Military & Wartime

Quitman, TX

North Carolina natives Benjamin and Alice Lee arrived around 1853 and built up a cotton plantation of more than 1,230 acres worked by their large family and enslaved people. Benjamin became a community leader and county commissioner, and the family burial ground begun at his death in 1856 gradually opened to neighbors and grew into a thirteen-acre public cemetery. Its graves—including four Lee sons who served in the Confederate army, alongside bankers, a mayor, a doctor, and newspaper publishers—read like a roster of the community's history.

Seagoville, TX

When James J. Lee donated this 1.125-acre tract in 1870, he made a deliberate act of charity: plots were never to be sold. As the first cemetery in southeast Dallas County, it became a democratic resting place, gathering some 1,500 burials that cut across the era's hard lines of race and rank — a Confederate founder, a Mexican War general, dozens of people of Mexican descent, and an enslaved man brought to Texas in 1855.

Giddings, TX

Straddling the Old San Antonio Road on land first surveyed for Moses and Stephen F. Austin's colony, Lee County became in 1854 the heart of Wendish settlement in America, when Pastor Johann Kilian led his Sorbian-speaking congregation from Central Europe to a new home here. Their school was the only one in the United States to teach in Wendish, a Slavic language that survives in the modern world chiefly here and in Australia. The county was organized in 1874 and named for Confederate general Robert E. Lee, with Giddings as its seat.

Union Township, PA · est. 1947

On August 16, 1782, Major John Lee and his family were killed near this place in a raid by an Indian war party, with only his son Robert surviving. The attack came during the violent final years of the Revolutionary War on the Pennsylvania frontier, when British-allied raids terrorized isolated valley settlements. Such tragedies were a grim feature of life on the contested edge of the new nation.

Salisbury, NC

Lee Slater Overman represented North Carolina in the United States Senate from 1903 to 1930, a long tenure that spanned the Progressive Era and World War I. He was a prominent ally of President Woodrow Wilson, backing the administration's wartime measures, and later chaired a Senate inquiry into wartime disloyalty. His home stood here in Salisbury.

Fredericksburg, VA

During the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee took up a position on this elevated ground, which afforded a sweeping view of the battlefield along the Rappahannock River. From this vantage—soon nicknamed "Lee's Hill"—he watched Union General Ambrose Burnside hurl waves of troops against the entrenched Confederate lines below. The assaults, especially against the stone wall at Marye's Heights, ended in one of the most lopsided Union defeats of the war.

Leesburg, TX

Established around 1870 on land donated by Dwight Hays Townsend, this graveyard grew into the resting place of a whole rural East Texas community. Its earliest burials are believed to be two children reinterred from the old Leesburg schoolyard, and its oldest marked grave dates to 1870. Generations of pioneers, community leaders, and war veterans lie here, a stone record of the people who built and defended Leesburg.

Harmony Township, PA · est. 1946

Through the winter of 1792-93, General Anthony Wayne drilled the newly formed Legion of the United States at this camp on the Ohio, turning raw recruits into a disciplined fighting force. The training paid off in 1794 when Wayne's army defeated a Native confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, breaking Indigenous resistance in the Northwest Territory. Legionville is remembered as one of the first formal basic-training encampments in American military history.

Allentown, PA

Carved from Northampton County in March 1812 and named for the river that powered its early industry, Lehigh County anchored the Pennsylvania German heartland around Allentown. Its ground had already earned a place in Revolutionary lore: when the British occupied Philadelphia in 1777-1778, patriots spirited the State House Bell — later called the Liberty Bell — to Allentown, hiding it beneath the floor of Zion Reformed Church. The county was also home to George Taylor, one of Pennsylvania's signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Lemley, TX

The earliest grave here, dating to 1857, lies on land the Thomas B. Martin family settled in 1853 on the raw Texas frontier. After Martin sold the tract to the Lemley brothers, who had come from Illinois in the 1850s, the burial ground took their name and served family, friends, and neighboring settlers — including at least five Civil War veterans, with many graves marked only by native stones.

Galveston, TX

A Connecticut sea captain's son who went to sea at fourteen, Lent Munson Hitchcock left New England to join the fledgling Texas Navy around 1836. He came to Galveston in 1837 and became part of the port city's early leadership, serving as harbor master, alderman, and treasurer before volunteering for the Confederate army. Active as a Mason and Episcopalian, he left his name on the town of Hitchcock, christened for him in 1891.

Fannett, TX

Leo Edward Craigen's life traced the arc of the post-Civil War South. Wounded at the bloody Battle of Shiloh in 1862, he lost a leg to surgery yet returned to serve with the Confederate cavalry until the war's end. He rebuilt an ordinary but rooted life in Jefferson County, Texas — teaching at the Taylor's Bayou School, marrying one of his own students, and finally carrying the rural mail through the Fannett area for the last fifteen years of his life.

Guthrie, TX

Born in 1813, Leo Roark came to Texas in 1824 as a boy during the earliest years of Anglo colonization under Mexican rule, and grew up to take part in the Texas War for Independence. He was present at the disturbances at Anahuac, one of the flashpoints that helped spark the Texas Revolution. He lived a long life on the Texas frontier, dying in 1892, and the State of Texas honored him with this marker in 1962.

Tallahassee, FL

This marker honors the Revolutionary War veterans who, by the 1830s, had settled in and around Tallahassee in Florida's frontier territory. In 1832 and 1833 these aging men — like Zachariah Gherkins, who had served as a private with North Carolina forces — came forward to apply for the federal pensions Congress granted for their service in the War for Independence. Their applications, filed a half-century after the war, quietly document how the Revolution's soldiers dispersed across a growing nation into its newest frontiers.

Commerce, GA

This Blue Star Memorial marker near Commerce honors Major Leon F. Ellis, Jr. of the U.S. Air Force, a Vietnam-era airman held as a prisoner of war. The Blue Star Memorial Highway program, launched by garden clubs in 1945 and named for the service flags of World War II, frequently recognized individual local servicemen. Here the Four Season Garden Club of Commerce joined the Garden Club of Georgia in the tribute.

San Francisco, CA · est. 2008

This plaque honors Leonard Matlovich (1943–1988), an Air Force technical sergeant and decorated Vietnam veteran who lived in this San Francisco building. In 1975 he deliberately challenged the military's ban on gay service members, landing on the cover of Time magazine and forcing the issue into national view. He later fought against AIDS and for LGBT equality until his death, and his epitaph — "A Gay Vietnam Veteran" — reads "Never Again / Never Forget."

Cuero, TX

Born in Cuero, Leonard Roy Harmon joined the Navy in 1939 and served as a mess attendant aboard the cruiser U.S.S. San Francisco. During the Battle of Guadalcanal in November 1942, as enemy fire raked the ship, Harmon helped evacuate the wounded and was killed shielding an injured shipmate with his own body, earning the Navy Cross. In 1943 the destroyer escort U.S.S. Harmon—the first U.S. warship named for a Black man—was christened by his mother.

Limestone Township, PA · est. 1947

On October 16, 1755, John Jacob Leroy was killed by Indians near this site, one of the earliest victims of frontier warfare in the region. His death came just after the Penn's Creek Massacre and in the wake of General Braddock's disastrous defeat, events that shattered the fragile peace and opened years of bloody conflict during the French and Indian War. Central Pennsylvania's exposed settlements suddenly found themselves on the front line.

Mount Joy, TX

Born in Virginia in 1840, Leroy Nelson DeWitt came to this corner of North Texas with his parents in 1854 and put down deep roots as a merchant and farmer. He married Mary Collier in 1861 and, the next year, joined the Confederacy to serve on the frontier through the end of the Civil War. Afterward he became a recognized leader in the area's civic, church, and business affairs until his death in 1918.

Greensburg, IN

This veterans memorial carries Calvin Coolidge's warning that a nation forgetting its defenders will itself be forgotten, a sentiment drawn from the president's 1920s addresses honoring those who served. Placed in the heart of Decatur County, it speaks to the small-town American tradition of gathering to remember local sons and daughters who went to war. Such "Lest We Forget" markers anchor courthouse squares and town greens across the Midwest.

Spokane County, WA

Dedicated in 1925 by the Spokane chapter of the Service Star Legion, this memorial honors the veterans of the World War—the conflict we now call World War I. The Service Star Legion was an organization of mothers and relatives of servicemen, and its 'Lest We Forget' tribute reflects the raw national grief and pride still fresh only a few years after the 1918 armistice. Across America in these years, communities raised such monuments to fix the memory of their sons in stone.

Galveston, TX

Levi Charles Myers Harby, born in South Carolina in 1793, served in the U.S. Navy during the War of 1812 and spent two years as a prisoner of war in England after his prize ship was recaptured. By 1836 he had "gone to Texas," and he later settled in Galveston, where his wife Leonora founded the first Jewish Sunday school in Texas and the city's Ladies Hebrew Benevolent Society. When the Civil War came, Harby served the Confederacy as an artillery captain aboard the CSS Neptune in the Battle of Galveston and ended the war commanding the harbor.

Orange, TX

Irish immigrant brothers bought an existing Orange shipyard in 1859 and built wooden ships for decades, a trade their descendants carried into the steel age. Under Edward T. Malloy, who joined in 1939 and later bought control, Levingston Shipbuilding boomed during World War II, delivering 160 tugs, tankers, and rescue vessels to the Army and Navy between 1941 and 1945. After the war it reinvented itself as a world leader in offshore drilling rigs before closing in 1985.

Hopkinsville, KY

As the Lewis and Clark Expedition made its way west and back, its leaders repeatedly passed through Kentucky's river country. William Clark—by 1807 a militia brigadier general and chief Indian agent for the Louisiana Territory—stopped with his family at Allsbury's Tavern in Hopkinsville in 1809. The tavern's keeper, Thomas Allsbury, was himself an early Hopkinsville figure who raised a company and served as a captain in the First Regiment of Kentucky Mounted Militia during the War of 1812.

Buckholts, TX

This burial ground reaches back to the 1830s colonies of Sterling C. Robertson, when Thomas Curry—whose late wife Satsa Vann was a Cherokee leader's daughter—brought his family to a league of land along Little River. His descendants married into the Lewis family, prominent in building the communities of Corinth, Buckholts and Cameron; Squire William Michael Lewis, a justice of the peace and Confederate cavalryman, was buried beneath a ranch oak in 1867, founding the cemetery. A typhoid epidemic a decade later added more graves to a plot whose burials mostly predate 1900.

Independence, TX

This marker honors a German-born immigrant who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 clash that won Texas its independence. Like many European newcomers, he cast his lot with the Texian cause and made his home in the new republic, dying near Independence in 1857.

Caldwell, TX

Virginia-born Lewis L. Chiles came of age in the era of Texas independence, taking his place among the volunteers who won the decisive victory at San Jacinto in 1836. He later founded the city of Caldwell, planting a town where a battlefield generation was busy building a new republic. He died in 1864, and this marker remembers him alongside his wife, Emily.

Lexington, MA · est. 1949

At dawn, some 700 British soldiers marching to seize colonial arms confronted about 80 minutemen on Lexington's common. Eight Americans died — the opening casualties of the Revolutionary War.

Lexington, KY

In June 1775, frontiersmen led by William McConnell camped on a branch of Elkhorn Creek and, on hearing of the colonists' clash with the British at Lexington, Massachusetts that April, named their campsite Lexington to honor the Revolution's first battle. Fear of attack delayed permanent settlement until 1779, when Colonel Robert Patterson and his companions raised a blockhouse and stockade. The town of Lexington was formally established by the Virginia General Assembly in 1782.

Chicago, IL

This memorial honors the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans who have served in the nation's armed forces from the Revolution onward, often in silence and at personal risk. For most of that history, their service came under policies that forced them to hide who they were, culminating in decades of formal bans lifted only in recent times. The memorial reclaims that hidden record of duty and sacrifice.

Garrison, TX

The community once called Miller's Mill was settled in the early 1800s and renamed Libby in 1898 for the postmaster's daughter, the same year its cemetery received its first burial. Among those laid to rest here is Thomas Farrell, an Irish immigrant born in 1845 who served in the Vermont Infantry of the Union Army before moving to Texas in 1877. Families began organized upkeep around 1918, keeping the ground as a record of the area's pioneers.

Allentown, PA · est. 2022

In the anxious autumn of 1777, with the British army marching on Philadelphia, the Continental Congress ordered the city's bells spirited away so they couldn't be melted into cannon. The great State House bell traveled north by wagon and rested for months beneath the floorboards of Zion's Reformed Church here in Allentown before returning home in 1778. Decades later, antislavery reformers seized on its inscription—'Proclaim liberty throughout all the land'—and renamed it the Liberty Bell, turning a cracked colonial bell into an enduring emblem of freedom.

Harleton, TX

This burial ground began serving the Baptist Church of Christ at Liberty, a congregation active in the Soda Lake Baptist Association as early as 1854. Church member Bennett C. Ragon, who came from Mississippi in 1853, deeded the first acreage in 1872, and the site has since grown to nearly seven acres. Its oldest dated stone belongs to Hightower Davis, who died in 1873, and among those laid to rest are veterans spanning every American conflict from the War of 1812 through Vietnam.

Cisco, TX

The cemetery preserves the memory of Liberty Hill, a once-thriving community with a school, two churches, stores, a blacksmith, and a cotton gin. Samuel B. Webb and his wife Amanda deeded the burial ground in 1899, and its earliest graves hold their daughter-in-law Viola, who died in childbirth in 1907, and her infant son. Confederate soldiers rest here alongside veterans of both World Wars and the families who settled this part of Eastland County.

Stephenville, TX

Marion D. and Harriet Pryor Kelley settled in the Liberty community in the mid-1880s and, in 1891, deeded land to Erath County for a cemetery and school. The oldest grave, dated 1890, is that of an infant son of the Handy family, and later burials include Civil War veterans John Bell Moring and A. Amariah Swanner and German immigrant Henry Hunt. The varied gravestones—granite, sandstone, marble, and limestone—bear emblems of the Masons, Order of the Eastern Star, and Woodmen of the World.

Upper Merion Township, PA

In the tense years before the Revolution, colonists across the thirteen colonies singled out great elms and other spreading trees as "Liberty Trees" — public gathering places where the Sons of Liberty rallied crowds against British rule. The tradition began with Boston's famous elm during the 1765 Stamp Act protests, where colonists hung effigies of royal officials from its branches, and the idea spread from town to town. Beneath these trees, ordinary people met, argued, and organized, turning a living landmark into a shared symbol of resistance. A memorial like this one in Upper Merion keeps that tradition of the patriot "tree of liberty" rooted in local memory.

San Francisco, CA

On April 19, 1894 — the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord — the Sequoia Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution planted this Liberty Tree in San Francisco. The name deliberately echoed the elms of the 1760s, beneath which colonists rallied against British rule. The planting was part of the patriotic-heritage movement that swept the country in the decades after the Civil War.

Hempstead, TX

Named for Justo Liendo, the original Spanish grantee, this 1853 estate became the model plantation of Leonard W. Groce, who ringed his mansion with its own industries. During the Civil War it served as Camp Groce, first a training camp and then a Confederate prison, and in 1865 it was occupied by Gen. George Custer, years before Little Bighorn. From 1873 to 1911 it belonged to the family of celebrated sculptor Elisabet Ney, who is commemorated on the grounds.

Town of Oyster Bay, NY

This remembrance flag honors New York firefighter Lt. Christopher Sullivan, who died in the line of duty when the World Trade Center towers fell on September 11, 2001. Placed by his wife Dolores and their children, it marks the extraordinary toll borne by the Fire Department of the City of New York, which lost 343 members that morning as they climbed into the burning towers so others could escape.

Portland, ME

Lieutenant Philip B. Frothingham of Portland, Maine, was born in 1894 and died in France on September 14, 1918, in the closing months of World War I. His body was brought home and buried in Evergreen Cemetery in 1920, and a local Veterans of Foreign Wars post was named in his honor.

Paris, TX

Alabama-born Henry William Lightfoot, a Confederate veteran of Forrest's Cavalry, came to Paris, Texas, in 1872 as law partner to Sam Bell Maxey and married Maxey's adopted daughter Dora two years later. The young couple built this house across from the Maxey home, its double gallery trimmed in Eastlake-style millwork and its lumber hauled from Jefferson. Lightfoot went on to serve as a state senator and chief justice of the 5th Court of Civil Appeals before his death in 1901; the Coleman family later restored the home in the 1950s.

Athens, TX

On a hill above the water, this family cemetery holds generations of Henderson County pioneers who arrived in the 1850s and 1860s to endure the hardships of early Texas life. Among them lie James Wilburn Miller, a Tennessee-born Civil War veteran, and his grandson Isadore, killed in action in World War I. Iron-ore rocks are said to mark several Indian graves, and the long-neglected burial ground was recently restored.

Davilla vicinity, TX

Dr. John Herndon Graves settled this Milam County area in 1858, and in 1880 his daughter and son-in-law deeded land for Lilac Baptist Church and its burial ground. The earliest marked grave, from 1870, belongs to Calvin McCormick, while Dr. Graves himself was the earliest-born of those interred. Among the graves lie veterans reaching from the Civil War and Spanish-American War through World War I and beyond, marking the community's service across generations.

Wyalusing Township, PA · est. 1947

On April 14, 1782, a small party led by Sergeant Thomas Baldwin came to this ground trying to free a woman and her children held captive by Native raiders — a common and wrenching feature of frontier war. The rescue turned into a four-hour fight. Three of the children were saved, but the mother was killed before they could reach her. The episode captures the intimate violence of the Revolution's final years along the Susquehanna.

Wyalusing Township, PA · est. 1928

On April 14, 1782, near this spot, Sergeant Thomas Baldwin's party tried to overtake a Native war band that had captured Mrs. Rosewell Franklin and her four children. After some four hours of fighting from hastily thrown-up breastworks, the rescuers freed three of the children, but Mrs. Franklin was killed. The skirmish was one of the last violent episodes of the Revolutionary frontier in the Wyoming country.

Cumberland Township, PA

This monument in the Gettysburg National Cemetery grounds commemorates Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, delivered on November 19, 1863, about 300 yards away during the cemetery's dedication. In barely two minutes and 272 words, Lincoln recast the war as a test of whether a nation 'conceived in liberty' could endure, and rededicated the living to 'a new birth of freedom.' The actual spot of the speech is marked nearby by the Soldiers' National Monument.

Progress, PA · est. 1994

Founded in 1827 by the Wesley Union A.M.E. Zion Church, this cemetery became a resting place for central Pennsylvania's Black community across generations. Among its graves are those of journalist and Civil War officer T. Morris Chester, educator and abolitionist William Howard Day, and more than twenty Civil War veterans. Each headstone marks a life that helped build free Black institutions in the decades around emancipation.

Gettysburg, PA · est. 2003

Founded in 1867 by the Sons of Good Will, Lincoln Cemetery gave Gettysburg's African American citizens and soldiers a dignified resting place they were otherwise denied. Roughly thirty veterans of the United States Colored Troops lie here — men who fought for the Union but were barred by segregation from burial in the town's famous National Cemetery. Later generations of Black veterans from the Spanish-American War through Korea joined them in ground first known as Good Will Cemetery and renamed for Lincoln in 1920.

Springfield, IL · est. 1972

Lincoln bought this Springfield house as a young lawyer and rising politician. He left it in 1861 for Washington, telling neighbors he might never return — and he did not.

Washington, DC

Rising at the western end of the National Mall, the Lincoln Memorial honors the sixteenth president who led the nation through the Civil War and preserved the Union. Designed by Henry Bacon as a Greek-style temple and dedicated in 1922, its central chamber holds Daniel Chester French's colossal seated statue of Lincoln, flanked by the carved words of the Gettysburg Address and his Second Inaugural. The famous dedicatory inscription above his head proclaims that Lincoln's memory is enshrined forever in this temple and in the hearts of the people he served.

Honesdale, PA · est. 1968

In May 1859, the influential editor Horace Greeley reportedly met with political allies in this building to lay groundwork for an unlikely presidential bid by Abraham Lincoln. The maneuvering echoed the coalition-building that would carry Lincoln to the Republican nomination at the 1860 Chicago convention. Such backroom parleys were where the anti-slavery Republican Party's strategy took shape on the eve of the sectional crisis.

Columbus, OH

On the north side of Columbus, in the working-class neighborhood of Linden, this memorial distills a community's gratitude into a single line: an honor roll of gratitude to "those who answered the call." Across the twentieth century, ordinary Ohioans left factory floors, classrooms, and front porches to serve in the nation's wars, and neighborhoods like Linden raised monuments so that their service would not slip out of local memory. A memorial like this turned a street corner into a place of return — the site where Memorial Day and Veterans Day gatherings kept faith with the people the neighborhood had sent away.

Warren, TX

When young W. C. Lindsey was dying of tuberculosis in 1898, he asked to rest on his family's own land, and his grieving parents opened this cemetery in answer. The family had come west from Mississippi in the 1840s, part of the great Anglo migration into the Texas frontier, and two of its sons marched off as Confederate soldiers—one of whom also served in the state legislature. Nearly fifty graves now cluster on the ground the Lindseys claimed as theirs.

Trawick, TX

This cemetery has served the Linn Flat community since the mid-nineteenth century, its land deeded by John Polk in 1849 with the stipulation that he lie at its center. The earliest burial, unmarked, dates to 1837, while the oldest marked grave belongs to Polk's wife, who died in 1855. The town of Linn Flat, named for its groves of linn trees, thrived until the railroad bypassed it in 1903, but families have kept the burial ground and its annual homecoming reunions alive for more than a century.

Dayton, TX

Founded in the 1850s to serve the people of West Liberty—now Dayton—this thirteen-acre burial ground grew informally, its sections known by family names like Smith and Alford, with a separately reserved area for Black residents now called Acie Cemetery. Many graves are unmarked; the earliest documented is that of six-day-old Joseph Monroe Linney in 1880. Those laid to rest here include pioneer settlers, elected officials, and veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Orange, TX

Joseph Linscomb moved from Louisiana to Texas around 1835 and served in a volunteer militia during the Texas Revolution before settling with his family in what became Orange County. He set aside an acre for a family burial ground, and his wife Denise was the first laid to rest there. Still active and tended by descendants, the cemetery holds more than a hundred marked graves.

Yorktown, TX

Amid the great mid-nineteenth-century European migration to Texas, a small group of Lithuanians settled around Yorktown in DeWitt County—so thoroughly absorbed into the larger German community that their story was long forgotten. The first family, David and Dora Stanchos, arrived about 1852, making them among the earliest documented Lithuanian immigrants to America, and roughly seventy more followed by 1874, most from the Gumbinnen region of East Prussia. They farmed, became citizens, fought on both sides of the Civil War, and left their dead in the Jonischkies Cemetery south of town.

San Augustine vicinity, TX

By 1880 families named Erwin, Crocker, Zeagler, Woods, and Harvey were farming this part of San Augustine County, worshipping first under a brush arbor before raising a one-room log church they called "Little Flock." The cemetery began in 1883 with the burial of six-year-old Carrie Bell Hawkins, who died while visiting the Erwin home, and the Erwins formally donated land for church, school, and cemetery in 1914. More than 400 graves now rest here, including charter church members and veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Hamilton Township, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, freedom seekers escaping slavery in Kentucky and the South pushed north through Ohio, and southwestern Ohio's rivers were both obstacles and guideposts. At this spot along the Little Miami, people fleeing bondage waded across the water on their way to Butterworth Station, one of the Quaker-linked safe havens that laced Warren County into the wider Underground Railroad network. The 2022 marker, placed by Friends of the Twenty Mile House, fixes that dangerous night crossing to a real place on the map.

Gilmer, TX

Burials on this steep rise called "Little Mound" may reach back to the late 1860s, before residents of the pioneer village of Calloway organized Little Mount Baptist Church in 1878 in a former Union church and schoolhouse. Over the decades the congregation rebuilt three times, thriftily reusing the same lumber from one meetinghouse to the next. Among those buried here is Emma Sansom Johnson, remembered as a Confederate heroine who as a sixteen-year-old guided General Nathan Bedford Forrest's troops across a river in her native Alabama before later settling in Texas.