Military & Wartime

Bellefonte, PA · est. 1950

On this site was born Andrew G. Curtin, Pennsylvania's Civil War governor. Elected in 1861, he steered the state through the conflict, organizing the celebrated Pennsylvania Reserve Corps and championing the soldiers of the Union. His legacy reached beyond the battlefield: he pushed for State Normal Schools to train teachers and secured funding for State Orphan Schools to care for the children of the war dead.

New Orleans, LA

Standing in New Orleans, this monument to Andrew Jackson carries his ringing declaration in defense of national unity. Jackson first won fame here as the general whose ragtag force turned back the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, the climactic victory of the War of 1812. He went on to become the seventh president, and his famous toast against disunion became a byword for federal resolve.

Richmond, TX

Andrew Jackson Beard fought at San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive battle that won Texas its independence from Mexico. He and his wife Sallie are buried in Big Creek Cemetery, among the early settlers of what became Fort Bend County.

Austin, TX

Alabama-born Andrew Jackson Hamilton moved to Texas in the 1840s and rose through its politics, serving as state attorney general, legislator, and U.S. congressman by 1859. A staunch opponent of secession, he left Texas during the Civil War, then returned when President Andrew Johnson named him provisional governor in 1865. He later sat on the Texas Supreme Court and ran twice, unsuccessfully, for governor before his death in 1875.

Cleveland, TX

Born in Mississippi in 1817, Andrew Jackson Isaacks came to Texas and fought in the Texas Revolution in 1835 before settling into the civic life of a young frontier region. He served as sheriff of Jasper County, raised a large family, farmed and ranched, and became the first postmaster at Tarkington Prairie in the 1850s. Buried where he died in 1864, his remains were reinterred at this site in 1970.

Crockett, TX

A Tennessee native, Andrew Jackson McGown came to Texas in 1835 and fought in the revolution against Mexico, taking part in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. He went on to help plant the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Texas, serving as a pioneer circuit-riding minister until his death. McGown also founded the newspaper "The Texas Presbyterian" and helped establish Andrew Female College in Huntsville.

Union County, NC

This spot in the Waxhaws country along the Carolina border marks the claimed birthplace of Andrew Jackson, born in 1767 to Scots-Irish settlers on the colonial frontier. Orphaned young during the Revolution, Jackson rose from the backcountry to national fame as the general who defended New Orleans in the War of 1812, and went on to become the seventh president. Both North and South Carolina have long laid claim to his exact birthplace.

Stoneham, TX

Andrew Jackson Montgomery came to Texas around 1830 and took his place in the fight for its independence, serving in Captain James Gillaspie's company at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive victory that won the Republic of Texas its freedom. The marker, erected by the state in 1957, carries a supplemental plate offering differing dates for his birth and arrival, a reminder of how uncertain early frontier records could be.

Stoneham, TX

Andrew Jackson Montgomery came to Texas in 1819 with the ill-fated James Long Expedition and, by 1823, opened a trading post where two Indian trails crossed — becoming the first known settler in what is now Montgomery County. The town and county both grew from that post and took his family name. He later fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, married Mary Mahulda Farris, and raised nine children.

Seguin, TX

Andrew Jackson Sowell came to Texas as a teenager and joined the fight for its independence. As one of the couriers sent out from the Alamo, he slipped away before the fortress fell in March 1836, carrying pleas for the reinforcements and supplies that never came in time. He lived on for decades afterward, and the State of Texas placed this Star-and-Wreath marker at his grave in 1956.

Raleigh, NC

Andrew Johnson was born in humble circumstances near this spot in 1808, in a small kitchen dwelling that still survives. A self-taught tailor who never attended school, he rose through Tennessee politics to the vice presidency and then, after Lincoln's assassination in 1865, to the White House. His stormy presidency during Reconstruction ended in the first impeachment of an American president.

Roanoke Rapids, NC

Andrew Joyner (1786–1856) served as a lieutenant colonel in the War of 1812 and went on to a long career in North Carolina public life, sitting in the state senate from 1835 to 1852. He was also an entrepreneur of the transportation age, leading the Roanoke Navigation Company and the Weldon & Portsmouth Railroad as the region worked to move goods by water and rail. His grave lies a short distance to the south.

Hallettsville, TX

Andrew Kent, a Kentucky-born carpenter, brought his large family to Green DeWitt's Colony in 1830, settling a league of land on the Lavaca River. As tensions with Santa Anna's government mounted, Kent and his son David took up arms at the Battle of Gonzales in 1835, the opening clash of the Texas Revolution. In February 1836 the two argued over who would answer the Alamo's call for help; Andrew sent David home and rode to San Antonio with "The Immortal 32" from Gonzales, dying in the Alamo's fall. Kent County was later named in his honor.

Gonzales, TX

Andrew Ponton came to Texas in 1829, settled in Green DeWitt's colony, and by 1834 served as alcalde—mayor—of Gonzales. When Mexican forces demanded the town's cannon in 1835, his delay in surrendering it helped spark the "Come and Take It" fight now remembered as the opening battle of the Texas Revolution. He also helped rally the Gonzales men, the "Immortal 32," who answered Travis's call and died at the Alamo, and he later served the Republic of Texas as a legislator and judge.

Gonzales, TX

As alcalde of Gonzales, Andrew Ponton wrote the defiant letter of September 26, 1835, refusing Mexico's demand that the colonists surrender their small cannon. Days later, on October 2, he stood among the defenders when Texans faced Mexican troops in the skirmish remembered by the 'Come and Take It' banner. That confrontation is widely regarded as the opening shot of the Texas Revolution.

Felicity, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, the Ohio River was the great dividing line between slaveholding Kentucky and free-soil Ohio, and the moment a freedom seeker stepped onto the northern bank the most dangerous leg of the journey began. Felicity, a small Clermont County village a few miles inland, sat squarely on that escape corridor, and Andrew Powell turned his own prosperity into a tool of resistance. Rather than hide his passengers, he moved them in plain sight, using his distinctive and well-recognized private carriage as cover to carry fugitives inland from the river toward the next link in the network. It was a quietly audacious gamble that a respectable man's conspicuous coach would draw less suspicion than a covered wagon on a back road.

Washington, TX

Andrew Robinson Sr. was the first of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" colonists to reach Texas, arriving in November 1821 with his family and later receiving title to over 9,000 acres. He co-founded the town of Washington, ran a ferry at the La Bahia Crossing, and kept a hotel and saloon. In 1835 he fought at the Battle of Gonzales, where his unit carried the original Lone Star flag sewn by Sarah Dodson.

Gonzales, TX

This marker remembers Andrew Zumwalt, born in 1817 and a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto, the 1836 clash that won Texas its independence from Mexico. He lived on into 1886, part of the generation of young men who fought for the republic and then helped settle it.

Hallettsville, TX

Tied to the Hackberry community, this burial ground took its name from settler A.G. Andrews, who by 1866 had given land for a cemetery and Baptist church. Its oldest marked grave, from 1860, belongs to Mexican War veteran Alfred Morrow, and among those buried here is Joseph Lawrence, a veteran of the Battles of Plum Creek and San Jacinto who at his death in 1897 was believed the oldest living veteran of the Texas Revolution. A local association still tends the grounds and gathers for annual homecomings.

Frankel City, TX

Andrews County was created by the Texas legislature in 1876 and finally organized in 1910, its wide plains among the last parts of Texas to be settled. It honors Richard Andrews, remembered as the first man to fall in the Texas Revolution, killed at the Battle of Concepción near San Antonio on October 28, 1835. His name carried into the far West Texas frontier the memory of the fight for Texas independence.

Goliad, TX

In the spring of 1836, as the Texas Revolution turned brutal, a woman remembered as Francisca Alavez moved among the Mexican army's prisoners performing quiet acts of mercy. She loosened cruel bindings, brought food and water, hid men, and pleaded for lives at Copano, Goliad and beyond—saving some of the very Texian captives marked for the Goliad Massacre, in which hundreds were shot on Santa Anna's orders. A survivor's memoir immortalized her as the 'Angel of Goliad.'

Upper Providence Township, PA · est. 2014

Anna Howard Shaw was one of the most powerful voices of the American woman-suffrage movement, a trained physician and ordained minister who traveled the country as a lecturer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association alongside Susan B. Anthony. During World War I she chaired the Women's Committee of the U.S. Council of National Defense, organizing women's contributions to the war effort and earning the Distinguished Service Medal. She made her home near this spot from 1908 until her death in 1919—just months before the ratification of the amendment she had fought so long to secure.

Upper Merion Township, PA · est. 2021

Anna Morris Holstein served as a hospital matron and nurse during the Civil War, tending the wounded at Gettysburg and beyond, then devoted her later years to historic preservation. She led the campaign to acquire and restore Washington's Headquarters and the grounds at Valley Forge — creating Pennsylvania's first state park, now a National Historical Park — and lent her efforts to saving Mount Vernon. As Organizing Regent of the local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter, author, and state building matron at the 1893 World's Fair, she made preservation a public calling.

Bellefonte, PA · est. 2002

Anna Wagner Keichline of Bellefonte broke ground in more ways than one. A Cornell graduate and suffrage advocate, in 1920 she became the first woman registered as an architect in Pennsylvania, designing buildings including the town's Plaza Theatre. She was also a prolific inventor, and during the First World War she served her country as a Special Agent in Army intelligence.

New York, NY

Annadale is a quiet neighborhood on the South Shore of Staten Island, and like communities across the country it sent its young men to fight in World War II. This memorial gathers the names of a dozen local residents who did not return from the war that raged from 1941 to 1945 across Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa. Neighbors raised tablets like this in parks and squares so the cost of the war would stay visible in the places these men had left behind.

Asheville, NC

Anne Penland was a pioneering nurse anesthetist whose service during World War I proved that women could safely administer anesthesia at the front. Her work so impressed observers that in 1918 the British medical corps began training female anesthetists of their own. Her home stood at this site in Asheville.

Asheville, NC

In 1918, as the Great War ground on and the demand for skilled medical care overwhelmed the Western Front, American nurse anesthetist Anne Penland crossed the Atlantic to serve. Anesthesia was a young specialty, and in Britain the delicate work of putting patients under was still reserved for physicians. Penland's steady, expert practice at the front proved so persuasive that the British medical corps changed course and began training its own women as anesthetists — a first for that service. She later returned to Asheville, where this marker notes her home once stood.

Anoka, MN

This memorial honors the men and women of Anoka, Minnesota who left home to serve in the armed forces. It names no single war, standing instead for the whole community's tradition of military service across the generations. Small-town honor rolls like this are how local communities keep faith with their veterans.

Houston, TX

Born in Massachusetts in 1798 and trained as a physician, Anson Jones came to Texas in 1833 and fought as a private at San Jacinto during the war for independence. He rose swiftly through the Republic—congressman, first Grand Master of Texas Masons, minister to the United States, secretary of state, and finally president in 1844. On February 19, 1846, he lowered the Lone Star flag and declared 'the Republic of Texas is no more,' earning his lasting nickname, 'the architect of annexation.'

Roans Prairie, TX

Anthony Drew Kennard, born in Tennessee in 1788, served in the Army of Texas in 1835 during the struggle for Texas independence, and lies buried here with his wife Sallie Moore Kennard. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1936, the centennial of the Republic, to honor his service. His grave ties this quiet Grimes County spot to the revolution that made Texas a nation.

Huntsville, TX

Anthony Martin Branch came from Virginia to Huntsville in 1847 and read law alongside historian Henderson Yoakum. A state legislator on the eve of the Civil War, he joined the Confederate army in 1862 and then the Confederate Congress, only to be refused a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1866 because of that service. A friend of Sam Houston, he was named co-executor of Houston's will before dying in the 1867 yellow fever epidemic.

Erie, PA · est. 1946

"Mad" Anthony Wayne was one of the boldest field commanders of the Revolution, remembered for his daring bayonet assault at Stony Point. After the war he led the young United States Army to a decisive victory over a Native confederation at Fallen Timbers in 1794. Returning east from that western command, he fell ill and died at the lonely lakeside garrison of Fort Presque Isle in December 1796, and was first buried beside the blockhouse there.

Fairfield, TX

Antioch Cemetery grew up alongside the Turlington community and its Baptist and Methodist congregations, in a well-watered stretch of Freestone County that drew settlers arriving by steamboat up the Trinity River from Galveston. Established in 1877 beside a church founded in 1870, it holds pioneers like Samuel G. Wells — a veteran of the Texas Revolution and a founder of Anderson County — alongside Civil War veterans and Conrad Henry, a German-born immigrant whose headstone towers over the rest. With its oldest graves at the center and 'deer tongue' flowers said to have been carried in by the first settlers, the ground reads like a map of the community's growth.

Bastrop, TX

This burial ground is the last trace of a farming community that thrived in Bastrop County before the Civil War. In 1882 the cemetery and its church-school building were relocated to this spot along the historic Gotier Trace, and the earliest marked grave here—an infant's—dates to that year. Among its roughly one hundred graves lie pioneer families, Confederate veterans, and many children lost to disease.

San Augustine, TX

In use since at least the 1860s, this East Texas burial ground served the Antioch Church of Christ, a congregation dating to 1836. Stephen Passmore deeded the property to church elders in 1880, though graves marking pioneers and Confederate veterans predate the transfer. Names like Dwire, Baggett, Ware, and Bland record the ordinary settlers who built San Augustine County.

Presidio County, TX

On June 12, 1880, in the rugged Big Bend country of Presidio County, four Pueblo Indian scouts serving under General Benjamin H. Grierson fought and turned back a band of twenty Apache warriors. The marker records it as the last Apache stand in the county — a small but telling episode in the long, grinding conclusion of the Indian Wars in far West Texas. It reflects the era when the U.S. Army relied heavily on Native scouts to fight other Native peoples.

Anderson, TX

First known as Pine Grove for the Baptist church at its heart, this Grimes County burial ground was in use by the 1860s, with a headstone dated 1869 and likely older unmarked graves. Land donors formalized it in 1886, and it holds Confederate veterans as well as Brosig T. Wasson, the county's first fatality of World War I. When the church disbanded in 1929, the cemetery took the name of the area's vanished post office, Apolonia.

Appomattox County, VA

On a quiet Sunday in April 1865, the long agony of the Civil War reached its close in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. There, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the remnants of his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending four years of war. This monument, raised in the Confederate memorial tradition, frames that surrender from the Southern perspective — a defeated army "still unconquered in spirit." Its language reflects the "Lost Cause" interpretation that shaped much of how the postwar South chose to remember the conflict.

Riviera, TX

In 1845, with the annexation of the Republic of Texas approved, the United States sent Gen. Zachary Taylor to occupy the contested land between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. After wintering and drilling near Corpus Christi, his army—whose rosters included two future presidents and many future generals—marched south in March 1846 along a road roughly traced by this spot. Skirmishes and the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma soon followed, prompting the U.S. declaration of war.

Dundalk, MD

This monument honors Aquila Randall, a young Maryland militiaman who fell on September 12, 1814, at the Battle of North Point—the land engagement east of Baltimore during the War of 1812. As British forces marched toward the city, Randall and his fellow citizen-soldiers of the local militia met them on the road through the Patapsco Neck, buying time and blood for the defense that would hold at Fort McHenry the very next day. The elegant classical inscription, opening with a line drawn from Joseph Addison's tragedy Cato, frames his death in the language of Roman virtue that the young republic so admired.

Goliad, TX

Founded in 1852 by the Western Presbytery of Texas, this men's college took its name from the Aranama Indians who had been converted at nearby Mission Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga. Housed in the old mission buildings and aided by funds from Goliad, it taught classical languages, mathematics, surveying, and bookkeeping. Like most of Texas's twenty-five colleges, it closed when the Civil War began in 1861 and its students marched off to the Confederate Army; the great storm of 1886 finished off its buildings.

Rockport, TX

This airfield grew out of the U.S. Navy's urgent need for pilot-training sites during World War II. In 1942 Aransas County offered land to the Civil Aeronautics Administration, voters approved a bond issue, and the county bought 700 acres for an auxiliary military landing field. Leased to the Navy for the war, it hosted landing practice for pilots based at Beeville, Kingsville, and Corpus Christi, and has served both military and civilian aviation ever since.

Port Aransas, TX

Begun in 1855 and first lit in 1856, this 67-foot tower with its imported French lens marked the natural Gulf pass to Aransas and Corpus Christi Bays. During the Civil War, Confederates buried the lens and damaged the tower in 1863 to keep its light from aiding Federal forces. Rebuilt after the 1919 hurricane, it was finally decommissioned in 1952 once the shifting pass moved south of it.

Port Aransas, TX

Aransas Pass, the natural inlet separating San Jose and Mustang Islands, became a strategically vital point along the Texas coast during the Civil War. Early on, Confederate vessels moved cotton and supplies freely through the pass, but a Union blockade soon tightened, and Federal forces under Captain J. W. Kittredge seized control until his capture in 1862. Control seesawed through 1863 and 1864, and after Union forces withdrew, Confederate ships again slipped supplies through the pass to sustain the wartime South.

Village of Newark, NY

In the village of Newark, in the Town of Arcadia along the path of the Erie Canal, this memorial was raised in 1928 to honor local residents who served in the nation's wars on land and sea. Erected in the years between the World Wars, it reflects a wave of community war memorials that followed the heavy losses of World War I, when towns across America sought lasting ways to commemorate their veterans. Its broad dedication to soldiers, sailors, and marines "of all wars" ties together generations of service from a single upstate New York community.

Alice, TX

Archelaus Bynum Dodson came to Texas from North Carolina in 1827 and threw himself into the independence movement, serving as a convention delegate in 1832 and as a lieutenant in 1835. His young wife, Sarah, sewed a red, white, and blue banner for his company — a flag remembered as an early Lone Star of Texas, said to have flown over Washington-on-the-Brazos when the Declaration of Independence was signed in March 1836. Dodson fought on through victory at San Jacinto, then spent his long life moving ever westward with the Texas frontier.

Archer City, TX

Word of copper here first spread after Texas Rangers on an 1860 campaign against the Comanches at the Pease River — led by Lawrence "Sul" Ross, a future governor — carried nuggets back to Austin. During the Civil War that ore was processed into gun caps for Confederate forces, and the Texas Copper Mining & Manufacturing Company was chartered in 1864, though wartime labor shortages stalled it. Repeated ventures into the 1880s and a 1899 lease by an Arizona firm all shipped some ore but failed to find a central vein, and the mines never met expectations.

Houston, TX

Archibald S. Lewis served in Captain Benjamin F. Bryant's company at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 engagement that won Texas its independence. He died in Houston in 1839, in the earliest years of the Republic of Texas. His marker preserves the memory of one of the ordinary soldiers who fought in that founding struggle.

Lovelady, TX

A South Carolina native and Confederate veteran, Archie Adams came to Houston County in 1873 and made his life there as a farmer and general-store owner, also serving as an election judge and county commissioner. He and his wife Selia Anna rest in the family cemetery he began in 1884 with the burial of an infant son. The journal he kept from 1873 to 1897 survives as a rare, detailed window into 19th-century rural life in East Texas.

Saint Louis County, MO

This memorial honors the comrades who gave their lives helping defeat the German armies in the Ardennes — the brutal winter fighting of late 1944 and early 1945 better known as the Battle of the Bulge. It was Hitler's last great western offensive, and American troops absorbed its full fury in the frozen forests of Belgium and Luxembourg.

Stamford, TX

As the United States braced for World War II, General Henry 'Hap' Arnold turned to civilian flight schools to give air cadets their first training, and the City of Stamford bought a slice of the old SMS Ranch to build Arledge Field, named for the businessman who led the effort. Dedicated in May 1941, the field trained cadets in Stearman PT-17 and Fairchild PT-19A biplanes under civilian instructors until the final class graduated in September 1944. After the war the buildings became Stamford's public airport.

Arlington, TX

Spanning more than ten acres, Arlington Cemetery gathers within its bounds several older graveyards — the original town cemetery, the W.W. McNatt addition, the Masonic Cemetery, and the Old City Cemetery. McNatt, an Arkansas transplant of 1872 and prominent merchant-farmer, sold the ground to the Arlington Cemetery Society in 1899. The oldest documented grave is that of one-year-old Mattie Luna Cooper (1874–75); around her rest pioneer settlers, veterans from the Civil War to World War II, and a long roster of the town's postmasters and mayors.

Arlington, MA

In the years after the Civil War, towns across the North raised monuments to their fallen sons, and Arlington was no exception. This memorial honors the local men who left this Massachusetts town to fight for the Union between 1861 and 1865, never to return. Its plain, heartfelt language—gratitude for those who gave their lives in defense of the Union—captures the spirit of civic mourning that swept New England communities as they reckoned with the war's staggering human cost.

Hillsborough County, FL

Dedicated in 1991 near a Florida retirement community, this plaque salutes American servicemen and servicewomen across all branches, in wartime and in peacetime alike. It belongs to a long tradition of local civic memorials that gather the abstract idea of national service into a single spot where neighbors can pause and reflect. Rather than mark one battle or one war, it honors the continuity of military duty as an ongoing feature of American life.

Bowling Green, OH

This campus memorial at Bowling Green State University honors the students — past, present, and future — who have left their studies to serve in the United States armed forces. It ties the life of a modern Ohio university to the long tradition of citizen-soldiers drawn from college classrooms in every generation of American conflict.

Pella, IA

This memorial in the old Dutch-settled town of Pella honors the men and women of the community who wore the uniform of the United States across generations. Rather than marking a single battle, it gathers into one dedication the service of soldiers, sailors, and airmen alike, in wartime and in the long stretches of peace between. Monuments like this became common civic anchors in the twentieth century, giving small Iowa towns a shared place to gather on Memorial Day and Veterans Day.

Pismo Beach, CA

Overlooking the central California coast at Pismo Beach, this memorial offers grateful recognition to all Americans who have honorably served in the nation's armed forces. Tributes like it gather the service of generations—across every branch and every war—into a single place of thanks.

Santa Clara, CA

During the American conquest of California in the Mexican-American War, this spot saw the small but decisive Battle of Santa Clara — remembered locally as the "Battle of the Mustard Stalks" for the fields the combatants fought through. On January 8, 1847, Californio leader Francisco Sanchez surrendered himself, his arms, and his American prisoners to Lieutenant Grayson, closing the skirmish that had erupted days earlier. An oak tree long marked the site of this armistice.

Kittanning, PA · est. 1982

Created in 1800, this county was named for General John Armstrong, who in 1756 led a raid that destroyed the Delaware village at Kittanning during the French and Indian War. The county seat took shape on that same ground in 1803. Decades later, in 1881, local ingenuity produced the "Daugherty Visible" typewriter, an early machine that let writers see their words as they typed.

Whitehouse, OH

This marker commemorates the founding of the United States Army on June 14, 1775, when the Second Continental Congress adopted the colonial forces besieging Boston and soon named George Washington to command them. Born in the opening months of the Revolution, the Army predates the nation it serves. The date is still observed each year as the Army's official birthday.