Military & Wartime

Anderson, TX

Erected by the State of Texas in 1936, this monument honors the pioneers of the Grimes County vicinity who shaped the Republic of Texas. Its two faces name veterans of the War of 1812 and the Black Hawk War, delegates to the conventions that pressed for independence, signers of the Texas Declaration, martyrs of the Alamo, and heroes of San Jacinto. Among them are figures like Jesse Grimes and a woman who sewed a flag for the Texas army.

King County, WA

This memorial pays tribute to the community's war dead, honoring local men and women who died in the nation's conflicts. Without naming a single war, it stands for the collective sacrifice a town remembers across generations of service.

Winona, TX

This site recalls the aftermath of the Battle of the Neches on July 16, 1839, when forces of the Republic of Texas defeated the Cherokees and allied tribes, killing their leader Chief Bowles. Army scouts fanned out through the surrounding country in the days that followed. The 1936 state marker commemorates that campaign, which drove the Cherokees from East Texas.

Utopia, TX

In June 1841, near this spot in the rugged hill country of the young Republic of Texas, Captain John Coffee Hays led a small company of Texas Rangers, aided by allied Mexican fighters under Captain Flores, in a sharp clash with a band of Comanche warriors. Such encounters were the grim, constant reality of a contested frontier where Rangers, settlers, and Comanche bands fought for control of the land. The State of Texas marked the site in 1936.

San Antonio, TX

On March 28, 1813, the Battle of Rosillo erupted near San Antonio as the "Republican Army of the North"—a mix of Anglo-Americans, Mexicans, and Native fighters—crushed Spanish Royalist troops under Governor Manuel de Salcedo. The victory came amid the Gutiérrez-Magee push during the Mexican struggle for independence, and it was darkened when captured Royalists were murdered on Colonel Bernardo Gutiérrez's order. The bloodshed helped doom the short-lived rebel republic.

Hempstead, TX

In the tense weeks after the fall of the Alamo and Goliad, Sam Houston's Texas Army was in full retreat across the Brazos country during the so-called 'Runaway Scrape.' On April 14–15, 1836, the army camped near here on Charles Donoho's plantation before marching toward Harrisburg — the final maneuver that would end days later in the decisive victory at San Jacinto. This unassuming farmland briefly held the fate of an independent Texas.

New York, NY

Inclenberg was the country estate of the Murray family, prosperous Quaker merchants whose 18th-century farm gave its name to today's Murray Hill neighborhood in Manhattan. In an age when this part of the island was open farmland, the estate was a landmark of colonial and Revolutionary-era New York. This tablet marks the geographic center of that vanished farm, now buried beneath the modern city grid.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1948

Originally the Pennsylvania State House, this brick Georgian building hosted the Second Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention. The Liberty Bell once hung in its tower.

Rockbridge County, VA

In December 1742, the Shenandoah Valley was a raw frontier where colonial settlers were only beginning to push into land that Native peoples had long traveled. A party of Iroquois moving south along the Great Warriors' Path—a major Indigenous route through the valley—met a band of newly arrived pioneers under Capt. John McDowell near where the Maury River empties into the James. The encounter turned deadly, marking the first recorded bloodshed between the two groups in what would become Rockbridge County. It was a small, chaotic collision, but one that foreshadowed the long and often violent contest over the valley in the decades ahead.

Pampa, TX

On November 8, 1874, at the height of the Red River War on the Texas Panhandle, Lieutenant Frank D. Baldwin led two companies of U.S. troops in an attack on a large Native encampment near this spot, freeing two young white girls held captive. The clash was one of many in the Army's campaign to force the Southern Plains nations onto reservations. Baldwin's actions here later earned him lasting recognition.

Selden, TX

This Erath County burial ground grew from land deeded by the Venable family for a shared cemetery, church, and school, with later gifts adding acreage. Its oldest marked grave dates to 1871, though earlier burials may lie unrecorded, and the interred include veterans reaching back to the Civil War. Adorned with interior fencing, curbing, and statuary, it endures under the care of a corporation formed in 1959 as a memorial to the pioneers who settled along Indian Creek.

Fort Lauderdale, FL

Long before a marina occupied this ground, Native people carried their canoes across the narrow neck of land here — a "haulover" linking New River Sound to the open Atlantic. In 1838, during the Second Seminole War, the army built a fort near this spot and named it for Major William Lauderdale, a name the growing city would later inherit. The post stayed active until the war's end in 1842.

Tuscarora Township, PA · est. 1947

The hill southeast of this marker saw sharp frontier fighting on September 29, 1778, when Colonel Thomas Hartley's soldiers from Fort Muncy clashed with Native warriors here. Two days earlier Hartley's raid had burned Queen Esther's town near present-day Athens, part of the brutal back-and-forth of Revolutionary warfare along the Susquehanna. These running fights pitted Pennsylvania militia against the Iroquois and their British allies in a contest for the northern borderlands.

Tuscarora Township, PA · est. 1928

During the Revolutionary War, Pennsylvania's northern frontier was ravaged by raids from British-allied Native war parties. In September 1778 Colonel Thomas Hartley led an expedition up the Susquehanna, burning Tioga and Queen Esther's Town before fighting a sharp engagement near this spot on September 29. His campaign broke the momentum of raids in the region and cleared the way for the massive Sullivan Expedition the following year.

Wimberley, TX

In the spring of 1840, peace talks between Texas and the Comanche collapsed in the bloody Council House Fight at San Antonio, and raiding surged along the frontier. That August, after a sweeping raid on the coastal town of Linnville, a large Comanche band was intercepted near Plum Creek by Texas Rangers and volunteers in a sprawling running fight. Local tradition holds that a handful of warriors were chased to this horseshoe bend of Lone Man Creek, where they hid in the tall grass and an oak mott until nightfall let them slip away, burying their dead beneath flat stones by moonlight.

Reading, VT

In the summer of 1754, as the French and Indian War flared along the northern frontier, an Abenaki raiding party captured the Johnson family and their companions at Fort No. 4 and marched them toward Montreal to be ransomed. On the night of August 30 they camped at this spot, and the next day Susanna Johnson gave birth to a daughter in a rough shelter the Abenaki built beside Knapp Brook. The child was fittingly named Captive.

Reading, VT

The Indian Stones near Reading, Vermont, mark the spot where, on August 31, 1754, a daughter was born to the captive Johnson family as they were being marched north by a Native war party during the tensions that erupted into the French and Indian War. The Johnsons' captivity and long journey to Canada became one of New England's best-known captivity narratives. The frontier of the upper Connecticut River valley was a dangerous borderland in those years.

Kokomo, IN

This memorial honors the women of Indiana — "Hoosier daughters" — who served their state and nation in times of both war and peace. It reflects a broad, deliberate effort to recognize contributions that were long overlooked in traditional monuments, which overwhelmingly commemorated men in uniform. Set in Kokomo, it stands as part of a wider movement across the country to give women's service its due public acknowledgment.

Indianola, TX

Once a great Texas seaport, Indianola saw the sweep of the state's history pass through its wharves: Spanish exploration, La Salle's 1685 landing nearby, German colonists led by Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, frontier army supplies, and even the U.S. Army's experimental camels. During the Civil War it and nearby Fort Esperanza were prizes in the Federal blockade, changing hands after fierce fighting in 1863. Twin hurricanes in 1875 and 1886 finally wiped the town from the coast.

Port Lavaca, TX

The graves in this cemetery record the hardships borne by the people of Indianola, one of Texas' great 19th-century ports. The earliest marked burial, a child named William Woodward, dates to the cholera and yellow fever epidemics of 1852, and soldiers of both North and South who occupied the town in the Civil War lie here as well. Victims of the devastating hurricanes of 1875 and 1886 that destroyed Indianola are also interred here.

East Hanover Township, PA · est. 1947

By the late 1920s Pennsylvania was searching for a permanent home to train its National Guard, and the rolling country below the Blue Mountain at Indiantown Gap offered the room. Authorized in 1929 and first purchased in 1931, the reservation grew quickly, and when the nation began rearming in 1940 the state leased the ground to the federal government as an Army cantonment. From a modest Guard camp it swelled past 16,000 acres, becoming one of the great mustering and training grounds of the mid-Atlantic.

East Hanover Township, PA · est. 1947

The land at Indiantown Gap was chosen in the late 1920s as a permanent training ground for the Pennsylvania National Guard, with the first acreage bought in 1931 and troops drilling there by 1932. As war loomed in Europe, the reservation was leased to the federal government in 1940 as an Army cantonment and expanded rapidly past 16,000 acres. What began as a state camp became a major staging and training installation feeding the nation's growing army.

Dundalk, MD

This memorial honors the infantry — the foot soldiers who bear the hardest, closest burden of war. Standing in Dundalk, Maryland, it gives the community a place to remember those who served in the ranks.

Edom, TX

Stephen Ingram, a veteran of the Second Seminole War, brought his family to Van Zandt County in 1850 and built log homes beside the Tyler–Porter's Bluff Road. His 1858 burial opened the family cemetery, soon joined by two infant granddaughters, and in 1897 his son deeded the ground to Ingram's descendants. The small burial place records generations of American service, holding two Civil War veterans, four who served in the World Wars, and two Korean War veterans.

San Diego, CA

This San Diego plaza honors Osmond K. Ingram, a Gunner's Mate First Class who died aboard the destroyer USS Cassin in October 1917 while trying to jettison depth charges as a German submarine attacked. He is remembered as the first U.S. Navy enlisted man killed in action in World War I, and the Navy later named a destroyer for him. His plaza keeps that early wartime sacrifice in public memory.

Inkom, ID

In towns across America it became a solemn custom to carve the names of local sons and daughters who died in the nation's wars into stone at the community's heart, so that a small place would never forget its own. This monument in Inkom, Idaho, bears such a roll of the local war dead, a permanent honor roll for a community that sent its people into the nation's service. The listing of names, without adornment, is the whole point: each was a neighbor.

Inman, SC

This monument in Inman honors the men and women of the community who served their country in wartime. Without naming a single conflict, it speaks to generations of local service—from the World Wars through later engagements—gathered into one place of remembrance. Such town monuments anchor collective memory on courthouse lawns and village greens across the country.

Butler Township, PA · est. 1993

As war spread across Europe in 1940, the U.S. Army sought a nimble, all-terrain scout car, and a small Butler County firm answered the call. A team led by engineer Karl Probst designed a light four-wheel-drive prototype that the American Bantam Car Company delivered to the Army that September, building 2,675 of the vehicles here. Though larger automakers eventually won the mass wartime contracts, it was Bantam that first created the machine the world would come to know as the jeep.

Austin, TX

New Hampshire–born Ira Hobart Evans rose to major in the Union Army during the Civil War, earned the Medal of Honor, and stood in the honor guard at President Lincoln's funeral in 1865. Sent to Texas and later returning as a Freedmen's Bureau agent, he won election to the state legislature and in 1870 became the youngest and first Republican Speaker of the Texas House. He went on to lead Texas railroad and land ventures and served for nearly a decade as president of the board of Tillotson College, a forerunner of today's Huston-Tillotson University, remodeling this Austin house with architect Alfred Giles.

San Diego, CA

This palm grove was planted by the Kiwanis Club of San Diego in honor of the 52 American citizens held hostage in Iran from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981. Seized when militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the hostages endured 444 days of captivity that riveted the nation, dominated the evening news, and reshaped American politics. Their release, on the day a new president was inaugurated, was met with yellow ribbons and celebrations across the country.

Charleston, SC

This monument honors the Irish Volunteers, a Charleston militia company drawn from the city's Irish immigrant community, whose members answered the call across half a century of American conflict. The inscription traces their service from the War of 1812 through the Florida War of 1835 — part of the long Seminole conflicts — and on into the Civil War, where the unit's men filled the ranks of Confederate companies including Co. K of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers in the Army of Northern Virginia. It stands as a communal tribute raised by Charleston's Irish to their own dead, the kind of ethnic militia company that gave immigrant newcomers a foothold and a sense of belonging in antebellum American cities.

Lone Star, TX

Livingston Skinner brought his family from Georgia to this corner of Texas in the early 1840s, and the burial ground began at the edge of their land with a daughter's grave in 1853. Over generations it filled with the Skinners and their neighbors from nearby Lone Star, and once shared its ground with the Iron Bluff Schoolhouse. Those buried here served in nearly every American conflict — Skinner himself a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Creek Wars, alongside later Confederate, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam veterans.

San Bernardino County, CA

In the spring of 1942, this stretch of the California–Arizona desert became Iron Mountain, one of nearly a dozen divisional camps in the vast Desert Training Center. Here the U.S. Army hardened and drilled soldiers under brutal heat and scarce water to ready them for combat in World War II. Tens of thousands passed through these austere desert camps before shipping overseas.

Paducah, KY

Paducah proudly claimed Irvin S. Cobb, the newspaperman turned humorist whose folksy Kentucky stories made him one of America's most popular writers in the early 20th century. A prolific author of more than sixty books, an O. Henry Award winner, and later a Hollywood actor and lecturer, Cobb was decorated by France with the Legion of Honor in 1918. His hometown Rotary Club raised this tribute to its most quotable son.

Pattison, TX

Isaac Best (1774–1837) was one of the 'Old 300,' the first families to settle Stephen F. Austin's colony. Before coming to Texas around 1824 he had built a mill and a fortified refuge, Best's Fort, on the Pennsylvania–Kentucky frontier during the War of 1812. In Texas he received a land grant east of the Brazos and steadily expanded his holdings to some 8,000 acres; nearby Best Creek still bears his name.

Llano, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1837 and orphaned of his mother as a boy, Isaac 'Ike' Maxwell followed the westering tide to the Texas Hill Country in 1854, naming his new home Bluffton after the Arkansas town he had left behind. He scouted for frontier units during the Civil War, then served his county as justice of the peace and in the state legislature, where he helped secure the granite that built the Texas Capitol. A Church of Christ minister, he was remembered at his death in 1931 as the oldest living pioneer of Llano County.

Moulton, TX

Isaac D. Hamilton came from Alabama to Texas in January 1836, joining Captain Jack Shackelford's Red Rover Company under Colonel James Fannin just as the Texas Revolution reached its bloodiest hour. Fannin's command was captured and, in March 1836, executed in the Goliad Massacre—yet Hamilton was among the few who miraculously escaped the slaughter and lived to tell of it.

Acton, MA

This farm was the home of Captain Isaac Davis, a young gunsmith who commanded the Acton minutemen when the alarm of April 19, 1775 called them to Concord. Davis famously volunteered his well-drilled company to lead the advance on the North Bridge, telling his superiors he had no fear taking the front. He was among the first Americans killed in the opening battle of the Revolution, and this monument, erected in 1895 by Charles Wheeler, marks the place he left that morning.

Camden County, NC

Isaac Gregory served in the provincial congress of 1775 and rose to brigadier general of the militia during the Revolution, later helping shape North Carolina's future at the state conventions of 1788-1789 that weighed the new federal Constitution. His home stood about four miles to the southeast. His was a life given to both the fight for independence and the founding of a government.

San Jacinto, TX

Isaac L. Jaques arrived in Texas in October 1835, on the eve of the revolution that would create the Republic. He fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in Captain Thomas H. McIntire's company. He died just months later at Lynchburg in August 1836.

Round Top, TX

Born in Georgia and arrived in Texas in 1835, Isaac Lafayette Hill taught school before the fight for Texas independence swept him up. He piloted the ferry at San Felipe that carried Sam Houston's retreating army in 1836 and then fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto that same year. He later farmed his land grant near Round Top and represented Fayette County in the state legislature in the 1850s.

Alto, TX

Born in Georgia in 1788, Isaac Lee lived in Mississippi and Arkansas before reaching Texas in 1828, settling near San Augustine and later Nacogdoches. He took part in the 1832 Battle of Nacogdoches and served in the Army of the Republic of Texas during the fight for independence. In old age he moved to a farm near Alto to live with his daughter, dying there in 1880 at age 92.

Hemphill, TX

A veteran of the War of 1812, Tennessee migrant Isaac Low reached this corner of Sabine County in 1828 and, during the Texas Revolution, ran a ferry across the Sabine River to help settlers flee the advancing Mexican army. He later served as a county commissioner, and his son Jesse donated the land for this cemetery, where the earliest marked grave lies. Others buried here include a Civil War captain and a man whose 1883 murder touched off a three-year local feud.

Weatherford, TX

Born in Georgia in 1793, Isaac Parker came to Texas in 1833 with the pioneer family that built Fort Parker in Limestone County. He fought in the Texas Revolution, served in the Congress of the Republic of Texas, took part in the 1845 statehood convention, and later sat in the state legislature. In the 1850s he introduced the bill that created the county named in his honor.

Weatherford, TX

Isaac Parker came to Texas in 1833 and took up arms in 1836 during the Texas fight for independence, then helped build the young republic as a member of its Congress from 1839 to 1845 and a delegate to the 1845 convention that led to statehood. A pioneer, soldier, and legislator, he later served as a state senator before his death in 1883 in the county that bears his family name. This centennial-era marker honors a life that spanned the frontier from wilderness to statehood.

Bald Prairie, TX

Tennessee native Isaac Phillip Stem enlisted in frontier service at seventeen and, after moving to Texas in 1836, joined the Republic of Texas army at Houston. He fought at the 1840 Battle of Plum Creek against Comanches who had raided the coast, served in the Somervell Campaign, and rode with mounted volunteers in the war with Mexico before joining the U.S. Infantry. He later settled in Robertson County as a farmer and rancher, dying in 1893.

Lockhart, TX

Georgia-born Isham Jones Good came to Texas in 1835 as a volunteer for the fight for independence from Mexico, narrowly escaping the 1836 Goliad Massacre that claimed Colonel Fannin's command. He returned to settle the frontier, fought in the 1840 Indian battle of Plum Creek, served as an early postmaster and Caldwell County's first sheriff, and helped organize the county in 1848 before turning to cattle ranching in Hays County.

Socorro, NM

Set in a community park in Socorro, New Mexico, this veterans' memorial gathers a town's gratitude into three simple words. Communities across the American West raised such markers to keep faith with neighbors who served and did not come home. No single war is named here — the tribute reaches across all of them.

Isle La Motte, VT

Isle La Motte, the northernmost island in Lake Champlain, entered the written record in 1609 when Samuel de Champlain reported landing, hunting, and camping here in early July. In 1665 French colonists built Fort St. Anne on the island's west shore — the first European settlement in what became Vermont — later commemorated by the shrine of St. Anne on the same ground. The marker links the moment of French exploration to the fortified foothold that followed.

Bryan, TX

Isom Palmer — a son of the frontier firebrand Martin 'Ringtail Panther' Parmer — came to Texas with his family in 1825 and took part in the 1826 Fredonian Rebellion near Nacogdoches. He fought under Capt. John M. Bradley at the Siege of Bexar in 1835 and served as sergeant-at-arms at the signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence, later settling in Brazos County in the early 1870s.

Indianapolis, IN

This memorial in Indianapolis bears, on three black granite tablets, the names of Indiana State Police personnel who died in the line of duty. The state police force was established in the early 20th century as automobiles and highways transformed law enforcement across Indiana. The wall gathers the fallen of that long institutional history into a single place of remembrance.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 2002

Consecrated in 1844, this Chambersburg burial ground was established by a Jewish Holy Burial Society so that the area's small but growing Jewish community could bury its dead according to Jewish law. It stands as the first Jewish cemetery west of Philadelphia, opened during the wave of mid-19th-century migration that carried Jewish families inland from the coast. Among those interred is Isaac Burgauer, remembered as the only Southern Jewish soldier who fell at Gettysburg to rest in a Northern Jewish cemetery.

Concord Township, PA · est. 2001

In 1729 Thomas Willcox built a paper mill on the West Branch of Chester Creek, launching an enterprise that would help supply the young nation's presses. Ivy Mills became a major source of paper for Benjamin Franklin's print shop, and by 1776 it was producing the stock on which the currency of the colonies and the Continental Congress was printed. Willcox's descendants ran the mill until 1866, and an early Catholic mission took root on the same property.

Woodbridge, VA

In February and March of 1945, U.S. Marines stormed the volcanic island of Iwo Jima in one of the Pacific War's bloodiest battles, fought to secure airfields within striking range of the Japanese home islands. The famous flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi became one of the most enduring images of World War II. This Virginia memorial echoes Admiral Chester Nimitz's tribute to the fighting there — "Uncommon valor was a common virtue" — and the Marine Corps motto, "Semper fidelis," always faithful.

Corsicana, TX

Georgia-born James A. Megarity served in the Confederate army through some of the Civil War's hardest fighting, including Gettysburg and Petersburg, and was present at Robert E. Lee's surrender. Having married Narcissa Hardman in 1859, he brought his family to Texas in 1872, rented land for a time, and bought this site in 1876 to build a home. His holdings grew to 187 acres, making him a prosperous farmer and a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

Clarksville vicinity, TX

J. D. Tippit grew up on a farm near this spot, served as a decorated World War II paratrooper, and joined the Dallas police in 1952. On November 22, 1963, working a beat in Oak Cliff shortly after President Kennedy was shot, he stopped a suspicious man for questioning and was gunned down. The man was Lee Harvey Oswald, and Tippit's killing helped lead to the assassin's capture.

Goliad, TX

Raised in 1885, this monument honors Col. James W. Fannin and the men who died with him in the Goliad Massacre of March 27, 1836, when hundreds of Texan prisoners were executed on Santa Anna's order weeks after Texas declared independence. Its faces bind together the rallying cries "Remember the Alamo, Remember Goliad" with the dates that independence was declared and, at San Jacinto, finally won.

Bowling Green, OH

This flag and pole honor Jack LeRoy French (1917–1994), a Navy veteran of World War II who spent six decades woven into the civic life of Bowling Green — a Kiwanian, a Mason, and a longtime Methodist churchman. His wartime service in 1941–1945 placed him among the millions of Americans who answered the call in the nation's largest war. The memorial marks a long life of service both in uniform and at home.

Cool Community, TX

A farm boy from near Garner, Jack L. Knight joined the Texas National Guard in 1940 and shipped out with his unit to the far side of the world when World War II erupted. Fighting to reopen the Burma Road, the vital overland supply line into China, he was killed while leading an assault on a Japanese position. His valor earned a posthumous Medal of Honor — the only one awarded in the entire China-Burma-India Theater — and he now rests in the cemetery named for his own great-grandfather.

Ennis, TX

Jack Lummus grew up on an Ellis County farm, starred as an athlete at Baylor, and played professional baseball and football before joining the Marines in World War II. On Iwo Jima in early 1945, he led his rifle platoon against a network of fortified enemy positions, pressing the attack even after being wounded, before a land mine cost him his life. For his extraordinary courage that day he was awarded the Medal of Honor.