Military & Wartime

Town of Clarence, NY

In 1807, pioneer Asa Harris settled this rise of land in western New York and opened a tavern along the frontier roads northeast of Buffalo, giving the area its enduring name of Harris Hill. When British forces burned Buffalo during the War of 1812, the hill's relative safety made it a refuge for families fleeing the destruction. The marker recalls both the area's earliest white settlement and a tense chapter when the young nation's frontier was a war zone.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 1990

Chartered by the Commonwealth and opened in 1845, the Harrisburg Cemetery is the oldest and largest burial ground in Pennsylvania's capital, spreading across 35 acres of carefully composed late-Victorian landscape. Its ornate statuary and its caretaker's house — designed by A.J. Downing, the era's foremost American landscape gardener — reflect the rural-cemetery movement's ideal of the graveyard as a serene, park-like place. More than 30,000 people rest here, among them Revolutionary War soldiers, Pennsylvania governors, and figures of local, state, and national note.

Houston, TX

This burial ground took shape as African Americans settled around Harrisburg's cattle trade and railroads in the mid-1800s, and after emancipation freedpeople organized their own benevolent societies to bury their dead with dignity. Successive Black organizations and, later, one of Houston's oldest African American funeral homes cared for the grounds into the 1960s. Those laid to rest here include a body servant of Sam Houston who witnessed San Jacinto, a soldier of the 84th U.S. Colored Infantry, a buffalo soldier who served in Cuba, and veterans of World War I.

Lower Merion Township, PA · est. 1947

This early Georgian house went up in 1704, when the Welsh Quaker settlements of the Philadelphia countryside were barely a generation old, and later took its name from owner Richard Harrison. Its most consequential resident arrived in 1774: Charles Thomson, who would serve as Secretary of the Continental Congress through the entire Revolution, keeping the young nation's official records. He lived out his long retirement here until 1824, a founding-era figure quietly farming outside Philadelphia.

Independence, MO

This Independence, Missouri, house is tied to the early years of Harry S. Truman, the 33rd President of the United States, who spent much of his life in and around this town. Rising from modest Missouri roots, Truman led the nation through the end of World War II and the opening of the Cold War. Independence remained his lifelong home, and sites like this one ground his extraordinary career in the ordinary community that shaped him.

Munfordville, KY

Formed in 1819 from Hardin and Barren counties, Hart County was home to the Buckner family. Simon Bolivar Buckner, a West Point graduate and Mexican War captain, became a Confederate general and later governor of Kentucky; his son, Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., commanded the U.S. Tenth Army and was killed on Okinawa in 1945. Both rest in the Frankfort Cemetery.

Orange County, NC

Hart's Mill was a working grist mill, but its real fame lies in the events that swirled around it. In 1766 it hosted a key gathering of the Regulators, backcountry farmers protesting corrupt colonial officials, and in 1781 a skirmish there gave a boost to the Patriot cause during the Revolution. The mill sat at the crossroads of two of North Carolina's great uprisings.

New Boston, TX

Harvey C. Sanders was a Kentucky-born Confederate soldier who fought at Shiloh and Chickamauga before being wounded and reassigned as a guard at the Confederate White House in Richmond. When the capital fell in April 1865, he rode for five weeks in the escort protecting the fleeing President Jefferson Davis toward Florida, a desperate flight that ended with Davis's capture in Georgia. Sanders was imprisoned for a year, then settled in this corner of Texas, where he was long remembered as the last surviving member of Davis's bodyguard.

Houston, TX

Harvey Homan arrived in Texas in January 1836, at the very outset of the revolution, and that spring fought at San Jacinto in Captain Richard Roman's company—the decisive battle that won Texas its independence. Born in Kentucky in 1806, he made his life in the new republic's rising city of Houston, where he died young in July 1846.

Bryan, TX

Arriving from Tennessee in 1839, Harvey Mitchell first served with the "minute men" guarding the north Texas frontier, then settled in Brazos County and filled nearly every local office from deputy clerk to chief justice. He taught school, kept a store, farmed, and helped build the county's churches and its 1846, 1853, and 1878 courthouses. His determination helped secure the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas for the county, earning him the title "Father of Brazos County."

Harwood, TX

Harwood sprang up in 1875 as a stop on the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railroad, and land for this cemetery was set aside when the town lots were first platted. Its oldest marked grave belongs to Civil War veteran I. M. Shelton, who — local tradition holds — was struck by lightning while working on the railroad in 1877. Among the graves lie veterans of nearly every American conflict from the Texas Revolution through the Korean War.

Haskell, TX

Haskell County was created in 1858 and finally organized in 1885, named for Charles Ready Haskell, a young Tennessean shot alongside Colonel Fannin's men in the 1836 Goliad Massacre during the Texas Revolution. Captain R. B. Marcy crossed this country in 1849 while surveying a wagon route to California, and the first settlement at the future county seat came in 1882.

Port Lavaca, TX

This burial ground served the family of Captain Sylvanus Hatch, a Cape Cod–born builder who served in the War of 1812 as an adjutant under Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans before later joining the Texas War for Independence. The Hatch family reached the Chocolate Creek area by 1842, and the captain established the cemetery in 1850 when his wife Pamela died of cholera—an outbreak that also killed German immigrants who had landed at Indianola and lie buried here. Hatch and two Confederate-veteran sons are interred among other pioneering families.

Arlington, TX

Named for Tennessee-born pioneer Harvey Hawkins, who received a 160-acre land grant signed by Governor Sam Houston in 1860, this cemetery began as a family plot for the Tate Springs community. By local memory an enslaved man named Poly Penn was the first buried here, though his grave is unmarked; the earliest lettered stone dates to 1868. As the settlement grew, the plot became a public burial ground in 1890, chronicling the pioneer families who put down roots in the mid-1800s.

Mineral County, NV

Hawthorne was laid out in 1880 by Carson and Colorado Railroad president H. M. Yerington as a division point, named for pioneer lumberman William A. Hawthorne rather than its planned name of Millbrae. The town seesawed through Nevada's county-seat rivalries—taking the Esmeralda seat from Aurora in 1883, losing it to Goldfield in 1907, and becoming Mineral County's seat in 1911. Its fortunes turned again in the late 1920s when the Navy, after a disastrous eastern munitions explosion, chose Hawthorne for a huge ammunition depot, commissioned in 1930.

Midway, TX

Patrick Hayes was an Irish immigrant who reached Texas around 1836 and promptly took up arms in the war that won Texas its independence. Rewarded and restless, he built a sprawling world of cotton plantations along the Trinity River, practiced herbal medicine as the locally beloved "Dr. Hayes," and in 1857 opened this family burial ground on his Seven Oaks plantation. Beneath its soil lie Hayes kin, and by long belief the enslaved people and servants whose graves went unrecorded, making the quiet cemetery a witness to a pioneering family's rise and the human cost woven into it.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997

Haym Salomon arrived in America around 1772, an immigrant who threw himself into the Revolutionary cause and was twice imprisoned by the British. From Philadelphia he worked as a broker and money-lender, extending enormous credit to help keep the struggling war effort and the young government solvent. Active in the city's Jewish community, he was never repaid and died in debt.

Brownsville, TN

This monument honors the soldiers of Haywood County, Tennessee, who fought and died for the Confederacy during the Civil War of 1861–1865, and it pointedly salutes the county's Confederate women, whose labor sustained the home front. Memorials like it rose across the South in the decades after the war — most during the Jim Crow era, erected by groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy — to shape how the Lost Cause was remembered.

Saint Jo, TX

Long before the town of Saint Jo was founded here in 1873, this spot at the head of Elm Creek was a landmark on the frontier crossed by government survey expeditions, a proposed federal railroad route, and the U.S. 2nd Cavalry under Albert Sidney Johnston marching to establish Texas frontier forts. A post office opened in 1860, and the site steadily grew from a waypoint into a permanent settlement.

Tyler, TX

When Union naval blockades choked off imported medicine during the Civil War, the Confederacy turned to home-grown remedies. Near the mineral waters of Headache Springs, one of only nine Confederate medical laboratories—and the sole one west of the Mississippi—produced medicines and whiskey for the government. Workers gathered native herbs like poke root, snakeroot and mullein and combined them with mineral salts into what the marker aptly calls the medicines of desperation.

Brownsville, TX

Jewish settlers reached the Brownsville and Matamoros borderlands in the mid-1840s, and in 1868 the Hebrew Benevolent Society bought a half-acre beside the city cemetery for a single dollar. Victims of an 1858 yellow fever epidemic were reinterred here, and for generations this was the only Jewish burial ground serving the lower Rio Grande Valley. Among its graves lie European immigrants and veterans of every American war since the 1840s.

Brownwood vicinity, TX

William W. and Pency Heflin settled here in 1875, and local tradition holds that the first burial was a child who died in 1876 after eating wild berries while his family camped on the property. The earliest marked grave, that of Robert Bonine, also dates to 1876, and a deed confirming the Heflins' donation of four acres was recorded in 1928. Among those resting here are many of the area's pioneer settlers and veterans of wars from the Civil War through World War II.

Waller, TX

German-born Heinrich Leverkuhn came to Texas in 1857 and served as a foragemaster for the Confederate army during the Civil War before opening a store in Hockley. In 1878 he took up farming and ranching in the community now called Macedonia, where he ran a cotton gin, syrup mill, and blacksmith shop. He helped found the Macedonia Methodist Church and McPherson School and, across two marriages, raised fourteen children.

Manheim, PA · est. 1962

Samuel P. Heintzelman was born in this Manheim house in 1805 and rose through the U.S. Army across two of the nineteenth century's defining wars. He earned distinction in the Mexican War of the 1840s and went on to command troops as a Union general in the Civil War. He died in Washington in 1880 and was buried in Buffalo.

McKeesport, PA · est. 2002

Helen Richey of McKeesport broke into the sky in 1934 when she became the first woman to fly a commercial airliner — only to face such hostility from male colleagues that she resigned within a year. Undeterred, she became the first woman licensed as an instructor by the Civil Aeronautics Authority. When war came she rose to command the American wing of Britain's Air Transport Auxiliary, flew with the Women's Airforce Service Pilots, and finished the war a Major.

Helena, TX

Founded on the San Antonio River in 1852 and named for a founder's wife, Helena sat astride the Chihuahua Trail that carried wagon freight, gold bullion, and daily four-horse stages between the Gulf coast, San Antonio, and northern Mexico. It became county seat in 1854 and, during the Civil War, ran its own Confederate post office and funneled cotton toward Mexican ports. When the railroad bypassed it in 1886 the town withered, and the county seat moved away in 1894.

Hemphill, TX

Laid out soon after Hemphill was founded in 1858, this cemetery reads like a directory of the young town's builders. Its oldest marked grave, from 1867, belongs to Marier C. Morris, daughter of pioneer physician Jubal H. Ragan, and though an 1875 courthouse fire destroyed the early records, tradition credits Simon Newsome Beckcom and William T. Morris with donating the original ground. Among those buried here are war veterans, merchants, community leaders, and state legislator Simeon R. Williams.

Hempstead, TX

During the Civil War, Hempstead was one of Texas's busiest Confederate hubs, its railroad feeding troops, manufactured goods, and supplies toward Houston and the coast. Camps Groce and Hebert trained soldiers, and Camp Groce grew into the state's second-largest prisoner-of-war camp, taking its first Union captives in 1863; nearby mills and shops turned out textiles, wagons, and harness for the army. In the spring of 1865, troops gathered here learned of Lee's surrender at Appomattox, and Confederate generals bade their men farewell in one of the war's last scenes.

Ingram, TX

Howard Henderson came to Texas in 1857 and survived the 1862 Battle of the Nueces, in which Confederate forces ambushed a group of German Unionists near the Nueces River. He later served as a Texas Ranger and, with his wife Narcissa, settled here after their 1866 marriage. When their infant twin sons died in 1870, the couple began this family burial ground, which grew to hold relatives and neighbors.

Henderson, TX

Believed to be Henderson's oldest, this cemetery took shape in the mid-1840s and holds soldiers from every U.S. war between the War of 1812 and Vietnam. More than half of it served the city's African American community, and among its graves lie Black merchants, a businessman, and a veterinarian, two Texas A&M University presidents, judges, legislators, and a sea captain—its once-segregating wrought-iron fence now removed. Shaded by magnolias and crepe myrtles, its Old South landscape reads like a directory of the town's whole history.

Athens, TX

Henderson County voted overwhelmingly for secession in 1861 and sent roughly a thousand men into Confederate service, one detachment returning with only thirteen survivors. Camps of instruction and a supply depot at Fincastle gathered grain and goods, while local kilns turned out earthenware for the war effort. Among wartime residents were Cynthia Ann Parker, recovered from Comanche captivity in 1860, and John H. Reagan, who became the Confederacy's postmaster-general.

Huntsville, TX

A West Point graduate who served on the frontier and in the Mexican War, Henderson Yoakum settled in Huntsville in 1845 and became a lawyer, civic leader, and close friend of Sam Houston. He helped found Austin College, serving as its first librarian and a teacher of law, and in 1855 published a landmark two-volume history of Texas. His descendants remained active in the state's cultural life.

Galveston, TX

The mercantile house of William Hendley & Co., founded in 1845, helped drive Galveston's rise as a great port, launching a packet line of fast sailing ships and building ever-larger vessels for the Gulf trade. Between 1855 and 1858 the firm erected this three-story Greek Revival commercial row of four granite-trimmed buildings, whose rooftop cupola became a lookout post for both Confederate and Federal forces during the Civil War. After the war it housed banks, engineers, and merchants as the block stayed at the center of Galveston commerce.

San Antonio, TX

Kentucky-born Hendrick Arnold took part in the capture of Bexar from December 5 to 10, 1835, one of the early victories of the Texas Revolution as insurgents drove Mexican forces from San Antonio. He died in 1849, and the State of Texas set this marker to his memory in 1936, the centennial of Texas independence.

Mt. Pleasant, TX

Henry Clay Thruston, born in South Carolina and standing an estimated seven to eight feet tall, became a national and international curiosity for his extraordinary height. He served the Confederacy through the Civil War — conspicuous as he was, he was wounded only twice — and by 1874 had settled with his family near the Daphne community in Titus County. He later toured with P.T. Barnum's Circus as "The Tallest Man in the World," seen by crowds across America and Europe.

New Castle, KY

Henry County, formed in 1798, carries the name of Patrick Henry, the Virginia orator whose cry of "liberty or death" helped ignite the American Revolution. A fixture of the House of Burgesses and the Continental Congress, he served as Virginia's first post-colonial governor and later opposed ratifying the Constitution until a Bill of Rights was added—rights the nation soon adopted. He declined a string of high federal offices to remain in Virginia.

Robert Lee, TX

Illinois-born Henry Davis Pearce came to Texas in 1856 and joined the Confederate army at New Orleans in 1861, seeing hard service at the Siege of Vicksburg and the Battle of Mansfield and being captured at Pleasant Hill before serving to war's end. He later wrote a history of Confederate veterans, raised a large family, and helped organize Runnels County before moving to Robert Lee in 1906.

Seguin, TX

Henry Eustace McCulloch's career spanned Texas's most formative struggles: he rode in the Texas Ranging Service in 1839–42, captained Rangers in the Mexican War, and served in the legislature and as a U.S. Marshal before the Civil War. He then rose to brigadier general in the Confederate Army, commanding the District of Texas and a brigade in the Vicksburg Campaign. He lies buried here beside his wife, Jane Isabella Ashby.

Palestine, TX

Henry Fields, born in South Carolina in 1806, was among the men who fought at San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive battle that won Texas its independence from Mexico. He lived on to 1890, dying in Anderson County. This marker honors his role as a veteran of that founding struggle.

Corsicana, TX

Florida-born Henry G. Damon served in the Confederate army and spent part of the Civil War as a prisoner before starting over in Corsicana in 1873. There he practiced law and founded the Texas Loan Agency, an early real estate mortgage firm that helped finance the region's industrial growth from this building through the 1890s. An active civic booster and prohibitionist, Damon helped shape the young oil town's development.

Galveston, TX

A New York native, Henry Journeay (1815–70) joined the fight for Texas independence, serving in the army of Texas in 1836. Six years later he took part in the ill-fated Mier Expedition, a Republic of Texas raid into Mexico that ended in capture for many of its men. His grave marks a life bound up with the violent birth pangs of the Lone Star Republic.

Corpus Christi, TX

Pennsylvania-born Henry Lawrence Kinney arrived on Corpus Christi Bay in 1838 and, a year later, opened a trading post on the bluff that would grow into a city. Much of his early trade was contraband run to Mexican Federalists, but his fortunes soared when General Zachary Taylor chose his outpost to stage the U.S. Army before the Mexican-American War. Kinney served as quartermaster, sold town lots to Taylor's soldiers, sat in the legislature for years, and chased grand schemes—a failed 1851 fair, a doomed Nicaragua venture—before dying in Matamoros in an unmarked grave.

Houston, TX

Henry Livingston Thompson served as a commodore of the navy of the Republic of Texas, the small fleet that guarded the young nation's Gulf coast. His death in Houston in November 1837 drew what the Telegraph called the largest and most respectable assemblage the fledgling capital had yet seen, with an oration delivered at the grave by General Rusk.

Beaumont, TX

Born in New York and raised in Missouri, Henry Millard tried his hand at mercantile trade in Natchez and New Orleans before migrating to Texas in 1835 amid the coming revolution. With a partner he bought land on the Neches River and laid out a townsite he named Beaumont, after his late wife's maiden name. He served in the Consultation of 1835 and commanded infantry as a lieutenant colonel at the Battle of San Jacinto, then held civic offices in his new town before his death in 1844.

Smithville, TX

Henry Mordorff, born in 1817, was among the volunteers who fought at San Jacinto in 1836, the battle that won Texas its independence. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1936, on the centennial of that victory, to honor his service and grave near Smithville.

El Paso, TX

Born into slavery in Georgia in 1856, Henry Ossian Flipper broke a color line at the nation's premier military school, becoming West Point's first African-American graduate in 1877. Commissioned into the 10th Cavalry — the celebrated Buffalo Soldiers — he served across the western frontier and engineered the drainage system at Fort Sill still known as "Flipper's Ditch." A racially motivated court-martial ended his Army career in 1882, but he rebuilt his life as a mining engineer, surveyor, and author across the Southwest, living a decade here in El Paso. Vindication came only long after his 1940 death, with an honorable discharge in 1976 and a full presidential pardon in 1999.

Giddings, TX

Henry Prentice Redfield came to Texas as a boy and, at sixteen, took up arms for its independence—fighting at Gonzales, the Siege of Bexar and San Jacinto in the revolution of 1835-36. He went on to fight in frontier conflicts with Native peoples, was wounded at Plum Creek in 1840, and later rode with the 1st Texas Cavalry in the U.S.-Mexican War at Resaca de la Palma and Monterrey. He lived until 1900, a veteran of nearly every early Texas war.

Ozona, TX

Born in Mississippi and a captain of Arkansas cavalry for the Confederacy during the Civil War, Henry Street Hudspeth came to Texas in 1877 and settled in Crockett County by 1888, serving as county clerk. He and his wife Elizabeth raised five children, among them C.B. Hudspeth, who went on to serve in the United States Congress.

San Francisco, CA

This San Francisco monument honors Henry W. Halleck, who served as General-in-Chief of the United States Armies from 1862 to 1864 during the Civil War. A scholar-soldier nicknamed "Old Brains," Halleck had deep California ties from his prewar years, helping shape the young state before the war called him east to Washington.

Jones Creek, TX

Henry William Munson's life spanned the violent birth of Anglo Texas. He fought at the 1813 Battle of Medina near San Antonio, returned east, then came back as one of Austin's colonists in 1824. He took up arms for Mexico to put down the 1827 Fredonian Rebellion, but turned against Santa Anna's agents at the 1832 Battle of Velasco. He and his wife Ann named one son Mordello, after the Mexican officer who had saved Munson's life at Medina.

Plainfield Township, PA · est. 1974

About 1800, William Henry II built a firearms works in this Northampton County valley, part of a noted gunmaking family whose craftsmanship armed Americans across generations. Rifles and muskets made here supplied troops in the War of 1812, and the Henry name endured on shotguns produced as late as 1904. The factory was one of the small, skilled arms shops that gave the young nation its firepower.

Grand Prairie, TX

Dallas bought this land in 1928 and leased it to the Army for a training field, relieving an overcrowded Love Field, and named it for Major William N. Hensley. As World War II loomed the Navy took part of the base for a reserve aviation station — nicknamed the 'Prairie Navy' for its inland setting — and North American Aviation began building T-6 trainers and later B-24 bombers here. The field trained fleet, Marine, Coast Guard, and free French pilots, plus WAVES and three future astronauts, before finally closing as Dallas Naval Air Station in 1998.

Shiner, TX

George Herder, a veteran of the Texas Revolution turned pioneer farmer and rancher, built this Greek Revival home in the 1880s in the Half Moon community. His son William later ran a butcher shop, worked the land, and opened the house to weary travelers. Held by the family for more than a century, the house and its outbuildings are the last trace of Half Moon.

Garden Valley, TX

In July 1839 the army of the young Republic of Texas encamped here under generals including Thomas J. Rusk and Edward Burleson during the campaign against Chief Bowles and the Cherokees and their allies. After the decisive fighting in nearby Van Zandt County on July 16, the soldiers disbanded and returned home nine days later. The state marked the spot during the 1936 Texas Centennial.

Randolph County, NC

Herman Husband was a Quaker reformer and pamphleteer who became a guiding voice of the War of the Regulation (1768–1771), rallying backcountry farmers against corrupt colonial officials. Fleeing North Carolina after the movement collapsed, he later resurfaced in Pennsylvania, where he took part in the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s.

Reading, PA · est. 1949

When General Burgoyne's British army surrendered at Saratoga in 1777, thousands of captured German auxiliary troops — most of them Hessians hired by the Crown — became prisoners of war held far from the fighting. Some were marched to Reading, where from 1781 to 1783 they lived in a camp of huts on the hillside just north of this spot. Many of these soldiers, once enemies, would remain in Pennsylvania after the war and settle among its German-speaking communities.

Walker County, TX

Born in Virginia and raised in Tennessee, Hezekiah Faris came to Texas in 1835 to fight for the colony's freedom and took part in the decisive victory at San Jacinto. He located bounty and headright land in this vicinity, became a local leader, and named Faris Chapel for his home church back in Tennessee. He married Matilda Stevens Roberts, and over time the family name shifted to Farris.

Austin, TX

Clarksville was founded in 1871 by freed slave Charles Clark as a place where former slaves could reunite their families, govern their own lives, and worship freely after emancipation. Around 1879 former slave Peter Tucker built this board-and-batten Cumberland-style house, later home to Hezikiah Haskell—a Union soldier and Buffalo Soldier who married into the family. Standing on its original site with high physical integrity, the house was deeded to the city of Austin and recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 2012.

Clinton, KY

Formed in 1821, Hickman County took its name from Capt. Paschal Hickman, a Franklin County landowner and one of nine Kentucky officers killed in the aftermath of the River Raisin battle in January 1813—each later honored with a county. The original Hickman County once encompassed the whole Jackson Purchase, the vast tract acquired from the Chickasaw, and was later subdivided into eight counties. Columbus served as its first seat of government.

Roxton, TX

As settlers poured into Lamar County in the late 1840s and 1850s, a Methodist congregation took root by 1852 and opened the burial ground that became Hickory Grove Cemetery. Its more than a thousand graves—many for infants and children—stand as sober witness to the hardships of pioneer life, while others hold veterans stretching from the Civil War through Korea. The diverse tombstones read almost as a stone archive of a frontier community's growth.