Military & Wartime

Kennedy Township, PA

This community monument in Kennedy Township honors the ordinary residents who gave their time and labor to keep local life running — the volunteer firefighters, first responders, civic clubs, and neighbors whose unpaid service built and sustained the small industrial towns of Allegheny County along the Ohio River. Such tributes reflect a deep American tradition of civic voluntarism, where the strength of a community rested not on paid officials but on the willingness of its people to pitch in. In the mill towns west of Pittsburgh, that spirit of mutual aid shaped everything from fire brigades to fraternal lodges to relief in hard times.

New York, NY

This memorial honors the men of a Brooklyn neighborhood who gave their lives in wartime service, without naming a particular conflict. Monuments worded this broadly often stand for more than one generation of service, gathering a community's war dead under a single dedication. They gave neighbors a shared place to mourn those who left the block and never came home.

Canyon, TX

When the 36th Division mobilized for World War II, Company F of its 142nd Infantry was filled largely with Randall County men — including ten sets of brothers and a father with his son. The unit shipped to Italy in 1943, waded ashore at Salerno, and spent some 400 days in combat across the European theater, earning seven campaign streamers. Eight local men were killed and two received the Distinguished Service Cross; from 1951 until it disbanded in 1968 the company drilled at a National Guard armory here.

Snyder, TX

Drawn from the National Guardsmen of Scurry County, Company G first organized and fought in France during World War I. Reorganized in 1924 and mobilized in 1940, it joined the 142nd Infantry of the famed 36th Division in World War II, fighting through some of the war's fiercest actions—Salerno, Cassino, North Africa, southern France, and Austria—as a heavily decorated unit.

Abilene, TX

On July 16, 1917, Company I of the 7th Texas Infantry was mustered into World War I service at Abilene under Captain R.M. Wagstaff, with 139 enlisted men drawn from the surrounding area. They trained at the West Texas Fair Grounds — now Rose Park — before transferring to Camp Bowie at Fort Worth and becoming part of the 142nd Infantry, 36th Division. The unit saw action in France with the French Fourth Army in October 1918 and mustered out in June 1919.

Dew, TX

William Scott Compton, an Alabama attorney, banker, judge, and state senator, purchased more than 3,000 acres in the Avant Prairie settlement in 1852 and built a log home, barns, and quarters for the people he enslaved. The cemetery began in 1855 with the burial of his eldest daughter and holds two sons who served as Confederate veterans, along with descendant George Walton White, a Texas legislator and Baptist minister. Family descendants formed an association in 1983 to maintain the well-preserved grounds.

Palestine, TX

Three Fitzgerald families settled Mound Prairie Creek in the 1840s, giving their name to the community that grew there. Fifteen charter members organized Concord Baptist Church at the local schoolhouse in 1871—naming it for a Louisiana community they had left—and worshipped in successive sanctuaries here despite a 1940 fire, with the adjoining cemetery holding early settlers and three Confederate veterans.

Quitman, TX

Settlers founded the Concord community in the 1870s, and early resident Hubbard Moseley gave land for a burial ground, a school, and a Baptist chapel. Velinda Wood, laid to rest in July 1875, has the oldest marked grave, though unmarked earlier burials lie among the roughly one thousand people from Concord, Hainesville, and nearby settlements interred here. Generations of caretakers and a cemetery association have tended the grounds ever since.

Bellmead, TX

The Concord Baptist Church organized in 1866, and the first burials in its adjoining cemetery came in 1869 with Elizabeth Parrish and her triplets. The graveyard is now nearly all that remains of Concord, a vanished town that once had a store, cotton gin, school, and church. Among the many veterans resting here is Elija Goodnight, considered the last U.S.-Mexico War veteran buried in Texas.

Kenney, TX

In the farmland of northern Austin County, Concord Cemetery opened in 1870 as the burial ground of the Concord Christian Church, its earliest grave holding a Confederate veteran and early settler. Around it gathered the pioneer families—Collins, Creath, McNutt and others—who had reached Texas in the 1830s, one of them serving with the baggage guard at San Jacinto. Confederate, Civil War and World War I veterans lie beneath its varied stones, a record of a rural community across a century of life. After decades of neglect, descendants cleared the overgrown grounds in 2010.

Troup, TX

Settlers drawn by cheap land and good water reached this part of East Texas in the 1840s, worshipping first in a brush arbor by Camp Ground Creek before building a church that doubled as a school. The Concord Cemetery grew alongside that congregation, its oldest documented grave dating to 1878, and land was deeded to it by the Martin family across the decades. Buried here are veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, tended each year in a cleaning tradition kept by pioneer families' descendants.

Concordia, MO

This Concordia monument gathers into one memorial the town's sons who served across a run of American conflicts—the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and the World War that followed. Erected by a community proud of its record of service, it reflects the small-town tradition of honoring veterans of every generation on a single shared stone. The span of wars named traces the nation's passage from civil strife to overseas empire to global conflict.

Corpus Christi, TX

In May 1862, with the Union warship Arthur blockading the Texas coast, enlisted men tried to desert the Confederate outpost at Camp Aransas by stealing a launch to reach the blockaders. Two captured men, both said to be from New York, were quickly court-martialed and hanged near Mesquite Street and Upper Broadway, the only military execution in Nueces County during the Civil War. Local Unionists were forced at gunpoint to view the bodies, marked with placards warning "traitors take warning," and many fled with their families to Matamoros, Mexico.

Marshall, TX

During the Civil War, this Marshall site sheltered the exiled Confederate government of Missouri, whose Union-held statehouse left its Confederate officials without a capital. From a modest one-story frame house, Governor Thomas C. Reynolds directed the civil and military affairs of Confederate Missourians from late 1863 until the war's end in 1865. The governor lived in a small cottage that once stood just across the street.

San Antonio, TX

Part of a 40-acre tract the Spanish crown once granted to San Antonio, this ground was carved into City Cemetery Number Four and, after an 1885 purchase by a United Confederate Veterans camp, became the Confederate Cemetery. Among its 900-plus burials lie noted Confederate figures including Texas Ranger and editor John Salmon "Rip" Ford, George Wythe Baylor, and General Hamilton P. Bee. Later graves of World War I and World War II veterans and of veterans' descendants share the same grounds.

Alvin, TX

Founded in the 1890s by a local camp of the United Confederate Veterans, this Alvin cemetery began as a burial ground for Confederate veterans and their families before its grounds were enlarged and opened to the wider public. Among those laid to rest here are veterans of four wars, victims of the deadly 1900 hurricane, and prominent civic leaders. The graveyard gathers the memory of a Brazoria County community across generations of service and loss.

Pewee Valley, KY

A mile south, beneath a granite obelisk, lie 313 men who died as residents of the Kentucky Confederate Home. Established on nearby high ground, the home sheltered aging and infirm Confederate veterans from 1902 until 1934. Their graves gather in one place the last chapter of a generation that had fought for the South a half-century before.

Round Rock, TX

Brothers Edward and John Hudson were Presbyterian ministers and teachers who came to Williamson County from Arkansas in 1856. Both served the Confederacy as chaplains — Edward joining an infantry company in 1862 and being wounded at Corinth and again in Georgia, John enlisting in a Texas cavalry regiment and serving to the war's end. On a private's pay, a chaplain held services, taught illiterate soldiers to read and write, tended the sick, and carried the dead from the field.

Jefferson, TX

Beginning in 1861, J. B. Dunn's meat plant near Jefferson dressed, packed, and shipped beef, pork, and mutton to the Confederate army, salting the meat in 42-gallon barrels and moving it along the Cypress Bayou shipping route. So much food and cotton flowed out of Texas that the state earned the name "breadbasket of the Confederacy," though the army sometimes complained of spoiled, bloody meat in the barrels.

Bonham, TX

During the Civil War this site served as the Confederate commissary for the Northern Sub-district of Texas, issuing uniforms, blankets, harness, saddles, and rations to soldiers guarding the state's northeastern frontier. At least seven brigades drew their supplies from here, and an army mess kitchen furnace cooked beef, pork, and wild game on the spot. To honor an 1861 treaty, the depot also distributed food to Choctaw, Cherokee, and other Indian Territory civilians allied with the South.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 1953

In the tense days before Gettysburg, the Confederate army swept north into Pennsylvania, and Chambersburg found itself briefly in the path of the invasion. On June 26, 1863, Robert E. Lee rode into the town square—the old "Diamond"—and conferred with corps commander A.P. Hill before setting up headquarters on the edge of town. Within days those same roads would carry his troops east toward the war's decisive battle.

Charleston, SC

Charleston Harbor is where the Civil War began: in April 1861, Confederate guns opened fire on the Union-held Fort Sumter, and the city then endured years of siege and bombardment. This monument honors the Confederate soldiers who defended Charleston until the war's end in 1865. Its inscription borrows the language of classical valor to frame their faith and courage.

Sargent vicinity, TX

In the winter of 1863–64, as Union forces pushed up the Texas coast capturing one port after another, Confederate commander John B. Magruder ordered the mouth of Caney Creek fortified against the advance. Thousands of Confederate troops threw up an earthen fort, redoubts, rifle pits, and trenches near this site, enduring weeks of naval bombardment. No infantry battle ever came—the fortifications did their job as a deterrent, and Banks soon shifted his campaign toward Louisiana.

Dare County, NC

Two miles to the southwest stood Fort Hatteras and Fort Clark, earthen forts guarding the vital inlet where the Atlantic meets Pamlico Sound. On August 29, 1861, after two days of heavy naval bombardment, they surrendered to Union troops. The fall of the Hatteras forts gave the North one of its first victories of the war and a foothold on the Carolina coast.

Frankfort, KY

During the Confederate invasion of Kentucky in the fall of 1862, the state government fled Frankfort for Louisville as Southern forces entered Lexington. Confederate cavalry passed through on September 3, and on October 4 Richard Hawes was inaugurated as the second Confederate governor of Kentucky, with Generals Bragg and Kirby Smith present. The ceremony was short-lived: the Confederates withdrew and Union troops reoccupied Frankfort on October 7.

Scott County, KY

This was the home of George W. Johnson, a Scott County native who in November 1861 was named Kentucky's first Confederate governor—leader of a shadow government in a state that never left the Union. When Confederate forces withdrew from Bowling Green into Tennessee in early 1862, Johnson followed. He served as an aide to General John C. Breckinridge but insisted on fighting as a private at Shiloh, where he was mortally wounded in April 1862, still holding the title of governor.

Rusk, TX

Built in 1862 by John L. Whitescarver and William H. and Benjamin F. Campbell, this East Texas works was meant to manufacture rifles for the Confederacy. Unable to obtain the materials and tooling for rifles, the operators instead produced Colt-model pistols. The inscription notes that a number of enslaved or free Black workers were employed at the factory.

Lincolnton, NC

In 1863, as the Confederacy struggled to supply its armies and hospitals under Union blockade, a medical laboratory was established here under Dr. A.S. Piggott to manufacture pharmaceuticals for the Southern war effort. With imported medicines cut off, such facilities became vital to treating sick and wounded soldiers. The laboratory operated until the war's end in 1865, and its remains lie two miles south.

Galveston, TX

Leon Smith went to sea from New England at thirteen and was a steamship captain by twenty before the Civil War carried him to the Texas coast. Commanding the marine department of the Confederate military district, he armored his ships with cotton bales and, with just two days' notice, prepared the waterborne assault that helped win the Battle of Galveston on New Year's Day 1863. Months later he rode through enemy fire to fight alongside Dick Dowling's men at the victory of Sabine Pass. His ships ran the Federal blockade, trading Texas cotton overseas for the guns, medicine, and goods the South could not otherwise obtain.

Clinton, SC

This monument stands in Clinton, in the South Carolina Piedmont, honoring the local men who served the Confederacy during the Civil War of 1861–1865. Like hundreds of similar memorials across the South, it was raised by a community reckoning with staggering wartime losses—few Southern towns emerged from the war without empty chairs at the table. Its phrase 'Lest We Forget' reflects the decades-long memorial movement, often led by local ladies' memorial associations and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, that shaped how the postwar South remembered its dead.

Columbus, TX

This sturdy brick tower — built by the town of Columbus in 1883 from more than 400,000 handmade bricks, with 32-inch walls — served as the community's water tower and fire house until 1912. Since 1926 it has been owned by the Shropshire-Upton Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which made it the Confederate Memorial Museum. Its dual life joins civic infrastructure with Lost Cause memorial culture.

Austin, TX

In 1884, John B. Hood Camp of United Confederate Veterans launched a home in Austin for aging, disabled, and destitute Confederate soldiers, aided by fundraising from the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Opened at 1600 West Sixth Street in 1886, the home grew from sixteen to twenty-six acres and passed to state control by 1891. More than 2,000 veterans lived here until the last resident died in 1954, and the buildings were razed in 1970.

Wilson, NC

During the Civil War, the buildings of the Wilson Female Seminary — chartered in 1859 — were pressed into service as a Confederate military hospital under Dr. S. S. Satchwell. Like many Southern schools and public buildings, the seminary was repurposed to treat the sick and wounded far from the front lines. The hospital stood a short distance southeast of this marker.

Wilson, NC

The twin dates 1861 and 1865 bracket the American Civil War, and the plain dedication "Our Confederate Dead" marks this as one of the memorial monuments that rose across the courthouse squares and cemeteries of the South. Wilson, a tobacco and cotton town in North Carolina's coastal plain, sent its men into a conflict that would claim hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides. Like most such markers, this one was raised by a later generation—monuments of this kind were erected largely between the 1890s and the 1920s, often by memorial associations and the United Daughters of the Confederacy—to grieve the fallen and shape how the war was remembered. It stands today as an artifact both of the war's staggering human cost and of the long, contested memory that followed it.

Pennsville Township, NJ

During the Civil War, the Union held thousands of Confederate prisoners at Fort Delaware, on a low island in the Delaware River, where disease swept through the crowded barracks. Those who died were ferried across and buried on the New Jersey shore at Finn's Point, their individual graves eventually lost. In the early twentieth century the federal government raised this monument to mark the mass resting place of 2,436 Confederate dead — an unusual act of national reconciliation, honoring former enemies on Union ground.

Franklin, TN

The Daughters of the Confederacy dedicated this monument in Franklin on November 30, 1899 — the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Franklin, one of the bloodiest few hours of the entire Civil War, fought here in 1864. Erected 'in honor and memory of our heroes,' it is a characteristic product of the turn-of-the-century Lost Cause movement, when Southern women's organizations raised hundreds of such memorials. Its inscription praises the Confederate dead in the elevated language of that era.

Baytown, TX

Brothers Thomas and John Chubb established a shipyard on Goose Creek before the Civil War, and when the war came they answered the Confederacy's call for Texas manufacturing by turning it into the Confederate Naval Works. There they built and repaired the shallow-draft centerboard schooners—vessels like the Royal Yacht and Bagdad—whose light draft let them slip through the shoals of the Gulf and run the Union blockade. Thomas Chubb rose to captain and superintendent in the Texas Marine Department, and the yard kept building ships for years after the war before the land eventually became part of the Goose Creek oil fields.

Fort Davis, TX

This marker traces Jefferson Davis's ties to Texas: a Mexican War officer in 1847, then U.S. Secretary of War in 1855, when he strengthened frontier forts to open West Texas and famously experimented with imported camels for desert patrols and hauling. After the Civil War and his imprisonment, the former Confederate president returned to visit the state and its veterans. Jeff Davis County was named for him in 1887.

Pierce County, GA

In the last winter of the Civil War, the Confederacy scrambled to move Union prisoners away from advancing federal armies, throwing up hasty stockades across south Georgia. This site held one such camp, established in mid-November 1864 and crowded with more than five thousand captured Union soldiers before it was abandoned in the first week of January 1865. Its few weeks of existence reflect a prison system stretched far past its limits in a collapsing war effort.

Sulphur Springs, TX

As Union armies pressed into the Deep South, thousands of Confederate families fled to the relative safety of Texas, where only a few coastal towns ever came under fire. Among them was the Louisiana family of Mrs. Amanda Stone, rescued after a road accident by Hopkins County neighbors who shared what little they had — even their last stewing hen. The marker recalls a broader exodus, noting Gen. Stand Watie's family in the Indian Territory and Gen. Kirby Smith's relatives, and the poverty, grief, and dependence on enslaved labor that the refugees carried with them.

Livingston, TX

As the Civil War opened in 1861, an Indian agent trained Alabama and Coushatta men of Polk County as cavalry, and in 1862 nineteen of them, including Chief John Scott, enlisted in the 24th Texas Cavalry. Reassigned as infantry and then briefly to naval duty, the company eventually numbered well over a hundred and spent much of the war building and running flat-bottomed scows to move Confederate supplies down the Trinity River. Wartime governors' correspondence recorded their service.

Newton, NC

Raised to honor the men of Catawba County who served the Confederacy between 1861 and 1865, this monument is one of hundreds erected across the South to the generation that fought the Civil War. Newton, the county seat, sent soldiers into a conflict that reshaped the nation and the region. Monuments like this one, typically dedicated in the decades after the war, became fixtures of the courthouse square.

Higginsville, MO

Dedicated in 1935 at Confederate Memorial Park in Higginsville, this monument honors the Confederate soldiers of Missouri—a bitterly divided border state where neighbor fought neighbor during the Civil War. The park grew up around a home for aging Confederate veterans, and the memorial reflects the Lost Cause remembrance movement of the early 20th century, when such monuments rose across the country decades after the guns fell silent.

Charlotte, NC

For three years during the Civil War, Charlotte became an unlikely center of Confederate sea power. After the fall of Norfolk in 1862, the Confederacy moved its navy yard inland to this rail junction, far from Union warships, where workers forged anchors, propeller shafts, and ordnance for a navy fighting against long odds. The yard operated until the war's end in 1865.

San Antonio, TX

Established in 1863 just beyond San Antonio's limits, this Confederate tannery answered the South's desperate need for shoes, harness, and saddlery once the Union blockade choked off manufactured goods. Its tanners used a distinctive mesquite-based liquor that soaked deep into the hides, letting the works run through the Texas summer when other tanneries spoiled. Alongside it stood a river-powered cotton and woolen mill, part of a wartime scramble to make salt, hats, and cloth at home.

Austin, TX

When Texas seceded on February 1, 1861, its 8th, 9th, and 10th Legislatures found themselves consumed by the machinery of the Civil War—raising, equipping, and supplying some 90,000 soldiers while defending a 2,000-mile expanse of coast and frontier. As the Union blockade choked imports, lawmakers built plants to make guns, powder, cloth, and salt, taxed produce in tithes, and financed cotton-for-goods barter through Mexico. Poor pay and worthless Confederate money left many legislators camping in tents and wagons on the capitol grounds.

Rusk, TX

During the Civil War, the open field along the road from Rusk to Crockett became Camp Rusk, a Confederate training ground chosen for its water supply from nearby Pryor Branch. Here new recruits drilled and veteran units were reorganized and re-equipped before heading to war; some went on to fight at Mansfield and Glorieta Pass. After the Confederacy fell, Union troops occupied the camp until the end of the occupation, when it was abandoned.

Fauquier County, VA

During the Civil War, the railroads and roads crossing Fauquier County, Virginia, became vital arteries for moving soldiers and supplies. This corridor in the rolling Piedmont country between Washington and the Shenandoah Valley saw repeated use by Confederate forces shuttling troops toward the front. The region changed hands frequently and witnessed cavalry raids, marches, and the campaigns that defined the war in northern Virginia.

Hillsboro, TX

Formed in 1901, the Confederate Veterans and Old Settlers Association of Hill County bought 73 wooded acres for its summer reunion, held annually from 1902 to 1924. The three-to-five-day encampments drew several thousand people who arrived by wagon, special train, or auto, gathering around a spring-fed lake, pavilion, and ballpark for speeches, music, and baseball. As the ranks of veterans thinned after World War I, attendance fell, and the association deeded the grounds to the state in 1924 for a Jefferson Davis State Park that was never built.

Bryan, TX

When the Civil War halted the Houston & Texas Central Railway and turned nearby Millican into a boomtown, the railroad afterward created Bryan City—and at least 161 Confederate veterans settled there to help build it. Buried in the Bryan City Cemetery, these men became bankers, ranchers, school superintendents, and early faculty of the Agricultural & Mechanical College of Texas, binding wartime comrades into the civic life of a new town.

Goldthwaite, TX

This memorial names a roster of Mills County men who served the Confederacy between 1861 and 1865, listing their ranks and units across Texas and Arkansas regiments. Several, like the three Trent brothers, marched off together from the same company. The stone gathers ordinary local soldiers into a single act of remembrance.

Bardstown, KY

In the autumn of 1862, the Confederate invasion of Kentucky swept through Bardstown, where General Braxton Bragg's army of some 28,000 men camped for nearly two weeks before marching toward the pivotal Battle of Perryville. The town saw the Confederacy again that winter and the next summer, as cavalry raider John Hunt Morgan camped and skirmished nearby. A night-long stand by a handful of Union cavalrymen in July 1863 briefly delayed one of his raids.

Edna, TX

When the Civil War came, this small Texas county of just 2,612 people sent more than a hundred men to Confederate service — among them a Mexican War amputee who marched on a crutch and a Texas Revolution veteran killed at Shiloh. Their names filled companies of the 1st and 2nd Texas and Whitfield's Legion, while others rode with Terry's Texas Rangers or served as Confederate marines. From this thinly settled corner of Texas, local men reached some of the war's bloodiest fields.

Lubbock, TX

George Herman Mahon grew up on a West Texas cotton farm, practiced law in Colorado City, and in 1935 won election to Congress from the newly created Nineteenth District, a seat he held for 44 years. Trusted with knowledge of the atomic bomb during World War II, he chaired the defense appropriations subcommittee and eventually the powerful House Appropriations Committee, steering federal projects to West Texas. He rode in President Kennedy's Dallas motorcade in 1963 and retired in 1978 as the longest-serving member of the House.

Liberty Hill, TX

Alabama native Sampson Connell, Jr. came to Texas as a boy in 1834 and, with his father and brother, fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, earning a land grant for his service to the young republic. He helped found a church in Milam County before settling in Williamson County as a farmer and stockman, and served in the Confederate army and local Home Guard during the Civil War. This family burial ground, also called Bear Creek, was part of his homestead, its oldest known grave his own 1873 cairn.

Brownwood vicinity, TX

William Connell brought his family to Texas in 1834 and lived through its most formative decades, serving in the Republic of Texas Army, the Texas Rangers, and later the Confederate Army. The cemetery that bears his name—thought to be among the oldest in Brown County—was likely in use before 1861, and when the Connells buried their son in 1866 they set what is believed to be its first headstone. Sixteen families and more than twenty unmarked graves lie here, a quiet record of the pioneers who settled this frontier.

Pierce County, WA

In the autumn of 1855, as war flared between settlers and Native nations across Washington Territory, a party traveling from Camp Naches toward Fort Steilacoom was ambushed near this ground on October 31. Two of the seven men were killed in the fighting. The Washington State Historical Society erected this memorial in 1924 to mark the site of the clash during the Puget Sound Indian War.

Corsicana, TX

Thomas Conner brought his family from Illinois to this part of Navarro County in 1856, and his son Edward bought 164 acres here in 1873. Family tradition holds that burials predate the first recorded interment of 1882, the year Edward formally set the cemetery aside. It has chiefly served the extended Conner family and holds the graves of at least four Confederate veterans, cared for today by the family's descendants.

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.

Fort Worth, TX

As the United States geared up for World War II, the War Department pushed for brand-new defense plants, and Fort Worth's Chamber of Commerce landed one by courting Consolidated Vultee (Convair). Ground broke here in April 1941, and the first B-24 Liberator rolled off the line just a year later—100 days ahead of schedule. At peak, 32,000 workers built more than 3,000 heavy bombers, along with C-87 transports and later B-32 Dominators, powering the Allied air campaign.