Civil War

Livingston, TX

Born in Georgia in 1839 and raised on a family with Texas plantation holdings, Isaac Newton "Ike" Turner mustered eighty Polk County volunteers at the Livingston courthouse in September 1861 and was elected their captain. He led them east as Company K of the 5th Texas Infantry in Hood's famed Texas Brigade, fighting through some sixteen battles—the youngest company commander in the brigade—before a mortal wound near Suffolk, Virginia, ended his life at twenty-four. First buried in Georgia, his remains were brought home to Texas in 1994 to rest among his family.

Kaufman, TX

Israel Spikes was an early settler of Kaufman County, where Spikes Prairie still carries his family's name. A Confederate veteran and Mason, he was chosen in 1875 to represent his district at the convention that drafted a new state constitution, riding horseback to Austin alongside John H. Reagan, the former Confederate Postmaster General and later U.S. senator. The 1876 Texas Constitution they helped write remained the state's governing document for generations.

Walnut Springs, TX

J.J. Cureton settled on the Palo Pinto frontier in 1854 and became a noted Indian fighter, leading neighbors in defense of their homes against raids. In 1860 he took part in the recovery of Cynthia Ann Parker, seized by Comanches twenty-four years earlier, and during the Civil War served as a captain in frontier troops guarding northwest Texas against both Indian attack and northern incursion. He later served as sheriff of Bosque County, and the C.S.A. outpost Camp Cureton bore his name.

El Paso, TX

Kentucky-born trader James Magoffin and New York-born miller Simeon Hart both built fortunes in the El Paso borderlands—Magoffin from a trading post at Magoffinsville and his deep contacts in Mexico, Hart from a mill grinding a hundred barrels of flour a day. When the Civil War came, both threw their commercial networks behind the Confederacy, funneling supplies to the 1861–62 Arizona–New Mexico campaign and trading Southern cotton for war goods through Mexico and Europe. Hart's arrangements even helped thwart a planned Union thrust across the Rio Grande in 1863.

Fairfield, TX

Alabama-born L. D. Bradley came to Texas in 1855 and commanded a company in Waul's Texas Legion during the Civil War. On May 22, 1863, in the Siege of Vicksburg, he led a daring volunteer party of some forty men to seal a Federal breach in a Confederate fort on the Mississippi, acting under heavy fire. He later commanded a regiment defending the Texas coast and in the 1864 Red River Campaign.

Sherman, TX

Connecticut-born Noble Allan Birge came to Texas before the Civil War, served as Marion County's first sheriff and then as a Confederate captain, and afterward became a leading cotton merchant. He moved his family to Grayson County in 1874, and after the great Sherman tornado destroyed his earlier home, he built this exuberant Queen Anne and classical revival house in 1896, where the Birge family remained until 1969.

Cobb County, GA

During the 1864 Atlanta Campaign, Union and Confederate armies grappled across the hills of north Georgia in a series of grinding engagements. Captain Peter Simonson, an Indiana artillery officer serving as a division chief of artillery, was entrenching a battery here on June 16, 1864 when a Confederate marksman killed him.

Greencastle, PA · est. 1954

On July 2, 1863, as the armies clashed just miles away at Gettysburg, young Union cavalry officer Ulric Dahlgren led a bold raid into the square at Greencastle and struck a larger body of Confederate horsemen. His troopers captured couriers carrying dispatches intended for General Lee, seizing papers that offered a glimpse into enemy movements at a decisive moment of the campaign.

Uvalde, TX

Maryland native William Benson trained as a civil engineer, then turned to teaching after settling in Brazoria County. During the Civil War he commanded a cavalry regiment as one of the youngest captains in the Confederacy before moving west to Uvalde, where he again took up the schoolroom. Around 1874 he and his wife Felicia settled on this site, living in a log house until their permanent home was finished about 1881, and Benson became a leader in the region's early irrigation efforts until his death in 1922.

Newburgh, IN

In the summer of 1862, Confederate raiders crossed the Ohio River and seized Newburgh without a fight, bluffing the town into surrender with a small force and fake artillery fashioned from stovepipe and wagon parts. It is often remembered as the first Confederate capture of a town north of the Ohio, a jolt that spread alarm through the southern Indiana border country. The raiders carried off arms and supplies before slipping back across the river.

Sabine Pass, TX

When Texas seceded, the Union blockaded its ports, and the closeness of Sabine Pass to Galveston made it a prize for both sides. In January 1863, Confederate Gen. John B. Magruder ordered an attack on the two Union sentry ships using "cottonclads"—riverboats armored with cotton bales. In a two-hour fight on January 21, forces including Lt. Richard "Dick" Dowling's all-Irish Davis Guard neutralized the frigate Morning Light and forced the Velocity to surrender, capturing both ships, $10,000 in supplies, and 109 prisoners.

Vernonburg, GA

In the spring of 1864, Confederate sailors devised a daring night raid to seize a Union gunboat patrolling the Georgia coast. On a dark, stormy June night, boarding parties rowed with muffled oars up to the USS Water Witch, cut through her nettings, and captured her in a fierce hand-to-hand fight that killed their commander, Lt. Thomas Pelot.

Lockhart, TX

John Madison Cardwell came to Caldwell County as a teenager, served through the Civil War, and returned to Lockhart to open a mercantile store on the courthouse square. In 1917 he commissioned this Classical Revival home with its two-story gallery and eleven-foot ceilings, but died before it was finished; his widow Martha lived here until 1944. The house survives as a graceful emblem of a self-made merchant's rise in a small Texas county seat.

New Braunfels, TX

Born in Prussia in 1821, Carl Heinrich Guenther immigrated to Texas in 1845 and became a pillar of New Braunfels — one of its first public school teachers and a leader of the German singing societies. In 1854 he presided over a statewide Saengerfest that adopted an anti-slavery platform, an unpopular stance in Texas; though he shared those leanings, he later joined the Confederacy as a captain. After his death his widow Margarethe carried on the family brewing business.

Winnsboro, TX

Built in 1903 by prominent attorney Marcus DeWitt Carlock, Sr. — a former Confederate courier, political leader, and friend of Governor Jim Hogg — this 17-room mansion was famous for its rare curly-pine stairway and lavish construction, right down to a foundation holding enough brick for a small house. A member of the Electoral College that helped elect Woodrow Wilson, Carlock entertained many high officials here. The home reflects the wealth and political reach of a leading East Texas family.

Gilmer County, GA

Organized in 1834 as Cartecay Methodist in the newly opened mountains of Gilmer County, this congregation built its present sanctuary in 1859. During the Civil War, townsmen stood guard over the building at night to protect it from raiders, and among the young men who preached here was the future bishop Warren Candler.

Robert Lee, TX

Cary Allen Gates was born in Kentucky in 1836, came to Collin County, Texas, in 1858, and enlisted in the Confederate army at McKinney in 1861. He saw hard service — the Battle of Chickamauga, an injury at Murfreesboro, and a wound through the wrist at Spanish Fort, Alabama — before returning to civilian life, raising a large family, and settling in Coke County in 1906, where he lived until 1927. His long life bridged the frontier settlement of Texas and the early twentieth century.

Ozona, TX

Joseph L. Casbeer, born in Lamar County, served the Confederacy in Company G of Col. R. T. P. Allen's Texas Infantry, mustering out at the war's end in 1865. He married Matilda Peacock in Lampasas County in 1871, raised two sons, and in 1898 moved west to Ozona in the ranching country of Crockett County. His grave marker records a life carried from the Civil War into the settlement of far West Texas.

San Antonio, TX

Organized in 1853 by San Antonio's cultured German immigrants, the Casino Association built an 1858 clubhouse with a theatre, a 700-seat hall, and banquet and club rooms. During the Civil War its stage hosted military balls, benefit concerts, and minstrel shows for the Confederate cause, while women gathered there to roll bandages. Over the decades its audiences included Robert E. Lee before the war and, later, Ulysses S. Grant and Buffalo Bill.

Linden, TX

Carved from Bowie County land in 1846, Cass County took its name from Lewis Cass, a soldier-statesman who had pushed hard for annexing Texas into the Union. The county's loyalties turned sharply in 1861: swept up in secession fervor, residents renamed it "Davis" for Confederate president Jefferson Davis, only to restore the original name in 1871 after the war. Its seat shifted too, from the busy river port of Jefferson to centrally located Linden once Marion County was split off in 1860.

Castine, ME

In the small coastal town of Castine, on a peninsula that had seen British occupation in earlier wars, residents raised this monument to the local men who marched off to the Civil War between 1861 and 1865. Like hundreds of New England towns, Castine sent its sons and sailors to fight for the Union, and many never returned. The inscription's closing line—paraphrasing the biblical passage in which Roman citizenship was bought 'with a great sum'—frames the survival of the United States as a costly-won freedom purchased through their sacrifice.

Randolph County, NC

Chartered in 1828 and opened in 1836, Cedar Falls was one of the early textile mills that harnessed the water power of the Deep River in Randolph County. Jonathan Worth — who would serve as North Carolina's governor from 1865 to 1868 — headed the enterprise, and during the Civil War the mill supplied cloth for the Confederate war effort.

Brazoria vicinity, TX

Built in 1861–62, the Cedar Lake Salt Works supplied a resource the Confederacy could not do without — salt to preserve meat for its armies and civilians. In November 1862, Federal landing parties from Gulf ships raided the works, destroying buildings, kettles, and boilers and ruining stored salt. When they struck again the next day at a nearby plant, Texas cavalry and Moseley's Battery of the 7th Texas Artillery Battalion drove the raiders back to their boats.

Rosebud, TX

Tucked into the Robertson Colony country of rural Falls County, this burial ground holds its earliest marked grave from 1874, though at least twenty people were laid to rest before the land was formally deeded in 1901. Most early burials cluster inside the fenced plot of surveyor and colony attorney J. G. W. Pierson, suggesting it began as a family ground; among those resting here are Civil War soldiers who lived out their later years on the Texas prairie.

Village of Roslyn Harbor, NY

Cedarmere was the beloved country estate of William Cullen Bryant, one of nineteenth-century America's most celebrated poets and, for nearly half a century, the influential editor of the New-York Evening Post. From 1843 until his death in 1878 he retreated to this wooded waterside property on Long Island's North Shore, writing, gardening, and hosting the literary and civic figures of his day. Bryant had risen to fame as a young poet in the Early Republic and matured into a leading public voice, championing causes from a free press to the creation of New York's great public parks. The house he shaped here reflects the era when American letters and American civic life were coming into their own.

Corpus Christi, TX

Forbes Britton, a Virginian and West Point graduate, first came to Corpus Christi as an army captain during the Mexican War of 1846 and returned as a civilian to build this classical revival house in 1849–50. He ranched, ran a shipping firm, helped fight for a deep-water channel, and served in the Texas senate, even carrying Governor Sam Houston's word to President Buchanan in 1860. During the Civil War the house served as a hospital for Confederate and then federal forces, and it is recognized as the oldest surviving structure in the city.

Austin, TX

Central Presbyterian traces its origins to October 1839, when Austin's first Presbyterian service was held in Bullock's Hotel—the city itself barely a year old as the Republic's capital. Builder Abner Cook, an elder of that first church, helped secure this property after a post–Civil War split within Presbyterianism, and a sanctuary rose here in 1874. Its rolls read like an Austin who's-who, including Gov. Francis Lubbock, the writer O. Henry, and U.S. Attorney General Thomas Watt Gregory, and its ministers helped found the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Riverside, TX

Founded in the 1870s on land owned by Lacy Harrington and named for the area's chalky geology, this graveyard's earliest documented burial is that of Civil War veteran Barney Carroll, who died in 1880. For more than a century it has served the Kittrell community, which once supported a post office, school, church, blacksmith, general store, cotton gin, and grist mill. A cemetery association formed in 1971 continues to tend the historic grounds.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 1948

Benjamin Chambers settled at the forks of the Conococheague in 1734 and laid out "Chambers Town" in 1764; two decades later it became the seat of the newly formed Franklin County. During the Civil War the town sat squarely in the path of Confederate operations—raided by J.E.B. Stuart's cavalry in 1862, occupied by Confederate troops in 1863, and finally put to the torch in 1864 when residents refused a ransom demand.

Greene Township, PA · est. 1948

Founded by Benjamin Chambers, who settled here in 1734 and laid out "Chambers Town" in 1764, Chambersburg became the seat of Franklin County in 1784. Its location in south-central Pennsylvania placed it repeatedly in harm's way during the Civil War: J.E.B. Stuart's cavalry raided it in 1862, Confederate forces occupied it in 1863, and in 1864 they burned much of the town after its people could not meet a ransom demand.

Hamilton Township, PA · est. 1948

Benjamin Chambers put down roots here in 1734 and laid out "Chambers Town" in 1764, and by 1784 the growing community was named the seat of Franklin County. The town's place in the Cumberland Valley made it a frequent Confederate target during the Civil War—raided by J.E.B. Stuart in 1862, occupied in 1863, and burned by Confederate troops in 1864.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 1948

Chambersburg traces its beginnings to Benjamin Chambers, who settled at this Cumberland Valley site in 1734 and laid out "Chambers Town" in 1764; it became the seat of Franklin County in 1784. During the Civil War the town endured repeated Confederate incursions—J.E.B. Stuart's 1862 raid, an 1863 occupation, and its burning in 1864 after residents could not pay a demanded ransom.

Macomb, IL

This 1929 memorial arch honors C. V. Chandler, who served as adjutant of the 78th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, one of the regiments Illinois raised during the Civil War. Beyond his wartime service, Chandler became a leading citizen and benefactor of Macomb and McDonough County, and the community raised this arch decades later to mark his lifetime of civic generosity. It reflects the way Gilded Age and early-20th-century towns memorialized the Union veterans who went on to shape local life.

Chappell Hill, TX

Founded in 1847 and named for early settler Robert Chappell, this Washington County town quickly became an education center, home to the Chappell Hill Male and Female Institute and Soule University. When war came in 1861, its male students marched off to the Confederate army, and the town served as a C.S.A. quartermaster depot.

Charleston, SC

In 19th-century Charleston, free and enslaved African Americans formed mutual-aid and benevolent societies—groups with names like "Charity" and "Benevolence"—that pooled members' dues to care for the sick, support widows and orphans, and guarantee every member a dignified burial. Excluded from many white institutions, these societies often maintained their own cemeteries, making the burial ground both a place of mourning and a testament to community self-reliance. This memorial marks one such African-American cemetery, honoring the societies whose charitable work sustained Charleston's Black community across slavery, the Civil War, and the generations that followed.

Lorena, TX

Charles Alexander Westbrook came from Mississippi to Texas in 1859 and, after Confederate service in the Civil War, settled his large family in McLennan County to establish a cotton plantation along Cow Bayou. In the 1870s he built a three-story stone home with square Doric columns beside the Waco-to-San Antonio stage road, often lodging travelers there. When the railroad arrived in 1881, the new town nearby was named Lorena for his daughter.

Charles City County, VA

In the decades after the Civil War, communities across the South erected monuments honoring their local soldiers, and rural Charles City County was no exception. This marker pays tribute to the men of the county who fought for the Confederacy between 1861 and 1865, opening with the Latin motto "Pro aris et focis" — "for altars and hearths" — a classical phrase invoking the defense of home and faith. The accompanying language, framing the cause as "constitutional liberty and the right of self government," reflects the Lost Cause memorial tradition that shaped how the war was remembered well into the twentieth century.

Goodnight, TX

Charles Goodnight glimpsed the promise of ranching at nineteen while crossing Texas bound for the California gold fields, and turned back to build a cattle empire. During the Civil War he scouted for the Frontier Regiment of Texas cavalry, guarding settlers against raids, and afterward he and partner Oliver Loving blazed the Goodnight-Loving Trail across the arid, Comanche-dominated lands of West Texas and New Mexico to supply distant forts. A legendary cattleman and Indian fighter, he also founded Goodnight College before his death in 1929.

Orange, TX

Born in Mississippi around 1820, Charles Holmes Saxon came to Texas in 1842 and, after serving in the Mexican War, helped organize Orange County in 1852, sitting on its first commissioners court and later serving as sheriff. He farmed, made shingles, and rode into the Civil War, seeing action across Texas, New Mexico, and Louisiana before dying in 1919 at nearly a century old.

Baltimore, MD

Colonel Charles Marshall served as military secretary and aide-de-camp to General Robert E. Lee, and was at Lee's side at Appomattox Court House in April 1865. He helped prepare Lee's farewell address as the Army of Northern Virginia laid down its arms.

Columbus, TX

Charles William Tait—military surgeon, surveyor, Texas legislator, and planter—completed this Colorado County home after returning from Civil War service with the 4th Texas Cavalry. The house features cottonwood siding and hand-molded brick in its chimneys. It was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1965.

Charleston, SC

The Charleston Light Dragoons were an elite volunteer cavalry company drawn from the planter families of the South Carolina Lowcountry, a unit whose roots reached back into the late 1700s. When war came in 1861, they rode for the Confederacy, and this monument gathers the names of those who did not return — officers, sergeants, and privates alike, honored together as the 'Heroic Dead.' The surnames carved here, among them Manigault and Prioleau, read as a roll call of old Charleston, a reminder that the city's leading households sent their sons into four years of cavalry service and often buried them for it.

Charlton, MA

In the years after the Civil War, towns across the North raised monuments to the men who never came home. This one was the gift of William H. Dexter, a Charlton native, honoring local soldiers who died in their country's service between 1861 and 1865.

Rusk, TX

During the Civil War, Cherokee County became a busy Confederate manufacturing and supply hub, with shops making wagons and harnesses, a gun factory turning out rifles and pistols, iron works casting tools, and salt and commissary works feeding the war effort. It also held Union prisoners and drilled raw recruits at a camp of instruction. Some two thousand county men served the Confederacy, among them Brigadier General Joseph L. Hogg, who died in Mississippi in 1862.

Alto, TX

In 1864 and 1865 this site produced crude kettles and plow tools from abundant, easily mined local iron ore, smelted with charcoal made from nearby timber. The workers were enslaved people who had fled the fighting of Louisiana's Red River Campaign. It was one of two war plants in a county whose ironmaking helped earn Texas the name "Storehouse of the Confederacy."

Livingston, TX

Reputed to have lived from 1805 to 1913, John Scott came to Texas in the 1830s and served most of his long life as a chief of the Alabama Indians in Polk County. He also served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. His story bridges the tribe's presence in Texas from the era of early Anglo settlement into the twentieth century.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2005

Opened in May 1861 as the first U.S. Army hospital of the Civil War, the Christian Street Hospital became a place of medical discovery as well as healing. Here Drs. S. Weir Mitchell, William Keen, George Morehouse, and colleagues studied nerve injuries among wounded soldiers, using electricity and drugs to pioneer the treatment of neurological disorders. The hospital closed in 1865 as the war ended.

Glasgow, KY

On Christmas Eve 1862, the main body of John Hunt Morgan's raiders camped south of Glasgow while Captain Thomas Quirk and his scouts slipped into town for a holiday celebration. Dismounting at a tavern, they were surprised by a patrol of the 2nd Michigan Cavalry bent on the same festive errand. A brief skirmish scattered both parties into the night—Christmas cheer traded for gunfire during Morgan's Christmas Raid.

Jacksonville, TX

Presbyterian minister Nicholas A. Davis left his Texas farm to serve as chaplain to the 4th Texas Infantry in Virginia, sharing a private's pay and rations while burying the dead, tending the wounded, and reading and writing letters for illiterate soldiers. Frustrated that Virginia newspapers claimed credit for Texas boys' victories, he published his 1863 account "The Campaign from Texas to Maryland." After the war he returned to preaching and planted Jacksonville's first commercial orchard, seeding the region's rise as a Texas fruit-growing center.

Girard, PA · est. 1974

From 1852 to 1875, the lakeside town of Girard was winter home to Dan Rice, the celebrated clown, satirist, and showman who was arguably America's most famous entertainer before the Civil War. Rice was more than a circus jester—a public figure quoted in the press and courted by politicians—and he donated the nearby Soldiers' Monument, one of the earliest memorials to the Union dead. His home once stood across the way.

Hallettsville, TX

In 1889 the Hallettsville town council, worried about the poor state of its scattered graveyards, set out to establish a proper city cemetery, buying 4.5 acres from Antonia Kuhn the next year and reinterring existing burials there. Around it, the Odd Fellows, Catholic, and Jewish citizens laid out their own grounds, and a nearby tract became an African American cemetery—a patchwork mirroring the town's diverse population. Its headstones inscribed in Czech, German, and English, the cemetery counts Confederate Maj. Gen. Arthur Pendleton Bagby among its notable dead.

Granbury, TX

The town of Granbury bears the name of Hiram B. Granbury, a Mississippi-born lawyer who came to Texas in the early 1850s and raised the Waco Guards for the Confederacy in 1861. He rose from major to brigadier general, was captured at Fort Donelson and severely wounded at Chickamauga, and led Granbury's Texas Brigade until he was among six Confederate generals killed at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, in 1864. The state erected this marker in 1964 to the general and the brigade that carried his name.

Sabine Pass, TX

Settlers reached this pass at the mouth of the Sabine River in the early 1830s, and in 1839 Sam Houston helped charter the town of Sabine and promoted the sale of more than two thousand lots—before a land-title dispute stripped him and his partners of the claim. Renamed Sabine Pass in 1860, the port became the scene of a celebrated 1863 Civil War engagement in which a small Confederate force turned back a Union bid to seize the harbor and push into Texas. Later jetty work spurred inland ports, though hurricane damage eventually sent the town into decline.

Tyler, TX

Founded in 1846 in country opened to settlement after the Republic's campaigns against the Cherokee, Tyler was named by the first state legislature for President John Tyler, who had signed the resolution annexing Texas. A modest farm market at first, it became a Confederate nerve center during the Civil War—headquarters for the Trans-Mississippi Department, home to an ordnance factory, and site of Camp Ford, the largest POW camp west of the Mississippi. Railroads, industry, and the 1931 East Texas oil boom later made it a regional hub, known for its junior college and annual Rose Festival.

Claremont, NH

Just four years after Appomattox, the citizens of Claremont raised this monument in 1869 to honor the local men who died in the Civil War. It belongs to the first great wave of Northern war memorials, erected while the grief was still fresh and the term 'the rebellion' still common. Towns across New England answered the loss of a generation by carving their neighbors' sacrifice permanently into the village landscape.

Toledo, OH

This memorial gathers the names of local men who marched off to the Civil War between the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 and the war's close in 1865. Toledo and the surrounding Lucas County sent thousands of Ohioans into Union regiments during those four years, and rolls like this one — Abbott, James, and the rest — were a community's way of fixing each volunteer's name in stone. It is less a battlefield monument than a hometown honor roll of service and loss.

Scottsville, KY

In December 1863, Confederate Colonel John M. Hughs led about 200 men in a raid on Scottsville, capturing and paroling its Union garrison of 86 and carrying off arms, saddles, and supplies. It was one stop in a wider campaign of harassment; twelve days earlier he had struck Monticello, paroling a larger garrison there. Such raids kept scattered Union outposts in the Kentucky-Tennessee borderland under constant pressure.

Catlettsburg, KY

During the Civil War, a Union post here guarded traffic on the Ohio River and grew into a supply base and communications hub for Federal forces in the Big Sandy region. In the winter of 1861–62, troops led by Colonel James A. Garfield—the future twentieth president—drove Confederate forces from the area with a victory at Middle Creek. The region was cleared of Confederates again in 1864 by Kentucky Union troops under Colonel George W. Gallup.

Port Lavaca, TX

As Union forces moved to seize Texas's Confederate ports in 1862, the gunboats Clifton and Westfield turned on the town then called Lavaca after easily taking Galveston and Indianola. On October 31, under a flag of truce, Commander William Renshaw demanded surrender and Maj. Gen. Daniel Shea refused; after a 90-minute evacuation the ships opened fire. The city garrison returned fire, and though the streets were battered by shelling that resumed the next morning, Lavaca stayed in Confederate hands until December 1863.

Memphis, TN

After Nashville fell to Union forces early in the Civil War, Governor Isham Harris moved Tennessee's wartime government to Memphis and convened the state legislature on this site for a month-long session. The state's archives were carried here for safekeeping as the fighting closed in. For those weeks Memphis served, in effect, as the Confederate capital of Tennessee.