Military & Wartime

Naples, FL

Naples' Freedom Memorial honors the victims and first responders of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and United Flight 93, alongside the armed forces, firefighters, law enforcement, and emergency medical workers who serve the nation. Conceived by the community in the years after 9/11, it stands as a place of civic remembrance far from the attack sites themselves.

Loyalsock Township, PA · est. 1993

Daniel Hughes, a Black raftsman who steered timber down the Susquehanna River, used his travels to a darker purpose for slavery's defenders: in the years before the Civil War he guided fugitives from Maryland to his home here, sheltering them before they moved north to freedom along the Underground Railroad. Hughes gave part of his land for a cemetery, where nine known African American veterans of the Civil War are buried. Known as Freedom Road Cemetery since 1936, the ground honors both the escape network and the men who later fought for the Union.

Angleton, TX

Georgia-born Freeman W. Douglass was among the Texian volunteers who guarded the army's baggage at the camp opposite Harrisburg during the San Jacinto campaign of April 1836. That guard duty freed Sam Houston's main force to win the decisive battle that secured Texas independence. This marker remembers one of the many rank-and-file participants whose ordinary duties made the revolution's turning point possible.

San Jacinto, TX

Freeman Wilkinson served in Captain Thomas H. McIntire's company at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 clash that won Texas its independence from Mexico in a fight lasting barely eighteen minutes. He died at Lynchburg in 1839, in the early days of the Republic of Texas, and was laid to rest near comrades who had fallen in the battle.

Comfort, TX

Between 1845 and 1861, German 'Freidenker'—Freethinkers who prized reason, democracy, and secular learning—settled across the Texas Hill Country, many of them refugees from the failed 1848 revolution. They founded Comfort and neighboring 'Latin Colonies' where a knowledge of Latin marked the cultured farmer-intellectual. Committed to universal rights, they opposed slavery and secession, and their loyalty to the Union during the Civil War cost many of them their freedom and their lives.

Dayton, TX

Local tradition holds that this cemetery took its name from a party of French settlers said to have been killed and buried nearby in the 18th century, though no physical trace of them survives. The documented history begins with Beasley Pruett, who received the surrounding land from the Mexican government in 1824 and was buried here after his death in 1835; the oldest marked grave dates to 1860. Generations of Liberty County settlers, public officials, and veterans of several wars lie within its two acres.

Cochranton, PA · est. 1946

French Creek was known to the French as the Riviere aux Boeufs before a young George Washington gave it its English name during his 1753 mission to warn the French out of the Ohio Country. The waterway served as a vital corridor during the French and Indian War, linking Lake Erie to the Allegheny, and later carried settlers into northwestern Pennsylvania. Its banks saw the movement of armies, traders, and pioneers alike.

LeBoeuf Township, PA · est. 1946

The French knew this stream as the Riviere aux Boeufs, part of their chain of waterways linking Lake Erie to the Ohio. When young George Washington passed through in 1753 on his mission to the French, he gave it the English name French Creek. The waterway became a corridor for troops and traders during the French and Indian War and later for the settlers who opened northwestern Pennsylvania.

Missoula County, MT

This memorial honors the men and women of the Frenchtown, Huson, and Alberton communities of western Montana who answered their country's call to military service. Bearing the familiar epitaph "All gave some, some gave all," it gathers three small rural communities in the Clark Fork valley into a shared act of remembrance. It speaks to the outsized role such places have played in furnishing America's armed forces.

Fresno, CA

This memorial honors the veterans of Fresno who served their country and gave their lives in its wars. Set in California's agricultural heartland of the San Joaquin Valley, it gathers the community's remembrance of generations of local service members into a single place of tribute. Memorials like it anchor civic ceremonies each Memorial Day and Veterans Day.

North Beaver Township, PA · est. 1948

By April 1773 the Christian Delaware of Friedensstadt, guided by the missionary John Heckewelder, abandoned their Beaver River town and resettled on the Muskingum River in what is now Ohio. There tragedy overtook them: on March 8, 1782, Pennsylvania militiamen murdered scores of these peaceful, unarmed converts at Gnadenhütten in one of the darkest atrocities of the Revolutionary frontier. The marker traces the thread from this quiet Pennsylvania mission to that infamous massacre.

Saint Louis, MO

This St. Louis monument honors Friedrich Hecker, a fiery leader of the failed German revolutions of 1848 who fled to the United States and became a hero to America's German immigrant community. The paired dates—1848 and 1861—trace his arc from European revolutionary to Union colonel, raising a regiment to fight for the country that had taken him in. Hecker embodied the "Forty-Eighters," liberal émigrés who poured their idealism into the Union cause.

Jasper, TX

When Joseph Andrew Jackson Sheffield brought his wife Rebecca and their fourteen children from Georgia to Jasper County in 1885, they built a large family farm and gave the community its name—Friendship—along with land for a church and school in 1899. The cemetery's first burial that year was the Sheffields' young granddaughter, and the ground was formally recorded as a cemetery in 1906. Among its hundreds of graves lie early settlers, Texas Rangers, and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Edom, TX

The first burial here was nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Carolina Piles in May 1856, followed within days by her sister, on land owned by their father. Among the roughly 188 graves lie six Confederate veterans of the Civil War. Four acres were set aside for the cemetery in 1886 and doubled by a later gift, and an association tends the grounds today.

Leavenworth, KS

This marker notes Fort Leavenworth's designation as a Registered National Historic Landmark. Established in 1827 on the Missouri River, the fort was a key staging point for the westward-bound Santa Fe and Oregon Trails and the oldest continuously active U.S. Army post west of the Mississippi. For generations it guarded the frontier and outfitted expeditions pushing into the West.

San Francisco, CA

Fort Point stands at the southern edge of the Golden Gate, a masonry fortress completed in 1861 to guard the entrance to San Francisco Bay just as the Civil War began. Its multi-tiered brick casemates were a marvel of 19th-century military engineering, and the American Society of Civil Engineers recognized it as a landmark in 1976. Though its guns never fired in anger, it symbolized the Union's determination to hold the gold-rich Pacific coast.

Warrenton, OR

On June 21, 1942, a 5.5-inch shell fired from the Japanese submarine I-25 exploded here, one of seventeen aimed at the Columbia River's coastal defenses at Fort Stevens. It was the only hostile shelling of a military base on the U.S. mainland during World War II and the first foreign attack on a mainland fort in over a century. The gunners at Fort Stevens, wary of revealing their positions, held their fire.

Walnut Springs, TX

First known as the Morgan Cemetery for Kentucky-born Daniel Morgan, who came to Texas in 1834 and served in the Civil War with the Texas State Troops, this burial ground sits along the eastern fork of the Bosque River. Its earliest marked grave dates to 1880, and oral tradition holds that railroad workers were buried here because of the nearby rail line. After the Morgan family sold out and left around 1906, the name changed to Fulton, honoring the trustees who took over the land.

Fulton, TX

Set aside in 1868 when George Ware Fulton platted the town, this community graveyard holds a poignant record of pioneer life — its earliest burial an infant, and its many children's graves testifying to the hard conditions of the coast. European immigrants, leading citizens, and veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam rest here; a 1947 brush fire destroyed many of the early wooden markers.

McConnellsburg, PA · est. 1982

Established from Bedford County in 1850, Fulton County honors Robert Fulton, the Pennsylvania-born pioneer of the steamboat. Its seat, McConnellsburg, was incorporated in 1814 in the ridges of south-central Pennsylvania. During the Civil War the county saw the first casualties of the Confederacy's Gettysburg Campaign, and in 1864 it hosted the last Confederate campsite on Pennsylvania soil.

Anderson, TX

This family burial ground honors the Ephraim Fuqua family, among the earliest settlers in this part of Grimes County. Fuqua secured a land patent from the young Republic of Texas in 1841 and set aside part of it for a cemetery, whose first recorded grave belongs to a Confederate soldier who died in 1862. Generations of the family rest here, including veterans of the Spanish-American War and both world wars.

West Chester, PA · est. 2002

In a converted auto repair shop in West Chester, chemist G. Raymond Rettew solved one of World War II's most urgent problems: how to make penicillin in quantity. Working with Wyeth Laboratories in 1943, his lab produced and shipped more of the new antibiotic to the armed forces than any other in the world. The drug that had been a laboratory curiosity became a battlefield lifesaver.

Middlebury, VT

This cannon was presented in 1910 by the U.S. Government to W. P. Russell Post No. 89 of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Vermont department of the great fraternal order of Union Civil War veterans. In the decades after the war, aging veterans gathered in G.A.R. posts across the North to keep faith with fallen comrades, and the federal government issued surplus ordnance to adorn their memorials. The gun stands as a tangible link between a small Vermont town and the armies that preserved the Union.

Gainesville, TX

Founded in 1850 and named for General Edmund P. Gaines, whose troops had backed the young Republic of Texas in 1836, Gainesville sat on the edge of the frontier in Cooke County. It served as a Confederate military supply headquarters during the Civil War and long stood as a bulwark against raids, while growing into a hub of agriculture, industry, and oil — and home to the famed Gainesville Community Circus.

Gainesville, TX

As the U.S. Cavalry pushed roads across the West, the Army in 1879 placed Lt. Henry O. Flipper, the first African American graduate of West Point, in command of building a supply road from Fort Sill in Indian Territory to Gainesville, Texas. Flipper served with the Tenth Cavalry, the famed Buffalo Soldiers. Within two years the railroad reached elsewhere and eclipsed the route, but the road stood as a lasting mark of Black soldiers' work opening the West.

Honey Grove, TX

Marshall A. Galbraith left Kentucky for Fannin County in 1847 and, after serving in a Texas Confederate cavalry regiment during the Civil War, returned to build this Greek Revival home around 1870. A farmer and businessman, he raised a family whose descendants still occupied the house when it was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1973.

Galveston, TX

Founded in 1842 by Samuel Bangs, Texas's first printer, the Galveston News grew under Willard Richardson into a major paper housed in the city's first four-story building. The Civil War forced it to flee to Houston, print on straw paper and yellow tissue, and shrink its columns, but it endured; under Confederate veteran A. H. Belo it later founded the Dallas Morning News in 1885, pioneering twin editions issued 300 miles apart.

Galveston, TX

With the Republic of Texas locked in tension with Mexico, a group of Galveston businessmen and their clerks organized the Galveston Artillery Company in 1840 and won a charter in 1841 to defend the harbor and city. Rarely called into state service, the company marched in parades and San Jacinto commemorations and made its most eventful trip in 1861, joining the call for Federal surrender at Fort Brown at the Civil War's outset. Reorganized after the war, it evolved by 1899 into the social Galveston Artillery Club, still tied to its militia roots.

Galveston, TX

Long a crossroads for Indians, privateers, and Spanish and French explorers, Galveston Island briefly served as capital of the young Republic of Texas. In March 1836, as Santa Anna's army invaded, President David G. Burnet's interim cabinet fled Washington-on-the-Brazos and eventually to Galveston, remaining until the decisive Texas victory at San Jacinto that April. The island then became the base of the fledgling Texas Navy, whose fortunes rose and fell until Sam Houston, feuding with Commodore Edwin W. Moore, ordered the fleet sold — a sale outraged Galvestonians forcibly blocked.

Galveston, TX

Few places have packed so much Texas history onto one strip of sand as Galveston Island. Shipwrecked Spaniards met the Karankawa here in 1528, the pirate Jean Lafitte made it his headquarters, it served briefly as capital of the Republic in 1836, and it changed hands in the Civil War before the catastrophic hurricane of 1900 killed thousands and remade the city behind a great seawall.

Galveston, TX

Galveston was Texas's most important seaport during the Civil War, a cotton-exporting city with foreign consulates and a ring of mud forts and gun batteries. Even under Federal blockade, daring blockade runners slipped out to Nassau, Havana, and Europe, trading cotton for guns and medicine. Confederates under General John B. Magruder retook the city on January 1, 1863, and the Trans-Mississippi Department made its final surrender here—followed on June 19 by the Emancipation proclamation that gave rise to Juneteenth.

Greene Township, PA · est. 1947

During the Revolutionary War, the far western reaches of Pennsylvania remained a dangerous frontier where settlers built fortified refuges against raids. Garard's Fort served as one such haven, garrisoned in 1777 by a small detachment of Virginia militia during the border disputes and warfare that gripped the Ohio Country. The marker also records the tragedy of May 12, 1782, when Native warriors attacked the family of Baptist minister John Corbly on their way to worship, killing his wife and three of his children.

Greene Township, PA · est. 1958

During the Revolutionary War this was a fortified frontier refuge, garrisoned in 1777 by a small detachment of Virginia militia at a time when the region was claimed as part of Monongalia County, Virginia. Life here meant constant danger on a contested border. On May 12, 1782, in an Indian attack near here, the wife and three children of Baptist minister Rev. John Corbly were killed on their way to church, and two more of his children were wounded but survived.

Boston, MA

Tucked into Boston's Public Garden, this quiet memorial honors the Massachusetts residents killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — a day with deep ties to the city, as both planes that struck the World Trade Center had departed from Logan Airport. Dedicated in the years after the attacks, the garden offers a contemplative space of remembrance amid one of America's oldest public parks.

Annona, TX

Joseph and Martha Wagley came from Louisiana to Red River County in 1833, part of the wave of settlers moving into the young Republic of Texas's borderlands. Their family burial ground took shape here before the Civil War, in which Joseph served the Confederacy and lost a son. After Joseph sold the land to the Garland family in 1866 the cemetery took on their name, and by 1914 it passed to the Methodist church, which with the Annona community still tends it today.

Newton County, TX

Benjamin Garlington earned the land that became this burial ground as a bounty for his service as a private and musician in the Mississippi Militia during the War of 1812. He later ministered to Newton County and neighboring Louisiana parishes as a Primitive Baptist preacher. He and his wife lie here alongside an unidentified laborer who worked for them and several others whose names are now lost.

Uvalde, TX

Established in July 1941 and named for Texas native and former Vice President John Nance Garner, this field trained pilots on the eve of and throughout World War II. Civilian instructors under Army Air Corps officers taught cadets to fly PT-19A trainers; men and women worked as mechanics and parachute packers, and later classes drew cadets from across the Americas and as far as Turkey. After deactivation in 1945 the runways became a city airport and the remaining buildings opened as Southwest Texas Junior College in 1946.

Lancaster, KY

Garrard County, the 25th formed in Kentucky, was created in 1797 and named for James Garrard, then the state's governor. A Virginia native and Revolutionary War militia officer, Garrard came to Kentucky in 1783 and helped shape its path to statehood at the Danville conventions before serving as governor from 1796 to 1804.

Dallas, TX

This burial ground holds the pioneer families who settled early Dallas County, with graves reaching back to the 1870s. Prominent merchants and attorneys—James Garvin and the Crawford brothers—donated the land to the community. Among those resting here are Civil War veterans, including Col. Pleasant Swor, who led an assault at the Battle of Corinth.

Floresville, TX

This burial ground is one of three that served the old Lodi Settlement, and most of those laid to rest here were Tejanos—Texans of Mexican descent. The earliest known grave, that of Polonio Garcia, dates to 1883, and the cemetery also holds veterans across generations of American wars, from Civil War soldier Juan de la Garza to World War I veterans Vicente Garza and Jesus Valdez. Its crosses, Spanish-language grave slabs, and brick enclosure—laid in bricks like those of the Wilson County Courthouse—still mark an active, living memorial.

Gonzales, TX

The Gates family came to Texas as part of Stephen F. Austin's original colony, and this cemetery sits on land granted to Samuel H. Gates for service in the Texas War for Independence. The first burial, in 1863, was his son Samuel A., a Confederate soldier who died soon after returning from imprisonment at Vicksburg; another son, Joseph Dillard Gates, served in one of Texas's first Confederate units before a career in county affairs. A later descendant taught on Indian reservations and helped organize the cemetery association.

Covington, TX

Founded around 1860 by Covington's founder Col. James Gathings and his brother Philip, Gathings College drew over 200 students and added a military department to prepare young men for Civil War service. While most of Confederate Texas's twenty-five colleges shuttered for want of teachers and books, this one stayed open—sustained by Gathings's mills, tannery, and workshops. He gave flour, meat, and shoes to soldiers' needy families and outfitted army units at his own expense.

Austin, TX

Born in Virginia in 1827, Alexander Watkins Terrell came to Texas in 1852 and served as a district judge before the Civil War, then rose to brigadier general in the Confederate army by 1865. In the decades after the war he became one of the state's most influential public men—serving thirty years in the Texas Legislature and, in the 1890s, as U.S. Minister to Turkey. He died at Mineral Wells in 1912.

Farmville, NC

Allen Hal Turnage (1891–1971), born in Farmville, rose to command the U.S. Marine Corps Third Division in the Pacific during World War II. He led its assaults on Bougainville and Guam in 1943–44 and was awarded the Navy Cross for his leadership. He was born just southeast of this marker.

Norristown, PA · est. 1949

Andrew Porter, born near this spot in 1743, served as an officer during the Revolutionary War and then turned his talents to mapping the young state, surveying Pennsylvania's western and northern boundaries between 1784 and 1787. He capped his career as the commonwealth's Surveyor-General from 1809 until his death in Harrisburg in 1813. His home, "Selma," is marked a block away.

Georgetown, KY

Scott County native Basil W. Duke (1838–1916) served the Confederacy as the trusted lieutenant and brother-in-law of John Hunt Morgan, giving discipline and dash to the famed 2nd Kentucky Cavalry. Twice wounded in 1862 and captured during the 1863 Indiana–Ohio raid, he later took command of Morgan's brigade and helped escort Jefferson Davis in the war's final weeks. Afterward he practiced law in Louisville, entered politics, and wrote the History of Morgan's Cavalry.

Exeter, NH

This spot in Exeter marks the home of Enoch Poor, a New Hampshire merchant and shipbuilder who rose to become a brigadier general in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. From this seacoast town he helped rally New Hampshire's men to the Patriot cause, leading troops through the hard campaigns of the war before his death in 1780. Exeter itself served as New Hampshire's revolutionary-era capital, making it a fitting home for one of the state's most trusted field commanders.

Hempstead vicinity, TX

In the uneasy months after the Civil War, the U.S. sent a large force into Texas to restore order and to counter French-backed forces in Mexico. From August to October 1865, George Armstrong Custer and his cavalry — with his wife Elizabeth, "Libbie" — camped on the Liendo plantation of Leonard Groce, heir to "Old 300" cotton baron Jared Groce. Custer's insistence that his troops respect Texans and their property helped keep relations with local families cordial.

Austin, TX

George W. Terrell arrived in Texas in 1840, during the brief life of the independent Republic of Texas, and rose almost at once to its highest offices — associate justice of its Supreme Court, Secretary of State, and Attorney General. As chargé d'affaires he carried the young nation's case to the courts of England, France, and Spain in 1844–45, the very years annexation to the United States was being decided. He died in Austin in 1846, months after Texas became a state.

York, PA · est. 1949

In 1778, while the Continental Congress sat in nearby York, General Horatio Gates—hero of the American victory at Saratoga and then President of the Board of War—kept his residence here. It was a fraught moment: the so-called "Conway Cabal," a murky swirl of criticism aimed at General Washington's leadership, was said to have unraveled in these rooms, thwarted in part by the young Marquis de Lafayette's steadfast loyalty to the commander-in-chief.

New York, NY

In the autumn of 1776, the British had just captured New York City and turned nearby Staten Island into a major staging ground, its shores watched across the narrow tidal waters of the Arthur Kill from New Jersey. Hugh Mercer—a Scottish-born physician who became one of Washington's most trusted generals—commanded American forces in the region and pressed the kind of swift, small-scale raids that kept a larger enemy off balance. This spot marks one such strike: patriots crossing from Perth Amboy fell upon the enemy by surprise, carrying off prisoners along with captured weapons and ammunition. Mercer would be mortally wounded only months later at the Battle of Princeton, sealing his place among the Revolution's early martyrs.

Mount Carmel, PA · est. 2001

A coal-town boy from Mount Carmel, James M. Gavin rose to become one of the most admired combat leaders of World War II. As a commander in the 82nd Airborne Division he jumped with his paratroopers into Sicily, Salerno, Normandy, and Holland, helping prove that airborne assault could reshape modern warfare. He went on to hold senior Cold War commands, retired as a lieutenant general in 1958, and served as U.S. Ambassador to France under President Kennedy.

Independence, TX

James Willie was a Georgia-born lawyer who rose in the young state of Texas to become its Attorney General in 1856–57, helping shape the legal footing of a state barely a decade removed from its own republic. When secession came, he cast his lot with the Confederacy, serving as an officer until his death in Houston in 1863. His life traces the arc from antebellum statecraft to the Civil War that consumed it.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1949

General John Armstrong lived on this site and earned lasting fame as the "Hero of Kittanning" for his 1756 raid on a Delaware stronghold during the French and Indian War. He went on to serve as a Revolutionary officer, a member of the Continental Congress, and a county judge, dying in Carlisle in 1795 and resting in the Old Graveyard two blocks south. His long career spanned the frontier wars and the founding of the nation.

Paducah, KY

This heroic statue honors General Lloyd Tilghman, a Maryland-born engineer who laid out the first railroad to reach Paducah before casting his lot with the Confederacy in 1861. He was killed leading troops near Vicksburg in May 1863. His sons and the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected the monument in 1909, sculpted by the noted Boston artist Henry H. Kitson.

O'Hara Township, PA · est. 1999

Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway commanded the 82nd Airborne Division during its World War II campaigns, including the invasion of Sicily, before leading the XVIII Airborne Corps into the war's final year. In 1951 he took over United Nations forces in Korea and soon rose to supreme Allied commander in Europe and then Army Chief of Staff, where he cautioned against reliance on massive nuclear retaliation. In 1989 the Ridgway International Peace Shrine was dedicated here in his honor.

Canadian, TX

In the winter of 1874–75, the U.S. Army swept the Texas Panhandle in the campaign now known as the Red River War, and General Nelson Miles ran part of it from a dugout post near here. His columns fought eight engagements that season and, in November 1874, recovered two of the captive German sisters, Addie and Julia, with their older sisters freed the following February. From this rough headquarters Miles nominated soldiers for the Medal of Honor, among them the celebrated scout Billy Dixon, before Fort Elliott rose in 1875 to carry on the work.

Washington County, MD

On the morning of September 14, 1862, the Maryland Campaign reached the wooded slopes of South Mountain, where Confederate forces fought to hold the gaps against advancing Union columns three days before the carnage at Antietam. In the fighting around Fox's Gap, Brigadier General Samuel Garland, Jr.—a young Lynchburg lawyer turned brigade commander under D. H. Hill—rode among his North Carolinians to steady their line and was struck down, dying of his wound that day. His loss was one of several among senior officers in a battle that bought the Army of Northern Virginia precious hours but could not stop the Federal push through the passes.

York, PA · est. 1949

This colonial-era building served as the headquarters of General "Mad" Anthony Wayne from February to May of 1781, as his troops waited in York for orders. Those orders would soon send him south to join Lafayette in the Virginia campaign that culminated in the decisive siege of Yorktown. Wayne, a fiery Pennsylvania soldier, was among the most aggressive field commanders of the Continental Army.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1949

General William Irvine came to Carlisle as an early physician before public life and war swept him up: he served in Pennsylvania's Provincial Convention, took up arms as a Revolutionary officer, and commanded the strategic western post at Fort Pitt. The house he occupied stood on this site before 1800. His path from frontier doctor to frontier general captures the versatility demanded of Revolutionary-era leaders.