wartime governor who mobilized the commonwealth for the Union.

Cooper, TX

Old Union Cemetery served the farm and ranch communities of Gough, Yowell, and Antioch, with its earliest recorded burial dating to W.H. Henderson in 1859. Among its more than ninety marked graves, arranged in family plots, lie many of the area's first settlers and at least three Civil War veterans — T.J. Hollon, Hiram G. Wynn, and T.J. Craig. The last burial came in 1946, and a cemetery association formed the next year to tend the grounds.

Riverside, CA

On July 1, 1929, Auxiliary No. 4 to the Sons of Union Veterans planted these trees in memory of the Union soldiers of the Civil War. Six decades after Appomattox, the descendants and heirs of the Grand Army of the Republic sought a living tribute to the men who had fought to preserve the Union. The grove is an act of remembrance rooted in the culture of Civil War commemoration that shaped early-20th-century America.

Plymouth, NC

The main line of Union defenses during the Battle of Plymouth ran across the road at this point from April 17 to 20, 1864. Dug earthworks like these, bristling with artillery, were meant to hold the river town against any land approach. They were ultimately overrun when Confederate forces pressed the assault on all sides.

Jacksonville, TX

This East Texas burial ground began in 1868 with the grave of Mary Ann Patton, first wife of John F. Patton—a Jacksonville postmaster and Confederate officer of the recent Civil War. In 1871 Patton deeded the surrounding land to a combined Union School and Church, and the cemetery has remained in continuous use ever since, sustained by community gifts. It endures as a record of the pioneer families who settled Cherokee County in the Reconstruction years.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2004

Founded in 1862 amid the Civil War, the Union League of Philadelphia began as a patriotic society rallying support behind President Lincoln and the cause of preserving the Union. Its members recruited and financed regiments for the war effort, including some of the first Black troops raised in the North. In the decades after the war its prominent membership turned to political reform and a wide range of civic and philanthropic work.

Hastings, MI

Echoing Lincoln's words at Gettysburg, this monument in Hastings honors the Union soldiers of 1861–1865 and names three of the war's decisive turning points — Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Missionary Ridge. Michigan sent tens of thousands of men to the front, and after the war communities across the state erected such memorials, often through Grand Army of the Republic veterans, to bind local sacrifice to the cause of preserving the nation.

Albemarle County, VA

In the closing months of the Civil War, Union cavalry under General Philip Sheridan swept through central Virginia, and in early March 1865 his troopers entered Charlottesville. Local officials reportedly surrendered the town to spare it from destruction, and Union forces occupied the area for several days while wrecking railroads and supply lines that had sustained the Confederacy. The University of Virginia and the town itself were largely spared the burning that befell other Virginia communities. Within weeks, Lee's surrender at Appomattox would end the war.

Lincoln Center, KS

This monument honors the Union soldiers and sailors who served between 1861 and 1865, the years of the Civil War. Kansas entered the Union as a free state on the eve of the conflict and sent a high share of its men into federal service. Memorials like this one rose across the Midwest as veterans aged and communities sought to fix their sacrifice in stone.

Yorktown, TX

Adolph Strieber, born in Zellerfeld, Germany, came to Texas as a boy through the port of Old Indianola in 1846. Like many Texas Germans who believed the Union should be preserved, he crossed Confederate lines on foot, by stagecoach, and by steamboat to enlist as a private in Springfield, Illinois, serving in Company G of the 16th Illinois Cavalry from 1863 to 1865. After the war he returned to Texas as a merchant and prominent citizen of Yorktown.

Pershing County, NV

Silver drew settlers into Buena Vista Canyon in 1861, and Southern sympathizers first named their camp Dixie. The following year, as the Civil War divided the nation, the town's neutral and Northern factions won out and rechristened it Unionville. It became the seat of Humboldt County until losing that honor to Winnemucca in 1873, and though the ores thinned by the late 1870s, Unionville kept a reputation as a calmer, more comfortable place than most raucous mining camps.

Meadville, PA

In the 1830s the young town of Meadville, one of northwestern Pennsylvania's earliest settlements, raised this temple-fronted meeting house in the Greek Revival style then sweeping the nation—its columns and clean lines meant to echo the democratic ideals of ancient Athens. The roughly $3,500 cost was underwritten largely by two of the region's leading families, the Shippens and the Huidekopers, whose fortunes were tied to the settlement and land business of the frontier era. Its design is credited to George W. Cullum, a West Point–trained Army engineer who worked on the nation's coastal fortifications—among them Fort Sumter—before rising to Union general during the Civil War.

San Saba, TX

The United Confederate Veterans formed in 1889 and swelled after Jefferson Davis's death, as camps across the South held reunions to honor the Civil War dead. San Saba County veterans organized the William P. Rogers Camp No. 322 in 1893, named for a hero of the Battle of Corinth whose daughter and son-in-law had settled in San Saba. Alongside a Daughters of the Confederacy chapter, the camp ran school programs and backed Confederate monuments until dwindling numbers ended it in the early 1930s.

Sabine Pass, TX

In September 1863, Union forces tried to force their way into Texas through Sabine Pass, where the small earthen Fort Griffin guarded the channel. A Confederate battery held its fire until the federal gunboats came within close range, then disabled the U.S.S. Clifton and U.S.S. Sachem and forced the fleet to retreat. Captured Union troops were marched inland to prison camps at Camp Groce and Camp Ford, sharing the grim conditions endured by prisoners on both sides.

Cumberland Township, PA

Erected by act of Congress, this monument on the Gettysburg battlefield honors the Regular Army — the professional cavalry, artillery, infantry, and engineers who fought beside the volunteers of the Army of the Potomac in the Gettysburg Campaign of June and July 1863. Amid a field crowded with monuments to state volunteer regiments, it singles out the career soldiers of the United States. Their steadiness helped hold the line in the war's pivotal battle.

Coupland, TX

Morgan C. Hamilton acquired a large land grant in this area in 1837 and went on to a remarkable public career, serving the Republic of Texas as Secretary of War and Marine and later representing the state as a United States Senator from 1870 to 1877. During Reconstruction he even recovered Texas bonds that had been shipped to Europe during the Civil War. His nephew later founded the town of Coupland on land that had once been the senator's.

Marietta, GA

Marietta's Confederate Cemetery holds thousands of Southern soldiers who died during the 1864 campaigns for Atlanta and in the region's crowded military hospitals. Many fell far from home and could never be identified, and this memorial marks the resting place of those unknown dead. Cemeteries like this one were commonly organized and tended by local memorial associations in the years after the war.

Gilmer, TX

This grave, the first in Morris Cemetery, holds a Confederate soldier whose name was never known. Making his way home at the war's end and gravely ill, he stopped at the nearby William Morris home, where he died before he could tell anyone who he was. He was buried here, an anonymous casualty of a conflict that claimed hundreds of thousands.

Gilmer, TX

During the Civil War, Upshur County became a busy Confederate supply and training center, its factories in Gilmer and Ore City turning out hats, shoes, saddles, cloth, iron, and pottery for the army while a quartermaster depot coordinated the effort. With the men away at the front, women, children, and the elderly kept the farms producing grain, meat, and cotton. The marker also honors Emma Sansom, the teenaged "sunbonnet heroine" who guided Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry to a hidden ford in Alabama and later settled in Texas.

Rankin, TX

Carved from Tom Green County and created in 1887, Upton County was not fully organized until 1910. It honors John Cunningham Upton, a distinguished Confederate officer killed at the Second Battle of Manassas in 1862. A land of cattle and sheep ranches, the county later saw oil wells rise across its range, and its seat moved from Upland to Rankin in 1921.

Spotsylvania County, VA

On May 10, 1864, during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, a young Union colonel named Emory Upton led twelve hand-picked regiments in a bold experiment: a massed assault on a narrow front, charging without pausing to fire until they reached the Confederate earthworks. The tactic briefly shattered the rebel line and proved so promising that it inspired the larger assault on the "Mule Shoe" salient two days later. This monument honors the New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin regiments — including the Vermont Brigade — that made the daring rush.

Galveston, TX

Before Confederate forces recaptured Galveston on January 1, 1863, the Ursuline nuns refused to evacuate their convent. During and after the battle the building's east wing became a hospital treating wounded from both sides, and a mortally wounded Confederate lieutenant died in the arms of Mother St. Pierre Harrington. The Confederate medical director credited the sisters' "noble conduct" with saving lives.

Cumberland Township, PA

This monument honors the 149th Pennsylvania Infantry, one of the regiments known as the Bucktail Brigade, who fought in the First Corps on the fields west and northwest of Gettysburg on July 1, 1863. Facing Confederate assaults near the Chambersburg Pike and the unfinished railroad cut, the brigade paid a fearful price to buy time for the rest of the Union army to reach the high ground south of town. The 'Bucktail' name came from the deer tails the men wore on their caps, a badge of their marksmanship heritage.

Gettysburg, PA

This monument marks the position of Company D of the 149th Pennsylvania Infantry, part of the Bucktail Brigade of the First Corps, during the opening day of Gettysburg on July 1, 1863. On the fields northwest of town the brigade met the advancing Confederate divisions head-on, holding as long as flesh and ammunition allowed before the Union line was forced back to Cemetery Hill. The precise placement of such markers let veterans and later visitors stand exactly where the fighting swept through.