Military & Wartime

Waco, TX

North Carolina–born physician David Richard Wallace came to Texas in the 1850s, taught at Baylor University, and served during the Civil War before becoming one of Waco's most prominent doctors and civic leaders. He helped organize state and local medical associations and, as an early pioneer in psychiatry, was chosen to head the state asylums at Austin and Terrell. His career spans the professionalization of medicine—and of mental-health care—in nineteenth-century Texas.

Austin, TX

George Moffit Patrick joined the Texan cause early, standing among the volunteers at Anahuac in 1832 and serving in the 1835 Consultation before commanding the schooner Flash in 1836. Virginia-born, he later led Texas Freemasonry as grand master and died in Grimes County in 1889.

Austin, TX

Dr. Gideon Lincecum, born in Georgia in 1793, served in the War of 1812 before becoming a self-taught frontier naturalist of international reputation. His studies of Texas plants and insects—especially the harvester ant—won him correspondents abroad, including Charles Darwin. He died at Long Point in Washington County, Texas, in 1873.

Edenton, NC

Dr. Hugh Williamson wore many hats — physician, scientist, Revolutionary patriot, and scholar — but he is best remembered as one of North Carolina's signers of the U.S. Constitution in 1787. He also served in Congress and wrote an early history of the state. His Edenton home once stood four blocks to the southeast.

Moulton, TX

Born in 1907 in a farmhouse near the tiny hamlet of Komensky, Hugo Strieder decided early that he would be a doctor and worked his way there, paying for medical school with business skills learned along the way before graduating from the University of Texas medical school in 1934. He turned down a city offer to come home to Moulton, where — fluent in German — he became the classic country doctor, treating everything from everyday wounds to polio outbreaks. Navy Medical Corps service in World War II sharpened his diagnostic and surgical skills, and in 1946 he opened his own clinic and "hospital on the hill," bridging the pre-war generation of rural doctors and the medical advances the war produced.

Rusk, TX

This typical Texas house was built in the 1850s and deeded in 1873 to Dr. I. K. Frazier, who had served in the 3rd Texas Cavalry and the brigade of Gen. Joseph Hogg during the Civil War. For more than forty years, until his death in 1908, Frazier was a leading physician of Rusk. The modest home links the town's medical care to a veteran of the Confederate cavalry.

Albany, TX

A Virginia-born physician who had served on Andrew Jackson's staff in the War of 1812, Jack Shackelford raised a company of Alabama volunteers—the Red Rovers—and brought his son and nephews to fight in the Texas War for Independence in 1835. Under Colonel Fannin his orders saved lives at the Battle of Coleto, but most of the captured Texans were executed in the Goliad Massacre of March 1836; Shackelford was spared for his medical skill and made to treat the wounded. His written accounts of Fannin, Coleto, and Goliad remain important sources, and in 1858 Texas named a county in his honor.

West Columbia vicinity, TX

James Aeneas Phelps left Mississippi for Texas in 1822, joining the earliest wave of Anglo-American colonists, and served as a hospital surgeon at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. That decisive fight won Texas its independence, and the wounded depended on the handful of physicians like Phelps. He died in 1847, a decade after the revolution he helped tend.

Johnson City, TX

Dr. James Odiorne practiced medicine in Illinois and Kentucky before settling in Texas in 1857 and moving to Blanco County in 1860, where he became a leading pioneer physician and civic figure. He served as a Confederate surgeon at Fort Mason during the Civil War and later as county commissioner, chief justice, and even newspaper owner. Riding by horseback or gig in all weather, and short on manufactured drugs, he turned to native herbs and even grew garden poppies for opium — a compounding accident with alcohol ultimately cost him his life.

Sealy, TX

Born in a log cabin near Cat Spring, James West Bostick was the son of one of Stephen F. Austin's original "Old 300" colonists, the first Anglo families to settle Texas. He served four years in the Confederate army before becoming a doctor, and in 1885 moved to the growing railroad town of Sealy, where he built this home in 1895 and helped found the local Episcopal church. As one of Sealy's first physicians, he also ran a drugstore until his death in 1897.

Waco, TX

Born in Virginia and trained in medicine in South Carolina, Dr. John Henry Sears settled in Waco in 1854 and built a practice there. He served as a Confederate surgeon during the Civil War, then returned to help found both the Waco Medical Association in 1866 and the Texas Medical Association in 1869. His work helped organize the medical profession in a still-young state.

Gonzales, TX

Dr. John Turner Tinsley left Tennessee for Gonzales in 1834, settling in the town on the eve of revolution. A physician who also served as alderman, mayor, and justice of the peace, he took part in the 1835 Battle of Gonzales—the 'Come and Take It' clash that opened the Texas Revolution—and helped Sam Houston's army during the panicked civilian flight known as the Runaway Scrape.

Canonsburg, PA · est. 2017

When the Civil War began, battlefield medicine was a chaos of scattered wounded and improvised care. Jonathan Letterman, a career Army surgeon raised in Canonsburg, rebuilt it from the ground up: a tiered system of triage, dedicated ambulance and supply wagons, and an orderly chain to move the injured from the firing line to the rear. At Gettysburg his methods treated the wounded of both armies, and the framework he devised became the backbone of modern military medical evacuation.

Dripping Springs, TX

Dr. Joseph M. Pound served in the Mexican War as a teenager, earned his medical degree in Louisville, and in 1853 settled near Dripping Springs, where his home doubled as a clinic and hospital for rich and poor alike. As a Confederate surgeon he contracted scarlet fever, recovered, and returned to a frontier regiment. The marker vividly recounts the desperate improvisations of Civil War medicine—bark teas standing in for quinine, opium milked from garden poppies, sutures of horsehair and silk, and the first widespread use of anesthetics and female army nurses.

Nacogdoches, TX

A Nacogdoches valedictorian who took his degree from Stephen F. Austin with the highest marks the college had seen, Joseph William Kennedy went on to Berkeley, where in 1940 he and colleagues Glenn Seaborg, Edwin McMillan, and Arthur Wahl discovered the element plutonium. He built the detection instruments essential to early radiochemistry and, from 1943, helped develop and test the atomic bomb on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, earning the Medal of Merit from President Truman. He later chaired chemistry at Washington University before his death in 1957.

Colleyville, TX

Dr. L. H. Colley, a Union Army veteran of the Civil War, migrated with his wife from Missouri to Texas in 1880 and settled in the Bransford community in 1885, where he became a respected physician and school-district election official. When a grocery store opened near his home in 1914, Colley suggested naming the growing area Colleyville. The community he named eventually absorbed several neighboring settlements.

Paradise, TX

Kentucky-born M. W. Matthews was both frontier doctor and preacher across nineteenth-century Texas. As an army surgeon in the Texas Revolution he treated Sam Houston after San Jacinto, later served in the Republic's Congress, and took part in the Mexican War. A firm Unionist during the Civil War, he once narrowly escaped hanging by Southern vigilantes even as he went on founding churches across the state.

Sterling City, TX

P. D. Coulson enlisted as a private in a Tennessee infantry regiment in 1861 and rose to surgeon with the rank of major, serving through some of the Civil War's bloodiest fields—First Manassas, Shiloh, Corinth, Vicksburg, and Atlanta—and being wounded twice. After the war he came to Texas and turned to public service, becoming the first county judge of newly organized Sterling County and later a judge in Coke County. His life bridges the battlefield surgery of the 1860s and the civic founding of West Texas.

Jonesville, TX

This East Texas home began in 1841–42 as a modest two-room central-hall house, then grew through the decades — a second story added in 1865, and Italianate rooms and Eastlake porches after Dr. Samuel Floyd Vaughan bought it in 1870. A Missouri native and Civil War veteran, Vaughan served Harrison County as physician and surgeon for the rest of his life. More than a century later the homestead still belonged to his family.

Orange, TX

Samuel M. Brown, born in South Carolina in 1836, served as a surgeon in the Confederate army before bringing his family to East Texas in 1866 and settling in Orange by 1871. A well-regarded physician, he tended not only paying patients but also county jail prisoners and the poor. His life ended in 1887 in a locomotive accident that, by a newspaper account, occurred as he was helping a child near the tracks.

Austin, TX

Thomas Jefferson Gazley left New York for Texas and threw himself into its fight for independence, serving as a physician in the Texas army in 1835–36 and signing the 1836 Declaration of Independence. He also helped shape the young Republic as a convention delegate, congressman, and Masonic leader. The State of Texas honored him with this marker in 1936, the centennial of independence.

Gonzales, TX

This grave marker honors Dr. Thomas Polk, born in 1792, who served the Texan cause during the fight for independence from Mexico. He aided the men who fought at the Siege of Bexar in late 1835 and through the decisive San Jacinto Campaign of 1836. The bronze Star and Wreath denotes a citizen recognized by the State of Texas for service during the revolution.

Orange, TX

Father and son William and David Caldwell Hewson were among the frontier physicians who built up young Orange County. William, Philadelphia-born, settled here in the early 1850s, practicing medicine while running a drugstore, an early sawmill, and helping erect the county courthouse. His son David, a University of Pennsylvania medical graduate, served as a Confederate medical examiner during the Civil War before returning to a thriving practice and leading the regional medical society.

Fayetteville, TX

Dr. William P. Smith served in the fight for Texas independence, standing as a regimental surgeon at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, where Sam Houston's army won the republic its freedom in a matter of minutes. Battlefield surgeons like Smith tended the wounded of a ragtag citizen army with little more than field kits and grit. The State of Texas erected this marker to him in 1962.

Cuero, TX

Dr. William Watt White earned his medical degree in Philadelphia in 1856 and served as a surgeon in Waul's Legion of the Confederate Army during the Civil War. The marker uses his life to open a window onto the grim improvisation of Confederate battlefield medicine — quinine substitutes brewed from tree bark, sutures raveled from silk or boiled horsehair, drugs smuggled past the naval blockade — during a war whose casualties were staggering. White himself contracted typhoid that eventually cost him his eyesight, yet he continued to practice medicine and lead in civic life long after going blind.

Neville Township, PA · est. 1995

On this island in the Ohio River just below Pittsburgh, the Dravo Corporation turned a peacetime engineering firm into one of the arsenal of democracy's most unlikely powerhouses. Its inland shipyard mass-produced Landing Ship Tanks—the ungainly, flat-bottomed LSTs that carried tanks, trucks, and troops straight onto hostile beaches. Using assembly-line techniques Dravo pioneered, this yard and four others hundreds of miles from any ocean built two-thirds of the Navy's entire LST fleet, floating them down the rivers to the sea. More than 16,000 workers here produced 145 of the vessels between 1943 and 1945.

Driftwood, TX

This cemetery began in 1884, when the Driftwood Methodist congregation built a sanctuary on land from David and Mattie Dorrah and set aside a burial ground just south of it. Graves from an older 1870s community cemetery were moved here, and among those at rest are the church's founding trustees and at least eight Civil War veterans. The Driftwood Cemetery Association still cares for it today.

Teague, TX

Julius Driver came from Georgia in 1852, bought frontier headright land in Freestone County, and later set aside 4.5 acres for this burial ground, where his daughter-in-law became the first person interred in 1869. Driver also donated land for a nearby church and school, where Freestone County's Confederate veterans held their first reunion in 1890. A cemetery association has cared for the property since 1915, and hundreds now rest here.

East Drumore Township, PA · est. 1921

This stone monument gathers the memory of four notable early Americans tied to the Drumore neighborhood of Lancaster County. Among them, Dr. David Ramsay won fame as a physician and one of the young nation's first historians, while Colonel Archibald Steele was remembered for his part in the Revolutionary era's daring frontier and Canadian campaigns. Together the four represent the Scots-Irish stock that filled Pennsylvania's southern townships and supplied leaders to the Revolution and the early republic.

Dryden, TX

Aviation came early to remote Terrell County: in 1919 the U.S. government built an airfield near Sanderson for the 90th Aero Squadron, whose biplanes patrolled the Mexican border. When World War II demanded a chain of civilian and emergency military fields across the Southwest, American Airlines and federal aviation authorities built this landing field, finishing its two mile-long rock-asphalt runways in October 1943. Later renamed Terrell County Airport, it went on to host civil air patrol and military training.

Clairette vicinity, TX

Duffau grew from the late-1850s arrival of settlers like Francis T. Duffau, taking its name and gaining a post office by 1860; it became a busy trade center before fires and a railroad bypass sent it into decline. Nearby mineral wells drew health-seekers to a small resort, and churches, a school, and a cemetery anchored community life for over a century. The graveyard's oldest recorded burial dates to 1865, and among its 950-plus graves lie veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, and the Korean War.

McKinney, TX

Dr. Joseph E. Dulaney (d. 1877), a Confederate Army surgeon, came to McKinney after the Civil War and married Lucy Ann Field (1844–1941), daughter of Collin County pioneers. In 1875 he built this Victorian cottage, notable for its many gables and fine porch detailing. Lucy lived here until 1910 with children including Joseph Field Dulaney, a pharmacist who later donated land across the street for a public library.

Dummer, NH

In small North Country towns like Dummer, New Hampshire, a simple stone or plaque set on the town common has long been the way a community keeps faith with its own — the neighbors, sons, and daughters who left the farms and mill villages to serve in the nation's wars. Rather than naming a single battle, this memorial gathers all of that service under one dedication, honoring generations of local veterans from whatever conflict they answered. It reflects a deep New England tradition of civic remembrance, where the town itself takes responsibility for marking sacrifice.

Corpus Christi, TX

Also called Flour Bluff Cemetery, this public burial ground was established in 1908 on land purchased by Edward and Minerva Duncan near Corpus Christi. Its oldest documented grave dates to 1909, and among those buried here are veterans of World War I, World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, alongside generations of families who helped build up Nueces County. It carries the state's Historic Texas Cemetery designation.

Omaha, NE · est. 1992

On the night of April 18, 1945, a Japanese balloon bomb drifted silently across the Pacific and exploded in the sky over the Omaha neighborhood of Dundee, near 50th and Underwood. The incendiary flared brightly but did no damage. Japan had launched thousands of these unmanned 'Fu-Go' balloons hoping to spark fires and panic across North America; U.S. officials suppressed all news of them so the enemy could never gauge their aim. Word of the Dundee blast stayed secret until the day after Japan surrendered.

Corsicana, TX

Kentucky-born Ewing Eric Dunn came to Texas in 1850, served as a county deputy sheriff, then fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War before building the first part of this frame house in 1866. He went on to serve as Navarro County sheriff from 1876 to 1884. Grocer S. M. Ransom enlarged the home in 1890, adding the wraparound porch, fish-scale shingling, and stained glass that five generations of the Ransom family enjoyed.

Tool, TX

Durham Avant left North Carolina for Texas in 1834, arriving with his wife Susan during the restless years just before the Texas Revolution. Serving as a Texas Ranger, he helped survey and site the seat of newly formed Henderson County and later opened a hotel in the county seat of Athens. Late in life he enlisted in the Confederate army alongside his son, and died in 1862 not long after joining up.

Durham Township, PA · est. 1947

Built in 1727, Durham Furnace was one of colonial Pennsylvania's early ironworks, smelting local ore into iron through more than six decades of blast until 1789. In the colonial wars and again during the Revolution it cast cannon and shot for the fight, turning frontier iron into weapons of war. Among its owners were the prominent colonial statesman James Logan and George Taylor, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

San Diego, TX

This marker records the founding of Duval County, created in 1858 and organized in 1876 with San Diego as its seat. The county honors Burr H. Duval, a young captain in James Fannin's command during the Texas Revolution. Taken prisoner after the surrender at Goliad, Duval was among the hundreds executed in the massacre of March 27, 1836.

Alexandria, VA

In the heady months after the Revolutionary War ended, a victorious George Washington made his way home to Mount Vernon, and the nearby port of Alexandria welcomed its most famous neighbor in style. On the last day of 1783, the town's leading men gathered at Duvall's Tavern to honor the general's return from the long fight for independence. Taverns like this one were the social and political heart of early American towns, doubling as banquet halls, meeting rooms, and stages for civic celebration.

Gettysburg, PA · est. 1994

In the spring and summer of 1918, a young Army captain named Dwight D. Eisenhower lived in this Gettysburg house with his wife Mamie and their infant son while commanding nearby Camp Colt. There he trained American soldiers in the new weapon of the First World War, the tank, on the very fields where the great Civil War battle had been fought. Decades later he would return to Gettysburg as a five-star general, Supreme Commander in Europe, and President of the United States.

Anchorage, AK

On September 22, 1995, a Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS of the 962nd Airborne Air Control Squadron went down shortly after taking off from Elmendorf Air Force Base for a routine surveillance training flight, with the loss of all 24 crew aboard — among the deadliest peacetime U.S. military aviation accidents in Alaska. The memorial honors the American and Canadian airmen who died.

Granbury, TX

Born in England, raised in Ohio, and a Union Army veteran, E. A. "Doc" Hannaford came to Granbury in 1871 and opened his drugstore in a tent before prospering. In 1886 he and merchant J. D. Baker put up a two-part Italianate commercial building — among the first stone structures in town — known as the "Arch Block," its cornice advertising Hannaford's Drug and Book Store. He became a leading civic figure, and the upper floor housed the local newspaper, doctors' offices, and a beauty parlor.

Eagle Pass, TX

When Union forces seized the lower Rio Grande in 1863, Eagle Pass became a vital Confederate customhouse and port of entry, the western terminus of the famed Cotton Road. Oxcart trains hauled thousands of cotton bales from San Antonio across a dangerous, bandit-plagued road to be ferried into Mexico and traded for guns, medicine, and supplies. Fort Duncan and Camp Rabb guarded the crossing in a town that had voted overwhelmingly against secession, and citizens once fought off raiders from behind barricades of cotton bales.

Waco, TX

Rising on the young frontier town of Waco just before the Civil War, this Greek Revival house announced that culture had arrived on the Texas prairie—even though only half of the ambitious design was ever finished. Built from local post oak, plantation-made brick, cypress, and heart pine by an unnamed shipwright, it passed from the widow of physician B. W. Earle to her brother, a Confederate general and lawyer, in 1872.

Waco, TX

This Waco house grew in stages across turbulent decades: John Baylis Earle built its first two rooms in the 1850s and, in a mill raised in 1861, manufactured uniforms for the Confederacy. The main house followed in 1868 for the Napier family, newly arrived from Alabama, and a Napier daughter lived here until 1957.

Jacksonville, TX

In 1858 Elijah Earle set aside this land as a burial ground, reportedly choosing his own plot and marking it by carving his initials into a tree. The cemetery became a resting place for East Texas pioneers and their descendants, including a veteran of the Texas Revolution, soldiers of the Civil War and both World Wars, and victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic. Expanded over more than a century, it remains cared for by a community association.

Rio Vista, TX

Texas had been famed for beef since Republic days, and during the Civil War its herds fed much of the Confederacy—civilians and soldiers alike—along a web of trails running to Vicksburg, Natchez, Mobile, Little Rock, and beyond. Drovers swam cattle across rivers as wide as the Mississippi, and the hazards ran to mistaken arrests: one officer and his son died in prison on such a drive. Johnson County supplier Meredith Hart, a veteran of 1836, kept sending beef even after being cheated with counterfeit money.

Lexington, TX

The Methodist Episcopal Church South bought this cemetery site in 1850, though some burials predate it. Among those resting here are San Jacinto veterans — including Lexington's founder, Capt. James Shaw, and William Hawkins — Civil War soldiers, an early county judge's wife, and, in a set-apart section, enslaved people.

Galveston, TX

Long a crossroads for Native peoples, privateers, and Spanish and French explorers, Galveston Island briefly became the seat of the Republic of Texas in 1836. As Santa Anna's army pushed east, President David G. Burnet's improvised cabinet fled Washington-on-the-Brazos and sheltered here until the Texan victory at San Jacinto. From this port the fledgling Texas Navy, later reorganized under President Lamar and Commodore Edwin W. Moore, guarded the coast against Mexican invasion until U.S. annexation in 1846.

Caldwell, TX

When Santa Anna revoked constitutional rights, thirty or more men left this thinly settled corner of Burleson County to join the Texas Revolution, fighting in the Grass Fight of November 1835 and the Siege of Bexar that December. With the men away, the Mexican advance came within forty miles, and civilians fled across the flooded Brazos toward safety in the United States during the panic known as the Runaway Scrape. On April 21, 1836, these settlers helped win the Battle of San Jacinto and Texas independence.

Lower Merion Township, PA · est. 1972

Opened in 1704 and known by a string of colonial names, this roadside inn served travelers on one of the region's key routes for well over a century. It was familiar to Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, and shortly after the Revolution it was renamed to honor General Anthony 'Mad Anthony' Wayne, who had lodged there. Taverns like this were the social and political hubs of colonial and Revolutionary America, where news traveled and plans were laid.

New York, NY

During both World Wars, New York Harbor was the busiest embarkation point in the country, funneling millions of troops and vast tonnage of war material across the Atlantic. Coast Guard Port Security specialists patrolled the waterfront, guarded ships and cargo, and worked to prevent sabotage and fire in one of the war effort's most vital chokepoints. This panel is part of a memorial to that service on the New York shoreline.

Boston, MA

This memorial honors the citizens of East Boston who served during the Vietnam War, one of the longest and most divisive conflicts in the nation's history. Between the mid-1950s and 1975, tight-knit, working-class neighborhoods like Eastie sent many of their sons to Southeast Asia. The plaque gathers that service and sacrifice into a single act of neighborhood gratitude.

Philadelphia, PA

In the Philadelphia neighborhood of East Falls, a mill and riverside community strung along the Schuylkill, residents raised this monument in 1949 through the East Falls War Memorial Association to honor the local men and women who had gone off to fight. Its inscription reaches all the way back to 1776, tying the neighborhood's sacrifice to every American conflict from the Revolution onward. Erected in the years just after World War II, it reflects the postwar impulse of countless towns and city neighborhoods to gather their veterans' service into a single lasting tribute.

Huntsville, TX

Organized in 1854 on land donated by Jonathan and Sarah McGary along the stagecoach road linking Huntsville and Austin, Ebenezer Cemetery grew up beside a Baptist congregation founded under the auspices of the Southern Baptist Convention. Its earliest marked grave dates to 1855, and among those resting here are first families of the Republic of Texas era and veterans reaching back to the Civil War. Though the congregation later disbanded and reorganized elsewhere, a memorial association incorporated in 1986 still tends the ground.

Henderson, TX

In the mid-1800s a farming and ranching settlement grew up along what is now FM 3310, known first as the Mansinger neighborhood and later as Ebenezer after its church and school. The cemetery's recorded history opens with the 1886 burial of Julia Kitchens, and among those resting here are pioneer families, Masons, Woodmen of the World, and veterans reaching back to the Civil War. Shaded by crepe myrtles and cedar, it still serves the descendants of those first settlers.

Odessa, TX

Ector County was created in 1887 and organized in 1891, carved from Tom Green County on the West Texas plains with Odessa as its seat. It honors Matthew Duncan Ector (1822–1879), a Texas legislator, Confederate officer, and respected jurist. The marker records the administrative birth of a county that would later boom with the discovery of Permian Basin oil.

New Kensington, PA

New Kensington's Eddie Adams grew from a high school yearbook photographer into one of the most celebrated photojournalists of his time. His 1968 image "Saigon Execution" won the Pulitzer Prize and helped turn American public opinion against the Vietnam War. Over a career centered in New York, his work filled the nation's leading newspapers and magazines, earning him more than 500 awards.

Eddystone, PA · est. 2019

When the guns of the First World War fell on Europe in 1914, an arms plant rose on the Delaware River at Eddystone to turn out Enfield rifles for Britain. After the United States entered the war, the factory retooled to make the American Model 1917 — and became the single largest rifle producer in the nation, employing some 15,000 workers, a fifth of them women. Its lines fabricated more than a million rifles, nearly half of the country's entire wartime output.