Military & Wartime

Madisonville, TX

In 1884 James C. and Lillis Jane Colwell deeded an acre for a community school, and when their four-year-old daughter Callie Lorena died in 1888, part of that land became a cemetery. A two-room schoolhouse stood beside the graves from about 1890 until the 1940s, when the Greenbrier community faded. The cemetery holds more than two hundred pioneer settlers and their descendants, along with veterans from the Civil War through the Korean War.

Brownwood, TX

Known as the 'Father of Brownwood,' Greenleaf Fisk (1807–1888) was born in New York to English parents and abandoned ministry studies in 1834 to brave the Texas frontier. He fought at San Jacinto in 1836, held county offices, and served as a senator in the Republic of Texas, and as a government surveyor he mapped and came to love this region. Settling here on a Texas Revolution land grant, he donated 60 acres for the town and 100 for county use, then persuaded neighbors to relocate to the new county seat.

New York, NY

In the years after 1918, neighborhoods across America raised memorials to the men who had marched off to the Great War, and Brooklyn's Greenpoint was no exception. A dense, working-class district of shipyards, glassworks, and immigrant families along the East River, Greenpoint sent its sons into the trenches of France, and this monument gathers the community's grief and pride into a single civic tribute. Its language—echoing Lincoln's vow that government 'shall not perish from the earth'—frames local sacrifice as service to the nation's founding ideals.

Galveston, TX

A Virginia-born physician who came to Texas in 1853, Dr. Greensville S. Dowell served as a Confederate army surgeon in Galveston during the Civil War before building a lasting mark on Texas medicine. He helped found the Galveston Medical Society, the Texas Medical College and Hospital, and the state's first medical journal. A gifted surgeon, he designed his own instruments and became a leading authority on the treatment of yellow fever, the scourge of Gulf Coast port cities.

Greenville, TX

Created in 1846, Hunt County set its seat at a spot donated by surveyor McQuinney Howell Wright and named it Greenville for Texas independence veteran Thomas J. Green. Unusually for north central Texas, the county voted for secession, and Greenville endured hardship, violence, and federal occupation through the Civil War and Reconstruction. The arrival of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas railroad in 1880 transformed the town into a cotton-shipping powerhouse, complete with banks, streetcars, and Texas's first municipally owned electric utility.

Gonzales, TX

James Jackson Hodges, grandson of a delegate to the 1835 Texas convention at San Felipe de Austin, married Martha Pritchett in 1849 and settled this area, building a schoolhouse that doubled as a Cumberland Presbyterian church. The oldest grave here is Martha's uncle John Pritchett, a War of 1812 veteran buried in 1856; Hodges deeded the land as a community cemetery in 1896. Nine of the couple's twelve children rest here in what remains a chronicle of area pioneers.

Longview, TX

Laid out in 1877 just beyond Longview's limits and beside a new railroad subdivision, this burial ground became the resting place for the town's founding generation. Its rows hold a War of 1812 veteran, dozens of Confederate soldiers, victims of the 1894 Dalton Gang bank robbery, and a family lost in the 1900 Galveston hurricane, alongside civic fathers like O.H. Methvin, called the father of Longview. Renamed Greenwood in 1905 when the city grew to enclose it, the cemetery reads almost as a directory of the region's past.

Dallas, TX

This Dallas cemetery sits on part of the John Grigsby League, a Republic of Texas land grant given for service at the Battle of San Jacinto. Pioneer banker W. H. Gaston gained title in 1874 after the famous "Grigsby Cases" legal battle and founded a cemetery here, which passed to the Greenwood Cemetery Association in 1896. Among its graves lie figures prominent in city, state, and national history, along with veterans of every American war since the Civil War.

Marshall, TX

Begun in 1840 as the private burial ground of the Van Zandt family and formally dedicated in 1881, Greenwood Cemetery holds many of early East Texas's founding figures. Among them are Isaac Van Zandt and James Harper Starr, each honored with a Texas county named for him, and Confederate brigadier generals Matthew Duncan Ector and Alexander Travis Hawthorne. Even a grandson of Sam Houston rests here, tying the ground to the first generation of the Texas Republic.

Longview, TX

Created and organized in 1873 from parts of Rusk and Upshur counties, Gregg County was named for General John Gregg, a delegate to the Secession Convention and the Provisional Confederate Congress who died as a Confederate officer in 1864. Longview serves as the county seat.

Rusk, TX

Built in 1847-48 from local pine in the classic dog-trot style—two rooms flanking an open central passage that caught the East Texas breeze—this is among the oldest houses in Rusk. Three of its early owners served as Confederate captains during the Civil War, and the Gregg family, community leaders, have held it since 1876. Modernizations in 1919 and 1935 kept the old home in use across the generations.

Reagan County, TX

Grierson Spring rose out of the arid country of West Texas as an 1878 outpost of Fort Concho and a stage stand on the Fort Concho–Fort Stockton road. It honored General Benjamin H. Grierson, who commanded federal troops in the region during the Indian Wars and led the celebrated Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry. The post was abandoned in 1882 as the frontier moved on.

Liberty, TX

Jackson Hawkins Griffin arrived in Liberty in 1835 and fought at the Siege of Bexar during the Texas Revolution, later opening his home as a boarding house for newcomers. When one of his lodgers died in 1846, Griffin set aside land for a burial ground that still bears his name. Griffin himself enlisted in the Confederate Army and fell at the Battle of Franklin in 1864, and the graveyard passed through Dr. James Cooke to the Methodist church before a 1981 restoration reopened it to the public.

Jacksonville, TX

Benjamin Franklin Grimes came to Cherokee County in 1852 with his parents, married Mary Jane Wallace in 1859, and raised ten children while running freight wagons and serving in the Confederate army. In 1883 he buried his daughter Cassandra Gabriella on the family's land, beginning what became the Grimes Cemetery. Still in use, it holds more than 80 graves, including those of a dozen veterans.

Anderson, TX

The ground here carries layers of Texas history: a road used in 1690 by Spanish explorer Alonso de León, the 1821 arrival of settler Andrew Millican, and Henry Fanthorp's inn and post office of the 1830s. The town took its name from Kenneth Anderson, the Republic of Texas's last vice-president, who died at Fanthorp's inn in 1845. Organized in 1846 and named for Declaration signer Jesse Grimes, the county even ran a gun factory and supplied troops during the Civil War.

Anderson, TX

Densely settled and richly agricultural, Grimes County threw itself behind the Confederacy, voting for secession 907 to 9 and sending nine companies to the army. Its ordnance works at Anderson turned out cannon, cannonballs, firearms, swords, and gunpowder, and a military telegraph line crossed the county on its way from Houston to Marshall. In a darker episode, five men accused of treason were held in the Anderson jail in 1864 under the suspension of habeas corpus before being deported to Mexico.

Seguin, TX

This marker recounts Guadalupe County's Confederate years, opening with the tense February 1861 standoff at the U.S. Arsenal in San Antonio, where local volunteers under Ben McCulloch forced the surrender without a shot. The county voted overwhelmingly for secession, its newspapers renamed to declare their loyalties, and its men trained at nearby Camp Clark, with Company D of the 4th Texas Infantry fighting through the war in Hood's Texas Brigade. The reverse honors the Tennessee-born McCulloch brothers, Ben killed at Pea Ridge and Henry defending the Texas frontier as a Confederate general.

Town of Bedford, NY

During the Revolutionary War, the high ground of Guard Hill offered a sweeping view over the surrounding Westchester countryside — the kind of vantage point that decided the fate of armies. It was important enough to be labeled "a commanding height" on the survey maps drawn by Robert Erskine, the Scottish-born engineer who served as Surveyor-General to the Continental Army and mapped the terrain George Washington's forces fought over. Throughout the war years, American observation patrols climbed to this summit to watch for enemy movement across a region that sat perilously between the British stronghold in New York City and the Patriot lines to the north.

Cambridge, OH

This monument honors the men of Guernsey County, Ohio, who marched off to fight in the Civil War—here remembered in the era's own language as the "War of the Rebellion." Between 1861 and 1865, counties across the Union sent thousands of volunteers into regiments raised locally, and Ohio contributed more soldiers per capita than nearly any other state. Memorials like this one rose in courthouse squares across the North in the decades after Appomattox, as communities gathered to grieve their dead and enshrine the service of the living.

Houston County, TX

Guiceland Cemetery began about 1871 with the burial of the infant William Guice on family land, and it grew into the resting place of hundreds from the surrounding community. Its graves hold veterans of nearly every American conflict from the Texas Revolution through Vietnam, alongside the settlers who farmed this corner of Houston County. A one-room building here once doubled as school and funeral chapel, later joined by a community tabernacle.

Greensboro, NC

On March 15, 1781, American forces under Nathanael Greene met Lord Cornwallis's British army here in one of the Revolution's hardest-fought battles. Cornwallis held the field but lost roughly a quarter of his men—a victory so costly it pushed him toward Virginia and, ultimately, surrender at Yorktown. The ground is now preserved as a national military park.

Longview, TX

Rooted in an 1842 landholding, this ground served as a family burial place from the 1850s before neighboring land was given for a school in 1870 and later a church. Named for a spring surrounded by sweet gum trees, Gum Springs became the heart of a farming community whose school, church, and cemetery shared the name. Among the roughly 800 graves lie Republic of Texas citizens and 58 war veterans, from a Mexican War soldier to men killed in World War II.

Fredericksburg, TX

Cut off from Northern factories by war, the Confederacy improvised its arms wherever it could—including this Fredericksburg workshop, where gunsmith E. Krauskoff and silversmith Adolph Lungkwitz built machinery to roll copper thin and stamp out percussion caps. They charged the caps with saltpetre from nearby bat caves and quicksilver smuggled through Mexico or past the coastal blockade. Their tiny caps fed rifles and pistols made in a scatter of Texas towns across the interior.

Paducah, KY

Gunsmith Ferd Hummel arrived in Paducah in 1861 and set up a small frame shop that soon served the Federal soldiers occupying the town, who brought their firearms to him for repair. When Confederate raiders looted his shop in March 1864, he had already hidden his best arms at home. He carried on his trade for years, earning a patent for a breech-loading firearm in 1881.

Blum, TX

Gus Bailey led the band of Hood's Texas Brigade during the Civil War, while his wife Mollie smuggled notes and quinine past enemy lines hidden in her hair. Bailey is credited with writing "The Old Gray Mare" on the eve of Second Manassas, after a spooked mare bolted through camp trailing tin pans. After the war the couple settled their large family and a traveling circus in Blum, playing scores of Texas towns and admitting ex-Confederates free.

Houston, TX

At sixteen, Gustav August Samuelson left Forserum, Sweden, and arrived in Houston in November 1848 with a party of Scandinavian immigrants met by the pioneering Swedish Texans S.M. Swenson and Swante Palm. Renaming himself Forsgard for his home village, he clerked, farmed, and helped run an informal agency guiding new Swedish arrivals into Texas life. During the Civil War he served with Texas forces building fortifications to defend Galveston, and later became a civic leader in banking, church, and Masonic circles.

Paducah, KY

Built in 1897 and long known as the Fraternity Building, this downtown Paducah landmark took on a wartime role during World War II as home to the Paducah–McCracken County Draft Board. Nearly 5,000 area men and women served in the war, many of them processed through this very building. It was named a Kentucky Landmark in 2002 and continues in use as offices.

Nacogdoches, TX

A Virginia-born empresario, Haden Edwards received a contract to settle American families around Nacogdoches but fell into bitter conflict with Mexican authorities and existing residents. In 1826-27 he led the short-lived Fredonian Rebellion, an early and premature bid for Anglo independence in Texas that collapsed quickly. A decade later, during the Texas Revolution, he was sent to the United States to raise funds for the cause.

San Augustine, TX

Haley Blount Bush, born into slavery in Shelby County in the 1860s, donated land in 1889 from her husband's grant to create this cemetery on the San Augustine county line. Among its 300-plus marked graves is Isom Biggers, a well-known African American Civil War veteran whose service was vouched for by neighbors also thought to rest here. The burial ground holds many people born into slavery and veterans of every war from the Civil War through Vietnam, cared for today by a cemetery association.

Rio Vista, TX

Thomas Haley reached Johnson County by 1852, built a race track along the Nolands River, and bred fine horses before serving as a captain in Parson's mounted volunteers during the Civil War; he died in 1865 of battle wounds, and his is the oldest marked grave here. The cemetery also holds Leonard Fisher, another Civil War veteran, and John Hubble, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence, among the county's pioneers. Since the 1990s a cemetery association has cared for the small burial ground.

Port Lavaca, TX

Built in 1858 at the southern tip of Half Moon Reef in Matagorda Bay, this three-story hexagonal lighthouse guided ships trading at Port Lavaca and nearby Indianola. During the Civil War, Confederate troops disabled its light to hamper Federal efforts against blockade runners, and it was restored in 1868. It served until 1943 and was moved to Port Lavaca in 1979.

York, PA · est. 1949

On this site stood the first printing press west of the Susquehanna River, operated by the firm of Hall and Sellers. When the Continental Congress fled to York from September 1777 to June 1778, this press turned out government publications and Continental currency for the struggling revolutionary cause. It was during Congress's stay here that the Articles of Confederation were adopted, making York briefly the seat of the young nation.

Hallettsville, TX

This ground began as the "Hallettsville Graveyard," deeded by Mary Jane Hallett Ballard to trustees in 1870 and used for burials until 1898, after which it fell into neglect and overgrowth. In 1952 civic groups persuaded the city to convert the site into a public park, whose central monument honors the county's heroes who fought at the Alamo, Goliad, Gonzales, and San Jacinto. The city and local garden club have tended the grounds ever since.

Middletown Township, NJ

During the American Revolution the Royal Navy patrolled the waters off New Jersey and New York, and it was here that young Lieutenant Hamilton Douglas Halyburton, a son of the Earl of Morton, met his end alongside Lieutenant James Champion and twelve sailors of H.M.S. Assistance. According to long tradition, the party perished in bitter winter cold near Sandy Hook, and their remains were buried on this spot. The memorial keeps the location of that wartime grave.

Hamilton, TX

Organized in 1858, Hamilton County counted just 489 people when the Civil War came, yet its 1861 secession vote ran 86 to 1. Sixty farmers formed the part-time Hamilton County Minutemen while others marched to Vicksburg and Shiloh, and those left behind lived a spare frontier life of log homes, homemade tools, and eggshell lamps. The war also bred hardship at home — cattle feuds, two men fleeing to join the Federals, and deserters living by theft along the creeks.

San Antonio, TX

Hamilton P. Bee was a fixture of early Texas public life, serving as secretary of the first state Senate, a legislator, and Speaker of the House in the 1850s before commanding troops in campaigns on the frontier. He fought as a cavalry lieutenant in the Mexican War, then rose to Confederate brigadier general, guarding the vital cotton road to Mexico and leading a brigade in the 1864 Red River Campaign, where he was wounded. His career threads through nearly every conflict of mid-19th-century Texas.

Crafton, PA · est. 1946

During the Revolutionary War, the frontier post of Fort Pitt guarded the vital forks of the Ohio, and disease was a constant threat to its garrison. In 1777 General Edward Hand ordered an isolation hospital built on this site to treat and quarantine sick and wounded troops, its log structure ringed by protective blockhouses. The precaution reflected the era's hard-won understanding that contagion could cripple an army as surely as any enemy.

Teville, TX

John J. Handley, a Confederate veteran who had lived in Georgia and elsewhere in Texas, settled in this West Texas country in 1892 and gave the land for its cemetery. He lived long enough to watch farming rise to rival ranching on the plains, and the tiny community of Teville—named for a road junction—rose and faded with him, its post office open only from 1906 to 1910. Four generations of the Handley family and their neighbors now rest in the ground he provided.

Donna, TX

Thomas J. Handy came to the lower Rio Grande as a Union cavalryman during the Civil War and stayed to build a life on the border. In 1866 he married Angelita Cavazos at her family's ranch along the old military highway, and together the couple became substantial landowners, joining an Anglo newcomer's fortunes to a rooted Tejano ranching family. Handy farmed, ranched, and served as a U.S. Customs inspector, and the family's holdings shaped the land around present-day Alamo for nearly a century.

Hempfield Township, PA · est. 1946

Just east of here stood Hannastown, established in 1773 as the seat of Westmoreland County and the first county seat west of the Allegheny Mountains. Its citizens gathered in 1775 to adopt a bold declaration backing the Revolutionary cause, an early frontier voice for independence. In 1782, near the end of the war, a raiding party burned the town, and it never fully recovered.

East Hanover Township, PA · est. 1947

Two miles north stood one of the region's pioneer Presbyterian congregations, founded in 1736 under its first pastor, Richard Sankey. Its graveyard became the resting place of the valley's earliest settlers alongside men who fought in the frontier wars and the Revolution that followed. A country churchyard like this is a layered record of the community that grew up around it.

Hanover County, VA

Standing near the Hanover County courthouse in Virginia, this monument honors the county's men who fought for the Confederacy and the women who supported the war effort on the home front between 1861 and 1865. Like hundreds of similar monuments erected across the South in the decades after the Civil War, it reflects the "Lost Cause" memorial movement that sought to commemorate Confederate service. Hanover County itself saw significant fighting, including the Battles of Hanover Court House and Cold Harbor nearby.

North Codorus Township, PA · est. 1953

In November 1863, this rural railroad junction in York County was where Abraham Lincoln's train changed lines on his way to dedicate the national cemetery at Gettysburg. Months earlier the same junction had funneled wounded men from the battlefield onward to distant hospitals, and it served as a key relay on the military telegraph network that carried war news north and east. What looks like an ordinary spot where two rail lines met was, for a season, a nerve center of the war in Pennsylvania.

East Hanover Township, PA · est. 1946

On June 4, 1774, Col. Timothy Green and eight fellow patriots of Hanover Township drew up what the marker calls the earliest resolves for independence in Pennsylvania. Written more than two years before the Declaration, their bold pledge to commit their cause to "Heaven and our Rifles" captured the defiant mood spreading through the colonial countryside. Such local resolves gave voice to ordinary communities determined to resist British authority.

Cobb County, GA

In June 1864, as Sherman's armies pressed toward Atlanta, Confederate forces under General William J. Hardee dug in along a line of North Georgia creeks and ridges to slow the Union advance. This marker notes the position of Hardee's Corps along the Mud Creek line, one link in a chain of entrenchments during the grinding Atlanta Campaign. The fighting here was less a single pitched battle than a deadly war of maneuver and earthworks in the Georgia summer.

Wiergate, TX

This piney-woods burial ground began with the grave of Joseph Lane around 1850, and in 1853 his son set aside a small plot that grew over the decades into a two-acre family and community cemetery. Among those buried here is James Persinger Hardy, who served with Kentucky volunteers in the Army of the Republic of Texas in 1836 and later as a Newton County commissioner. Wrought iron, a handful of inscribed stones, and rows of iron-ore rocks marking unknown graves recall the settlers who wrested their living from the surrounding forest.

Bel Air, MD

This memorial in Bel Air honors the members of Harford County's public safety agencies — police officers, firefighters, and emergency responders — who died in the line of duty while protecting the county's citizens. It stands as the community's collective tribute to those who gave their lives in service to others.

Bel Air, MD

This memorial honors students of Harford County's public schools who entered military service and gave their lives for their country. Behind each name is a young person who left the classrooms of Bel Air and the surrounding county to serve, and did not return. The community placed this tribute so their sacrifice would remain part of the schools' shared memory.

Harford County, MD

This marker recalls the late summer of 1782, when the French army of the Comte de Rochambeau made camp here at Harford Town, then called Bush, on its long march north after the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown. Noted as the twenty-second camp of that homeward journey, the site is one link in a chain of encampments that traced the allied army's route across the young nation. The French troops were returning after helping seal the Revolution's outcome the previous autumn.

Harlingen, TX

As World War II approached, Harlingen offered the Army 960 acres of its flat coastal plain — useless for artillery but ideal for aircraft — and in August 1941 the Harlingen Army Gunnery School took its first students. At its peak the base trained up to 9,000 airmen, among them Women Airforce Service Pilots, before closing in 1946. Reactivated during the Korean War as Harlingen Air Force Base, it trained more than 13,000 navigators until its 1962 closure dealt the local economy a heavy blow; its grounds now serve an airport, museums, and schools.

Happy, TX

Holland E. Toles opened a grain elevator in this Panhandle area in 1926 and was joined by Vernon Harman in 1938, with the partnership continuing after Toles's death. Wartime demand, expanding irrigation, and a federal grain program soon called for larger storage, and construction of this six-unit concrete elevator began in March 1945. The labor came from an unexpected source: some fifty Italian prisoners of war from a camp near Hereford, working under Geneva Convention rules, who finished the job that July.

Longview, TX

Harmon General Hospital, authorized by the U.S. Army in 1942 and named for Col. Daniel Warrick Harmon, treated servicemen in Longview from late 1942 until the end of 1945. This ecumenical chapel, opened in January 1943, served Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish personnel alike. After the war the property became a college campus, and the well-preserved little chapel was renovated and formally named Speer Chapel.

Nacogdoches, TX

When James Norvel Pitts came to Texas in the 1870s, his wife, son, and a caravan of Pitts brothers and Mississippi friends followed by wagon to join him, founding the community they aptly named Harmony. Pitts donated land for a combined church-and-school building and this public cemetery, whose oldest marked grave dates to 1886. Families long gathered for an annual cemetery cleaning day, a tradition later carried on by a formal association, and among those buried here are veterans reaching back to the Civil War.

Tatum, TX

The oldest grave here belongs to J. W. Hall, buried in 1844 beneath a large rock before John W. Kuykendall formally donated the first two acres in 1852. Maintained by a cemetery association since 1882, the grounds have grown through later gifts of land. Those laid to rest include the area's early settlers and county leaders alongside veterans of the Mexican War, Civil War, both World Wars, and Vietnam.

Hemphill, TX

This burial ground began in 1896 with the death of J.R. Harper, a Mississippi native who brought his family to Texas and gave his name to the surrounding community once known as Lick Skillet. As the Harper Chapel community grew, local Baptists raised a frame church here in 1934, and neighbors continued burying their dead on land expanded by later donors. Veterans of conflicts beginning with World War I rest among the generations of area families.

Harpers Ferry, WV · est. 1963

Brown and 21 men captured the federal arsenal at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah. Cornered by U.S. Marines under Robert E. Lee, Brown was captured, tried, and hanged — becoming a martyr to abolitionists and a warning to the South.

Cincinnati, OH

In the 1830s and 40s, Cincinnati sat on the Ohio River just across from the slave state of Kentucky, making it a charged crossroads where the realities of American slavery were impossible to ignore. It was here, during her years living in the city, that Harriet Beecher Stowe witnessed the human toll of bondage firsthand and endured personal grief that deepened her moral conviction. Those experiences fueled Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), a novel that put the cruelty of slavery before a national audience and helped harden Northern opposition in the decade before the Civil War.

Hughes Springs, TX

Settlers reached this corner of Cass County in the 1850s, and the community took its name after John T. Harris arrived in 1853 on land that already held a Methodist log church and burial ground. The church doubled as a schoolhouse, was rebuilt larger in 1859, and the cemetery grew alongside it, its oldest legible stone dating to 1859. Rebuilt again after a 1949 tornado, the church endures beside graves that include veterans from the Mexican War through Korea.

Houston, TX

Home to the Karankawa and Orcoquiza peoples and once eyed by Spain for a presidio, this region was permanently settled in 1822 by Stephen F. Austin's colonists. John R. Harris founded a village he named for his family and for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and it grew into one of the most influential colonial municipalities, playing a major role in the Texas War for Independence. The county was created in 1836, briefly held the Republic's capital, served as a Confederate command and ordnance center, and eventually grew into the world-commerce hub of Houston.

Waco, TX

In the 1850s the Haley, Crain, Caufield, and Jones families settled along Harris Creek in McLennan County, founding a community that took the stream's name. The burial ground began with the 1865 grave of young Hattie Timmons and grew on land the Jones family formally set aside in 1872, part of it reserved for a church and school. Among those resting here is Joel Crain, who received the surrounding land as a grant for his service at the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto.