Immigration

City of Poughkeepsie, NY

Statues of Christopher Columbus stand in cities across the United States, many erected by Italian American communities around the 1892 quadricentennial of his 1492 voyage as symbols of heritage and belonging. A monument like this one in Poughkeepsie reflects that long tradition of civic commemoration.

Garden Ridge, TX

In the mid-1800s, German families—Schwab, Friesenhahn, Wenzel, Fey, and others—left nearby New Braunfels to carve farms out of the countryside, forming the village that became Comal. Among the first Germans to reach Texas in the 1840s, they built a close-knit farming settlement anchored by a cooperative cotton gin, a grocery, a blacksmith shop, and early church and school institutions. Some of their farms remain in the hands of descendants today.

New Braunfels, TX

Comal County was created and organized in 1846, carved from the Travis and Bexar land districts, and named for the river whose spring-fed islands suggested pancakes to early settlers. Its seat, New Braunfels, had been established a year earlier and honors Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, the German nobleman who led colonists here. The county's very names carry the imprint of its German founding.

New Braunfels, TX

Comal County held its first court in a clerk's home in 1846 and cycled through cramped quarters before commissioning renowned Texas courthouse architect J. Riley Gordon in 1898. Gordon's Romanesque design, built of stone quarried on land owned by statesman Edward Mandell House, features his signature rounded pavilion entrances and richly detailed masonry. A stone jail addition followed around 1930, and the building has been carefully renovated since.

New Braunfels, TX

The Comal County Fair has been a fixture of New Braunfels since the early 1890s, beginning in 1892 as a fundraiser tied to the dedication of the city hospital. A fair association organized in 1893 under president Harry Landa, and the event moved to permanent grounds along the Guadalupe River by the turn of the century. Scaled back during two world wars and the Depression, it endures as one of the largest county fairs in Texas, still closing local schools and businesses.

Comfort, TX

Dedicated in 1892, this Gothic Revival building first housed the German Evangelical Congregation founded a year earlier by the Rev. Frederick Bauer, part of the strong German heritage of the Texas Hill Country. Its bell tower was added around 1898, and for more than fifty years the Lutherans shared the space with other denominations, earning it the name Comfort Community Church. Renamed Immanuel Lutheran in 1947, the congregation still worships here.

Comfort, TX

Comfort grew from a settlement of German immigrants who arrived in 1854, and within two years they had enough children to warrant a log-cabin schoolhouse with dirt floors and backless benches. After the Civil War the community organized a Schulverein to oversee education, and German-trained teachers like Carl Herbst and Fritz Fischer taught for decades. A three-room limestone schoolhouse with a bell tower rose in 1892–93 and expanded into the 20th century as non-German families arrived and curriculum shifted.

Georgetown, TX

In the 1880s and 90s, immigrants from Austria, Bohemia, Germany, Moravia, and Silesia were drawn to Williamson County's rich blackland farm soil, forming a community that gathered around a cotton gin built about 1883. The 1890 post office took the name Theon, from the Greek for "to God," and social life revolved around a rifle club's dances and contests and a cooperative beef club that butchered and shared meat each month. When the post office and school closed, the gin kept the little farming settlement alive.

Rosenberg, TX

At the close of the 19th century a community of Mennonites settled these lots of the old Barnabas Wickson league, and their earliest dead—Heinrich Reimer in 1898, Maria Klassen in 1899, and children lost to typhoid in 1900—were laid to rest here. In 1905 a non-Mennonite neighbor, George W. Howell, deeded an acre beside the Concord school for a public cemetery. When the devastating 1900 storm drove many Mennonites away, families of German, Czech, and Polish descent moved in and took over the burial ground, whose earliest marked grave dates to 1913.

El Paso, TX

On land once known as Concordia—home of Chihuahua trader Hugh Stephenson, whose wife Juana was laid to rest here in 1856—this ground grew into El Paso's great frontier burial place. By the 1880s townsfolk drove three miles out to inter their dead, and by 1890 the grounds had been parceled into Catholic, Masonic, Jewish, Black, Chinese, Military, Jesuit, and other sections, a mosaic of the borderland's peoples. Among the thousands who rest here is the notorious gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, alongside pioneers, civic leaders, and war veterans.

La Vernia, TX

Concrete Cemetery grew out of the land of James Henry Newton, who brought his family from Mississippi about 1851–52 and set aside a burial ground when his brother Joel died in 1856, though an 1855 grave suggests earlier use. The surrounding community—first called Bethesda, then Concrete—took its name from an 1858 concrete building that served as school, church, and Masonic hall. Newton deeded the tract formally in 1875, and the cemetery came to hold both Anglo and Hispanic sections, with more than 800 burials of pioneers, veterans, and children.

Oxford Township, PA · est. 1947

Founded as a mission in 1730 and crowned with a chapel in 1787, Conewago stands among the oldest Catholic congregations in the United States and the first dedicated to the Sacred Heart in Pennsylvania. Jesuit priests ministered here to a community of German and Irish Catholic settlers at a time when their faith was barely tolerated in the British colonies. The enduring chapel is a rare survival of colonial-era Catholic worship on the American frontier.

Waco, TX

In 1870 only about fifty of Waco's residents were Jewish, but the Hebrew Benevolent Association, incorporated in 1873, gave the small community its first foothold. As political unrest drove heavy Eastern European Jewish migration in the 1880s, Waco's Jewish population grew rapidly, and in 1888 fifteen Orthodox families chartered Agudath Jacob, the city's first Orthodox congregation. From a rented room over a grocery store it grew through a series of synagogues, a religious school, and — by 1966 — a shift toward the Conservative movement, led for 62 years by the Rev. Samuel Levy.

Fort Worth, TX

Founded in 1892 as Fort Worth's first Jewish congregation—its name means "Love of Peace"—Ahavath Sholom raised a modest wooden synagogue in 1893 and, as its membership grew, moved and rebuilt repeatedly over the following century. A Hebrew Institute added in 1914 became a community hub, and its facilities served military personnel through both World Wars, while auxiliary and men's groups nurtured charitable and cultural life. Though the synagogue's location has shifted again and again, the congregation has remained the center of the community's religious observance.

Galveston, TX

Erected in 1870, Congregation B'nai Israel served as a cultural and religious center for Galveston's Jewish community for eighty-five years and was the second oldest temple in Texas. Its most famous leader, Rabbi Henry Cohen — who served from 1888 to 1950 — became one of the city's most beloved figures, a tireless humanitarian and adviser to people of every faith. The building was converted to a Masonic Temple in 1953.

Austin, TX

Congregation Beth Israel was organized in 1876 by about thirty charter members, led by the businessman Henry Hirschfeld and newspaper publisher Phineas de Cordova. The congregation bought a lot at 11th and San Jacinto and built its first synagogue in 1884, and Joe Koen began a remarkable 45-year term as president in 1889. In the 1950s and '60s it moved to a new campus on Shoal Creek Boulevard, where it remains a center of Austin's Jewish life.

San Angelo, TX

Jewish families had settled the Concho Valley by the 1880s, and by the 1920s some three dozen households in San Angelo set out to build a synagogue, dedicating Congregation Beth Israel in 1929. Many were immigrants or the children of immigrants from Eastern Europe who ran the city's retail trade. Fiercely independent, the congregation never joined a national branch of Judaism and served Jews across a wide stretch of West Texas before other towns built their own synagogues.

Waco, TX

Waco's Jewish community organized a benevolent association in 1869 and a B'nai B'rith lodge in 1873, holding Reform services in homes and rented rooms before formally founding Congregation Rodef Sholom—"pursuing peace"—in 1879. Led by figures such as Louis Migel and Sam Sanger, the forty founding families built their first synagogue on Washington Avenue in 1881 and a second on the same site in 1910. The congregation, with its Temple Sisterhood and later synagogue on North New Road, has continued a long tradition of service and philanthropy.

Beaumont, TX

Beaumont's Jewish community traces its formal worship to Yom Kippur services held in September 1887, during the East Texas boom years. The congregation built its first synagogue in 1901 and, under Rabbi Samuel Rosinger, dedicated this larger temple in 1923 — a design by Chicago architect Albert S. Gottlieb that quickly became a local landmark. Temple Emanuel has served the region's Jewish families ever since.

North Union Township, PA · est. 2007

Spanning Fayette and Westmoreland Counties, the Connellsville Coke Region sat atop the rich Pittsburgh coal vein, whose coal baked into an exceptionally pure coke prized for smelting iron. From the mid-19th century into the 1970s, thousands of beehive ovens glowed across the hills, fed by immigrant and migrant laborers who streamed in after the Civil War to work the booming trade. Byproduct ovens built beside the steel mills eventually made the old beehives obsolete.

Horseshoe Bay, TX

Conrad Fuchs, born in Germany in 1834, came to Texas in 1845 with his family and moved into Burnet County in 1853, receiving a state land grant in 1862. He left to serve in a Confederate artillery unit during the Civil War, then returned to build a steam grist and saw mill on Tiger Creek and to run the "Tiger Mill" post office. The fieldstone house he raised in the German pioneer style—with a central hall where his wife taught local children—became the heart of the settlement.

Webster, TX

Seito Saibara, a former university president and the first Christian member of Japan's parliament, came to Texas in 1903 at the invitation of the Houston Chamber of Commerce to advise farmers on rice cultivation. His son Kiyoaki brought 300 pounds of superior Shinriki seed from Japan, and together they planted crops that supplied improved seed across Texas and Louisiana. Though the colony of Japanese families the Saibaras hoped to establish ultimately dissolved amid homesickness, the father and son spent decades advancing rice strains and techniques that strengthened a major Gulf Coast industry.

Brownsville, TX

In 1853 a colony of the cloistered Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament—the order's first in America—arrived in frontier Brownsville from Lyons, France, and opened a school in a bare warehouse, hand-printing their own bilingual textbooks. Through Indian raids, yellow fever, storms, and the Civil War the nuns taught without pause; after a hurricane destroyed their first convent in 1867 they rebuilt a distinctive New Orleans French–style structure that served as a girls' school for generations.

Athens, GA

When the Civil War cut the Confederacy off from European arms, two recent English immigrants, Ferdinand and Francis Cook, set out to build the weapons the South could no longer buy. They first established their armory in New Orleans, but as Union forces closed in on that port city in 1862 they hauled the precious rifle-making machinery inland to Athens, Georgia. Here, along the Oconee River, their works turned out Enfield-pattern rifles for Confederate soldiers, making it one of the few private armories to supply the Southern war effort.

Cooks Point, TX

This congregation formed in 1881 to serve the German-speaking families settling Burleson County, organized largely through the efforts of Anna Duewall, who had arrived with her family only a year before. Known first as the German Methodist Church and led by the Rev. Jacob Ott, the fellowship met in members' homes until it built a sanctuary in 1883 and later took the name Cooks Point.

Castroville, TX

In 1844 the empresario Henri Castro planted a colony of Alsatian immigrants on the Medina River west of San Antonio, and Castroville still wears that Old-World heritage in its steep-roofed stone cottages. Jean Baptiste Cordier, one of those first settlers, raised this dwelling from local limestone with three rooms below and an attic above — a modest but sturdy piece of the frontier. Over the decades it passed through the hands of a blacksmith, a shoemaker, and the Tschirhart family, its shared occupancy a snapshot of how tight-knit these pioneer households were. Restored by later descendants, it earned recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1976.

Corpus Christi, TX

The Corpus Christi Cathedral, seat of its diocese since 1940, replaced fire-damaged Saint Patrick's on land donated by the prominent Kenedy family. Architect C.L. Monnot designed a lofty structure evoking the early Spanish missions, with asymmetrical bell towers, painted terra-cotta domes, and art-glass windows. On the advice of Pope Pius XII, it was named for its host city—whose Latin name means "Body of Christ"—and dedicated on July 17, 1940.

Corsicana, TX

Jewish settlers—many of Eastern European or Alsace-Lorraine origin—came to Corsicana in 1871 as the Houston and Texas Central Railroad pushed through toward Dallas, and they soon needed a burial ground. The earliest known interment dates to 1877, and in 1881 the Hebrew Cemetery Association bought this land, with a Ladies' association forming in 1887 to maintain it. Marked by obelisks and statuary, the cemetery holds more than 400 graves, among them merchants, civic leaders, a rabbi, and an unidentified 1884 tightrope walker whose fatal fall gripped the town.

Moulton, TX

When soldiers came home to rural Lavaca County after World War II, they wanted somewhere to celebrate, and in 1946 Alfons and Martha Pavlicek opened the Cotton Grove dance floor. Strung with colored lights and ringed by a white picket fence, it drew the grandchildren of German and Czech immigrants to hear local bands like the Hi Toppers play polkas and waltzes sung in the old languages. For eight years it was the social heart of the area — even hosting wedding receptions for couples who first met there — until air-conditioned indoor halls and a polio outbreak drew the crowds away.

Shiner, TX

Barbed wire, the railroad, and German and Czech immigrants hungry for small family farms combined to make cotton king in Lavaca County. From August Stephan's first gin in 1892 through the founding of the Shiner Oil Mill in 1896, ginning, cottonseed-oil processing, and rail export drove Shiner's economy for nearly eighty years. The industry peaked in the 1920s with eight gins inside the city limits—four of them on this very site—before the last bale was ginned in 1971.

Mooreville, TX

German-speaking families who moved from Washington County to Falls County's rich farmland gathered on March 4, 1884, at Anton Wittner's home to found the German Baptist Church of Cottonwood. They worshiped in members' houses until building a church in 1888. During World War I the congregation was wrongly suspected of hiding arms despite backing the war effort; services shifted from German to English by 1930, and the church took its present name in 1945.

Hubbard, TX

This cemetery grew from land granted to Parrott W. McNeese for his service in the Texas Revolution, whose son George deeded acreage for a school and graveyard after an infant son died in 1873. Around it flourished the Cottonwood community—a store, cotton gin, and school peopled partly by German families brought from Brenham in 1882. The burial ground holds veterans from the Texas Revolution to the Korean War, including a husband-and-wife pair who both served in World War II.

Cotulla, TX

Polish immigrant Joseph Cotulla came to present-day La Salle County in 1865, and when the town that bears his name was founded in 1882 he donated land for both the courthouse and this city park. In its early years the park served as a campsite for travelers and ranchers, then gained a bandstand at the turn of the century for concerts and lectures, and a miniature golf course and playground in the 1930s. It has remained a gathering place at the heart of community life ever since.

Cotulla, TX

Joseph Cotulla left Poland as a boy in 1856, crossing to America by ship and oxcart and settling into the ranching country of South Texas, where he registered his own brand in 1863. He served two years in the First Texas Cavalry of the Union Army during the Civil War, then drove cattle to Kansas and steadily built a ranch that grew to more than 30,000 acres across three counties. In 1881 he donated land to the railroad for a townsite that took his name and became the seat of La Salle County.

Dallas, TX

Cox Cemetery holds more than 400 marked graves and perhaps 100 unmarked burials, its oldest stone from 1848 marking a two-month-old child. Absalom Humbard, who came to Texas after being wounded and imprisoned during the Civil War, permanently set the ground aside for burials near White Rock Lake, where it served pioneer families—Glovers, Lavenders, Coxes, Donagheys and others who had arrived from across the United States and from Germany. It also served the vanished railroad communities of Fisher (later Calhoun) and Reinhardt before they were absorbed into Dallas.

Fredericksburg, TX

German immigrants who reached Fredericksburg in the late 1840s spread into the surrounding hills and, in 1878, raised a sturdy native-limestone schoolhouse that opened to about forty children. The land came from farmer Mathias Schmidt, who by local tradition won the privilege in a foot race. Over the years the building did double and triple duty, sheltering a teacherage, a post office, a Lutheran congregation, and the community band before merging into the Fredericksburg school district in 1957.

Grand Saline, TX

Creagleville took shape in the 1840s along the Dallas-Shreveport Road, a major route across northern Van Zandt County, and was named for German immigrant Henry Creagle, who settled here about 1847. A school appeared by 1854, and the farming community soon gained a church, cotton gin, gristmill, and cemetery. As families moved away the village faded — its school consolidated in 1941, its church closed in 1991 — but the cemetery, holding more than fifty Civil War veterans, endures.

Crosbyton, TX

This state monument honors Henry Clay Smith — "Uncle Hank" — a German-born pioneer who, with his wife Elizabeth, built the famed Rock House in 1877 and became a byword for frontier hospitality on the Texas Plains. The couple settled at Old Emma above the Cap Rock, an escarpment marking the edge of the high plains, and the State of Texas raised this memorial to them in 1936. They lie buried near the home that made their name.

Cross Creek Township, PA · est. 1950

On the eve of the Revolution, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians pushing into western Pennsylvania first gathered for worship in 1775 at the shelter of Vance's Fort, a mile north. By 1779 they had raised their own church nearby and called their first pastor, planting a durable religious community on a still-contested frontier; the stone building standing today was erected in 1864. It is a portrait of how faith and settlement advanced together across the Alleghenies.

Fredericksburg, TX

Long an Indian signal point rising 1,915 feet, this limestone hill was recorded in 1847 by German geologist Ferdinand Roemer, who arrived as German colonists settled the Fredericksburg area. Settler John Christian Durst, finding an old timber cross on its summit, named it Kreuzberg, or Cross Mountain. Its Easter fires recall both a German folk tradition and the 1847 Meusebach treaty that made peace with the Comanche nation.

Pasadena, TX

As permanent settlers arrived near Buffalo Bayou in the 1890s, the new town of Pasadena needed a place to bury its dead, and this knoll overlooking Vince's Bayou became its community graveyard in 1906. Renamed Crown Hill after World War I, likely for the nearby Crown Central Refinery, it holds veterans of four American wars and generations of early settlers and community leaders. It also became a resting place for Mexican-American farm families beginning in the 1920s, earning it the name the Mexican Cemetery.

Augusta County, VA

Bored through the Blue Ridge Mountains in the 1850s, the Crozet Tunnel — also called the Blue Ridge Tunnel — was an audacious feat of antebellum engineering led by French-born civil engineer Claudius Crozet for the Blue Ridge Railroad. Hand-drilled and blasted largely by Irish immigrant laborers and enslaved workers through nearly a mile of hard rock, it was, when completed, among the longest railroad tunnels in the United States. The west portal marks where crews working from opposite sides finally met deep inside the mountain near Rockfish Gap.

Crystal City, TX

After the United States entered World War II, the Immigration and Naturalization Service ran a lesser-known internment system alongside the mass removal of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. At Crystal City, a former migratory-labor camp became the nation's largest internment facility and the only one built exclusively for families, holding Japanese, German, and Italian nationals seized in the U.S., Hawaii, and Latin America for possible prisoner exchange. Ringed by a ten-foot barbed-wire fence and guard towers, the compound functioned like a small town of some 700 buildings and averaged 2,800 residents; it did not close until 1948.

Cuero, TX

Chartered in early 1872, the Cuero Land and Immigration Company set out to develop more than 4,000 acres carved from an 1833 Mexican land grant. Its founders were men of standing — among them civil engineer and congressman Gustav Schleicher and Fletcher S. Stockdale, who had briefly served as governor of Texas in 1865. By donating land to lure the Gulf, Western Texas and Pacific Railway, the company brought the first train in March 1873, touching off a land boom that made Cuero a thriving railroad terminus and civic center.

Brownsville, TX

Built in 1893, this handsome brick building housed 'La Nueva Libertad,' the growing grocery and mercantile business of Don Andrés Cueto, a Spanish immigrant, complete with retail store, storerooms, a carriage house, and domed bakery ovens. Its corbelled brick cornice and parapet make it a fine surviving example of late nineteenth-century South Texas commercial architecture.

Center Point, TX

Cypress Creek Cemetery holds the nineteenth-century heritage of a German settler community in the Texas Hill Country. Its oldest documented grave, from 1861, belongs to Laura Steves Boerner, whose husband Wilhelm was killed at the Battle of the Nueces in August 1862—a deadly clash in which Confederate forces attacked German Unionists fleeing Texas. Pioneers, children, a respected physician, and even two strangers who died of tuberculosis while passing through rest here.

La Grange, TX

On March 24, 1889, Czech immigrants gathered in La Grange to form the Katolicka Jednota Texaska (KJT), the Czech Catholic Union of Texas, chartered that July with six lodges. As a fraternal benefit society it offered life insurance, financial aid, and educational scholarships, eventually growing to more than a hundred lodges statewide. It remains a pillar of Texas's Czech-Catholic community.

Abbott, TX

Drawn from Fayette County and from Moravia in Austria-Hungary, Czech immigrants became one of Hill County's largest and most influential groups, many fleeing compulsory military service, political limits, and the imposition of German in their schools. Lured by cheap land and rich soil, the first arrivals came in the 1870s and drew others as the railroads opened the region, making Abbott the informal capital of Czech settlement. Neighbors admired their thrift and tidy farms, and for generations they kept their language and old-world customs.

McAllen, TX

Brothers Enrique and Modesto Guerra opened a grocery in the brand-new town of McAllen in 1908, joined two years later by their father Diódoro to form D. Guerra and Sons. The family moved the business into this handsome brick and concrete building in 1912, where it operated until 1964. Its distinctive façade—recessed doorway, concrete brackets, and a molded-brick cornice with starburst and garland designs—still records the firm's name and construction date.

D'Hanis, TX

In 1847 empresario Henri Castro planted D'Hanis, his fourth colony, and named it for a company official. Alsatian immigrants endured great hardship to raise a community that lasted more than thirty years—until the railroad bypassed the town in 1881 and the settlement simply picked up and moved to the tracks. The new D'Hanis prospered by shipping cattle, cotton, and brick, and from 1900 a strong Mexican-American community added to its life.

Northampton, MA

Dominic Daley and James Halligan were two Irish Catholic immigrants hanged in Northampton in 1806 for the murder of a young Massachusetts farmer, convicted on thin circumstantial evidence amid fierce anti-Irish and anti-Catholic feeling. Their court-appointed lawyer mounted a spirited defense, but the two men went to the gallows before a crowd said to number in the thousands. For generations the case was remembered as a rush to judgment driven by prejudice rather than proof. In 1984, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts formally exonerated both men, publicly acknowledging that they had been wrongly put to death.

Fredericksburg, TX

This rock house was probably built by F. Dambach, who bought the lot for $70 in 1867 and sold it two years later for a handsome $450. Unlike Fredericksburg's famous weekend "Sunday Houses," it was a full-time home. Widow Anna Besier acquired it in 1881, added the porch, and moved into town so her four children could reach school—keeping cows across the street and selling milk, butter, and cheese.

Danevang, TX

Founded in 1894 on land secured by the Danish Folk Society, Danevang became the first successful Danish community in Texas. Most of its settlers had first lived among fellow Danes in the northern states before moving south to preserve their language, faith, and culture, raising a Lutheran church in 1895. Despite disease, insects, and poorly drained land, their hard work and cooperation turned the prairie into productive farms.

Danevang, TX

In 1894, at the crest of Danish emigration to America, the Dansk Folkesamfund arranged Texas land for a colony meant to keep Danish faith, language, and culture alive far from the homeland. The settlers named it Danevang — "Danish Field" — and by 1895 had raised a community hall that doubled as church, schoolhouse, and pastor's residence. For generations the Forsamlingshus hosted every sacred and secular festival of the colony, surviving even a 1945 hurricane that tore it from its foundation.

Fredericksburg, TX

The Rev. Gottlieb Burchard Dangers, who emigrated from Germany in 1849 and became Fredericksburg's second Protestant minister, built this stone house in 1851 on a lot bought from a fellow settler. About 1857 he added two rear rooms and a cellar. Its half-timbered fachwerk walls reflect the pioneer German building traditions that immigrants carried to the Texas Hill Country.

Lincoln County, NC

Daniels Church traces its Evangelical Lutheran congregation to 1774, when German settlers organized in the Carolina backcountry. J.G. Arndt served as its first regular minister, with Philip Henkel as assistant. The present sanctuary, built in 1888, is the third to stand on the site.

Darby, PA · est. 1952

Set aside in 1682 as William Penn's Quaker colony was taking root, the Darby Friends Burial Ground has received the dead of this community without interruption for well over three centuries. The land was donated by John Blunston, an English Quaker who founded Darby and rests here himself. The grounds also hold the grave of John Bartram, the largely self-taught colonial botanist whose plant collecting and famous garden near Philadelphia earned him fame on both sides of the Atlantic.

Rostraver Township, PA · est. 1994

On December 19, 1907, an explosion tore through the Darr coal mine near Van Meter, killing 239 men and boys — many of them Hungarian immigrants who had come to America for the promise of steady work underground. It was the deadliest blow in the deadliest month American coal mining has ever known: more than 3,000 miners died that December, including 34 in the nearby Naomi mine weeks earlier. In Olive Branch Cemetery, 71 Darr miners lie together, 49 of them never identified.

Houston, TX

David Grieves was a Scottish immigrant who cast his lot with the Texas struggle for independence, serving in Captain Henry Teal's company at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. That short, decisive fight secured Texas's break from Mexico. Grieves lived only briefly afterward, dying in the raw new town of Houston in 1837.

Boston, MA

David Ignatius Walsh (1872–1947) broke a barrier in 1914 as the first Irish Catholic elected governor of Massachusetts, then spent decades in the U.S. Senate, where he chaired the Naval Affairs Committee. The son of Irish immigrants, he climbed through a Yankee-dominated political world to become one of the state's most powerful figures. His statue on the Charles River Esplanade carries the motto 'Not for self, but for country.'