Military & Wartime

Cumberland Township, PA

On the afternoon of July 2, 1863, Brigadier General Joseph B. Kershaw led his South Carolina brigade of McLaws' Division across the Emmitsburg Road toward the Union line near the Rose Farm. The assault carried into some of the fiercest fighting of the second day, on ground remembered for the Peach Orchard and the Wheatfield. This marker fixes the brigade's line of advance.

Kinston, NC

The Confederate ironclad CSS Neuse was built upriver at Whitehall and floated down the Neuse River to Kinston during the Civil War. Plagued by low water and shifting fortunes, she was grounded and burned by her own crew in 1865 to keep her from Union hands. Her recovered remains lie one block north of this marker.

Plymouth, NC

The Confederate ironclad ram Albemarle, commanded by James W. Cooke, helped Confederate forces recapture the river town of Plymouth in the spring of 1864. The powerful vessel dominated the Roanoke River until a daring Union raid sank her; she went down about 600 feet north of here on October 27, 1864. Her loss reopened the region to Union control.

Camp Hill, PA · est. 1948

In the autumn of 1775, as the newly rebellious colonies gambled on carrying the war north, Capt. William Hendricks raised a company of frontier riflemen from the Cumberland County countryside and marched them toward Canada. They joined the desperate assault on Quebec on the last day of the year, fighting under Gen. Richard Montgomery in a driving snowstorm. The attack failed, Montgomery was killed, and Hendricks fell with him.

Brady, TX

When World War II demanded thousands of new pilots, Brady mayor Harry Lamar Curtis secured his town's airfield as a national defense airport and won federal money to enlarge and pave it. A contract flight school relocated from Dallas's Love Field in 1941 and became Brady Aviation School, training more than 10,000 cadets under West Texas's clear, uncrowded skies before it closed in August 1944. The cost was not only financial: twenty-one cadets, six instructors, and a personnel officer died in training accidents here.

Damascus Township, PA · est. 1947

In 1755, settlers from Connecticut led by Moses Thomas and Daniel Skinner planted the first colony on the upper Delaware, on lands the Native peoples called Cushetunk. Their arrival reflected Connecticut's sweeping and contested claims to lands stretching west across Pennsylvania. During the Revolution the little settlement was overrun — seized in 1778 by a force of Indians and Loyalist Tories — a casualty of the brutal frontier warfare that swept the Delaware and Susquehanna valleys.

Monterey, CA

Built by the Mexican government in 1827, Monterey's Custom House collected duties on foreign shipping when the town was the capital of Alta California, Mexico's far northern province. U.S. consul Thomas O. Larkin contracted to enlarge it in 1841, and on July 7, 1846 Commodore John Drake Sloat raised the American flag over the building, signaling California's passage from Mexican to U.S. rule. Later restored, it stands today as California's first registered historical landmark.

Morristown, NJ

This homestead dates to 1799 and the farm of Silas Condict, a New Jersey patriot active in the cause of American independence. It later became home to the Cutler family, including Augustus W. Cutler, a congressman remembered as a champion of free public schooling in New Jersey. The site witnessed more than a century of the state's political and civic life.

Mt. Vernon, TX

Founded in 1851, the Associated Cypress Baptist Church built its meetinghouse on land later deeded to the congregation by Spencer Shearer, whose gift also created a burial ground called to service by the tolling of the bell tower. Local tradition holds that Confederate troops drilled on the church grounds during the Civil War. The congregation helped seed other area churches, and descendants of its founders remain active today.

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.

Temple, TX

Raised near Travis in Austin County, Cyrus Maxwell Campbell enlisted in the Confederate army at 21 and rose to captain in the 16th Texas Infantry. After the war he farmed with the help of Freedmen, then turned to lumber, opening Campbell & Lovitt Lumber in Temple in 1888 and expanding across Central Texas until the Depression closed the family enterprise in the 1930s.

Lubbock, TX

On the eve of World War II, the United States realized it would need pilots by the thousands and launched the Civilian Pilot Training Program to turn college students into aviators. At Texas Technological College in Lubbock, roughly 6,500 cadets moved through the program, and half of them took to the air from this dirt-runway field run by local flyer 'Dag' Dagley. When the war's demand for pilots faded, the field closed and its quarter-section became the College Heights neighborhood.

Daingerfield, TX

Founded about 1830 at a spring where Captain London Daingerfield was killed, this East Texas town became a Confederate hub during the Civil War. Several army units enrolled here, and local tanyards, sawmills, a gristmill, a distillery, and foundries supplied leather, meal, and iron to the war effort—those foundries foreshadowing the later Lone Star Steel Company. The square, laid out in 1841, had already seen frontier drama, including an 1842 trial tied to the killing of Robert Potter of the Regulator-Moderator Feud.

Dalhart, TX

In May 1942, as the U.S. mobilized for World War II, flat, dry-skied Dallam and Hartley Counties made an ideal training ground, and Dalhart Army Air Field opened as a glider school for the new Waco CG-4A "Hadrian." Cadets learned to be snatched aloft on nylon tow ropes behind C-47s and to fight as infantry once they landed. As the war's needs shifted, DAAF retrained to turn out B-17 crews and then B-29 bombardment groups — one of them, the 393rd Bomb Squadron of the 504th Group, becoming the core of the unit Col. Paul Tibbets led to drop the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. The field closed that December.

Georgetown, TX

William Cornelius Dalrymple left North Carolina for Texas and served in its revolutionary forces and as a Texas Ranger in the turbulent 1830s. Settling on the San Gabriel River, he helped select the Williamson County seat and rose through public life as tax assessor, state representative, and senator. In 1860 Governor Sam Houston named him aide-de-camp and commander of the Texas Militia.

Houston County, TX

The Daily family and their neighbors founded the Dalys Community in the 1850s, and when Ethalinda Meriwether died in 1876 the Dailey and Hill families donated ground for a burial place. The cemetery served both this settlement and nearby Reynard, gathering generations of East Texas farm families into one hillside. Among its graves lie veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars, and in 1981 the name was formally fixed as Dailey Community Cemetery.

Goldsboro, NC

Dan Bullock was just a teenager from Goldsboro who lied about his age to join the Marines, and at fifteen he became the youngest American killed in the Vietnam War. A Private First Class, he died in combat in 1969, and his grave lies a short distance from this marker. His story is one of astonishing youth, sacrifice, and a childhood cut brutally short by war.

Exeter, NH

This marker in Exeter honors Daniel Chester French, born here in 1850, who grew up to become one of the most celebrated American sculptors of his age. Though his family soon moved to Concord, Massachusetts, French returned to art after an early bent for the practical, and his career carried him from small-town New England to the grandest public commissions in the nation. He worked in the classical, dignified idiom that defined American civic monuments at the turn of the twentieth century.

Village of Scarsdale, NY

In 1774, near this spot in the countryside that would become Scarsdale, Daniel D. Tompkins was born into a New York on the eve of revolution. He rose to serve as the state's governor from 1807 to 1817 — the demanding War of 1812 years, when he pledged his own credit to keep New York's troops supplied — and then two terms as Vice President of the United States under James Monroe. The Westchester County Historical Society placed this marker, funded by Charles Butler, to fix the memory of where his life began.

Washington, NC

Daniel G. Fowle, whose home stood on this spot, packed a lifetime of public service into the turbulent decades around the Civil War. He served as a Confederate officer and as the state's Adjutant General in 1863, later sitting as a superior court judge and state legislator before winning the governorship, which he held from 1889 to 1891. His career traced North Carolina's arc from secession through Reconstruction to the New South.

Jarrell, TX

Daniel Harrison came to Texas from Tennessee in 1835 and served with Texan forces during the Revolution, later fighting in the 1839 Battle of the Neches as a militia volunteer for the young Republic. Settling in what became the Corn Hill community, he worked as a blacksmith on the stage route from Austin to Fort Gates—vital labor for a military road—while also farming and raising livestock. He later served in Central Texas' 27th Brigade during the Civil War, and he and his wife Nancy were eventually reinterred at Corn Hill Cemetery.

Midway, TX

A Pennsylvania-born fur trapper who had served under Zachary Taylor in the War of 1812, Daniel Larrison became one of the earliest Anglo settlers of what is now Madison County, receiving a Mexican land grant in 1833. He and his wife Sarah settled around 1828 near the junction of the La Bahia Trail and El Camino Real—a natural waystation for travelers—and raised twelve children while hunting, trapping, and farming corn and cotton. Larrison Creek still carries the family name.

Bartlett vicinity, TX

Born in Maine in 1814, Daniel McKay came to Texas in 1834 with Sterling C. Robertson's colony and settled near Nashville, on the edge of a dangerous frontier. In 1836 he fought at the Battle of San Jacinto that won Texas its independence, and in 1845 he married Jane Bryant, daughter of a government Indian agent and fellow San Jacinto veteran. The family lived at fortified "Bryant's Station" until moving to a Bell County land grant in 1853, and McKay later served the Confederacy during the Civil War.

San Angelo, TX

Daniel Millar reached Texas in 1831, during the last years of Mexican rule, and joined the fight for Texas independence. As a member of Captain William J.E. Heard's company of citizen-soldiers, he stood on the field at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the swift and decisive clash that won the Republic of Texas its freedom. He lived on until 1894, and the state raised this marker to his memory in 1956.

Arcola, TX

Born in Mississippi in 1791, Daniel Perry brought his family to Texas in 1832 and settled on land along the Brazos as Anglo colonization spread through Stephen F. Austin's grants. He served as a captain and recruiter in the Texas Army, fought at San Jacinto in 1836, and then joined the Republic of Texas Navy before signing the 1837 petition that created Fort Bend County. A rancher and farmer who ran cattle under the "7P" brand, he died in 1869 and was buried at Duke Cemetery.

Stephenville vicinity, TX

Daniel Roberts Thornton, from Mississippi, married Mary Anna Garland—daughter of a frontier fighter—and the couple settled in Erath County in 1857 to raise cattle on a still-dangerous frontier. Mary Anna served as midwife and doctor to her neighbors while the family reared eight children; Thornton later fought for the Confederacy, served as county commissioner, and donated land for a school and the Hannibal Cemetery. Their lives trace the arc from open range to settled community.

Austin, TX

Daniel Shipman took part in the earliest sparks of the Texas Revolution, joining the 1832 disturbance at Anahuac and the storming and capture of Bexar in December 1835. Born in North Carolina, he was among the settlers who turned frontier grievances into open rebellion against Mexican rule. His grave records a life bound up with the birth of the Texas Republic.

Grovetown, GA

In the small town of Grovetown, Georgia, just west of Augusta, a community recreation center carries the name of Danny Goodale, a local son born in 1948 who was killed in action in Vietnam in March 1969, still in his early twenties. His death came during some of the fiercest years of American involvement in Southeast Asia, when the war reached deep into towns like this one and returned young men home as names on plaques and monuments. Naming a place of gathering, sport, and youth after him turned everyday community life into a living memorial, ensuring his sacrifice stayed woven into the town he came from.

Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1947

About 1744, frontier founder Daniel Brodhead raised a building here for Moravian missionaries, part of the remarkable Moravian effort to carry their faith to settlers and Native peoples along the Pennsylvania frontier. The mission stood barely a decade: in 1755, as the French and Indian War set the backcountry aflame, it was destroyed in the raiding that emptied the region. Its site lay beside what is now the cemetery.

Victoria, TX

Darwin M. Stapp took up arms in the Texas War for Independence, taking part in the 1835 Siege of Bexar that drove Mexican forces from San Antonio in the opening months of the revolution. The State of Texas raised this marker in 1962 to honor his service. He belongs to the generation of volunteers whose fighting won the Republic of Texas its independence.

Saint Paul, MN

Raised by the Daughters of the American Revolution, this monument honors the men and women of Saint Paul and Ramsey County who died in the First World War. When the United States entered the conflict in 1917, communities across Minnesota sent volunteers and draftees to the Western Front, and the losses were felt in every neighborhood. The scriptural line "Greater love hath no man than this" frames their deaths as the ultimate sacrifice.

Glynn County, GA

This Blue Star Memorial marker on St. Simons Island carries a personal dedication, honoring Lt. David Anderson Everett of the U.S. Navy, a prisoner of war returned from Vietnam. Blue Star Memorial Highways began in 1945, named for the blue-star service flags of World War II, and garden clubs across the country later used them to honor individual servicemen as well as the armed forces at large. Here the St. Simons Island Council of Garden Clubs joined the Garden Club of Georgia to recognize a hometown POW.

Gonzales, TX

David Burkett came to Texas with his family in 1830 as a member of Green DeWitt's colony and took up the cause of Texas independence as a citizen soldier. In 1836 he served as a guard for the women and children fleeing Gonzales ahead of Santa Anna's advancing army — the desperate flight remembered as the Runaway Scrape. He is buried on his 4,428-acre land grant that once stretched south from this site.

Webberville, TX

David Crawford Edmiston came to Texas as a boy in 1835 and spent his life on its contested frontier—riding with the Texas Rangers in frontier defense, again during the Mexican War, and serving in the Confederate army during the Civil War. He and his wife Rhoda raised eleven children on their Webberville farm, whose surviving buildings still mark the land the family worked.

Jacksonville, TX

David Greene Templeton, a North Carolina native, reached newly organized Cherokee County soon after 1846 and settled in the Gum Creek community that became Old Jacksonville. He grew into a prominent landowner and civic leader, was named in 1850 one of the original trustees of the Presbyterian college at Larissa, and served in the Confederate home guard during the Civil War. His descendants went on to play a prominent role in the early growth of Jacksonville.

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.

Circleville, TX

David McFadin, a Tennessean who came to Texas in 1828 and fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, built this sturdy house in 1850 with native stone walls more than two feet thick. Its cool, never-failing spring later drew Confederate soldiers who camped here on their way to the Civil War.

Fairfield, TX

David Hall Love (1816–1866), a Tennessee native, fought in the Texas War for Independence and, at the Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836, helped capture a large body of enemy soldiers before carrying word of the Texan victory on foot to Harrisburg. For his service he received a bounty land grant, and from that land he later donated the townsite of Fairfield. He went on to serve his church and community as a precinct justice.

Circleville, TX

This marker honors David Hutcheson McFadin, who took up arms in the Texas War for Independence and fought as a soldier at the Battle of San Jacinto. That decisive 1836 clash, where Texian forces routed the Mexican army in less than twenty minutes, secured Texas independence and made men like McFadin part of the founding generation of the Republic. The State of Texas erected the memorial in 1962 to keep his service in public memory.

Chicago, IL

David Kennison was long celebrated as the last living participant of the Boston Tea Party of 1773, the defiant night when colonists dumped British tea into Boston Harbor to protest taxation without representation. He was said to have lived to a remarkable age and died in Chicago, where admirers marked his grave as a tangible link to the Revolution's opening acts. The monument ties the young city of Chicago to a founding struggle a continent away.

Gonzales, TX

David L. Kokernot served the Texas cause during the war for independence from Mexico in 1835–36, acting as a soldier, officer, scout, and courier. This monument, erected by the State of Texas in 1962, honors his part in the revolution that created the Republic of Texas.

Easton, PA · est. 1953

At "The Forks" where the Lehigh meets the Delaware, David Martin secured grants in 1739 and 1741 to run a ferry across the water — one of the vital crossings that stitched frontier Pennsylvania to the routes heading west. For decades travelers, wagons, and goods depended on it, and during the Revolutionary War it carried troops and supplies for the American cause. It served until 1806, when bridges and better roads finally overtook the old ferry.

Orange, TX

David Robert Wingate moved his family from Mississippi to a large East Texas cotton plantation in 1852, having built his fortune in sawmilling. During the Civil War he supplied lumber from his Sabine Pass mill to build Fort Sabine and other Confederate posts, and Federal troops burned his home and business in retaliation. Undeterred, he rebuilt in Orange after the war, invested in a sawmill, took up rice farming, and served as county judge.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2004

David Salisbury Franks was among the small number of Jewish officers to serve the American cause during the Revolution, rising to major and serving as aide-de-camp to General Benedict Arnold. When Arnold's treason was exposed, suspicion inevitably fell on the men closest to him, and Franks endured investigation before being formally cleared and going on to diplomatic service. He died in Philadelphia's 1793 yellow fever epidemic and, having no coreligionists to bury him, was laid to rest at Christ Church by a Christian neighbor.

Waco, TX

David Smith Kornegay was a soldier of the Texas Revolution who fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836 and later escaped the deadly Dawson Massacre of 1842. Born in North Carolina in 1810, he came to Texas in its founding struggle and died in 1856. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1936 during the centennial of independence.

Longview, TX

Born in Longview in 1902, David Sutton Meredith, Jr. graduated from the University of Texas and returned home to practice law, winning election as Gregg County judge the same year, 1926. As a special district judge in the 1930s he prosecuted "hot oil" violators who illegally overproduced from the East Texas field. He volunteered for military service in World War II and served again in the early 1950s before rising to Texas Assistant Attorney General.

Bethany, PA · est. 1947

In this house in Bethany, David Wilmot was born on January 20, 1814. A Pennsylvania congressman, he gave his name to the Wilmot Proviso of 1846, a proposal to bar slavery from any territory won in the Mexican War. Though it never became law, the Proviso set off one of the fiercest debates in American politics, hardening the sectional divide over slavery's westward spread in the years before the Civil War.

Barry, TX

David Wilson Campbell left Georgia for a still-young, still-contested Texas in 1835, arriving just as the fight for independence from Mexico was breaking open. He shouldered a musket with the Texas army in 1836, then traded soldiering for the plow, breaking ground as one of Navarro County's early farmers. In 1845 he deeded ten acres to the Harmony Methodist Church, and a corner of that gift became the family cemetery where generations of Campbells now rest.

Gatesville, TX

Matt Davidson came from Tennessee to the Milam-era Texas frontier in 1852, married one of Coryell County's first couples, and after Confederate service built a log home on Coryell Creek. Land overlooking his homestead became the community burial ground, its earliest marked grave dating to 1862. Around it grew a whole settlement—schools, a post office, churches, and stores—and its more than 600 graves hold veterans of every war from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Corsicana, TX

William and Jane Davidson brought their family from Mississippi to Texas in 1851, settling by the late 1850s on hundreds of acres in southeastern Navarro County. The Davidsons prospered as sheep farmers and ranchers in cattle country—earning the nickname "Grangers" for their likely ties to the farmers' fraternal order—while two sons rode off to serve in the 20th Texas Cavalry during the Civil War. Set aside in 1861, this fenced family plot with its stone obelisks holds the graves of the pioneer parents and several of their descendants.

Galveston, TX

Built in the years just after the Civil War by Norwegian immigrant and early Galveston settler Captain John Davidson, this house passed through a remarkable line of owners. Among them was Samuel Moore Penland, a grandnephew of Sam Houston who served in Galveston during the Civil War, became a businessman and customs official, and donated Houston artifacts and letters to the Rosenberg Library. Having survived the 1885 fire and the 1900 storm, the Greek Revival house is among the oldest of its kind in the East End district.

Owensboro, KY

In 1864, several hundred enslaved African American men in Daviess County left bondage to enlist in the Union army, a choice that promised eventual freedom for themselves and their families. They served in the 100th, 109th, and 118th U.S. Colored Infantry and the 5th and 6th U.S. Colored Cavalry, fighting at Richmond, Petersburg, and Appomattox and across the western theater. In a Kentucky where pro-slavery Unionists bitterly opposed Black recruitment, enlisting was an act of extraordinary courage and risk.

Austin, TX

George W. Davis brought his family to Texas in 1835, on the eve of revolution. He fought in Captain Mosely Baker's company at the Battle of San Jacinto while his wife Emiline sheltered their children on the Sabine River during the Runaway Scrape. Davis received a large land patent in 1841 and built a home near this burial ground, which holds Davis family members and neighbors and is still cared for by descendants.

Gainesville, TX

This ornate Queen Anne residence, built in 1891, was the home of William O. Davis — a Civil War veteran who came to Texas in 1870 and rose from a self-educated background to become a prominent Gainesville attorney, state senator, and the town's first mayor. Its gingerbread trim and decorative brickwork advertised Davis's standing among the community's early leaders during the flush years of the Gilded Age. The house was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1982.

Dublin, TX

Born in Dublin in 1920, George A. Davis, Jr. was one of six brothers who served in the military. He enlisted as an aviation cadet in 1942, flew hundreds of missions as an early P-47 Thunderbolt pilot in World War II, and became a leading jet Ace in Korea with the 334th Fighter Interceptor Squadron. On February 10, 1952, near the Manchurian border, he downed two MiG-15s before his own SabreJet was hit and crashed south of the Yalu River. He received the Medal of Honor posthumously.

Gainesville, TX

William Owen Davis carried the arc of the post-Civil War South into Texas: a Georgia native and Confederate veteran, he was admitted to the Georgia Bar in 1870 before settling in Gainesville near the Red River. There he built a decades-long public career — school board member, city alderman, state senator in the 1880s, and finally mayor at age 81 — while practicing law prominently enough to argue two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. His life traces the Gilded Age reintegration of Southern professionals into civic and legal leadership.

Lamesa, TX

Dawson County honors Nicholas Mosby Dawson, a Texas patriot who fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836 and later fell in the 1842 clash known as Dawson's Massacre during the turbulent years of the Republic of Texas. The county was created in 1858, recreated in 1876 from Bexar Territory, and finally organized in 1905, with Lamesa as its seat. Its name carries the memory of the sacrifices that won and defended Texas independence.

New Bern, NC

The Marquis de Bretigny, a French nobleman, served the Patriot cause as a state purchasing agent in Martinique in 1781–82, securing supplies for the Revolution. He also fought at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse and later served as a Councillor of State. His home once stood near this spot in New Bern.

Cuero, TX

This ground lay within Green De Witt's 1825 empresario grant and became DeWitt County in 1846, its seat shifting from Cameron to Clinton and finally to Cuero in 1876. Settled first by Anglo-Americans and, by 1860, half by German immigrants, the county sent its men into nearly every fight of the Texas Revolution — the Alamo, Goliad, Gonzales, and San Jacinto among them. The marker rolls out a long honor list of the pioneers and soldiers who founded and defended it.

Marble Falls, TX

First recorded by a naturalist in 1821, this deep natural shaft earned a dark reputation during the Civil War and Reconstruction, when it is believed as many as seventeen bodies were dumped into it. Among the victims were pro-Union Judge John R. Scott, settler Adolph Hoppe, several Reconstruction-era officials, and Ben McKeever, killed amid conflict with local freedmen; an oak that once stood over the hole reportedly bore rope marks from hangings. Poisonous gases kept the shaft unexplored until 1951.