Military & Wartime

Laredo, TX

On March 17, 1837, Erastus "Deaf" Smith—the celebrated scout of the Texas Revolution, now a captain of scouts for the young Republic of Texas—led just 21 men against a larger force of Mexican cavalry from the Laredo garrison near this spot. The sharp encounter was one of many border skirmishes that flared along the contested Rio Grande frontier after San Jacinto. Smith, famously hard of hearing, was among the most trusted frontiersmen of the Texas cause.

Hereford, TX

Created in 1876 and organized in 1890, this Panhandle county honors Erastus "Deaf" Smith, the celebrated scout and spy of the Texas Revolution who distinguished himself for bravery at the Battle of San Jacinto. Its county seat began as La Plata — often called Grenada — before Hereford took the role in 1899.

Lake County, FL

This marker honors Dean R. Gilmore, a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Forces who died on November 14, 1944 — his twenty-third birthday — during the height of World War II. The USAAF was the wartime air arm that flew bombing and combat missions across Europe and the Pacific, and young officers like Gilmore paid a heavy price in those campaigns. His memorial in Lake County, Florida, keeps one airman's sacrifice from fading into the war's vast casualty rolls.

DeBerry, TX

Settled around an 1850 sawmill and grist mill, this East Texas cotton community became a market and ginning center before oil arrived after 1900. It took its name from Col. Alfred W. DeBerry, a Confederate cavalry officer who served in the wartime Texas legislature and later, as secretary of state under Governor Richard Coke, helped return state government to local control after Reconstruction.

City of Dunkirk, NY

This marker honors Corporal Cyrus W. James, a young Dunkirk man who enlisted in the 9th New York Cavalry, Company G, in the autumn of 1861 at the age of 22. His regiment served in the Eastern Theater of the Civil War, and James fell on July 1, 1863 — the opening day of the Battle of Gettysburg. The 9th New York Cavalry was among the Union forces engaged that morning west and north of the town, where dismounted troopers helped delay the Confederate advance until the infantry arrived.

Cedarburg, WI

A dedication placed by American Legion Peter Wollner Post 288 in honor of those who served in the armed forces. The Legion post, named for a local fallen soldier, tends the memory of the community's veterans across the wars of the twentieth century.

Bryson City, NC

In the winter of 1864, the mountains of far western North Carolina were a contested frontier of the Civil War. Near Deep Creek, Union forces struck Thomas's Legion — a Confederate command that famously included Cherokee soldiers from the nearby Qualla Boundary. The blow here helped erode Cherokee support for the Confederate cause in the southern Appalachians.

South Lebanon, OH

In the years just after the Revolution, pioneers pushed into the Ohio country, and the settlement that became Deerfield took root around 1795 in the Little Miami valley of what is now Warren County. Benjamin Stites laid out the town in 1802, and among its first residents were veterans of both the Revolution and the War of 1812, men who had traded muskets for plows on the young republic's frontier. As the community matured it folded into Union Township in 1815, took the name South Lebanon in 1871, and grew an industrial side — powder works and food businesses that gave the village a working economy well into the industrial age.

Austin, TX

Soon after the United States entered World War II, the Army Air Corps established an air base on Del Valle land once part of a Mexican land grant, with the City of Austin buying 3,000 acres to lease to the government. Opened in 1942 as a troop-carrier training center, it was renamed for Capt. John A. E. Bergstrom, Austin's first war casualty, killed at Clark Field in the Philippines in December 1941. Crews trained here flew in the invasions of Normandy and beyond, and over the next half-century the base served through the Berlin Airlift, Korea, and Iraq before closing in 1992 and becoming Austin's international airport in 1999.

Delaware Township, PA

This memorial stands in the Delaware Cemetery near Dingman's Ferry, a Delaware River hamlet in Pennsylvania's Pike County that grew up around one of the region's early ferry crossings. It was raised in 1982 by American Legion Post No. 851 — part of the veterans' organization chartered by Congress in 1919 in the wake of World War I — whose posts are customarily named for local servicemen, here Tilghman, Angle, and Smith. Rather than marking a single battle or soldier, the stone deliberately gathers 'all veterans' under one dedication, the kind of collective remembrance found in small-town cemeteries across America.

Goldthwaite vicinity, TX

Though families settled this Mills County area in 1878, the Democrat community's graveyard began only at the turn of the 20th century, its earliest documented grave a one-year-old girl who died in 1904. In 1905 J. L. Chancellor deeded three acres to the Democrat and Rock Springs communities for a public burial ground. Among its graves are children lost to the worldwide influenza epidemic and veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.

Camden County, NC

Dempsey Burgess answered the Revolution on two fronts — in the provincial congresses of 1775-1776 that guided North Carolina toward independence, and in the field as a lieutenant colonel of militia. After the war he served in the U.S. Congress from 1795 to 1799. His grave lies about seven miles to the southeast.

Forty Fort, PA · est. 1972

Built in 1790 in the Wyoming Valley, this house was home to Colonel Nathan Denison, who had served as a Revolutionary War officer during a turbulent era of frontier warfare and land disputes in northeastern Pennsylvania. After independence, Denison became a Luzerne County judge, helping build the civic institutions of the young republic. The home stands as a tangible link between a soldier's wartime service and his later role in ordering a new nation's local government.

Slocum, TX

Settlers reached this area—known as Ioni after a nearby Indian village—in the early 1830s, and the land was granted to James Bradshaw in 1835. The cemetery began in 1851 with the burial of the infant son of Kindred and Diana (Bradshaw) Watkins near the family home, growing from a family plot into a community graveyard renamed Denson Springs in 1878. Set in a grove of trees, it holds marked and unmarked pioneer graves and the resting places of veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.

Denville, NJ

During the American Revolution, the Continental Army built a chain of signal fires on high ground across northern New Jersey and the surrounding region to relay warnings of British troop movements. When lit, one beacon would alert the next outpost, sending an alarm racing across the countryside far faster than any messenger on horseback. This replica in Denville recalls a single link in that network of 23 outposts spread across the Northeast, where sentries stood ready to set their pyres ablaze at the first sign of attack.

Derry Township, PA · est. 1948

This churchyard, the oldest pioneer burial ground in Dauphin County, holds the first generations of the region's Scots-Irish settlers. Among the graves lie the early pastors William Bertram and John Roan, alongside men who fought in the French and Indian Wars and the Revolution. One of them, Col. John Rodgers, put his name to the Hanover Resolves of 1774, an early pledge of resistance to Britain.

Desdemona, TX

Serving the frontier community of Desdemona since J. S. and Rosa Jones deeded an acre for a public graveyard in 1880, this cemetery holds pioneer settlers, Civil War and world-war veterans, a physician who served the area for fifty years, and children lost young. When oil gushers surrounded the grounds in 1918, the boom brought sudden wealth—and new residents—to the very families buried among its oaks.

Belpre, OH

In 1791 the Ohio country was raw frontier, and the settlers clustered near Belpre—many of them Revolutionary War veterans who had come west with the Ohio Company—needed a reliable way to turn grain into flour. Jonathan Devol, a resourceful millwright, answered by mounting a gristmill on two boats anchored in the Ohio River, letting the current itself drive the stones. Sheltered beside Farmer's Castle, the fortified stockade built during the Indian wars of the early 1790s, his floating mill ground 25 to 50 bushels a day and served families scattered across some thirty miles of riverbank.

Yorktown, TX

This memorial honors the men and women of DeWitt County, Texas, who served in the Vietnam War. Placed by the local community and tied to the Vietnam Veterans of America, it stands for a generation of small-town Americans who answered the call during one of the nation's most divisive conflicts. It gathers their service into a single place of remembrance close to home.

Mount Carmel Township, PA

Diamondtown is a small patch community in the anthracite coal country of Northumberland County, where hard-rock mining families sent generations of sons and daughters into the nation's armed forces. This memorial gathers all of them under a single dedication — not to one battle or war, but to everyone from the community who wore the uniform, in combat and in the quieter years of peacetime service. Marble and bronze tributes like this one became the civic heart of Pennsylvania's coal towns, where local identity and national service were tightly bound.

Madison, CT

Dianne Bullis Snyder, a veteran American Airlines flight attendant born in 1959, was working aboard Flight 11 on the morning of September 11, 2001, when it became the first hijacked plane to strike the World Trade Center. She and the rest of the crew were among the earliest victims of the attacks that reshaped the nation. This quiet Connecticut memorial anchors that vast national tragedy to a single hometown life and the tender epitaph her community chose to remember her by.

Dickens, TX

Dickens Cemetery opened in 1891, the very year the town was founded, when the wife of pioneer barber C. F. Jones died and was buried at the foot of a hill above the Croton Breaks. The landowner soon donated five acres around her grave for a community burial ground, and it grew to more than eighteen acres, gathering the town's early settlers, officials, and the man many called the "Father of Dickens," attorney W. C. Ballard. Among its graves lie veterans of every American conflict from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Elkhart, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1812, Dickerson Parker fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 clash that won Texas its independence, before his death in 1844. His wife, Lucinda Eaton Parker, is remembered with him. Both were part of the earliest Anglo settlement of Anderson County.

Town of Lewiston, NY

Tucked into the Town of Lewiston near the Niagara frontier, Dickersonville Cemetery holds the graves of some of the area's earliest settlers, with burials dating to the years just after 1810. The names recorded here — Hannah Mills, Isaac Woolson, and Second Lieutenant John Farley — trace the lives of pioneers who took root in western New York during a turbulent era that included the War of 1812 along the nearby Niagara River. The marker was placed by the Town of Lewiston's Historic Preservation Commission to honor this early burial ground.

Dickinson, TX

Chartered in 1853, the Galveston, Houston, and Henderson Railroad was the first line to reach the Texas coast, its early wood-burning engines "Perseverance" and "Brazos" rattling across a trestle spanning Galveston Bay by 1859. The "Old Reliable Short Line" carried real military weight during the Civil War, aiding the Confederate recapture of Galveston. This 1902 depot, designed by architect George B. Stowe, later served excursion crowds and shipped the region's fruit and vegetables to market before being moved here in 1967 and reborn as a museum.

Dido, TX

Settlement here began in 1848, and by 1887 landowner Dempsey S. Holt had donated three acres for a school, church, and cemetery, with a Confederate veteran and pioneer physician later adding more. The little village took the whimsical name Dido, after the mythological Queen of Carthage, and thrived with a post office and stores until the railroad passed it by in the 1890s. Around a thousand graves remain, holding many of the area's founding families.

Llano, 1400 Hickory Street, Llano Street Cemetery, TX

South Carolinian Dillard Cooper reached Texas in January 1836 with Captain Shackelford's Red Rovers and joined Colonel Fannin's command. Captured after the defeat at Coleto Creek, he was among the prisoners held at Goliad when Mexican troops massacred more than 300 men — and one of the few who escaped, traveling two weeks by night through enemy lines to reach Texian forces. Cooper lived out his long life farming in the Texas Hill Country, dying in 1896.

Birmingham Township, PA · est. 1915

Near the village of Dilworthtown, the Battle of Brandywine drew to its close on the evening of September 11, 1777. After Washington's line was flanked and driven back through the surrounding hills, the last fighting flared here as darkness ended the day. The marker fixes the point where one of the Revolution's largest engagements finally spent itself.

Butler, MO

Dedicated in 1987 by Disabled American Veterans Chapter 67, this monument in Butler honors every veteran regardless of the war they served in. The DAV was founded after World War I to advocate for wounded and disabled servicemembers, and chapters like this one carry that mission into local communities. The monument stands as a general tribute rather than a memorial to one conflict.

Richmond, TX

In Civil War Texas, cavalry was king: horsemen accustomed to the saddle flocked to mounted units for the mobility and dash of scouting and raiding. But the Confederacy needed infantry, and by mid-1862 whole Texas cavalry regiments were dismounted "under strong protest." At Richmond in 1863, an order stripping men of A. W. Terrell's regiment of their prized horses sparked a mutiny, with dozens riding off before most returned to fight in the 1864 Red River campaign.

Robert Lee, TX

In 1896 the Smith and Chapman families set aside four acres on the divide between the Colorado and North Concho watersheds for a cemetery and an all-faiths sanctuary serving the scattered ranches around them. Callie Chapman, buried in 1897, was the first laid to rest here. Its roughly one hundred graves hold the region's earliest settlers and veterans of both World Wars and Korea, and descendants of those pioneers keep it in use today.

Reading, PA · est. 1951

On this Reading site stood the home of Dr. Jonathan Potts, who served from 1777 to 1780 as Deputy Director General of the Continental Army's Northern and Middle Departments. In an era when battlefield disease killed more soldiers than musket fire, Potts organized the army's overwhelmed medical service during the hardest years of the Revolutionary War.

San Antonio, TX

After Pearl Harbor drew the United States into World War II, the government detained not only more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in relocation camps but also thousands of Japanese, German, and Italian nationals—and their U.S.-citizen relatives—as 'enemy aliens.' Fort Sam Houston's old Dodd Field airfield became a U.S. Army temporary detention station, twenty acres ringed by double barbed wire and eight guard towers. From early 1942 it held detainees—never more than 150 at once—until they were paroled, exchanged, or moved to other camps, and it closed late that year.

Wasioja Township, MN

This memorial honors the men of Dodge County, Minnesota, who served in the Civil War. Minnesota was the first state to offer troops to the Union in 1861, and rural counties like Dodge sent companies of volunteers to campaigns across the South. Nearby Wasioja was famous for a recruiting station where nearly an entire class of young men enlisted, many never returning—a loss memorialized throughout the county.

Floydada, TX

Dolphin Ward Floyd, a North Carolinian who settled at Gonzales, was among the 32 men of that town who answered William B. Travis's call and slipped into the besieged Alamo in early 1836. He died there fighting for Texas independence, and when the county was created in 1876 it was named in his honor.

Brazoria, TX

A Vermont-born newcomer to Texas, Don Carlos Barrett sat on the General Council of the 1835 Provisional Government during the opening months of the Texas Revolution. That body named him judge advocate general of the army with the rank of colonel, placing him at the legal heart of the fledgling war effort. He died in Texas in 1838, having helped shape the institutions of the emerging Republic.

San Antonio, TX

Don José de Jesús Rodríguez was among the Tejanos who fought for Texas independence, joining the storming party that entered Béxar in December 1835 during the siege of San Antonio. He went on to serve as a soldier and Ranger in the young republic. The State of Texas honored his service with this marker in 1963.

San Antonio, TX

Born in San Antonio de Béxar in 1810, Juan Ximenes joined the fight for Texas independence in 1835–1836 and was among the storming party that took Béxar on December 5, 1835. Honored in his lifetime as a citizen, soldier, and Texas Ranger, he died in 1877, and the state raised this marker to his memory in 1963.

Charleston, WV

This monument preserves the memory of Andrew Donnally Jr. and a cemetery once rooted in Kanawha City before being relocated here. Born in 1778 at Fort Donnally, a fortified frontier station in Greenbrier County during the era of the American Revolution, Donnally belonged to one of the pioneering families who pushed into western Virginia's Kanawha Valley and made their homes along the river opposite the salt-making community of Malden. When his old burying ground was moved, these stones came with it, carrying a family's story from the frontier generation into the settled 19th-century valley.

Bartlett vicinity, TX

Set aside by pioneer settlers Samuel and Helen Leatherman in the 1860s, this ground became the burial place for the community of Donohoe, its earliest marked grave that of the Leathermans' infant grandson in 1869. Among those laid to rest are unknown travelers who died passing through and veterans of the Texas Revolution, the Civil War, and World War I. The town is long gone; the cemetery is all that remains.

Valparaiso, FL

This dedication at Doolittle Memorial Park honors all who served honorably in the armed forces of the United States. Rather than commemorating a single battle or war, it stands as a general tribute to American military service across generations. Community veterans memorials like this one gather the sacrifice of many conflicts into a single place of remembrance.

La Veta, CO

This memorial honors Doris Bristol Tracy, one of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), the pioneering program created in 1942 that trained women to fly military aircraft on non-combat missions so male pilots could deploy. The WASP ferried planes, towed gunnery targets, and tested aircraft; decades later, in 2009, the surviving members were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Tracy's marker ties a small Colorado town to that national story.

Waco, TX

Doris "Dorie" Miller grew up on a McLennan County farm and enlisted in a segregated U.S. Navy, serving aboard the USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. When the attack came, the mess attendant carried his wounded captain to safety, then manned an anti-aircraft gun he had never been trained to use. Admiral Chester Nimitz awarded him the Navy Cross, the first ever given to an African American; Miller was later killed in action in 1943, and a warship was named in his honor.

New York, NY

From an apartment on this block, one of America's most fearless journalists warned the world about the rise of fascism. Dorothy Thompson, the "intrepid girl reporter," had interviewed Adolf Hitler and been expelled from Nazi Germany; her widely syndicated column "On the Record" pressed Americans to abandon isolation and confront the Axis threat. She lived here from 1941 to 1957, at the height of her influence.

Grapevine, TX

Dr. William E. Dorris brought his family to Grapevine in 1871 after a three-month wagon journey from Mississippi, having served as a Confederate captain during the Civil War. He bought a 37-acre farm near good water and put down roots in the growing community, where his son continued the family's medical practice for decades. The Folk Victorian farmhouse later passed to the Brock family, who raised twelve children here across 85 years.

Andrews, TX

Dorsie M. Pinnell, a descendant of a Virginia Revolutionary War soldier, came to Texas at seventeen seeking better health. He served in the Spanish-American War with Company K of the 1st Texas Infantry before taking up ranching in Andrews County, where he raised four sons with his wife Jessie. His life traces the westward path of a young man who traded the East for the promise of the open Texas plains.

Cicso, TX

The Texas and Pacific Railway built the Delmar Depot near here in 1880 before rail activity shifted toward what became Cisco. A community called Dothan grew up, gaining a post office in 1902, and settlers Jim and Manirval Dunaway donated land for a cemetery whose first burial, in 1905, was their own great-grandson. Dothan supported a school and stores and reported fifty residents by 1915, but the school closed in 1940. Families have kept up the cemetery, with its granite, limestone, and fieldstone markers and at least twenty-two veterans' graves.

Jayton, TX

Deep on the Comanche frontier, more than a hundred miles beyond the outer forts, this Brazos River salt works was the northernmost business in Confederate Texas. Salt had become desperately scarce during the Civil War, yet it was essential for curing meat and hides and keeping army animals fed, so the state funded exploration that found spring water nearly pure salt. The reduction of the brine was overseen by the Texas Military Board, with troops standing guard over the dangerous, isolated work.

Gainesville, TX

Francis Marion Dougherty, an Alabama native, came to Texas in the 1840s and settled in Gainesville in 1858, later serving in the Civil War and seeing action in the Red River Campaign. Returning to Cooke County, he built a career as a merchant and banker and won election to the Texas House of Representatives in 1879 and 1881. There he worked on fence law, county boundaries, agriculture, and railroad development, while helping launch the county fair through the local board of trade.

Cle Elum, WA

This memorial honors Signalman First Class Douglas A. Munro, a native of Cle Elum who served in the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II. Munro is remembered for his courage under fire while evacuating Marines from a beach in the Pacific, giving his life in the effort. He remains a singular figure of valor in his service's history.

Eagle Pass, TX

This monument honors General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964), one of the most prominent—and most debated—American military commanders of the twentieth century, carrying one of his best-known exhortations about duty and sacrifice. MacArthur's career stretched from World War I through his command in the Pacific in World War II and the early Korean War, making him a towering figure across decades of American military history. Memorials to him appear in communities far from any battlefield, a measure of his hold on the public imagination.

Mertzon, TX

On January 8, 1865, Confederate troops and Texas militia clashed with a large party of Kickapoo who had entered Texas without authority while making their way toward Mexico. After some five hours of fighting, the Texans withdrew, having suffered 22 killed and 19 wounded. The encounter embittered relations, and later Kickapoo raids on the frontier were traced back to the fight at Dove Creek.

Mertzon vicinity, TX

On January 8, 1865, in the closing weeks of the Civil War, some 2,000 Native people clashed here with Texas Rangers and state troops under Captains John Fossett and S. S. Totten in one of the bloodiest frontier fights of the era. Four officers and twenty-two of their men were left in unmarked graves near the mountain. The battle exposed how the frontier's Indian conflicts raged on even as the great war between the states drew to a close.

Mineola, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1823, Dr. Adolphus Leander Patten trained as a physician and set out for California in 1854, only to settle in Quitman, Texas, instead. He practiced medicine, took an active role in civic life and Masonic affairs, and served as a surgeon with the 22nd Texas Regiment during the Civil War. In the 1870s he moved his family to Mineola, where he continued caring for patients until his death in 1900.

Matagorda, TX

A Dutch immigrant who reached the United States in 1818 and trained as a physician, Albert Moses Levy threw in his lot with the Texas cause in the mid-1830s. He served as chief surgeon at the Siege of Bexar in late 1835 and later aboard a warship of the fledgling Texas Navy. Afterward he settled in the coastal town of Matagorda, married, and took an active hand in state and local affairs.

Houston, TX

Dr. Bedford Forrest Coop and his second wife, schoolteacher Ethel Reed Coop, came to Houston in 1914 seeking a fresh start and quickly became civic leaders in the Heights. While he built a downtown medical practice, Ethel served on the Houston school board and social service board, taught for the Red Cross, and led the Housewives League during World War I, when future president Herbert Hoover named her a speaker for the national food-conservation campaign. In 1950 an elementary school was named in her honor. Their 1914 Craftsman house, later a boarding house for young teachers and a bed and breakfast, still stands with much of its original character.

Reading, PA · est. 1951

This was the home of Dr. Bodo Otto, a military surgeon who served the Continental Army from 1775 to 1782. As surgeon-in-chief at Valley Forge during the brutal winter of 1777–78, the aging physician tended troops battling smallpox, exposure, and starvation in the encampment that became a symbol of American endurance.

Clute, TX

Branch Tanner Archer was among the Virginia-born physicians and firebrands who threw their lot in with Texas during its break from Mexico. In 1835 he presided over the Consultation, the provisional assembly that set the colonists on the road to revolution, then sailed east as one of three commissioners sent to win money, arms, and sympathy from the United States. A frontier county still carries his name, a common way early Texas honored the men who argued its independence into being.

San Antonio, TX

English-born physician C.E.R. King came to America as a boy and served as a Confederate Army surgeon during the Civil War before settling in San Antonio. In 1880 he hired fellow Englishman Alfred Giles, one of the region's most celebrated architects, to design this native-stone Victorian building that housed both his home and his medical office. His descendants lived here until 1929, when the Junior League of San Antonio bought it for use as a tea room and meeting place.

Lockhart, TX

Trained in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Alabama-born D. Port Smythe became a pioneering physician in Lockhart. When war came he served as a Confederate surgeon with Texas mounted units across the frontier and the Trans-Mississippi, and the letters he sent home—full of worry over his children's reading, the crops, and the family's debts—read like a portrait of countless Texas Confederates. In later years he taught chemistry at Galveston Medical College and became the first full-time college physician in Texas.