Military & Wartime

North Braddock, PA · est. 1994

In the summer of 1794, farmers across western Pennsylvania rose up against a federal excise tax on whiskey — the cash crop of the frontier — in what became the young republic's gravest test of federal authority. Here at Braddock's Field, thousands of armed militiamen from the four western counties massed on August 1–2 in a show of force that stopped just short of open war. Their gathering, the largest armed defiance of the national government before the Civil War, pushed President Washington to raise a militia army and march west to restore order.

Towanda, PA · est. 1982

Formed in 1810 and first called Ontario County, this region was renamed in 1812 for William Bradford, the second U.S. Attorney General. Its seat, Towanda, was incorporated in 1828 along the Susquehanna. The county remembers Sullivan's March—the 1779 Revolutionary campaign against the Iroquois that passed through the valley—and native son David Wilmot, whose 1846 Proviso to bar slavery from new territories helped ignite the national crisis over slavery.

Fairfield, TX

Merchant W. L. Moody built this Greek Revival house in 1860 for his bride, Elizabeth Bradley, complete with a well at the rear once used to cool milk and butter. After Moody moved to Galveston—where he became a Civil War veteran and a leading businessman—he sold the home to his father-in-law, F. M. Bradley, for $2,800 in gold. The house passed between two of Freestone County's most influential families on the eve of the Civil War.

Laurel County, KY

After the bloody Battle of Perryville in October 1862, Confederate General Braxton Bragg gathered his forces and began withdrawing southward, ending the Confederacy's bid to hold Kentucky. Union General Don Carlos Buell pursued as far as this point in Laurel County before deciding further pursuit was not worthwhile. Bragg's army continued on, passing through the Cumberland Gap in late October.

La Vernia, TX

Brahan Lodge began meeting under dispensation in 1858 and was chartered in 1859, named for Dr. Robert W. Brahan and led by first master John Rhodes King. Its members had fought in the Texas War for Independence, the Mier Expedition, the Mexican War, and Indian campaigns, and they quarried and ox-carted the stone for a hall completed in 1871 that also served as church and school. The marker is dedicated above all to the lodge's Civil War veterans, who served in famed Confederate units from Hood's Texas Brigade to Terry's Texas Rangers, fighting from Chickamauga to Appomattox.

Hillsborough County, FL

This quiet family burial ground in Hillsborough County holds the graves of soldiers from the Civil War era, when Florida had joined the Confederacy and sent its sons to fight far from home. Small private cemeteries like this one dot the rural South, marking where families laid veterans to rest on their own land rather than in distant national cemeteries. The plain fieldstones and family plots tell a story of loss absorbed at the household level.

Birmingham Township, PA · est. 2001

On September 11, 1777, the rolling farmland around Birmingham Township became the stage for the largest single-day battle of the Revolutionary War. Washington's Continentals tried to hold the fords of the Brandywine against Sir William Howe's advancing British and Hessian troops, but a wide flanking march turned the American position and opened the road to Philadelphia. The Commonwealth Treasure designation recognizes this preserved ground as hallowed to the founding struggle.

Nahunta, GA

Brantley County was carved from neighboring counties by the Georgia legislature in 1920 and named for Benjamin D. Brantley. Local tradition holds that the old Brunswick & Western Railroad running through it marked the southernmost point reached by Sherman's forces, and the marker lists the county's first slate of officers — sheriff, ordinary, clerk, tax collector, and the rest. It stands as a compact civic record of a young south-Georgia county's founding.

Brazoria, TX

Founded in 1828 by John Austin, a friend of colonization leader Stephen F. Austin, Brazoria grew into a port, market, and social center for the young Anglo colony. Here Jane Long — widow of the filibuster Dr. John Long, who had tried in 1819 to wrest Texas from Spain — kept a tavern that anchored the town's public life. Burned during the Texas Revolution and rebuilt, Brazoria served as a county seat and business hub until 1897.

Bryan, TX

During the Civil War, the Brazos County Commissioners Court became an engine of the Confederate home front, outfitting local men with horses, clothing, and equipment and levying war taxes while exempting soldiers' estates. It surveyed the needs of soldiers' families and appropriated funds for their care, and it issued its own small-denomination county warrants that circulated as legal tender. The court also procured scarce goods—powder, lead, medicine, shoes, cotton cards—for resale to a blockaded citizenry.

Hearne, TX

Established in 1863 along a Brazos River tributary and chartered by the Texas legislature, this company was meant to produce flour and cloth for the Confederate war effort. With coastal blockades choking off imports, Texas scrambled to build factories, and planters funded the enterprise with cotton in exchange for the right to export bales of their own. Like many wartime ventures, its output proved small and came too late to matter.

South Padre Island, TX

This narrow sea channel between Brazos and Padre Islands, named by the Spanish, sheltered small ships even as its shifting depths turned away larger vessels—and its seclusion made it strategic in war after war. Texas's warship Invincible battered the Mexican Bravo here in 1836, Zachary Taylor massed thousands of troops on Brazos Island for the war with Mexico in 1846, and the depot changed hands again on the eve of the Civil War. Federal troops landed unopposed in 1863, and the region saw the war's last land battle at nearby Palmito Ranch in 1865 before a hurricane finished the depot in 1867.

South Padre Island, TX

Guarding the mouth of the Rio Grande, Brazos Santiago Pass became one of the Confederacy's most vital lifelines during the Civil War. With the Union blockade choking Southern ports, cotton and war material moved through neutral Mexican Bagdad and slipped into this pass from Cuba, Europe, and beyond, keeping the Trans-Mississippi supplied. The region changed hands repeatedly, and troops staged from Brazos Island fought at Palmito Hill in May 1865 — the last land engagement of the war, weeks after Appomattox.

Breckenridge, TX

Breckenridge Cemetery began with the burial of Dr. Alexander Miller in December 1872, and W. R. Brown patented the land and began selling plots in 1881. Formally dedicated as Oaklawn in 1926, it passed to the City of Breckenridge in 1952 and has grown to more than 10,000 graves. Veterans from the Texas Revolution to the present rest among its sandstone, marble, and granite markers.

Fayetteville, TX

David and Sarah Breeding came from Kentucky in 1833 with their sons to settle here in Mexican Texas, and three of those sons—John, Napoleon, and Fidelio—fought in the Texian army, sharing in the victory at San Jacinto in 1836. On the family's land in 1834, a teacher named Rutland held what is remembered as the first school session in Fayette County, drawing children from settler families for miles around. The family cemetery opened with David Breeding's burial in 1843 and still holds him and his kin.

Lubbock, TX

When Lubbock lacked an airport in the 1920s, civic boosters raised money for a municipal field, opened in 1930 and managed by local flyer Clent Breedlove. In 1941 Breedlove opened his own 219-acre airport east of the Tahoka Highway, complete with four runways, hangars, a café and a control tower. During World War II the field trained thousands of cadet pilots through the Civilian Pilot Training Program and Texas Tech's pre-flight detachment, feeding the nation's desperate wartime need for aviators.

Brenham, TX

Founded in 1843 and named for Republic of Texas patriot Richard Fox Brenham, this Washington County seat became a railhead and supply center during the Civil War. It grew into a hub of farming, trade, and manufacturing and gave rise to Blinn Memorial College in 1883. Its celebrated Maifest keeps alive the folk traditions of its German-influenced community.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 1964

The Moravians who founded Bethlehem built this stone house in 1748 to lodge their unmarried men, and it quickly became a hive of colonial-era craft — a bell foundry, silkworm raising, and other trades that made the community largely self-sufficient. During the Revolution it sheltered wounded Continental soldiers as a military hospital, and after 1815 it opened as a girls' school before becoming part of Moravian College and a museum.

Douglass, TX

This family burial ground dates to 1816, when East Texas was still Spanish and later Mexican territory, and it holds members of the Brewer family who helped win Texas independence. Henry and John Brewer took part in the Battle of Nacogdoches, an 1832 clash that pushed Mexican forces from the town, while Henry Mitchell Brewer fought in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. Their graves record a household woven directly into the fight for the Texas Republic.

Cushing, TX

In 1835 the Mexican government granted Henry Brewer a league of land — some 4,000 acres — where settlers built log cabins by the springs and farmed, raised stock, and mined iron on the peak variously called Flowery, Brewer, or Iron Mountain. Brewer and his son John fought in the 1832 Battle of Nacogdoches, and Henry Mitchel Brewer served at San Jacinto before John later joined the Confederacy. A 1936 Texas Centennial marker honors the family and doubles as a grave marker; descendants revived the overgrown cemetery in 2001.

Bowling Green, OH

This memorial honors the 'Kent Four and the Jackson Two' — the students killed in the spring of 1970 when National Guardsmen fired on antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio and, days later, police opened fire at Jackson State College in Mississippi. The shootings came amid nationwide campus protests against the widening war in Southeast Asia. Their deaths shocked the country and became defining moments of a bitterly divided era.

Bridgeport, PA

This memorial rose in the small industrial borough of Bridgeport, tucked along the Schuylkill River across from Norristown in southeastern Pennsylvania. It was dedicated on Memorial Day of 1976 — the nation's Bicentennial year — a moment when countless American towns paused to honor their own who had worn the uniform. Rather than singling out one war or one soldier, the community chose to remember every local man and woman who served the nation, in peacetime garrisons and on distant battlefields alike, the living alongside the dead.

Chapman, TX

This burial ground began in 1861 when Eli Buckner set aside a half-acre around his family's graves as a public cemetery, and it grew as pioneer families poured into the Chapman community—among them the Reverend J. C. Alford Bridges, who reportedly arrived from the Deep South with ten children in twenty covered wagons. A Confederate veteran, Bridges bought the land in gold and gave it his name, and his descendants served as postmasters and neighbors for generations. Today the cemetery holds pioneers, dozens of veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam, and, in unmarked graves, people believed to have been enslaved.

The Colony, TX

The Bridges settlement, reportedly the oldest in Denton County, took root in 1843 as part of the Peters Colony land-grant venture. This cemetery, on land granted to W. A. Bridges in 1850, holds burials dating to 1855, including many children and Civil War soldiers among its early immigrant families. Deeded to the county in 1889, it preserves more than a hundred sandstone and granite markers.

Campbellsville, KY

Elias Barbee (1763-1843) served in the Revolutionary War from Culpeper County, Virginia — as did all five of his brothers — before settling in what became Taylor County and rising through the Kentucky Militia to brigadier general. As a state senator he championed education for the disabled: in 1822 he introduced the bill, drafted by Judge John Rowan and signed by Gov. Adair, that on April 10, 1823, established the Kentucky School for the Deaf at Danville.

Indianapolis, IN

Benjamin Harrison entered the Union Army as a second lieutenant of the 70th Indiana Regiment, insisting on drilling raw recruits into disciplined soldiers and rising to brigadier general during the Civil War. He went on to serve as a United States Senator from Indiana and, in 1889, became the twenty-third President of the United States. This marker honors his wartime service and public career.

Milwaukee, WI

Brigadier General Erastus B. Wolcott served as Surgeon General of Wisconsin during the Civil War and for thirteen years afterward, overseeing the medical care of the state's soldiers. In an era when disease killed more men than bullets, military surgeons like Wolcott shouldered an enormous burden, and his monument praises a life of service to profession, city, and nation. Milwaukee honored him as a healer as much as a soldier.

Silverton, TX

Created in 1876 and organized in 1892, Briscoe County honors Andrew Briscoe, a defender of Texas liberty who fought at the Battle of Concepción, the capture of Bexar, and San Jacinto before serving as chief justice of Harris County. Carved from the vast Bexar Territory, the county took shape as settlement pushed into the Texas Panhandle, with Silverton as its seat. Its very name links this frontier land to the generation that won Texas independence.

Concord, MA

In the decades surrounding the American Revolution, slavery persisted even in Massachusetts towns like Concord, and the men and women who won their freedom often built new lives on the margins of the communities that had once held them. Brister and Fenda Freeman were among these formerly enslaved residents, making a home near this spot and raising a family in the years of the young republic. The surname they carried — Freeman — was itself a quiet declaration of the liberty they had claimed.

Elkton, KY

This marker notes the birthplace of Benjamin Helm Bristow (1832–1896), a Kentuckian who rose to prominence first in uniform and then in national government. He served as a Union officer during the Civil War before becoming the nation's first Solicitor General and, later, Secretary of the Treasury, where he won fame for prosecuting the corrupt Whiskey Ring. The plaque frames him simply as 'the soldier,' the role that launched a notable public career.

Leming, TX

Brite Cemetery has served Atascosa County since the 1850s, formally set aside when pioneer Thomas Ransdele Brite died in 1859, though his infant son's 1854 grave is the earliest marked burial. Brite came to Texas in 1839, served in the Republic of Texas Army campaigns and the Mexican-American War, and became the county's first tax assessor-collector. Among those buried here are Texas Ranger and Mexican-American War veteran Robert E. Neill and San Jacinto veteran Alfred Kelso, alongside many other early settlers.

Hyde County, NC

During the spring of 1942, German U-boats hunted so successfully off the Outer Banks that sailors called these waters 'Torpedo Junction.' The armed British trawler HMS Bedfordshire, sent to help defend the American coast, was torpedoed on May 11, 1942, with the loss of all aboard; only four bodies were recovered and buried here. The small plot is cared for to this day as a piece of Britain on American shores.

Virginia Beach, VA

During the War of 1812, Britain's Royal Navy threw a blockade across much of the American coastline, choking off trade and bottling up shipping. On February 4, 1813, that blockade reached the Chesapeake Bay, putting the great waterway and its ports under enemy guard. Standing watch at the bay's mouth was the Cape Henry Lighthouse, the first lighthouse authorized by the new federal government, whose beacon and surrounding waters became part of this contested wartime frontier.

Village of Brockport, NY

In the Erie Canal village of Brockport, the local American Legion post and its Auxiliary joined the community to honor area residents who served in the nation's armed forces. The memorial was dedicated on May 31, 1976 — Memorial Day weekend — as a bicentennial project marking 200 years of American independence. Its sponsorship by the Harsch-Crisp-Seaman Post 379 reflects the central role of veterans' organizations in shaping local civic remembrance across small-town America.

Cambridge, MA

David Joseph Brodette served in Company F of the 168th Infantry Regiment, part of the famed 42nd "Rainbow" Division of the American Expeditionary Forces sent to fight in France during World War I. He was killed in action on October 29, 1918 — barely two weeks before the Armistice silenced the guns on November 11 — at just 23 years old. Cambridge answered his loss the way countless American towns did after the Great War: by giving a piece of the community itself, a memorial circle, his name, so that a neighbor who never came home would remain part of the landscape he left behind.

Bronte, TX

This memorial in the small West Texas town of Bronte honors local men and women who served in the nation's wars. Communities across America raised such monuments in courthouse squares and town centers, turning the abstract idea of national sacrifice into a place neighbors could gather, remember, and lay a wreath. The dedication to those who fought for peace and freedom reflects a civic tradition of collective gratitude.

Hostyn, TX

This Fayette County homesite sits on land whose owners were swept up in Texas's fight for independence: Samuel Brookfield bought it in 1835 and died at the Alamo the next year, while his son Francis and Musgrove Evans fought at San Jacinto. In 1838 the Republic's Congress even voted to make this land the site of its capital, "Austin," before Sam Houston vetoed the bill. When Mexican troops seized San Antonio in 1842, the Maverick family took refuge here, and local men including Francis Brookfield died in the Dawson Massacre that September.

San Antonio, TX

When the United States entered World War I, the Army rushed new airfields into service to train the pilots it suddenly needed. Hangar 9 rose at Brooks Field early in 1918 to shelter the fragile JN-4 "Jenny" biplanes that green aviators learned to fly. Among the airmen who passed through in the years that followed was Charles A. Lindbergh, later the first to fly solo across the Atlantic, and the hangar became a proving ground for early blind-flying instruction by instruments alone.

Bastrop, TX

Alexander and Althea Brooks raised this Greek Revival home of native cedar and pine by 1851, in the early years of Texas statehood. In 1865 it passed to James Harvey Wilbarger—son of famed frontier survivor Josiah Wilbarger—who as a teenager had ridden with the Texas Mounted Volunteers in the U.S.–Mexico War. His family held the property for more than a century, adding a carriage house and cook's house by 1887.

Kerrville, TX

In the late 1840s Joshua D. Brown traveled from Gonzales and set up a cypress shingle mill on the site that became Kerrville. This cemetery began in 1872 with the burial of his nephew, and it holds the graves of Brown, his wife, and her family. In 1923 part of the grounds became a veterans' burial ground known as Kerrville National Cemetery.

Brownwood, TX

Brown County was created in 1856 and organized the next year, named for Capt. Henry S. Brown, who came to Texas in 1824 as an Indian trader and frontier fighter. Brown commanded a company at the 1832 Battle of Velasco and served in the Convention of 1832, one of the steps toward Texas independence. The county seat of Brownwood was named for him and moved to a new site of the same name in 1867.

Kosse, TX

North Carolina native Ervin Brown brought his family to Texas in 1846 and, by 1857, to a 1,600-acre farm in Limestone County near Eutaw. The family plot that grew here holds Ervin and Matilda and generations of their descendants, several of whom shaped Texas public life. Their sons served as Confederate captains, and Thomas Jefferson Brown rose to become Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court.

Richmond, TX

Begun as the Pentecost Graveyard in the Big Creek settlement, this cemetery dates to at least 1841 and the burial of George S. Pentecost, one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" colonists. It lies on land granted to another Old 300 colonist, Samuel Pharr, and holds Texas Revolution veterans, Confederate soldiers, and the Pentecost, Beard, and Brown families whose intermarriage gave the ground its name.

Milledgeville, GA

Built about 1825 for George T. Brown by English-born architect John Marlor, this Federal-style Milledgeville house served as a hotel for legislators and visitors while the town was Georgia's capital. Merchant Daniel Stetson bought it in 1857, and his family tied it to the secession era: his son-in-law, Judge Daniel Sanford, was clerk of Georgia's Secession Convention. Later famous as the Sanford House Tea Room, it was moved to this site in 1966 to be preserved.

Atlanta, GA

At 3:30 on the afternoon of July 22, 1864, during the Battle of Atlanta, Confederate divisions under Gen. John Bell Hood struck the Union Fifteenth Corps astride the Georgia Railroad. The eight brigades of Brown's and Clayton's divisions smashed through four entrenched Federal brigades at the point of the assault, the battle's critical moment, later immortalized in the Atlanta Cyclorama at Grant Park.

Tucker, GA

Near this crossroads stood the justice's office of Browning's Militia District, which Union reports of July 1864 called 'Browning's Court House.' On July 18, as Sherman's armies closed on Atlanta, part of Gen. John A. Logan's Fifteenth Corps detoured through here to support Garrard's cavalry as it tore up the Georgia Railroad near Stone Mountain, camping that night at Henderson's Mill.

Comfort, TX

This burial ground served Brownsboro, a Hill Country community first settled by shinglemakers, then farmers, and later railroad workers. Thomas and Sarah Manning gave land for a cemetery and church in 1870, with the earliest recorded burial in 1877; among those interred are five Civil War veterans. As the town faded and floods took their toll, the cemetery outlasted the community it once served.

Brownsville, PA · est. 1946

Long before it was Brownsville, this bluff above the Monongahela was called Redstone Old Fort. The Ohio Company built a storehouse here in 1754, and Fort Burd rose in 1759 during the struggle for the Ohio country. The site sat astride a succession of great routes west — Nemacolin's Trail, Burd's Road, and eventually the National Road.

Brownsville, TX

For nearly a century the ferries — the chalans — knit Brownsville to Matamoros across the Rio Grande, carrying everyone from retreating Mexican generals after San Jacinto to Confederate cotton dodging the Union blockade. Charles Stillman's operations dominated the crossings from the 1840s, and in the 1880s a plank boardwalk sprang up from the railroad to the dock, soon lined with shops for the crowds of travelers. The international bridges of 1910 and 1928 finally made the boats — and the boardwalk that grew up around them — obsolete.

Brownsville, TX

During the Civil War, Brownsville became the Confederacy's crucial back door to the world. With the Union blockading Southern ports, cotton rolled down the "cotton road" to the Rio Grande and across to the neutral Mexican port of Bagdad, returning as European war material. Federal forces seized the town in November 1863 after Confederates burned Fort Brown and their stores, but Southern troops retook it in July 1864, restoring its role as a lifeline for the Confederacy west of the Mississippi.

Commerce, TX

The first American Legion post in Texas was chartered at Commerce in 1919, the very year the veterans' organization was founded nationally. Moved to act by the funeral of a local soldier who had served in the First World War, a town doctor led the effort, and the post was named for the first Commerce man to die in that war. It went on to prominence at the state and national levels.

Gilmer, TX

Brumley Crossroads Cemetery sits near the old Cherokee Trace and the Jefferson-Quitman Road, routes that carried early settlers into Upshur County. The Mt. Gilead Primitive Baptist Church, organized in 1848, founded the burial ground, whose oldest legible stone marks the infant Muzado Harriss. Weathered fieldstones, ironstone, and later granite markers trace generations of pioneer families and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Brunswick, MD

This memorial in Brunswick, a Maryland railroad town that grew up around the Baltimore & Ohio's sprawling rail yards, honors the community's veterans of every generation. Its inscription deliberately pairs "peace and war" — recognizing not only those who served in combat but also those who wore the uniform during peacetime and stood ready. Small towns across America raised such memorials on courthouse lawns and in town squares, turning a shared sense of duty into a permanent civic landmark.

Brunswick, GA

During World War II, the J. A. Jones Construction Company's Brunswick shipyard employed more than 16,000 men and women who built 99 steel 'Liberty Ships' between 1942 and 1944. Turning out roughly four of the 447-foot cargo and troop carriers each month, the workers once built seven in a single December as the Battle of the Bulge raged in Europe. Their ships helped keep the Allied supply lines open.

Leon County, TX

The Yarborough family left South Carolina by way of Alabama and settled in eastern Leon County in the 1850s, and their five sons all served the Confederacy during the Civil War. Two brothers, Wade Hampton and William Burns Yarborough, bought 186 acres in the Brushy area in 1883, where Wade set aside three acres for a Primitive Baptist church and cemetery that doubled as a one-room school. Fire claimed the sanctuary in the 1920s, but the burial ground endured.

Bryan, TX

Rising from displaced farmland in 1942, Bryan Army Air Field became a key World War II training ground—home to the nation's only instrument-instructor school for a time, more than a thousand Women Airforce Service Pilots, and a segregated corps of African American servicemen. From here Col. Joseph Duckworth made the first intentional flight into a hurricane in 1943. Reactivated for the Korean War as a racially integrated jet-training base, it trained Tuskegee airmen, foreign pilots, and future astronauts before its land became part of Texas A&M University.

Pembroke, GA

This marker commemorates Jonathan Bryan (1708-1788), the planter, patriot, and public leader for whom Bryan County is named, honoring him as a founder and 'father' of Georgia. It was placed in 1991 by the Adam Brinson I Chapter of the National Society, Colonial Dames of the Seventeenth Century.

Pitt County, NC

Bryan Grimes rose to major general in the Confederate Army, and his war carried him from the 1862 Peninsula Campaign to the final stand at Appomattox in 1865, where his troops reportedly fired some of the last shots. His family plantation, "Grimesland," stood on this ground. He returned to farming here after the war.

Liberty, TX

This family burial ground holds many of Liberty County's founding figures, including Luke Bryan, a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto who later served as county sheriff, and his brother Pryor Bryan, who fought in the Texas Revolution and the Civil War. Also resting here are Confederate captain and publisher Watson D. Williams, the businessman Isaiah C. Day for whom Dayton is named, and a remarkable cast of writers, musicians, judges, and benefactors whose lives stretch from the Republic of Texas into the twentieth century.

Brokenstraw Township, PA · est. 1947

Buckaloons stood at the meeting of Brokenstraw Creek and the Allegheny River, a site so long inhabited that excavated burial mounds attest to its deep antiquity. In 1749 the French officer Céloron de Blainville passed through on his expedition to claim the Ohio Valley, and in 1779 the village was destroyed during Colonel Daniel Brodhead's Revolutionary War campaign against the Seneca. Its story spans centuries of Native life along these rivers.