Military & Wartime

Johnson City, TX

Georgia-born and raised in DeWitt County, James Polk Johnson served in the Confederate army before joining his uncles in the Blanco County cattle business, which he bought and made his own by 1871. In 1879 he founded a new town on the Pedernales River — Johnson City — and worked to develop it, though his ambition to make it the county seat was not realized until 1891, six years after his death.

Old Center, TX

James Rowe came to the Mexican frontier of Texas from North Carolina and took up arms in the 1836 revolution that won Texas its independence. A prosperous tanner, he helped organize newly created Panola County in 1846, served a term in the young state's legislature, and donated the ground where this cemetery now stands. His story is a compact portrait of the settler-soldiers who turned a contested borderland into an American state.

Lampasas, TX

James S. Gillett's life traced the martial history of nineteenth-century Texas: a Kentucky-born frontier fighter who earned a major's rank in the Mexican War, sat in the early Texas Legislature, served as Adjutant General, rode again with the Texas Rangers, and finally soldiered for the Confederacy. His son James B. Gillett would carry the family name into Ranger legend. The marker gathers a career that touched nearly every armed chapter of the state's formative decades.

La Grange, TX

James Seaton Lester served as a delegate to the 1835 Consultation, the assembly that set Texas on the road to revolution, and fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. He went on to serve in four congresses of the Republic of Texas. The state honored him with this marker in 1962.

Sulphur Springs, TX

James Selen Stout came of age on the raw northeastern Texas frontier and, still a teenager, rode three months in the Republic of Texas cavalry in 1836 — service that earned him a 320-acre land grant. As a scout and explorer he helped draw settlers into the region, and decades later took up arms again for the Confederacy during the Civil War. He and his wife Elvira raised eleven children on land his family helped open.

Lexington, TX

Born in 1808, James Shaw fought in the Texas War for Independence and stood among the soldiers at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. He went on to serve as a representative or senator across five congresses of the Republic of Texas, helping govern the young nation before it joined the United States. He is buried here beside his wife, Nancy Ann Shaw.

York, PA · est. 1949

James Smith, who lies buried in this churchyard, was one of Pennsylvania's signers of the Declaration of Independence. A York lawyer of Irish birth, he raised a company of Associators—citizen-soldiers—early in the Revolution and served in the Continental Congress. He was also an ironmaster, part of the frontier industry that helped arm the American cause.

Honey Grove, TX

James Thomas "Tank" Holt came to Fannin County as a boy in 1849 and, after riding with the Confederate cavalry in the Civil War, turned a freighting business into a diversified fortune. He invested in ranching, a cotton oil mill, and a national bank, and even built Honey Grove's first public water system. His career traces the arc of a frontier veteran becoming a pillar of a growing Gilded Age Texas town.

Daingerfield, TX

James Thompson served in the North Carolina militia in 1781, helping secure American independence, before joining the westward drift of pioneer families through Alabama and Mississippi to the young Republic of Texas, where he was revered as a patriarch. His kin carried that martial thread onward: a son-in-law fought in the War of 1812, and a grandson became a Texas Ranger and county sheriff, killed in an Indian fight. Thompson and many descendants rest in the Daingerfield Cemetery.

Gonzales, TX

Indiana-born James W. Robinson came to Texas in 1833 and was elected the Republic's first lieutenant governor in 1835, briefly serving as governor before shouldering a musket as a private at the Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836. He later settled in Gonzales, sat as a district judge, and served on the state Supreme Court. The office he first held became the second-highest in Texas, wielding broad power over the Senate and legislation.

Austin, TX

Born in Georgia in 1797, James Wales Jones was one of the Old Three Hundred—the first colonists Stephen F. Austin brought into Mexican Texas in the 1820s. He took up arms in the Texas War for Independence and lived out his days in the young republic and state he had helped to found, dying in 1847. His wife, Hetty Stiles Jones, survived him by more than half a century.

McKinney, TX

Built about 1868 by civic leader James Waller Thomas for his family of thirteen, this modest Collin County house began as a single room and has changed little since 1902, preserving original flooring, chimney, and rough-hewn timbers from before rail service reached North Texas. Thomas also edited and published the county's first newspaper, and his outspoken support for the Union and for the rights of Black settlers made him enemies — the site witnessed an attempt on his life during the turbulent Civil War and Reconstruction years.

Bigfoot, TX

James Washington Winters fought at San Jacinto in the 1836 revolution that won Texas independence and later joined the Somervell Expedition. A loyal follower of Sam Houston, he refused to sign the oath of allegiance to the Confederacy at Oakville on July 4, 1861, yet served as a captain, provost marshal, and scout in the militia patrolling the country between the Nueces and Rio Grande. He spent eight years in Tuxpan, Mexico, and raised a large family with his wives Piercy Tullos and Elizabeth Wier.

Bigfoot, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1817, James Washington Winters fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive clash that won Texas its independence from Mexico. He lived to age 86, and in 1936 — the centennial of Texas independence — the state erected this marker at his grave.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1949

James Wilson rose from a Carlisle law office to become one of the most consequential legal minds of the founding generation. As a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress he signed the Declaration of Independence, and at the Constitutional Convention he was among the principal architects of the framework that still governs the nation. He later served on the first U.S. Supreme Court.

Jamestown, NY

In the industrial city of Jamestown, near the shores of Chautauqua Lake, this monument honors local residents who left their factories and farms to serve in the First World War and never returned home. Dedicated in the years after 1918, it reflects the wave of civic memorials that swept American towns large and small as communities sought to give permanent form to their grief and pride. The inscription's reference to "the world war" — before a second would require renumbering it — dates its sentiment squarely to that interwar generation.

Edgewood, PA · est. 1959

Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884) lived and died at the homestead on this site, but her influence reached far beyond it. A fearless newspaper editor, she championed the abolition of slavery, women's rights, and temperance, and served as a nurse during the Civil War. She also chronicled her turbulent age in the memoir "Half a Century," writing at a time when few women held a public voice in American journalism.

Port Bolivar, TX

Born in Maryland in 1798, Jane Herbert Wilkinson Long followed her husband into the dangerous filibustering expeditions that sought to wrest Texas from Spain. Left to hold a fort on the Bolivar Peninsula through a brutal winter with her daughter and an enslaved woman named Kian, she gave birth there amid hunger and danger — the episode that earned her the honorary title "Mother of Texas." She later received her own headright of land in Austin's colony, unusual for a woman, and opened her San Felipe boarding house to the rallies and intrigue of the Texas Revolution.

Charlotte, NC

In the autumn of 1780, the Revolution's southern campaign swept into the North Carolina backcountry, and for a few tense weeks Lord Cornwallis's British army occupied Charlotte — a town so fiercely rebellious he reportedly branded it a "hornet's nest." This marker honors Jane Parks McDowell, who according to local memory rode ten hard miles to carry word to the American camp as the British pulled out of the town. Her ride belongs to that anxious moment when Patriot militia shadowed every British move through the Carolina Piedmont.

Parker, AZ

This surviving building stood within the Poston site near Parker, one of the War Relocation Authority camps where the United States confined Japanese Americans during World War II. Beginning in 1942, tens of thousands of men, women, and children—most of them U.S. citizens—were removed from the West Coast and held behind barbed wire in remote desert camps solely because of their ancestry. Ordinary houses and barracks like this one were home to families who lost their freedom without charge or trial.

Laredo, TX

Samuel Matthias Jarvis, a Columbia-trained engineer from New York, joined Zachary Taylor's army in the Mexican-American War, later married in Nuevo León, and settled his family in Laredo after the Civil War. As county surveyor and mayor from 1868 to 1872, he laid out streets and parks, mapped the city, and expanded the old Spanish town plan of 1767. He donated the land for this plaza, known by his name since at least 1881.

Jasper, TX

Far from the great battlefields, Jasper County was a vital rear-area hub for Confederate Texas — voting overwhelmingly for secession and serving as a communication, supply, and transportation center during the war. Texas troops crossed it on the 1862-64 Louisiana campaigns, a mounted courier route ran through it, and it hosted a quartermaster depot and brigade headquarters of the Texas State Troops. When the war ended, Union occupation forces under George Custer bivouacked on the town square.

Beaumont, TX

Jean Baptiste 'Jonas' Chaison was born in Nova Scotia to French parents and, after his family's imprisonment during the French and Indian War, fled to France before returning to North America. He joined the American cause in 1775 and, by the marker's account, served through the Revolution — at Brandywine and Germantown, wounded at Eutaw Springs, and present at Yorktown under Lafayette. He later settled as a farmer, moved to Beaumont around 1840, and lived, the marker says, to well past a hundred; the Daughters of the American Revolution marked his grave in 1944.

Washington, DC · est. 1997

Jean Monnet (1888–1979), the French economist remembered as a founding architect of a united Europe, spent part of World War II in Washington working from an office in the historic Willard Hotel. As a member of the British Mission, he threw his talent for large-scale coordination into America's "Victory Program," helping marshal the astonishing surge of industrial output that armed the Allies. Only after the war did he turn that same genius for cooperation toward binding former enemies into a peaceful European community.

Fort Davis, TX

Carved from Presidio County and organized in 1887, this West Texas county was named in honor of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States. The town of Fort Davis, which had served as Presidio County's seat, became the new county's seat. The marker records the administrative birth of a mountainous, sparsely settled corner of the Trans-Pecos.

Jefferson, TX

Long home to the Caddo Indians, this corner of Texas drew Anglo-American colonists in the early 1800s, and Jefferson was founded in 1839 on a curious double grid — one aligned to the compass, another angled to Big Cypress Bayou. As a bustling inland port on the Red River system it welcomed riverboats daily and served as a major Confederate supply center during the Civil War. A cleared logjam in 1873 lowered the water, killed the port, and sent the town into a long decline that tourism later reversed.

Jefferson, TX

Founded in 1836 and named for Thomas Jefferson, this East Texas town rode the steamboat trade up the Big Cypress Bayou to become the state's chief river port between 1846 and 1870. During the Civil War its wharves and workshops turned to the Confederate cause, running a quartermaster depot that produced boots, shoes, ironwork, and preserved meats for the army. When the river traffic faded, the antebellum mansions remained, and a 1939 oil strike nearby added a new chapter.

Jefferson, TX

During the Civil War, the prosperous river port of Jefferson became a vital engine of the Confederate war effort in East Texas. A major quartermaster depot established here in 1862 supplied clothing and camp equipment, a Cotton Bureau station bought up the cotton that funded the cause, and county iron works cast plows, kettles, and cannon balls. Cattle and sheep were driven here for slaughter and shipment, and a boot factory helped outfit the army, while troops leaving Texas embarked from the town.

Beaumont, TX

Justice in Jefferson County has been dispensed on this Beaumont site since 1838, when a simple jailhouse rose on land acquired from pioneer settler Nancy Tevis just two years after the county was organized. A succession of buildings followed — an 1854 courthouse that doubled as a church and, during the Civil War, a Confederate hospital, then an 1893 brick structure. The great Spindletop-era oil boom finally outgrew them all, and in 1931 the fourteen-story Art Deco courthouse that stands today replaced them.

Houston, TX

Completed in 1924 and run jointly by the City of Houston and Harris County, this Neoclassical hospital rose atop the 1840 Houston City Cemetery—its basement built above ground because the graves were never removed. At the request of Confederate veterans and their families, it was named for the former Confederate president in honor of the many veterans buried beneath it. Serving indigent patients for just thirteen years, the building later housed a psychiatric ward, a juvenile detention unit, and, since 2005, residential lofts.

Concord, NC

On the night of April 18, 1865, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, stopped in Concord during his flight south after the fall of Richmond. The house where he stayed once stood on this spot, a waypoint in the collapse of the Confederacy in the war's final days.

Jefferson, TX

During the Civil War, Jefferson was a bustling inland port and supply hub in East Texas, and munitions had to be stored somewhere safe. This single-room brick powder house was engineered for exactly that purpose, its deliberately light roof meant to vent the blast upward if the powder inside ever ignited. After the war, Union troops occupied the site and used the buildings for encampment. It survives as the only freestanding ordnance magazine in Texas.

Tennessee Colony, TX

Settlers from Tennessee and Alabama founded Tennessee Colony in 1847, and around 1850 Elbert S. Jemison established a plantation here, working enslaved people on his own cotton fields and renting their labor to neighbors and the nearby Confederate salt works. After emancipation in 1865, many freed people stayed, establishing this cemetery where—by tradition—both former enslavers and the formerly enslaved lie buried. Generations of African American residents, including veterans of the twentieth century's wars, rest here still.

Brownwood, TX

Richardson Jenkins, one of Brown County's earliest pioneers, settled a farm northeast of Brownwood whose spring took his name and later served the local school and church. The county's earliest known graves here belong to four army surveyors ambushed and killed nearby, and Jenkins himself, who died in 1867, has the first marked grave; veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam also rest in the cemetery.

West Pittston, PA · est. 1947

Raised in 1776 by Connecticut settlers who claimed the Wyoming Valley under Yankee title, John Jenkins' stockaded home was one of the small frontier forts guarding families along the Susquehanna. On July 1, 1778, as a British and Loyalist force under Major John Butler swept down the valley, the fort surrendered and was put to the torch—days before the bloody Battle of Wyoming that scattered the settlement.

Clifton, TX

Jens Jenson came to Bosque County in 1854 with his Norwegian immigrant family, went to sea out of Galveston, and served in the Confederate Army before settling to farm. Beginning with a single stone room in 1867, he expanded the house as his family grew to eleven children, and his descendants have farmed the ancestral acres ever since.

Exeter, NH

Standing in Exeter since about 1730, this handsome frame house is remembered as the home of Jeremiah Smith, one of early New Hampshire's most accomplished public men. A veteran of the Revolutionary War who reportedly marched to the Battle of Bennington, Smith went on to serve in Congress, sit as chief justice of the state's highest court, and win election as governor in the young republic's early years. His career spanned the generation that turned a cluster of former colonies into a working state government, with Exeter — a onetime Revolutionary-era capital of New Hampshire — as his home ground.

Orange, TX

A Missouri native, Jerome Swinford came to Sabine Pass in 1859 to enter the steamboat trade and, after Civil War service, settled in Orange, where he worked in a sawmill and became a popular merchant. An active Mason, he served as mayor, alderman, and school board member, helped plan a ship channel at Sabine Pass, and won election to the Texas Legislature in 1888.

Manchester, TX

Born in Tennessee around 1785, Jesse B. Bowman drifted west with his family through Illinois and Arkansas before claiming land in Texas in the 1830s. In early 1836 he answered the roll at the Alamo as a private under Jim Bowie, and he died in the mission's fall on March 6. Like the other defenders, his body was burned by Santa Anna's army, leaving this marker near his old homestead as his memorial.

Bastrop, TX

This state marker honors Jesse Halderman, who took up arms in the Volunteer Army of Texas in 1835 and fought at San Jacinto in 1836 — the decisive eighteen-minute battle that won Texas its independence from Mexico. The State of Texas set the 'Star and Wreath' stone in 1962 to mark his service and resting place.

Gonzales, TX

Jesse Kencheloe Davis was an Alabama-born soldier who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive clash that won Texas its independence from Mexico. He lived out his years in Gonzales County — the very town remembered as the flashpoint of the Texas Revolution — and is buried here with his wife Eliza.

Blanco, TX

Kentucky-born Jesse L. McCrocklin came to Texas in 1833 and fought through the revolution, taking part in the 1835 Siege of Bexar and the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, then joining the 1842 Somervell Expedition against Mexico. A stock raiser, farmer, and blacksmith, he eventually settled on his land grant in Blanco County, where he lived to the age of 87.

Sugarcreek, PA · est. 2014

Jesse L. Reno rose from a boyhood in nearby Franklin to become one of the Union's promising corps commanders, cutting his teeth in the Mexican War and teaching at West Point before the Civil War. Leading the 9th Corps of the Army of the Potomac, he was killed in September 1862 at the Battle of South Mountain, Maryland, on the eve of Antietam. Grateful neighbors named this Venango County town Reno in his honor.

Sherman, TX

Jesse "Jess" P. Loving came to Texas from Missouri in 1847 and settled in Sherman by 1852. A Confederate veteran, he became a leading citizen, serving multiple terms as county treasurer and in the state legislature. In 1879 he drove the founding of the Old Settlers Association of Grayson County, helping the pioneer generation preserve its own story.

Huntsville, TX

Jesse Parker, already a veteran of the War of 1812, moved to Mexican Texas in 1822 among the earliest Anglo colonists. He represented the Sabine District at the 1832 Convention at San Felipe de Austin—one of the gatherings that pushed Texas toward independence—and later farmed his land grant in what became Walker County while serving as a deputy land commissioner. Buried on his own property in 1849, he was reinterred here more than a century later.

Latham, TX

Kentucky-born Jesse Robinson came to Texas in 1822 and became one of its first Texas Rangers, fighting for independence at Concepción in 1835 and San Jacinto in 1836, then again against the Woll invasion in 1842. A breeder of fine horses who raced them at Gussettville, he married Sarah Jane Newman — the famously formidable frontierswoman known as "Sally Skull" — and spent his last years in this county. He died in 1882 at eighty-two.

Eagle Pass, TX

Jesse Sumpter came to the Texas frontier as an infantryman in the years after annexation, serving from 1848 to 1852 and standing among the first troops posted to Fort Duncan on the Rio Grande. He put down roots in the young border town of Eagle Pass, trying his hand at nearly every trade the frontier offered — saloon keeper, mustang hunter, rancher, and lawman. When Maverick County was finally organized in 1871, he pinned on the badge as its very first sheriff.

Whitney, TX

This state marker honors Jesse Walling, who fought in the Battle of San Jacinto—the decisive 1836 clash where Texian forces under Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna's army and secured Texas independence. Marked with the Star and Wreath, it was erected by the State of Texas in 1957 to remember one of the revolution's soldiers.

Three Rivers, TX

Jessy Franklin Gray passed the state teachers exam at seventeen and was a school superintendent when the U.S. entered World War I. Commissioned a lieutenant, he fought with the American Expeditionary Force at Saint-Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne, was gassed and wounded, and won a Silver Star and Purple Heart for taking command of a leaderless company under fire. Returning home, he served in the Texas House from 1945 to 1953, championing the landmark Gilmer-Aikin education reforms and helping spare Three Rivers from reservoir flooding.

Houston, TX

Jethro Russell Bancroft came to Texas in 1830 and served in Captain Thomas H. McIntire's company at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 clash that won Texas its independence. He died in 1848. This marker commemorates his service to the Republic.

Tuscola, TX

This creek most likely carries the name of Jim Ned, a Delaware chief who, during the Republic and early statehood years of roughly 1840 to 1860, served as a scout for the Texas militia on frontier campaigns. His story reflects the complex role of Native people who navigated — and sometimes allied with — the expanding Texan frontier. Today dams near the junction of the creek's forks impound the waters of Lake Brownwood.

Bellville, TX

Born in Mecklenburg, Germany, J. H. Hintz immigrated in 1855 and settled near Millheim, joining the Cat Spring Agricultural Society and serving in Waul's Texas Legion during the Civil War, when he was captured and imprisoned until 1865. A farmer by livelihood, he won lasting fame as a Baumeister, or master builder, whose bridges, halls, and multi-sided dance pavilions—like the twelve-sided Bellville Turnverein Pavilion of 1897—still stand. Distinguished by precise joinery and soaring roof framing, his round halls remain gathering places for music and celebration.

Joaquin, TX

Benjamin Franklin Morris gave land for a railroad right-of-way and a township in the 1880s, and the depot town of Joaquin grew up around it. A one-acre gift in 1890 established the Baptist church, and in 1894 Viola Rushing donated adjoining ground for a cemetery in memory of her young sister. Among its more than 800 graves lie a dozen Civil War veterans, the town's first mayor, and two children killed in the 1937 New London School explosion.

Harding Township, NJ

During the brutal winter of 1779–1780, the Continental Army made its main encampment at Jockey Hollow, near Morristown, New Jersey, enduring cold and disease worse than Valley Forge. This monument marks the resting place of more than 100 Continental soldiers who died in service and were buried nearby, raised by the people of Morristown as a tribute to their sacrifice for American liberty. The quiet cemetery stands as a reminder that the Revolution was won as much in freezing camps as on the battlefield.

Medina, TX

Joe H. Newcomer built a long career in Texas law enforcement, serving as a Special Texas Ranger, deputy sheriff, justice of the peace, and chief of police. During World War II he worked as a shipboard security officer for a chemical company, and he later helped found and lead regional peace-officer associations. His marker, recorded in 1968, honors a life spent in public safety and civic service.

McGregor, TX

Joel Burditt Crain came to Texas from Tennessee in 1834 and served as sergeant-major in Sam Houston's army during the war for independence. At the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836 he is said to have received the surrendered sword of Santa Anna's chief of staff, Colonel Almonte. For his service he earned a substantial land grant, and he married a daughter of General James Smith, namesake of Smith County.

Raleigh, NC

Standing since before 1770, the Joel Lane House was the home of a wealthy planter and legislator whose plantation covered much of what is now Raleigh. Political leaders gathered here in the turbulent Revolutionary and early statehood years, and it was on Lane's land that commissioners decided in 1792 to plant North Carolina's new permanent capital. The city of Raleigh grew from that choice.

San Antonio, TX

John 'Jack' Coker (1789–1861) came from South Carolina to Texas in 1834 and fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. He was among the party led with 'Deaf' Smith that destroyed Vince's Bridge, a stroke that may have blocked Santa Anna's army from retreat or reinforcement and helped secure the Texan victory. For his service the Texas Legislature awarded him 1,920 acres, where he and his brother Joseph founded the Coker community.

Austin, TX

A Tennessee-born orator and prosecutor, John A. Wharton served as a delegate to the Texas Secession Convention in 1861 before joining Terry's Texas Rangers as a company captain. When Colonel Terry was killed, Wharton was elected to lead the famous cavalry regiment, fighting at Shiloh and through the Kentucky campaign. Twice wounded and repeatedly promoted for bravery, he rose to major general in 1863 after Chickamauga and led a cavalry corps in the 1864 Red River campaign.

West Columbia, TX

John Adriance came of age with the Texas Revolution, serving in Captain Jacob Eberly's unit as Sam Houston's army retreated before Santa Anna in the spring of 1836. Detailed to guard Bell's Landing so civilians could flee, he and fifteen comrades then raced to rejoin Houston—arriving to learn the decisive Battle of San Jacinto had already been won on April 21. He lived a long life afterward, marrying Lydia Ann Cook of New York in 1846 and dying in 1903.