Military & Wartime

Victoria, TX

Built in 1883, this Victoria home belonged to Alexander Lowe — a veteran of the Mexican War who went on to serve as mayor and to work as a businessman and wheelwright. He was also a pioneer in refrigerated shipping, an innovation that transformed how perishable goods moved to distant markets.

Waco, TX

Alexander McKinza left his native Alabama for Nacogdoches in 1834, arriving on the eve of Texas's fight for independence. He joined the Sabine volunteers under Capt. Benjamin F. Bryant and fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto on April 21, 1836. Settling into civilian life, he married Clarissa Brewer, kept a store near Douglass, and served as a Nacogdoches County justice of the peace before moving to McLennan County around 1860.

Marshall, TX

Alexander Travis Hawthorn rose from Arkansas lawyer to Confederate brigadier general, leading troops at Shiloh and earning commendation for gallantry at the Battle of Jenkins' Ferry. After the war he turned from soldiering to business and then the pulpit, spending his final decades as a Baptist minister in Texas.

Maysville, KY

Born about five miles west of Maysville in 1808, Alexander W. Doniphan moved to Missouri and became a militia general known for restraint—famously refusing an order to execute Mormon leader Joseph Smith and others after the 1838 disturbances. His lasting fame came in the Mexican War, when he led the 1st Regiment of Missouri Mounted Volunteers on a remarkable 3,600-mile campaign, defeating larger Mexican forces with a poorly equipped command. His march remains one of the epic feats of American volunteer soldiering.

Salado, TX

During the Civil War, the William R. Alexander Distillery on this site met a pressing wartime need. Governor Francis Lubbock ordered Texas distilleries closed in 1862 to conserve grain, but army demand for medicinal liquor—used for opiates and stimulants—soon reopened a select few, Alexander's among them. Amid drastic shortages, Texans across the state improvised bandages, lint, and homemade remedies for the troops.

Mexia, TX

Alfonso Steel fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive clash in which Texian forces under Sam Houston routed the Mexican army in a fight lasting less than twenty minutes and won independence for the Republic of Texas. Wounded in that battle, Steel lived on for decades and became its last surviving veteran, a living link to the founding fight of the Texas Republic. The State of Texas honored him with this marker in 1962.

Graford, TX

Tennessee-born Alfred Lane came to Texas with his family in 1836 and settled in Robertson's colony before moving to the Black Springs area of Palo Pinto County in 1856, where he raised horses on the open range after marrying Elizabeth Goodnight. Brother-in-law to the famed cattleman Charles Goodnight, who called him "a splendid brave man," Lane scouted for the Texas Rangers during the Civil War and helped drive Goodnight's cattle west of Fort Belknap. He was killed by Indians while returning home and lies buried in nearby Crawford Cemetery.

Houston County, TX

Alfred M. Hallmark (1817-1880), born in Madison County, Alabama, came to Texas with his parents in 1834 and settled in present-day Houston County. He enlisted in the Texas Army on March 6, 1836, and fought in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto that April, later farming and helping run the post office in the Mustang Prairie community. In 1842 he married his cousin Sarah, with whom he raised twelve children.

N.Richland Hills, TX

Alfred M. Hightower arrived near Smithfield from Illinois in 1858 to ranch, and though he opposed secession, he cast his lot with the South once war broke out. As a Confederate mounted rifleman he fought at Elkhorn Tavern (Pea Ridge) in Arkansas, one of the largest battles west of the Mississippi. He tried Kansas in the 1870s before returning to ranch here until his death, leaving his name on a nearby street.

Dayton, KY

This memorial in the Ohio River town of Dayton is dedicated to all American veterans, honoring military service without naming a single war. Such all-veterans tributes anchor countless town squares and riverfront parks across the country, offering a place for communities to gather on Memorial Day and Veterans Day. It speaks to the broad, enduring recognition of those who wore the uniform.

Newburg, WI

A memorial bearing the well-worn tribute 'All gave some, some gave all,' honoring the community's military veterans and its war dead. No single conflict is named; the words speak to service and sacrifice across generations.

Germantown Hills, IL

This memorial carries the familiar tribute "All gave some, some gave all," honoring those who served in the armed forces and those who died in that service. Placed in a small Illinois community, it stands for local sons and daughters who answered the nation's call across the generations. Without naming a single war, it speaks to the broad debt owed to American veterans.

Crockett, TX

Episcopal worship reached Crockett in 1850, and All Saints was formally founded in 1864 by Bishop Alexander Gregg during the depths of the Civil War, its special ministry bringing many enslaved people into the parish. By 1867 the church building had been lost—possibly to fire—and the local economy lay in ruins from the war, leaving the faithful to gather in homes with occasional priests for decades. Reactivated in 1947, the congregation built a new church in 1958.

Biscay, MN

This memorial in the small community of Biscay, Minnesota, honors the men and women who have served and continue to serve in defense of the nation's freedom. Tiny towns across the American heartland take special pride in remembering their own who wore the uniform. The memorial makes that gratitude visible at the center of community life.

Conway, AR

This memorial on the University of Central Arkansas campus in Conway honors alumni who died in the nation's wars — those who "made the ultimate sacrifice." College war memorials became a fixture of American campuses in the twentieth century, turning shared classrooms and dormitories into places of remembrance. By honoring alumni across all conflicts rather than a single war, it speaks to the long thread of service running through generations of students.

South Bristol, ME

This granite memorial in the small fishing town of South Bristol honors Wellington MacFarland Jordan, a young infantryman who was born in 1891 and died in service at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, in his early twenties. A local road was renamed in his memory, and the town later broadened the monument to salute all its veterans across every American conflict. It reflects the way small New England communities wove a single lost son's name into a lasting tribute to collective service.

Lost Prairie, TX

Allan Jefferson Rogers, born in Alabama, came to Texas in 1856 and served as a sergeant in Company K of Bass's Regiment, the 20th Texas Cavalry, during the Civil War. His unit campaigned across Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and Indian Territory in the war's Trans-Mississippi theater, the vast and often overlooked western front of the conflict. This marker preserves the memory of one of the many Texans who fought far from the war's famous eastern battlefields.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1967

Rising on the banks of the Allegheny in 1814, this federal arsenal was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, one of the young republic's most important architects. For generations it garrisoned troops and manufactured and stored munitions, feeding the U.S. Army through the Civil War, the Indian Wars of the West, and the Spanish-American War. As an ordnance works it made Pittsburgh a linchpin of American military supply across the nineteenth century.

Cuero, TX

Born in Kentucky in 1804, Allen Caruthers fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 engagement that won Texas its independence. He and his wife Martha, a North Carolina native, were among the settlers who built lives in the young republic and state before his death in 1863. Their graves near Cuero mark the resting place of one of the veterans whose service is woven into the founding story of Texas.

Allen, TX

Formally established by the Odd Fellows in 1884, Allen Cemetery has gathered a community's memory across three acres for well over a century. Its stones record early epidemics, pioneer settlers and physicians, and veterans of foreign wars — among them a soldier killed in the Meuse-Argonne offensive of World War I and another who served in the Spanish-American War — while oral tradition places an older slave burial ground in one corner. A cemetery association organized in 1899 still tends the grounds and keeps an annual Decoration Day.

Allentown, PA · est. 1947

Allentown was laid out in 1762 by William Allen, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant and chief justice of colonial Pennsylvania, and was known as Northampton until 1834. Its most storied moment came in 1777, when patriots spirited the Liberty Bell out of Philadelphia ahead of the advancing British and hid it here, while the town also sheltered wounded Continental soldiers. Incorporated as a city in 1867, Allentown went on to thrive as a center of textiles and cement.

Whitehall, PA · est. 1947

Laid out in 1762 by the powerful colonial jurist William Allen, this Lehigh Valley town spent its first seventy years known as Northampton before taking its founder's name. In the anxious autumn of 1777, as the British occupied Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell was spirited here for safekeeping and Revolutionary wounded were nursed in the town. It grew through the 19th century into a humming center of textiles and cement, earning its city charter in 1867.

South Whitehall Township, PA · est. 1947

Founded in 1762 by the colonial leader and jurist William Allen, this town went by the name Northampton until 1834. During the Revolution its distance from the Delaware made it a safe haven — the Liberty Bell was hidden here in 1777 and wounded Continental soldiers were treated nearby. Chartered as a city in 1867, it became a long-lived hub of textile mills and cement works.

South Whitehall Township, PA · est. 1947

William Allen, a leading colonial jurist, established this settlement in 1762; it answered to the name Northampton until 1834. In 1777 it sheltered the Liberty Bell from advancing British forces and hosted Revolutionary wounded. Incorporated as a city in 1867, it flourished as a center of textiles and cement manufacture.

Jefferson, TX

Built around 1851 by Daniel Nelson Alley, a founder of Jefferson, this Greek Revival house with its four-room central-hall plan stands among the earliest homes of Marion County. In 1884 it passed to Hector McKay, a Civil War veteran and one of the region's leading attorneys, whose family held it into the mid-20th century. The house survives as a rare antebellum landmark of a onetime riverport boomtown.

Columbus, TX

When war came, the little railhead of Alleyton became a vital artery of the Confederacy. As the terminus of the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado Railroad, it gathered cotton from Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas to launch it down the "Cotton Road" toward the Rio Grande. After Vicksburg fell in 1863 and the Mississippi was sealed, this route to neutral Matamoros, Mexico became the South's lifeline, exchanging cotton for guns, clothing, and medicine that flowed back through Alleyton.

Whitesboro, TX

Allison Cemetery took shape in the mid-1800s on three acres of North Texas prairie, its oldest dated grave marking a burial in 1865. Among those resting here are a family lost to influenza in the 1850s, several war veterans, and generations of the Dennis family and their neighbors—some in graves marked only by rough stones. Still tended by descendants, it remains in use today.

Carthage, NC

In 1781 the Alston House was the scene of a sharp skirmish when Loyalist partisans under David Fanning attacked the Whig militia of Philip Alston during the Revolution's brutal backcountry fighting. The house later became the home of Benjamin Williams, four-time governor of North Carolina. The site preserves the memory of the neighbor-against-neighor warfare that scarred the Carolina interior.

Alto Pass, IL

This memorial in the small southern Illinois village of Alto Pass honors the veterans of the surrounding area across four states of service — those who served, those who died, and those still serving. Rather than marking a single war, it stands for the community's whole tradition of military sacrifice. Memorials like this one gather a rural district's gratitude into one place.

Gonzales, TX

This state monument honors Amasa Turner, who served as a private, officer, and recruiter in the Army of Texas during the revolution of 1835–36. Marked with the Lone Star and wreath, it was erected by the State of Texas in 1962 to commemorate his role in winning Texas independence.

Emory, TX

A Missourian by birth, Ambrose Fitzgerald settled in 1846 on land then part of Nacogdoches County, and as new counties were carved from it he became the first clerk for both Van Zandt and Wood counties. After serving in the Civil War he returned to hold nearly every clerical office in newly formed Rains County. A Baptist preacher as well as a public servant, he baptized James S. Hogg, who would go on to become governor of Texas.

Laredo, TX

Dedicated on March 15, 1961, this flame was given to Laredo on the fiftieth anniversary of the American Legion, the veterans' service organization chartered in 1919 after World War I. It honors all who served in the nation's armed forces, a living symbol of gratitude rather than a monument to any single battle. Eternal-flame tributes like it spread across American towns in the postwar decades.

Donna, TX

Dedicated in 1920, just a year after World War I veterans founded the American Legion, Donna's Border Post No. 107 claimed the distinction of being the first Legion hall built or owned by any post anywhere in the world. It rose in a small Rio Grande Valley town whose returning soldiers wanted a permanent home for fellowship and service. The state recognized its significance as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Amarillo, TX

Organized in July 1919, just two months after the American Legion's founding caucus in St. Louis, Amarillo's Hanson Post is among the oldest in Texas. It honors Dr. David T. Hanson, a beloved local physician who served in the Spanish-American War and World War I and was killed tending a wounded soldier at St. Etienne, France. Under first commander Ernest O. Thompson and later leaders, the post fought for veterans' jobs, medical care, and the regional Veterans Hospital that opened in 1939.

New York, NY

After World War I, returning veterans chartered the American Legion in 1919, and its local posts quickly became fixtures of civic life in neighborhoods across the country. A post like Hillcrest 1078 in Queens raised a memorial such as this to honor the community's servicemen and keep faith with those who did not return. Its Auxiliary — the Legion's women's organization — carried much of that remembrance work, from dedication ceremonies to the care of veterans' families.

Hallettsville, TX

Hallettsville's World War I veterans chartered American Legion Post 230 in 1920 to serve those who had served. They named it for Thomas and Margaret Hudgeons—a young couple who married just before Thomas shipped out for France, where he died in 1918 when the troopship Tuscania was torpedoed, followed by Margaret's death in 1919 while nursing for the Red Cross. From rented rooms above the post office to a Depression-era Recreation Hall, the post has channeled decades of veterans' service into scholarships and civic improvement.

Laguna Beach, CA

Erected by American Legion Post 222 on Memorial Day, 1959, this modest stone speaks for a Laguna Beach community still close to the losses of two world wars and Korea. In the postwar decades, veterans' posts across California raised markers like this one to give a permanent civic home to remembrance — a place to lay a wreath each May. Its plain language, dedicated to "those who gave their lives that our nation might remain free," is the vocabulary of mid-century American mourning.

Beeville, TX

This American Legion post honors Charles H. Lytle, Beeville's first African American serviceman killed in World War II, who died when the USS Ommaney Bay went down near the Philippines in 1945. Chartered in 1946 for Black veterans in the Jim Crow era, the post became a vital community hub — hosting the segregated proms that African American graduates were barred from attending at the local white high school.

San Saba, TX

Home from the trenches of World War I, San Saba's veterans found only an aging Confederate camp to greet them — and those old soldiers helped the newcomers organize American Legion Post No. 27 in 1919, among the first in the nation. The post took the name of Wiley B. Murray, a local son killed fighting in France, and in 1920 the Legionnaires escorted his repatriated body from the rail station to burial, a service they would repeat for each county man brought home. For a century the post has knit itself into community life through parks, schools, and the welcome it extended to later generations of veterans.

New York, NY

This memorial stands for America's merchant mariners — the civilian sailors who crewed cargo and supply ships and whose losses lie in the unmarked depths of the sea. Merchant seamen have long borne heavy casualties, especially in wartime, when their vessels ran gauntlets of submarines and mines to keep the nation supplied. The memorial gives a place of remembrance to men who have no marked graves.

Paducah, KY

Chartered in 1917, the McCracken County chapter of the American Red Cross was born of World War I, raising $42,000 in its first war drive. But its defining hour came in the great Ohio Valley Flood of 1937, when it mounted an enormous evacuation and relief effort—spending over $1.1 million in a single disaster. Through two world wars, droughts, tornadoes, and fires, it served the county for more than fifty years.

Boothbay Harbor, ME

This marker stands where a stone fort and barracks once guarded the Boothbay region during the American Revolution. Along Maine's rugged coast, local soldiers manned such fortifications to watch the harbors and waters against British raids and privateers during the War for Independence.

Town of Fishkill, NY

During the Revolutionary War, the high ground above Fishkill in the Hudson Highlands held a chain of signal beacons—great piles of wood and brush kept ready to be set ablaze. Lit in sequence, these fires flashed warning across the valley of British troop movements, giving the name to nearby Mount Beacon and the city below. This monument, raised generations later on an Independence Day, honors that early-warning system and the vigilance it demanded.

Marcus Hook, PA · est. 2002

At Marcus Hook, the American Viscose Company became the first firm in North America to manufacture rayon, the pioneering artificial fiber, on a commercial scale. To house its workforce — many of them women — the company built Viscose Village between 1912 and 1915, a planned community in the English Domestic Revival style designed by the Philadelphia firm of Ballinger and Perrot. The plant's fibers went on to serve countless military uses in both World Wars.

Straban Township, PA

On the rolling farmland east of Gettysburg, this tablet marks where the Amherst (Virginia) Artillery — Kirkpatrick's Battery of Nelson's Battalion — was posted during the three-day battle of July 1863. Attached to the artillery reserve of Ewell's Corps in the Army of Northern Virginia, the battery went into action with a rifled gun and three smoothbore Napoleons in support of Lee's assaults on the Union line. Hundreds of such cast-iron tablets were placed across the field to record exactly where each unit stood.

West Columbia, TX

Born in Massachusetts in 1810, Ammon Underwood came to Texas in 1834 after a young life of odd jobs, two shipwrecks, and wandering exploration. He fought in the 1835 Siege of Bexar during the Texas Revolution, then settled at West Columbia, where he ran a thriving mercantile business for fifty years and counted Republic of Texas president Anson Jones among his close friends. He lost a cotton fortune during the Civil War but later served in the state legislature.

Houston, TX

Recruited in New Orleans for the Army of Texas, Amos B. Edson arrived in Texas on January 28, 1836, in the thick of the revolution. He served in Captain Amasa Turner's company at the Battle of San Jacinto — the decisive fight that won Texas its independence — but did not long survive the victory, dying at Houston in 1837.

Washington, TX

Amos Gates, born in 1799, was among the settlers of Stephen F. Austin's first colony, the "Old Three Hundred" generation that established Anglo-American settlement in Mexican Texas. This marker also remembers his son William C. Gates, born in 1834, who served in the Confederate army before his death in 1877. Together they span the colony's founding and the Civil War era at Washington, cradle of Texas independence.

Billerica, MA

On the morning of April 19, 1775, as British regulars marched toward Lexington and Concord, John Hancock and Samuel Adams were fleeing for their lives. The two Patriot leaders had been staying in Lexington when Paul Revere's midnight warning sent them scrambling for safety, and their path led them here to the Amos Wyman farmstead in the countryside north of the fighting. At this modest homestead the men who would soon be marked for arrest by the Crown found food and shelter while the first shots of the Revolution echoed across Middlesex County.

Town of Dover, WI

This AMVETS memorial carillon honors the nation's war dead, its ringing bells intended as a living tribute to those who died so that freedom might endure. Carillons and bell memorials became a popular form of remembrance in the decades after the world wars, offering sound rather than stone as a way to mark sacrifice. The inscribed lines tie the peal of the bells directly to the memory of the fallen.

Bartow County, GA

In the autumn of 1864, as Sherman's armies pressed through north Georgia, Confederate troops under General Samuel G. French stormed the Union-held gap at Allatoona Pass on October 5, trying to sever the railroad that fed the Federal advance. The fighting was close and brutal, and among the fallen was a soldier whose name was never recorded. For generations afterward, Southerners made their way to this solitary hillside grave to honor him.

Carthage, TX

On a tree-shaded hill southeast of Carthage lies the burial place of many of Panola County's founding settlers, named for Jonathan Anderson (1798–1890), who donated 100 acres for the town itself. A veteran of the Texas Revolution who fought at the Siege of Bexar and the Battle of San Jacinto, Anderson went on to serve as county sheriff. His first wife, Nancy Whetmore, was the first laid to rest here, followed by veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars.

Palestine, TX

Settled largely by families from the Deep South, Anderson County voted overwhelmingly—870 to 15—for secession in 1861, even as Governor Sam Houston pleaded against it on the steps of Palestine's Osceola Hotel. More than 1,100 local men filled a dozen Confederate companies, over 300 dying on battlefields from New Mexico to Pennsylvania. On the home front, factories and salt works supplied the war effort while a hotel served as a makeshift hospital; among the county's leaders was John H. Reagan, the Confederacy's postmaster general.

Schuylkill Township, PA

This burial ground holds the Anderson family and was dedicated by Isaac Anderson, who served as a first lieutenant in the Chester County militia during the Revolution in 1779 and later represented Pennsylvania in Congress from 1805 to 1807. His life traced the arc from citizen-soldier of the Revolution to lawmaker of the early Republic.

Leander, TX

Thomas Anderson, a Pennsylvania native, built this mill in 1863 in the Texas Hill Country, and during the Civil War it produced gunpowder for the Confederate armies. Small backcountry works like this one helped a South cut off from imported munitions supply its troops from local resources. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936.

Andersonville, GA

Incorporated in 1853 as a small farming village, Andersonville was thrust into history when Camp Sumter prison opened here in 1864 and its commandant, Capt. Henry Wirz, was tried and executed for the suffering of Union prisoners. Amid that misery, the Irish priest Father Peter Whelan — himself a former prisoner of war — came in June 1864 and tended the stockade's prisoners daily for four months, remembered by Union and Confederate men alike as a 'Good Samaritan.' The town today calls itself a 'Civil War Village,' honoring the dead of both sides.

Andover, ME

In the small western Maine town of Andover, this memorial honors the local men who served in the Civil War from 1861 to 1865. Like countless New England villages, Andover sent a disproportionate share of its young men to fill the Union ranks, and their absence and loss reshaped the community for a generation. The monument keeps their service in the town's collective memory.

Village of Tarrytown, NY

Here on September 23, 1780, three local militiamen — John Paulding, David Williams, and Isaac Van Wart — stopped a traveler on the road near Tarrytown and discovered he was Major John André, the British adjutant general carrying papers that exposed Benedict Arnold's plot to surrender West Point. Their refusal of André's bribes unraveled one of the Revolution's most dangerous conspiracies. André was later hanged as a spy, and the three captors became early American heroes.

Crockett, TX

Andrew Edwards Gossett (1812–1890) moved from Tennessee to Texas in 1833 with his wife Rhoda and a large Mexican land grant. He helped defend the frontier in the unsettled years after the revolution by serving in the Texas Army, and in 1836 he donated land for a townsite, naming it Crockett for his old family friend David Crockett—soon to die at the Alamo. Gossett went on to serve as a peace officer and county judge and raised eleven children by two marriages.

Beaumont, TX

This marker honors Andrew F. Smyth, who served as an officer in the Jasper Volunteers during the Texas War for Independence. The 1835–36 revolution pitted Anglo and Tejano settlers against the government of Mexico and produced the short-lived Republic of Texas. Local volunteer companies like the one Smyth helped lead were the backbone of the rebel forces.