Military & Wartime

Goliad, TX

First known to Spanish settlers as a mission and presidio in 1749, this place — La Bahía del Espíritu Santo — became a strategic fort under Spanish, Mexican, and Texan control before its name was changed to Goliad in 1829. In 1836 it was the scene of the massacre of Fannin and his command, a rallying cry of the Texas Revolution. Organized as a county that same year, it later sent several companies to the Confederate army.

San Antonio, TX

Laid out by Spain around 1720 as El Camino Real a La Bahía—the King's Highway to Goliad—this road served for a century and a half as a major route for emigrants, armies, and traders, later becoming part of the Chihuahua Road linking the Gulf Coast to Mexico. Soldiers of Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, and the Confederacy marched along it, as did Native peoples, and near this spot it crossed Salado Creek on the approach to San Antonio. Its heavy traffic faded only when the railroads arrived.

Gonzales, TX

Here on September 29, 1835, Mexican troops arrived to reclaim a small cannon the government had lent the colonists of Gonzales for defense against raids. The Texians stalled for two days while reinforcements gathered, then flung back their famous answer — "Come and Take It." The standoff over that little gun helped ignite the Texas Revolution.

Gonzales, TX

At this spot in a peach orchard, the colonists of Gonzales buried their contested cannon to hide it from 150 Mexican dragoons sent to seize it in September 1835. Two days later they dug it up, mounted it on ox-cart wheels, loaded it with chains and scrap iron, and fired what is remembered as the first shot of the Texas Revolution.

Gonzales, TX

This cemetery holds, by tradition, the reinterred remains of Gonzales's earliest settlers in a common grave, alongside figures central to the Texas Revolution. Among them are Dr. George W. Barnett, quartermaster Major Valentine Barnett, and Matthew Caldwell. Gonzales itself was the site of the revolution's opening skirmish over the "Come and Take It" cannon.

Gonzales County, TX

When Green DeWitt planted his colony on the Guadalupe River in 1825, he ordered a road cut to link his capital at Gonzales with San Antonio, and surveyor Byrd Lockhart opened the eighty-mile route in 1827—its mileage notched into roadside oak trunks. Settlers, traders, and Mexican travelers braved the road despite the danger of raids. A decade later it became a thoroughfare of the Texas Revolution: the 'Immortal 32' marched down it from Gonzales to reinforce the Alamo, and Santa Anna's army followed after the fort fell.

Athens, TX

Named for a pioneering family that migrated from Alabama in the 1850s, Goodgame Cemetery has served Henderson County since the Civil War era, its first recorded burial a young girl who died in 1863 while her father was away at war. Floyd Crockett Goodgame's sons became Confederate officers, and one, a schoolteacher, returned to teach and help found the community of Turkey Creek. The ground was formally deeded in 1901 and holds veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Korea, marked by Woodmen of the World stones and family curbing.

Tyler, TX

Begun in 1857 as a home called "Bonnie Castle," this Tyler landmark was bought after the Civil War by Dr. S. A. Goodman and enlarged by his son, Major W. J. Goodman, a surgeon in the 13th Texas Infantry of the Confederate army. Passed down and remodeled across generations, it was willed to the city in 1939 and has housed the Smith County Historical Society Museum since 1960.

Gorham, ME

Erected in 1866 by Honorable Toppan Robie, this monument honors the sons of Gorham who died in the Civil War, then still fresh in memory as "the Great Rebellion of 1861." Maine sent a remarkably high share of its men to the Union cause, and towns like Gorham paid dearly in the war's battles. Raised just a year after Appomattox, it is among the earliest generation of Civil War memorials.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2026

Gouverneur Morris served as a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and it was his pen that gave the finished document much of its final polish. He is remembered as the "Penman of the Constitution" for drafting the Preamble and its ringing opening words, "We the People." During that momentous summer he lodged at Mary Dalley's boarding house nearby.

Hopkinsville, KY

Born near Bardstown and trained at Transylvania University, Charles S. Morehead built a long public career—state legislator, attorney general, U.S. congressman, and governor of Kentucky from 1855 to 1859. As the nation fractured, he joined the 1861 Washington Peace Conference in a last effort to avert war; though he stayed officially neutral, his sympathy for the Confederacy and criticism of Lincoln led to his arrest and months of imprisonment. Warned of a second arrest, he fled abroad and died at his Mississippi plantation in 1868.

Frankfort, KY

George Madison came to Kentucky as a young Virginian who had already soldiered in the Revolutionary War, and he spent roughly two decades as auditor of the state's public accounts after his appointment by Governor Isaac Shelby. Distinguished service in the War of 1812 lifted him to popularity, and in 1816 Kentuckians elected him governor. He died only weeks after taking office—the first Kentucky governor to die in office—and Lieutenant Governor Gabriel Slaughter completed the term. Madison rests in the state section of the Frankfort Cemetery.

Harford County, MD

This roadside marker along the old Post Road honors William Paca, born nearby in 1740, who rose to sign the Declaration of Independence and later served three terms as governor of Maryland. The Post Road itself, noted here as established in 1666, was one of the colonial arteries binding the Atlantic settlements together long before the Revolution. Paca went on to help shape Maryland's early state government and its constitution.

Austin, TX

Andrew Jackson Hamilton, an Alabama-born lawyer nicknamed "Colossal Jack" for his stature and eloquence, settled in Texas around 1846 and rose through its legal and political ranks. A staunch Unionist alongside his friend Sam Houston, he fled Texas in 1862 as the secession crisis deepened, and Abraham Lincoln named him a brigadier general and military governor. He returned to serve as provisional governor during the turbulence of Reconstruction before losing the office in 1869.

Austin, TX

Edmund J. Davis (1827–1883), a Florida-born lawyer and judge, became one of Reconstruction Texas's most polarizing figures. During the Civil War he commanded a regiment of Texas Unionists and rose to brigadier general, then led the Radical Republicans and won the governorship in 1870 as Texas rejoined the Union. His controversial term — praised for backing free public education, condemned over the state police and corruption charges — ended in the 'Coke-Davis' standoff of 1874, when Davis occupied the Capitol's first floor before President Grant declined to intervene and he left peacefully.

Marshall, TX

Edward Clark, the son of a Georgia governor, settled in Texas in 1842 and rose through its politics as legislator, secretary of state, and lieutenant governor. In 1861 he became the state's first Confederate governor when Sam Houston was removed for opposing secession, and in his brief term he raced to mobilize Texas for war — organizing camps of instruction, converting resources to arms, and sending some 20,000 troops to the Confederacy. He then raised and led the 14th Texas Infantry, was wounded and commended at the Battle of Pleasant Hill in 1864, and returned to law and business after the war.

Marshall, TX

Born in Georgia in 1815, Edward Clark came to Texas in 1842 and climbed its political ladder from state representative and senator to secretary of state and lieutenant governor. In 1861 he became governor, then raised and led the 14th Texas Infantry through the Red River campaigns of the Civil War, taking a wound at the Battle of Pleasant Hill. He returned to law and business after the war until his death in 1880.

Austin, TX

Elisha Marshall Pease came to Texas from Connecticut in 1835 and fought at the Battle of Gonzales that opened the Texas Revolution before building a career in law and government. As governor in the 1850s he helped establish a permanent school fund and Texas's first free public schools, expanded railroads, and moved his family into the new Governor's Mansion. A committed Unionist, he later returned as a Reconstruction-era provisional governor and resigned in protest in 1869.

Coldspring, TX

George Tyler Wood came to Texas from Georgia in 1839 and settled along the Trinity River, rising through the Republic's Congress and the Annexation Convention. He left the state Senate to fight in the Mexican War, and his battlefield reputation carried him to the governor's chair in 1847. His single term wrestled with Indian conflict, the Santa Fe boundary dispute, and a heavy public debt, while establishing a state library and penitentiary.

Bastrop, TX

Joseph Draper Sayers moved to Bastrop as a boy in 1851 and won distinction in the Civil War, rising to adjutant general of the Confederate Army through his battlefield valor. A Mason, Methodist layman, and lawyer, he built a long political career: state senator in 1873, lieutenant governor from 1879, U.S. congressman from 1885 to 1899, and governor of Texas from 1899 to 1903.

McKinney, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1825, James W. Throckmorton came to the Texas frontier as a boy in 1841, served as a young hunter and scout, and fought in the Mexican War before turning to law and politics. Though he defended the right of secession, he was one of only seven delegates to vote against leaving the Union in 1861, then served the Confederacy during the war. Elected governor in 1866, he was removed the next year by General Philip Sheridan as 'an impediment to Reconstruction,' and later returned to serve in the U.S. Congress.

Marble Falls, TX

Oran M. Roberts presided over the 1861 convention that took Texas out of the Union, served as a Confederate officer, and after the war rose to be governor of Texas from 1879 to 1883. Leaving office, he taught law at the University of Texas and built this modest cottage for his retirement in Marble Falls. Later owners moved the house and dressed it up with Victorian touches, but it remains tied to one of the era's central figures.

Weatherford, TX

Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham volunteered at fifteen and fought through the Civil War before settling in Texas, teaching school, and rising through the law to become a five-county district attorney and then a long-serving U.S. congressman for West Texas. His fame took root in 1871 with his fiery prosecution of Kiowa chiefs after the Warren Wagon Train Massacre. As the last Confederate veteran to serve as governor of Texas, from 1903 to 1907, he championed reforms in taxes, child labor, uniform textbooks, and honest elections — and died at this home in Weatherford.

Bastrop, TX

Joseph D. Sayers built this Greek Revival home in Bastrop in 1868 for his bride, Ada Walton, having come to Texas from Mississippi as a boy and served as a Confederate officer in the Civil War. Returning to teach school and practice law, he rose through Texas politics as state senator, lieutenant governor, and U.S. congressman before serving two terms as governor from 1899 to 1903. The house stands as a physical anchor to one of the more consequential political careers of the post-Reconstruction South.

Hillsborough, NC

In the turbulent final years of the Revolution, North Carolina's Governor Thomas Burke was seized in Hillsborough by the Loyalist raider David Fanning and his Tories on September 12, 1781. Carried off as a prisoner to Charleston, Burke's capture showed how fiercely the backcountry civil war between Whigs and Tories still raged even as the wider Revolution neared its end.

Russellville, KY

This corner was home to John J. Crittenden from 1811 to 1818, early in a career that made him one of Kentucky's most distinguished statesmen. He served in the War of 1812, sat in the legislature, became the state's fifteenth governor, and was U.S. Attorney General under three presidents and a five-time senator. He is best remembered for the Crittenden Compromise of 1860, a last, failed attempt to hold the Union together on the eve of the Civil War.

Paducah, KY

Founded in 1848 in a private home, Grace Church raised its first sanctuary from lumber cut in Louisville and floated down the Ohio to the Paducah riverfront, consecrating it in 1851. During the Civil War the federal government seized the property and pressed it into service as a hospital. The present Gothic church was begun in 1873 to serve a growing river city, and later survived the devastating 1937 flood.

Hopkinsville, KY

Organized in 1831 by Hopkinsville laymen with help from an early missionary who became its first rector, Grace Episcopal grew alongside the young town of western Kentucky. Its first sanctuary rose around 1850, and in 1875 the parish welcomed Jefferson Davis—an Episcopalian and Christian County native—to worship. The present church was built in 1883–84 and became a hub of the community's social and cultural life, surviving a tornado that toppled its tower in 1978.

Irene, TX

When William and Sarah Graham came from North Carolina to settle here in 1856, they brought a household that included enslaved people, some of whom are believed to be buried in and around this ground. The oldest marked grave belongs to their six-year-old granddaughter, buried in 1866. The site is bound up with Abe Mason, a Tennessee-born Confederate veteran wounded at Shiloh who married into the family and became one of Hill County's largest landowners.

Boston, MA

This tablet at the Granary Burying Ground, founded in 1660, names some of the notable Americans buried within. They include three signers of the Declaration of Independence — John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Robert Treat Paine — alongside colonial and early-republic governors, jurists such as Samuel Sewall, and prominent ministers. It is one of the most visited stops on Boston's Freedom Trail.

Granbury, TX

Known as "the cemetery lot" before the town of Granbury even existed, this hillside held graves predating the city's 1866 founding, the earliest from 1853. Church leaders briefly made it the site of a high school that grew into Granbury College before the land returned to full use as a burial ground in 1915. Among those at rest are the city's namesake, Confederate Brigadier General Hiram B. Granbury, and veterans of every American conflict from the War of 1812 through Vietnam.

River Forest, IL

This memorial honors the men who "wore the blue" in the Union Army during the Civil War of 1861–1865. It was dedicated in October 1930 by the Past President's Club of the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, one of the heritage societies that carried the memory of the Grand Army of the Republic into the twentieth century. It stands in River Forest as a tribute to those who preserved the Union.

Bellingham, WA

The Grand Army of the Republic was the great fraternal organization of Union veterans of the Civil War, a powerful force in American civic life from the 1860s into the twentieth century. This memorial was dedicated in 1931 by the Woman's Relief Corps, the Sons of Veterans and their auxiliary, and the schoolchildren and citizens of Bellingham — a community gathering to honor the aging and dying generation that had fought to preserve the Union. By that date the last Union soldiers were passing into memory.

Reno, NV

In 1890 the General O.M. Mitchel Post 69 of the Grand Army of the Republic — the great fraternal organization of Union veterans — bought seventeen lots in Reno's Hillside Cemetery as a final resting place for its Civil War comrades. Among those buried here are Nevada volunteers who served across their own state and the neighboring West from 1861 to 1866. After decades of neglect and vandalism, the Daughters of Union Veterans and local citizens began restoring the plot in 1963.

Judsonia, AR

"In Memory of the Defenders of the Union, 1861–1865" marks the Grand Army of the Republic — the powerful fraternal order of Union Civil War veterans — in Judsonia, Arkansas. Though Arkansas joined the Confederacy, thousands of its men, white and Black, fought instead for the Union, and this memorial honors that loyal service.

Baltimore, MD

The Grand Army of the Republic was the great fraternal order of Union veterans who had marched home from the Civil War, and by the 1930s their ranks were thinning fast as the old soldiers passed into memory. This sundial was placed in Baltimore in 1933 not by the veterans themselves but by their descendants — the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, a heritage society formed to keep faith with the men of 1861–1865. A sundial makes a fitting tribute: a quiet instrument marking the passage of time over a generation that was slipping away.

Reno, NV

This tree was planted in soil gathered from Civil War battlefields and dedicated in June 1913 by the national commander-in-chief to honor the Grand Army of the Republic, the great fraternal order of Union veterans. In 1969 it was rededicated by the Sons and Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War in Reno, keeping the memory of those soldiers alive into the 20th century.

Grand Prairie, TX

The Curtiss Flying Service bought this Grand Prairie tract in 1929 and opened an airport and flying school in 1930, only to see it shuttered within the year by the Depression. Aviator Lou Foote revived it as a flying school before the U.S. Navy bought the field in 1942 and built it into a primary flight-training facility, where about 1,000 men learned to fly during World War II, some practicing night landings without permanent lights. After the war the field passed to the Texas National Guard and the Army before closing in 1976.

Grand Saline, TX

The great salt deposit at Grand Saline, first worked by Native peoples and developed into salt works by 1854, became a strategic source of salt for the Confederacy during the Civil War. When owner Sam Richardson went to war, his wife ran the operation until the Confederate government took over production, exempting salt workers from the army and drawing brine through hollowed gum-log pipelines to iron evaporating kettles that yielded over 10,000 pounds a day. With salt the only means to preserve meat and cure leather, it grew so scarce that women dug up smokehouse floors to reclaim it.

Somerville, MA

On the first day of 1776, on the heights the Continental Army had seized during the siege of Boston, the newly organized army raised a flag of thirteen stripes representing the thirteen united colonies. The gesture came from the ring of fortified hills where Washington's troops held the British bottled up inside the town. It was one of the earliest displays of a common banner for the colonies acting as one.

Corsicana, TX

Grange Hall Cemetery served the small farming community of Cryer Creek and likely took its name from the Grange, the farmers' organization that was a powerful force in rural life. Burials began here as early as 1872, five years before pioneer Samuel Wilson donated the land for a Methodist church and churchyard. Among those at rest are Civil War veterans, pioneer families, and members of a colony that migrated from Meridian, Mississippi, in 1870.

New York, NY

This monument was raised by American Legion Post 1296 to honor those who died in their nation's service. The American Legion was founded in 1919 by returning veterans of the First World War and became one of the country's most active builders of local war memorials through the twentieth century. Without naming a single conflict, the dedication reaches across every war to all who "paid the supreme sacrifice."

Vancouver, WA

Long before he commanded Union armies or entered the White House, Ulysses S. Grant served here as a young quartermaster at Columbia Barracks (later Fort Vancouver) in 1852–1853. Posted to the far edge of the Oregon Country, he pined for the family he'd left behind and dabbled in frontier ventures to make ends meet on an officer's thin pay. The lonely, obscure years he spent in the Pacific Northwest were a world away from the fame that lay ahead.

Monroe Township, OH

This cast-iron nameplate is a surviving relic of the original Grant Memorial Bridge, a steel truss span erected between 1925 and 1927 during the great era of American road-building, when reinforced steel and concrete were replacing the wooden and iron crossings of the previous century. The bridge carried its name in honor of Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War general and president who was born just a short distance away at Point Pleasant in Clermont County. When the original structure was eventually retired, this nameplate — one of two — was preserved and set into the walkway so that travelers could still touch a piece of the old bridge.

Paige, TX

German immigrants settled the Grassyville community in the 1850s and organized a Methodist church, and many of this cemetery's gravestones are lettered in German script. The two earliest burials date to 1871, and among those resting here are seven Confederate veterans who served in a Texas artillery battery during the Civil War. Though the village itself has vanished, the burial ground remains in use.

Goliad, TX

After Col. James Walker Fannin's outnumbered Texas force surrendered following the Battle of Coleto in March 1836, Santa Anna ordered the prisoners held at Presidio La Bahía executed. On Palm Sunday, roughly 400 men were marched out and massacred and the wounded shot within the fort, with Fannin himself the last to die; a handful were spared by their medical skill or saved by the "Angel of Goliad," and about thirty escaped. Weeks later Gen. Thomas J. Rusk's army gathered the scattered remains and gave them a military burial here on June 3, 1836.

Leitchfield, KY

When Kentucky carved Grayson County from Hardin and Ohio counties in 1810, lawmakers honored Col. William Grayson (1740–90), a Virginia lawyer who served as aide-de-camp to George Washington during the Revolution and later sat on the Board of War, in the Continental Congress, and in the very first U.S. Senate. The marker also recalls that Washington himself once held 5,000 acres within the county's bounds. Grayson helped ratify the new Federal Constitution at Virginia's 1788 convention before his brief Senate tenure ended with his death in 1790.

Sherman, TX

During the Civil War, Grayson County served as a Confederate military, defense, and supply hub on Texas's northern frontier. Cavalry regiments raised here captured federal forts in Indian Territory and manned a defensive line along the Red River, while Sherman depots gathered clothing and food for troops and soldiers' families. Even the notorious guerrilla William C. Quantrill camped nearby in 1863–64 before fleeing Confederate arrest.

Henry Clay Township, PA · est. 1947

This bend of the Youghiogheny had served as a fording place since Native peoples first traced paths through the mountains. In 1754 young George Washington's Virginia troops camped here on the eve of the frontier clashes that opened the French and Indian War, and the next year Braddock's ill-fated army tramped through on its march west. Decades later, in 1818, the National Road threw a bridge across the water at this very spot, cementing its role as a great gateway through the Alleghenies.

Delaware Township, PA · est. 1949

The Great Shamokin Path was once the main Indian highway west, running from Shamokin—now Sunbury—toward the Ohio country. Along it traveled the Delawares (Lenape) as they were pushed out of their eastern Pennsylvania homelands by the pressure of colonial settlement. After the crushing defeat of General Braddock in 1755, Delaware warriors used this very trail to strike back at the frontier settlements during the French and Indian War.

Bell Township, PA · est. 1950

The Great Shamokin Path was a major Indian thoroughfare linking the Susquehanna and Allegheny rivers, running near this spot long before European roads followed the same ground. Delaware and Shawnee people used it for hunting and trade, and warriors traveled it during the French and Indian War. In July 1772 the Moravian missionary Bishop John Ettwein led some 200 Native Americans and their cattle along this stretch as they migrated west to the settlement of Friedensstadt.

Fairfield, CT

In the summer of 1637, the year-long Pequot War reached its grim conclusion in the tidal swamps of what is now Fairfield. A band of Pequot survivors, fleeing the destruction of their Mystic fort weeks earlier, was cornered here by English colonial forces and their Native allies. The fighting in the boggy ground scattered the last organized Pequot resistance and effectively ended the war, one of the earliest and most consequential conflicts between English settlers and Indigenous peoples in New England.

Seattle, WA · est. 2008

Dedicated in 2008, this plaque commemorates the centennial of the Great White Fleet's 1908 visit to Seattle during President Theodore Roosevelt's celebrated round-the-world naval cruise. From the city's waterfront the fleet continued its historic voyage across the Pacific. The dedication drew together Seattle's maritime and civic organizations a hundred years on.

Seattle, WA · est. 1961

In May 1908 the U.S. Navy's Great White Fleet steamed into Seattle's Elliott Bay, part of an epic 46,000-mile voyage around the globe. Crews came ashore near this spot at the foot of Lenora and Virginia Streets, then the site of piers 9 and 10. The visit was a proud moment for a young port city eager to claim its place on the Pacific.

Hearne, TX

When Hearne grew up as a rail crossroads on the Texas farmland where enslaved and later freed African Americans lived and labored, its Black community needed a burying ground of its own. Consecrated in 1894 as the New Colored Cemetery — later St. Mark's, then Riverside — it took its first known burial in 1896 and has since received hundreds, among them veterans reaching back to the Spanish-American War and members of the Mosaic Templars of America, a rare Texas chapter of that Black fraternal order. Church congregations and, from 1982, the Greater Riverside Association enlarged and tended the grounds to their present 24 acres.

Temple vicinity, TX

The Rev. Early Greathouse, a Georgia-ordained minister who had served in Alabama's government, brought his family to Bell County in 1870, built the area's first cotton gin, and organized its early Baptist churches. Around 1871 he set aside land for this burial ground, which grew from a family plot into a community cemetery. Among those laid to rest here are former slaves who came to Texas with the Greathouse family, a survivor of the Battle of San Jacinto, and veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars.

Greensburg, KY

Created in 1792 as the last of seven counties formed by Kentucky's first legislature, Green County was named for General Nathanael Greene of the Revolutionary War. Greene fought at Trenton, Brandywine, and Monmouth before Washington sent him south, where his Carolina campaign helped drive the British from Charleston in 1782.

Port Lavaca vicinity, TX

The community of Green Lake grew up beside its namesake tidal lake in the late 1840s, given fresh impetus around 1849 when wealthy Kentucky planters arrived with their families and enslaved workers to raise cotton. They built grand homes and a private school, but the Civil War upended everything: after Texas seceded, Federal troops camped nearby awaiting transport ships. With its economy resting on slave labor, Green Lake declined once the war ended and most original settlers had left by 1875.

Chester, PA · est. 1954

"Green-Bank" was the name given to a house built on this site in 1721 by David Lloyd, a leading figure in colonial Pennsylvania. In later years it was home to the distinguished Porter naval family and a place the celebrated Admiral David Farragut is said to have visited, until the house was destroyed in 1882 by the disaster remembered as the "Jackson Explosion."

Cameron, TX

Built in 1847 of logs and locally made brick, this was among Cameron's earliest homes, raised by George Green, a surveyor who had fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in Texas's 1836 fight for independence. As the frontier town matured, board siding went up in the 1850s and later owner R. L. Batte, Sr. added rooms while raising his own children and many orphans under its roof. The now-enclosed cabin survives as a layered record of two families and a young Texas.