Military & Wartime

Pinehill, TX

John S. Buckner brought his family from Georgia to settle this Rusk County area before 1850, and was among the first laid to rest in the family burial ground in 1870. Both his sons served the Confederacy — Arthur Washington Buckner was at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, when Lee surrendered, then returned to run a sawmill, store, and cotton gin at Pinehill. His daughter May Buckner Hillin later led the women of Pinehill to smash the whiskey containers of a drugstore after an 1892 stabbing, an axe-wielding echo of the temperance crusade.

Timpson, TX

This burial ground has served the Buena Vista community since it organized in 1848, on land donated by South Carolina native Joseph Penn Burns. Its earliest marked grave dates to 1851, and those interred include early merchants and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the War of 1812. When the railroad bypassed Buena Vista in the 1880s and the town faded, the cemetery endured as the community's lasting landmark.

Buffalo Township, IL

This marker recalls the killing of William Durley on May 19, 1832, when he was ambushed near Buffalo Grove while carrying dispatches between American officers during the Black Hawk War. That conflict pitted the U.S. and its militia against Sauk and Fox people led by Black Hawk, who sought to return to homelands east of the Mississippi. The war brought violence across northern Illinois and hastened Native removal from the region.

Morton, TX

In the summer of 1877, troopers of Company A, 10th Cavalry—the African American Buffalo Soldiers who helped guard the Texas frontier—set out from their posts to pursue a Comanche party across the arid Llano Estacado. The Comanches drew the column away from every water hole, and after days in the heat Capt. Nicholas Nolan led his parched men and animals back toward Double Lakes, having gone 86 hours without water. Four soldiers who wandered off in a desperate search for water never came back.

Buffalo Springs, TX

Known as early as 1849 and used by buffalo hunters, Buffalo Springs was briefly chosen in 1867 as the site of a permanent U.S. Army post, only to be abandoned within months for want of water and timber in favor of Fort Richardson. It then served as a stage stand and campground between that fort and Fort Sill. In July 1874 it was the scene of a fight between Indians and a company of Texas Rangers under Captain George W. Stevens.

Buffalo Springs, TX

During the Civil War, Buffalo Springs stood in a thin line of sentry forts guarding the Red River and the exposed North Texas frontier from 1861 to 1865. Cavalry manned it at intervals — notably when 3,000 Federal troops massed to the north in Indian Territory in 1864 — while enduring chronic shortages of guns, food, and horses. Frontier families "forted up" here in a fortified square of picket houses, posting guards on wood- and water-gathering parties until a water famine forced them out in 1862.

San Antonio, TX

Dedicated in 1930 as the Army Air Corps' 'West Point of the Air,' Randolph Field consolidated flight training near San Antonio, and its 1931 administration building—Building 100—became instantly famous. Cadets nicknamed the tower-topped structure 'The Taj Mahal' for its exotic silhouette, which hides a 500,000-gallon water tank and an 1,100-seat theater. Designed by architect Atlee B. Ayres, it starred in aviation films and came to symbolize the rise of American air power.

Marfa, TX

Built in 1920, Building 98 served as the Officers Club and Bachelor Officers Quarters for Fort D.A. Russell near Marfa. In the final years of World War II, from 1943 to 1945, the fort held German prisoners of war from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps — and their ornate murals, depicting West Texas scenes, still survive on the building's interior walls. Its adobe-and-concrete construction and distinctive A-shaped footprint earned it recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Ligonier Township, PA · est. 2003

In the spring of 1759, during the French and Indian War, the frontier of western Pennsylvania was a contested and dangerous supply corridor. Captain Thomas Bullet's party of about 100 Virginians was hauling provisions from Bedford to Fort Ligonier when French and Indian troops ambushed them near here on May 22, inflicting more than 40 casualties and seizing many of their supplies. Such raids on supply lines were a defining feature of the war in the Ohio Country.

Statesboro, GA

Bulloch County was carved from Bryan and Screven Counties in 1796 and named for Archibald Bulloch, a leading Georgia patriot who in early 1776 was chosen president of the colony's Executive Council and became its first provisional governor. He held that post until his sudden death in February 1777, at the height of the Revolution. The marker also records the county's first slate of officers, commissioned in 1796.

Burbank, CA

Sealed on July 4, 1977, by the Burbank Bicentennial committee, this time capsule was buried during the nationwide wave of celebration marking 200 years of American independence. Its makers addressed it to the citizens of Burbank in 2026, to be opened on Independence Day—a message across half a century. It captures a community's optimism at the height of the Bicentennial moment.

Middletown, PA · est. 1946

Col. James Burd was among the frontier soldiers who fought in the French and Indian War, the 1750s–60s struggle that pushed European powers and their Native allies across the Pennsylvania backcountry. From his estate "Tinian," Burd also helped author the Middletown Resolves in June 1774, one of many local declarations of grievance that swept the colonies on the eve of the Revolution. He and his wife, Sarah Shippen — of a prominent Pennsylvania family — lie buried near the entrance of the Middletown Cemetery.

City of Troy, NY

In the booming iron city of Troy, New York, Henry Burden's works harnessed water power to mass-produce horseshoes at an astonishing rate — machinery so productive it is said to have helped shoe the Union cavalry during the Civil War. The lower works forged these famous horseshoes for the army in wartime and for civilian markets after. Troy's ironworks helped make the upper Hudson Valley a powerhouse of 19th-century American industry.

Bastrop, TX

Richard Burger left Germany around 1859 and, after riding with Terry's Texas Rangers during the Civil War, settled into life as a Bastrop tailor and merchant. He bought this newly built Greek Revival house and raised a family here with his wife Clara, whose skill in German 'hair art' reflected the community's Old World traditions. Burger helped anchor local culture as an original stockholder in a town gathering place called 'The Casino.'

Franklin Park, IL

Josette Beaubien lived at the very hinge of Chicago's beginnings. She survived the 1812 Fort Dearborn engagement, married Jean Baptiste Beaubien—among the settlement's earliest permanent residents—and was sister to a Potawatomi leader, embodying the mingled French, American, and Native worlds of the frontier trading post that would become a great city. When she was buried here in 1845, Chicago was still a raw young town on the prairie.

Wayne Township, OH

In the early 1790s the young United States fought the Northwest Indian War for control of the Ohio country, and General "Mad Anthony" Wayne rebuilt the shattered American forces into a disciplined army known as the Legion of the United States. As Wayne's troops marched and camped across the frontier toward their decisive 1794 victory at Fallen Timbers, sickness and hardship claimed men far from any battlefield. Two of those soldiers died while the Legion camped here in 1793 and were laid to rest near this spot, their names lost to history.

Concord, MA

Near this spot, by Concord's Old North Bridge, lie British regulars who died on April 19, 1775 — the first day of the Revolutionary War. As the redcoats searched Concord for hidden arms, colonial militia confronted them at the bridge in the 'shot heard round the world,' and men fell on both sides. The graves quietly hold the memory of soldiers who died far from home at the war's very outset.

Waynesboro, GA

One of Georgia's original counties, Burke was created in 1777 from lands ceded by the Creeks, having earlier been organized as the colonial Parish of St. George. It was named for Edmund Burke, the British statesman and orator whose speeches in Parliament famously defended the American colonies' grievances. The marker lists the county's earliest sheriffs, tax collectors, and clerks from the 1770s and 1780s.

Waynesboro, GA

Historic Burke County, the former St. George's Parish, claims eight Georgia governors by birth, residence, or marriage. Among them were Revolutionary figures like John Houstoun, Declaration signer Lyman Hall, and Edward Telfair, along with later leaders including Herschel V. Johnson—Stephen Douglas's 1860 running mate—and Progressive-era senator and governor Hoke Smith. Together their careers span more than a century of the state's political life.

Caldwell, TX

The land here was farmed as early as 1744 by Native people under Spanish missionaries, and in 1830 Fort Tenoxtitlan guarded the Brazos crossing on the old San Antonio Road, drawing Anglo-Texans who lived off wild game. The county was organized in 1846 and named for Gen. Edward Burleson — a hero of San Jacinto, Indian fighter, and Republic of Texas vice-president — with its seat at Caldwell. During the Civil War it sent troops, cotton, and food to the Confederacy.

Caldwell, TX

On February 23, 1861, Burleson County voters chose secession by 422 to 84, and within days the "Burleson Guards" organized and offered themselves to the state. Most joined Company G of the 2nd Texas Infantry, while others served in Walker's Texas Division, Waul's Legion, Terry's Rangers, and Hood's Brigade. At home, a state-troop regiment guarded local citizens and the county court funded food and supplies for soldiers' families.

Caldwell, TX

When the United States entered World War II, rural Burleson County answered far above its size: roughly 1,300 of its 18,000 residents put on a uniform, many leaving the county for the first time in their lives. Their war reached from the deck of the U.S.S. California at Pearl Harbor—where Somerville's Thomas J. Gary died saving his crewmates and earned the Navy Cross—to the bloody landings at Salerno, the Ploesti oil-field raids over Romania, the Bataan Death March, and the beaches of Normandy. At home, families ran short-handed farms, joined recycling drives, and sent their nurses and defense workers to the effort.

San Marcos, TX

This restored log house honors Gen. Edward Burleson (1793–1851), an officer in the Texas War for Independence, a leader in frontier defense, vice president of the Republic of Texas, and a state legislator. The original dwelling, built in 1848 of hewn elm and oak with a rock chimney, had fallen into ruin by 1917 before being rebuilt in 1964 using the old chimney stones and period logs. It stands for the generation that fought to establish and defend the young Republic.

Burlington, WI

Dedicated on Memorial Day 1992, this Burlington monument honors the men and women of the community who served the United States across the world wars and later national conflicts. It belongs to a long American tradition of towns raising local tributes so that the sacrifices of their own neighbors are not forgotten. Standing on public ground, it turns an abstract idea of service into a place where families and veterans can gather.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 1947

On the morning of July 30, 1864, Confederate cavalry under Gen. John McCausland rode into Chambersburg and demanded a ransom in gold and cash. When the town could not or would not pay, McCausland put it to the torch in retaliation for Union Gen. David Hunter's destruction in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. The fire gutted the heart of the town, making Chambersburg the only major Northern community burned by Confederate forces during the Civil War.

Montgomery Township, PA · est. 1947

Along this road on July 29, 1864, Gen. John McCausland's Confederate cavalry rode north through Franklin County. Passing by way of Mercersburg, they reached Chambersburg the next morning and burned it, then pressed on to McConnellsburg by that night. The raid traced a swift, punishing arc across south-central Pennsylvania in the war's final year.

Washington, NC

When Union forces evacuated the occupied town of Washington in April 1864, departing troops burned and shelled it, leaving much of the community in ruins. The destruction came at the close of a long Federal occupation of this Pamlico River port. It was one of many Southern towns scarred as armies withdrew.

Trenton, TX

Tennessee native William Boyd Burns donated the land for this cemetery in 1876, next to the log cabin where he lived as a pioneer settler of the Trenton community. He also gave ground for a union church and schoolhouse, tying the burial ground to the area's earliest institutions. Its graves include Civil War veterans — among them a physician who fought at Shiloh — and generations of the settlers who built up Trenton.

Burnside, KY

This spot on the upper Cumberland began as Point Isabel, one of the small settlements planted by families drifting west from the Carolinas and Virginia around 1800 in search of new farmland on the Kentucky frontier. Its greatest moment came in 1863, when the Union army recognized the strategic value of the site and turned it into a rendezvous point and supply depot. From here troops and provisions were staged for the push into East Tennessee, part of the Federal effort to break Confederate control of that mountainous, Unionist-leaning region.

Burr Ridge, IL

Bearing the familiar tribute 'All gave some, some gave all,' the Burr Ridge Veterans Memorial honors local residents who served in the nation's armed forces. Community memorials like this gather a town's gratitude into a single place of reflection, without singling out any one conflict. They are a fixture of American civic life, tying local identity to the broader story of national service and sacrifice.

Westport, CT

Built in 1740, this Westport house went up when coastal Connecticut was a landscape of farms, ferries, and busy post roads. Its marker records that Capt. Thomas Nash raised it for Zachariah Burr, a member of the prominent Burr family, and that by the time of the Revolution it served as an inn—one of the taverns where travelers, news, and sometimes soldiers passed through. Roadside inns like this were the social hubs of 18th-century New England.

Junction, TX

Founded in May 1919, this American Legion post honored a local man killed in France during the First World War and quickly became one of Kimble County's best-known organizations. In 1938 members built a native-rock home on this site, lining its walls with wartime keepsakes, and added a memorial hall after the Second World War. In 1966 the old "Legion hut" passed to the county historical museum.

Athens, TX

Orphaned young in Mississippi, Bushrod "Bush" Wofford came to Texas in the early 1850s and in 1853 bought 320 acres near Fincastle, where he raised a hand-hewn log house that his second wife, Eliza, expanded with a gallery porch and dog run. He farmed, ran the Wofford & Son mercantile, served as a lieutenant in a Civil War reserve unit, and raised a large family whose descendants became fixtures of Henderson County. In 2001 that family donated the old house for relocation and restoration here as a museum.

New York, NY

In the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, this memorial honors the men of the 13th Assembly District who answered the call to serve when the United States entered the First World War in 1917. Erected in the era's wave of civic commemoration, it reflects how tightly the war effort was woven into local political and community life, right down to the assembly-district level. Monuments like this rose in neighborhoods across New York in the years after the 1918 armistice, naming and honoring the sons a community sent overseas.

Hempfield Township, PA · est. 1946

Four miles north, on the wooded ground at Bushy Run, Colonel Henry Bouquet's column won a hard two-day fight against Native warriors on August 5 and 6, 1763. The victory broke the siege of Fort Pitt during Pontiac's War, the sweeping Indigenous uprising against British rule in the aftermath of the French and Indian War. Bouquet's success reopened the frontier passage west, and the battlefield is preserved today as a state park.

Delmont, PA · est. 1946

Three miles south of this marker lies Bushy Run, where Colonel Henry Bouquet's soldiers defeated Native warriors in a grueling battle on August 5 and 6, 1763. Fought during Pontiac's War in the wake of the French and Indian War, the clash lifted the siege of Fort Pitt and cleared the road for settlers pushing into the Ohio country. The ground is now protected as a state park.

Penn Township, PA · est. 1964

In August 1763, as Pontiac's War swept the frontier and Native forces besieged Fort Pitt, Colonel Henry Bouquet led a relief column that was ambushed here at Bushy Run. After a desperate two-day fight, Bouquet's troops broke the encirclement and pushed on to relieve the fort, one of the few clear British victories of that uprising.

Butler, TX

During the Civil War, Texas county courts outfitted their enlisting soldiers and aided the orphans and widows left behind. They also recognized private 'soldiers' homes'—households that fed men traveling to and from the army—reimbursing them for meals. Freestone County had at least eleven such homes, including one near this site run by plantation owner Hillary Manning, and the Rev. Thomas Castleton organized many more across the region, gathering donations of gold, cattle, and even a hotel to support the work.

Hamilton Township, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, southwestern Ohio sat on the front line of the struggle over slavery — just across the river from the slaveholding South, it became threaded with secret routes north. Built in 1820, the Butterworth family's homestead in Warren County served as the county's southernmost link in that clandestine network, sheltering freedom-seekers who had crossed the Ohio River and guiding them toward safety. Beyond hiding refugees, the Butterworths helped bring the railroads to the region and founded Maineville Academy, planting schooling alongside their activism. Generations of the family went on to civic and reform leadership.

Jackson, GA

Butts County was created in 1825 and named for Captain Samuel Butts, killed in 1814 at the Battle of Calabee during the Creek War. Within its bounds lay Indian Springs, where treaties with the Creeks opened vast tracts—first the lands between the Flint and Ocmulgee, then the remaining Creek territory in Georgia—to settlement. The marker also names the county's first officers.

Crockett, TX

When Stephen and Keziah Box brought their family from Alabama to Mexican Texas in 1826, they were among the first Anglo settlers of what would become Houston County, and the acreage they set aside for their dead became one of the region's oldest burial grounds. The earliest grave belongs to their daughter Dicy, wife of a veteran of the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, and the cemetery later passed to James Bynum, who gave it his name. Generations of the family kept it, and its rows hold veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Korea.

West Columbia, TX

A surveyor who came from Missouri to Green DeWitt's colony around 1826, Byrd Lockhart laid out roads from Gonzales to the coast and San Antonio and organized frontier defenses against raids. In 1835-36 he served in the Texan army at the Siege of Bexar, helped raise the Gonzales rangers known as 'the immortal 32,' and left the Alamo on a supply mission before its final fall, later working as a spy for the army. He died in Columbia in 1839, and the town of Lockhart was named in his honor.

Town of Brigham, WI

On the storm-lashed night of November 25, 1944, an Army C-47 cargo plane flying from Chicago to Minneapolis iced over and slammed into Blue Mound just north of this monument. The wartime crash claimed its crew on the Wisconsin hillside, far from any battlefield but squarely part of the home-front cost of World War II. The workhorse C-47 was the era's most vital military transport, and accidents like this shadowed its constant flights.

Cohasset, MA

In towns across Massachusetts, ordinary street corners were quietly renamed after local sons who did not come home from war — a New England tradition of honoring the fallen where neighbors pass every day. This square in Cohasset carries the name of C. David Strout alongside the word "Korea," marking his service in the war that raged on that divided peninsula from 1950 to 1953. Such dedications turn a familiar intersection into a small, permanent act of civic memory.

Yorktown, TX

The Eckhardt family's mercantile store dates to 1848, just after Yorktown's founding, when wagons hauled goods inland from the Gulf port of Indianola and gold and silver were smuggled to San Antonio hidden beneath potatoes to buy supplies. This sturdy building — iron shutters, an elevator, and walls twenty-five inches thick — went up in 1876 to house the thriving business. During the Civil War the Eckhardt wife kept the store running while her husband and two sons served the Confederacy.

Taylor Township, PA · est. 1968

In the autumn of 1758, during the French and Indian War, the Moravian missionary Christian Frederick Post carried out a delicate diplomatic errand: winning Native allies of the French over to the British side. Holding councils at the Kuskuskies towns from August to November, his negotiations helped erode French support among the region's Indian nations. Combined with the advance of General Forbes's army, that pressure led the French to abandon and burn Fort Duquesne at present-day Pittsburgh on November 24, 1758.

Gilmer, TX

Cut off from Northern and European factories by the Union blockade, the Confederacy had to clothe its armies from scratch — and here in Gilmer, the Potts brothers turned local wool into some 600 hats a year for Confederate soldiers. They were part of a vast improvised war economy: Texas factories turned out overcoats, blankets, shoes, and caps, while housewives carded wool, spun cloth, and knitted socks at home. Even the state penitentiary wove 130,000 yards of cloth a month.

Center, TX

On April 4, 1964, descendants of Confederate soldiers gathered here to open the Texas Civil War Centennial with a living roll call, answering for fathers and grandfathers who had fought a century before. The men honored had served in the Red River Campaign of 1864–65, the Confederate effort that turned back a Union push up the Red River toward Texas. A restored Val Verde Battery cannon was hauled to ride in an eight-mile parade northeast to the Mansfield Battleground, where it fired again and the assembly unveiled the first out-of-state marker of the centennial.

Mineola, TX

Cadwell Walton Raines (1839–1906) packed several careers into one Texas life — Methodist preacher, teacher, lawyer, newspaper publisher, county judge, and finally state librarian. A Georgia native who came to Texas in 1853 and served in the Confederate army, he founded The Mineola Hawkeye in 1880 at the urging of his friend, future governor James Stephen Hogg. As state librarian from the 1890s until his death, Raines built the library's Texana collection, wrote reference works, and helped found the Texas State Historical Association.

La Pryor, TX

Founded in the spring of 1862, this Confederate frontier post guarded the crossing of the Nueces on the San Antonio-Eagle Pass Road, a lifeline that carried Southern cotton south to Mexico and manufactured goods north to the Confederacy. Manned by the frontier regiment under Col. James M. Norris, it was one of a chain of camps set a day's ride apart from the Red River to the Rio Grande. Short of food, horses, and guns and under constant threat of raids, the men here found little of war's glory and much of its hardship.

Circleville, TX

During the Civil War, a factory near this site on the San Gabriel River made cotton cards—the stiff wire brushes needed to turn raw cotton into batts for spinning—between 1862 and 1865. With the Union blockade choking trade, Texans could no longer swap cotton bales for finished cloth and had to make textiles at home, importing scarce cards through neutral Mexico at steep prices. Chartered by Confederate Texas and owned by Joseph Eubank, Jr., the factory was part of Governor Lubbock's push to re-tool the state's farm economy for war, as Texas became a storehouse of supplies for the Confederacy.

Kendalia, TX

George Wilkins Kendall (1809–1867) learned printing in the Northeast before co-founding the New Orleans Picayune in 1837. Riding with the Texas Rangers during the Mexican War, he filed dispatches that made him one of the world's first war correspondents, and his columns tirelessly promoted Texas to readers as far away as the Sandwich Islands. Settling on a Kendall County sheep range, he produced wool for Confederate uniforms and blankets during the Civil War while fighting Comanches, fires, and freezes to keep his flocks.

Cherokee County, TX

This site once held some of the more than 3,000 Union soldiers captured at the Battle of Mansfield, Louisiana, on April 8, 1864, when Confederate forces turned back the Federal Red River Campaign aimed at invading Texas. Overflow from Camp Ford at Tyler—the largest prisoner-of-war camp west of the Mississippi—these men were part of the vast logistical problem of holding captives in a resource-thin corner of the Confederacy. The marker anchors one node in a network of Texas prison camps far from the war's famous battlefields.

Lometa, TX

West of here on the Colorado River, brine springs long used by Native people as a healing resort were turned to industry during the Civil War. Workers pumped brine with a horse-driven lift onto a forty-foot scaffold, where cedar boughs concentrated it before iron kettles boiled it down—about one bushel of salt from fifty of brine. The salt supplied the Confederate army's men, cavalry horses, and mule teams, along with ranch and table needs.

Buchanan Dam, TX

During the Civil War, brine welling up from ancient Cambrian sea deposits fed a salt works between Tow Valley and Old Bluffton, where a day's boiling in a hundred 250-gallon iron kettles yielded twenty to thirty bushels. The precious salt cured meat and hides, seasoned tables, and fed cavalry horses across a Texas cut off from coastal supply. The busy site also hosted Llano County's first district court and a nearby stagecoach stop before Lake Buchanan drowned it in 1935.

Concan, TX

During the Civil War the Confederacy was chronically short of gunpowder, and inventive locals turned to whatever nitrate sources they could find. Here in the Texas Hill Country, workers mined the deep deposits of bat guano inside a vast limestone cave, extracting saltpetre — the essential ingredient of black powder — and combining it with sulphur and charcoal. A narrow-gauge railway with mule-drawn cars carried the diggings out of chambers so large that one room measured hundreds of feet across, with the mules themselves stabled underground.

Concord, NC

Erected in memory of the Confederate dead of Cabarrus County, this monument marks the years 1861–1865 with the solemn language of granite, marble, and the cypress branch, an old emblem of mourning. Like hundreds of courthouse-square monuments across the South, it was raised by a community determined to honor its war dead and to shape how the Civil War would be remembered. It stands today as both a memorial and a document of that memory.

Ingram, TX

Alabama native Guilford Marion Cade served as a doctor in the Confederate Army before moving to Texas in 1865 and, in 1883, bringing his family to Kerr County. After a storm destroyed the family's log cabin, his son built a frame house, and in the early 1930s a grandson and great-grandson raised this two-story stone house on a high hill — its irregular rubble masonry doubling as a demonstration model for the builder's carpentry clients.

Town of Highlands, NY

This monument at West Point sets in stone the Cadet Honor Code of the United States Military Academy: that a cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do. The academy, founded on the Hudson in 1802, built its reputation on binding future officers to a standard of integrity as demanding as its training in arms. The code's stark simplicity has made it a defining creed for generations of graduates.

Canton, TX

Georgia-born Cadwell Walton Raines came to Texas in 1858 and served in R.M. Gano's Texas Cavalry during the Civil War before turning to teaching, law, and journalism. As Van Zandt County judge he was caught up in the county's turbulent 1877 County Seat War, and he later published newspapers in several East Texas towns. Appointed State Librarian in 1891 by his friend Governor James Stephen Hogg, he rebuilt the neglected library and assembled its foundational collection of Texana before his death in 1906.