Military & Wartime

Austin, TX

George W. Littlefield came to Texas as a boy in 1850, rode with Terry's Texas Rangers in the Civil War, and emerged a major who turned to the cattle business, amassing great ranches across New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle. Settling in Austin in 1883, he moved into banking and served as a regent of the University of Texas, funding buildings, scholarships, and library collections. He built this Victorian residence in 1894 and left it to the university on his death.

Cooper, TX

An Illinois native and veteran of the Black Hawk War, Littleton Rattan came to Texas in 1839 and built a farm in what became Delta County. In the Republic era he rode as a Texas Ranger with three area militia companies, and during the Mexican War he served under the legendary Ranger Jack Hays. He was killed in battle with Native Americans on December 18, 1847, though the site of the fight and his grave remain unknown.

Boston, MA

This plaque honors members of Local 34—a labor union chapter—who left their jobs to serve in the armed forces during World War II. Across the country, unions, workplaces, and neighborhoods raised such memorials to their own who answered the call. It stands as a small, local tribute within the vast American mobilization of the 1940s.

Jefferson, TX

Royal and Martha Lockett came to Texas from Georgia in the late 1850s with their eleven surviving children and the people they enslaved, and seven of their eight living sons went on to serve in the Confederate Army. The earliest marked grave is that of young Walter R. McGarity, a Lockett grandson who died in 1862. Family memory holds that a Union soldier who died on the Lockett Plantation was also buried here, and by 1999 the grounds held Confederate and World War II veterans among six generations of descendants.

Henderson, TX

Henry T. Lockridge settled in Rusk County in the 1850s and, after serving in the Confederate Army, bought the land in 1863 where he and his wife Jane spent the rest of their lives. The family cemetery on that property holds its oldest marked grave from 1881, though earlier burials are believed to lie there. Long inactive after the 1940s, it saw new burials again beginning in 2004, and much of the surrounding land is still owned by Lockridge descendants.

Manor, TX

This cemetery lies on land settled in 1833 by Gordon C. Jennings and his family, who came from Missouri as part of Stephen F. Austin's "Little Colony." Gordon became the oldest defender to die at the Alamo in 1836, while his young daughter Catherine earned lasting local fame for riding to warn neighbors as the Mexican army advanced during the Runaway Scrape. Catherine later married Sylvester Lockwood, and their descendants still tend the graves of these Texas pioneers.

Shippensburg, PA · est. 2007

Since the early 19th century, Locust Grove Cemetery has been the resting place of enslaved and free Black residents of the Shippensburg area, and the site of the town's first African American church, founded in the 1830s. In 1842 Edward Shippen Burd granted the land to the local Black community, and for well over a century it remained the only public cemetery in the area open to African Americans. Among its graves are twenty-six Civil War soldiers, alongside veterans of every American conflict through Vietnam.

Town of Oyster Bay, NY

In the years after World War I, American communities received captured German artillery as war trophies and lasting memorials. This cannon reached Locust Valley through Henry P. Davison, a prominent banker who chaired the American Red Cross War Council and helped organize the nation's wartime relief effort; the French government presented the gun in recognition of American support. Set beside the library, it was dedicated to the local men and women who sacrificed and served during the Great War.

Altoona, PA · est. 1947

In September 1862, with the Civil War at a grim turning point, the governors of the loyal Northern states gathered at the Logan House, a famous railroad hotel that once stood on this site. Pennsylvania's Governor Andrew Curtin called the conference, and the assembled governors pledged their states' support to President Lincoln at a moment when he was preparing the Emancipation Proclamation. Their united stand helped steady the Union war effort.

Harmony Township, PA · est. 1946

Logstown was one of the great Native towns of the upper Ohio, home between 1727 and 1758 to a mix of Iroquois, Delaware, Shawnee, and other peoples. Its council fires drew British and French agents alike, each competing for Indian alliances as the two empires maneuvered for control of the Ohio Country. The conferences held here helped set the stage for the French and Indian War.

Santa Barbara County, CA

This memorial gathers the Lompoc Valley's remembrance of the men and women who served in the Vietnam War, a conflict that drew hundreds of thousands of Americans overseas from the mid-1950s into 1975. Its words dwell not on politics but on honor kept and sacrifice "never forgotten," the language of a community determined to welcome home those the wider nation was often slow to thank. It stands among the many local Vietnam memorials raised across the country in the decades after the war.

Snook, TX

Traveling preachers served the Lone Oak community until residents organized a Baptist church in 1905. In 1911 they called the Rev. A.S. Broaddus, who led the congregation for an extraordinary 42 years — stepping away only to serve as a U.S. Army chaplain in both World Wars. Multi-day summer revivals, with family camping, brush-arbor services, and dinner on the grounds, marked the rhythm of church life.

Mart, TX

This McLennan County burial ground began as land bought in 1880 by trustees of the Lone Oak School for a church and school. It was pressed into use as a cemetery by September 1881, when the infant son of the Goodman family was laid to rest here. Confederate veterans and a lone Union veteran of the Civil War also lie among the pioneer dead.

Reagan, TX

Founded by former slaves in connection with a Methodist Episcopal church, this three-acre burial ground served the Black community of Long Branch for more than a century. Families who had come from Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia by 1870 built a two-room school, chose teachers from their own ranks, farmed as tenants, and gradually became landowners. Their sons served in every American conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam—including Anthony Shaw of the 104th U.S. Colored Infantry—and among those buried here is Silvia King, who recorded her remarkable life story before her death in the 1930s.

Cumby, TX

In the late 1830s, Texas Rangers camped in a grove of blackjack oaks west of present-day Cumby, and settlers gathered nearby for protection at a place called Black Jack Grove. To the south, James M. and Mary Long settled along Turkey Creek in the 1850s, reportedly setting aside land around 1860 to bury a girl who died as her family passed through. The oldest marked grave belongs to John M. Webb (d. 1869), and among later burials rest Civil War veterans and Woodmen of the World members.

Granbury, TX

Also called Temple Hall Cemetery, this burial ground is the last trace of two vanished pioneer settlements—Temple Hall and Center Mill—that grew up along Long Creek in the mid-1800s. Its earliest known graves are the Haley children, who died in 1864 and 1865, and it holds judges, county officials, mill builder Thomas Parkinson, and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War. A cemetery association has tended the grounds since about 1909.

Karnack, TX

When the United States braced for World War II, the Army turned to Monsanto to run a new East Texas plant that poured out more than 400 million pounds of TNT between 1941 and 1945. The site never truly stood down: it made propellant during the Korean War, and from 1956 Thiokol built solid-fuel rocket motors here, employing nearly 3,000 workers by the Vietnam era. Fittingly, in 1988 it became the first place on American soil where U.S. Pershing missiles were destroyed under an arms-reduction treaty with the Soviet Union.

Burnet, TX

Long before it became a tourist attraction, this Hill Country cavern sheltered a remarkable cast of characters. Native peoples knew it well, Texas Rangers reportedly rescued a captive here, and Confederates manufactured gunpowder in its chambers during the Civil War. Later, outlaws said to include the Sam Bass gang hid in its depths, and it even housed a nightclub before opening to the public in 1932.

Macomb, IL

Part of Illinois's 'Looking for Lincoln' heritage trail, this marker ties Macomb to Abraham Lincoln through a photograph and his appearances at the McDonough County Courthouse. As a circuit-riding lawyer and rising politician in the 1850s, Lincoln crossed western Illinois arguing cases and building the reputation that carried him to the presidency.

Houston, TX

Lorenzo de Zavala was a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence and the first vice president of the Republic of Texas. His plank-covered log house near Harrisburg, built in 1829, sheltered the wounded as a hospital after the decisive 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, and it was there that de Zavala died that November.

Olyphant, PA · est. 1995

On March 21, 1917, just sixteen days before the United States formally entered World War I, Loretto Perfectus Walsh became the first woman to enlist in the U.S. Navy, serving as a Chief Yeoman (F) in Philadelphia. Born in Olyphant in 1896, she was part of a wave of women who stepped into naval clerical and support roles so that men could be sent to the front. Discharged in 1919, she died young in 1925, but her enlistment marked a genuine milestone.

Los Ebanos, TX

This bend of the Rio Grande has been crossed for centuries, first recorded when José de Escandón's Spanish colonists forded here in the 1740s along a route that also carried a salt trail to El Sal del Rey. Over the generations it saw Mexican War troops in 1846, Texas Rangers chasing cattle rustlers in 1874, and smugglers during Prohibition. A licensed ferry and inspection station opened in 1950, and the hand-pulled crossing—named for the ebony trees on its banks—is said to be the only government-licensed, hand-operated ferry on any U.S. border.

Wichita Falls, TX

The men of the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery—many of them Texans from the Wichita Falls area—were captured by Japanese forces on Java in March 1942, in the opening months of America's Pacific war. Held prisoner for three and a half brutal years, the survivors were not freed until Japan's surrender in September 1945. Their fate was so obscured during the war that they became known as the 'Lost Battalion.'

Jacksboro vicinity, TX

Ringed by distant "Seven Blue Hills" and overlooked by a lookout point called Spy Knob, Lost Valley saw repeated violence on the Texas frontier. Settler families were killed here in 1857, teamsters of the Warren Wagon Train were slain in 1871 just after General W. T. Sherman had passed safely through, and in 1874 a Texas Ranger escort under Major John B. Jones was ambushed on this ground. In later years the same valley settled into quiet farm and ranch country.

Goliad, TX

Acquired in 1896 and soon renamed for a local African American family, Lott Cemetery holds the graves of trail drivers, cattle-industry workers, and everyday families whose modest wooden crosses and sculpted obelisks trace the ups and downs of the local economy. When the 1902 tornado destroyed a nearby Methodist church and neighborhood, several dozen victims were buried in a communal grave along its eastern edge. Among those resting here are more than thirty veterans, two centenarians, and a man known only as "Bingo," raised by a prominent cattleman's wife.

Corpus Christi, TX

Prussian-born Louis de Planque came to the Rio Grande borderlands during the Civil War, when Confederate cotton pouring through Brownsville and Matamoros made boomtowns of both. He photographed Union and Confederate troops alike and weathered devastating hurricanes in 1867 and 1875 that twice destroyed his studios. Rebuilding each time, the flamboyant "Don Luis" spent his final decades as Corpus Christi's celebrated portrait photographer, training his wife Eugenie to carry on the business.

Waco, TX

Missouri-born Louis Moore came to Texas about 1834, received a Mexican land grant, and enlisted in the Texas Army in April 1836, guarding the baggage at Harrisburg during the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. He later served with the Texas Ranger company that established Fort Fisher, raised nine children, and spent his last years in the Chalk Bluff community.

Galveston, TX

Louis Trezevant Wigfall (1816–1874) was a South Carolina–born lawyer and firebrand who rose through Texas politics to the U.S. Senate, where he became one of the most uncompromising voices for Southern secession. On the eve of the Civil War he famously rowed out to Fort Sumter as an aide to General Beauregard to press its surrender, then served the Confederacy as a colonel of the 1st Texas Infantry, a brigadier general, and a Confederate senator. Texas placed this marker in 1963.

Sadler, TX

Louis Wilmouth, born in Kentucky in 1806, was among the Texan volunteers at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 clash that won Texas its independence. He lived out his years in Grayson County, dying in 1893, and rests in Harshberg Cemetery near Sadler alongside his wife, Ellen Vittitoe Wilmouth.

Phillips County, AR

This stone marks the base point established on November 10, 1815, from which U.S. surveyors laid out the vast lands of the Louisiana Purchase using the Fifth Principal Meridian. One of the first surveys from this point served to satisfy the land-bounty claims of soldiers who had fought in the War of 1812. From this humble marker in the Arkansas wilderness, the grid that organized much of the American interior was reckoned.

Louisville, CO

In the years after the Great War, the coal-mining town of Louisville gathered to honor its own. Raised in 1924 by residents and the local Women's Club, this honor roll lists roughly 120 townspeople who served in World War I. That a woman's name — Genevieve Moffitt — heads the list reflects how thoroughly the war reached into every corner of a small Colorado community.

Dallas, TX

Convinced their city's future lay in aviation, Dallas leaders drew crowds to air shows and in 1917 secured a World War I Army flying school, which the Signal Corps named Love Field for Lt. Moss Lee Love, an aviator killed in a 1913 crash. Through the 1920s it hosted flying schools and pioneering air-mail routes and welcomed the likes of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, then served in World War II with a ferrying group, WASP pilots, and a Lockheed modification center. Nearly closed after a larger airport opened in 1973, it revived into one of the nation's busiest airports.

Brookeland, TX

Lowe Cemetery honors Barnabas Colistus "Barney" Lowe, a pioneer who reached Texas around 1832 and earned 640 acres for his service in the 1835 Siege of Bexar during the Texas Revolution. Burials here date to 1840 and include nine citizens of the Republic of Texas and veterans spanning the Texas Revolution, the Civil War, and the Korean War. It is also called Stumptown Cemetery, for the community that clear-cut its virgin timber by 1925.

Rusk, TX

Settlers from the southern states reached this part of Cherokee County by the late 1840s, and Lowe's Chapel Cemetery began soon after — local tradition says with a child from a passing wagon train, buried beneath a pile of rocks. E. H. Lowe deeded five acres to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in a deed recorded in 1882, and dozens of area families are buried here alongside veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam. An annual homecoming has drawn descendants for more than eighty years.

Amarillo, TX

In the early 1900s Amarillo was a young, ambitious railroad town eager for the trappings of a settled city — and a military university promised discipline, education, and prestige on the high plains. Lowery-Phillips Military University served that hope only briefly, closing its doors in 1917 as the nation turned toward the Great War. The buildings found a second life sheltering children at the Amarillo Children's Home before finally being demolished in 1966.

Newtown, PA · est. 2001

On February 19, 1778, with the British holding Philadelphia and Washington's army wintering at Valley Forge, roughly 40 armed Loyalists raided the tavern that stood here. The fighting left five American soldiers dead, four wounded, and eleven captured. Tailors working at the site had been sewing uniforms for the troops at Valley Forge, and some 2,000 yards of cloth were carried off.

Weymouth, MA

The rank 'Lieutenant' marks this Weymouth memorial as a tribute to a resident who served as a commissioned officer in the armed forces. Like many of the dedicated squares and memorials that dot New England towns, it fixes a local servicemember's name to a public place so that neighbors pass it daily. The inscription names the man and his rank without identifying the conflict in which he served.

Livingston, TX

Raised in Livingston, James M. Parker Jr. joined the Army Air Corps and, as the United States entered World War II, volunteered for the Doolittle Raid—the daring first American strike on the Japanese mainland. In April 1942 he flew as co-pilot aboard the B-25 "Whirling Dervish" with Crew #9, completing the bombing run before the low-on-fuel crew bailed out over China. He returned home, recovered from malaria, and served on through the war before retiring in 1947 with numerous decorations.

Woodville, TX

Philip A. Work came to Texas in 1838 and represented Tyler County at the 1861 secession convention before raising Company F of Hood's famed Texas Brigade. As lieutenant colonel he commanded the Texans from 1862 to 1864, including at Sharpsburg (Antietam), where the brigade suffered over 82% casualties—among the greatest losses of any unit in the war. He led the Texas Brigade on the second day at Gettysburg and through the Confederate victory at Chickamauga in 1863 before returning home in failing health.

Albany, TX

Albany High School graduate William Edwin Dyess became one of the Pacific war's most consequential survivors. Captured when Bataan fell in 1942, he endured the Death March, escaped his captors a year later, and then did something rarer still — his firsthand published accounts of prisoner abuse reached the American public and shaped how the world understood the war in the Pacific. He died in a stateside P-38 crash weeks after a hero's visit to his hometown football field in 1943.

Albany, TX

Albany-born and Tarleton-educated, William Edwin Dyess trained as a pilot at Randolph Field and was leading the 21st Pursuit Squadron of P-40s in the Philippines when Japan struck in December 1941. His stubborn attacks at Subic Bay with almost no aircraft, his ordeal on the Bataan Death March, and his daring escape a year later made him a symbol of resistance. His Chicago Tribune accounts of Japanese atrocities altered world opinion, and his story inspired a book and an acclaimed play before his death in a 1943 crash.

Abilene, TX

This Abilene marker traces the arc of Albany native William Edwin Dyess from aviation cadet at Randolph Field to squadron commander in the Philippines, where he fought on despite crippling losses of aircraft. Taken prisoner at the fall of Bataan in 1942, he survived the Death March and prison camps, then escaped with eleven others in 1943 — reaching Australia by guerrilla contact and submarine. His accounts in the Chicago Tribune exposed conditions in Japanese camps before he died flying a new P-38 over Burbank late that year.

Oxford, OH

This memorial honors Lieutenant Colonel William R. Higgins, a Marine and member of the Miami University class of 1967, along with every Miami alumnus who died in service to the country. Higgins was serving on a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Lebanon when he was captured and killed in the late 1980s, a loss that drew national attention. The marker ties the university's community to the broader cost of American military service.

Galveston, TX

Edward Lea, a Maryland-born Naval Academy graduate, stayed loyal to the Union at the Civil War's outbreak despite his father Albert's urging him to join the Confederacy. As first officer of the U.S.S. Harriet Lane, he fought in the Battle of Galveston on New Year's Day 1863 against Confederate forces whose commander's staff included his own father. Mortally wounded, Edward is said to have spoken his last words — 'My father is here' — as Albert reached his dying son on the deck.

Killeen, TX

Born in St. Louis in 1894 and a 1916 graduate of Texas A&M, Andrew Davis Bruce began 37 years of military service in 1917, rising to lieutenant colonel at age 24 in France during World War I. Asked to create the Army's tank destroyer center, he chose Killeen in 1942 for its terrain and climate and named the camp for Confederate general John Bell Hood, giving rise to Fort Hood. In World War II he led the 77th Infantry Division through Guam, Leyte, Ie Shima, and Okinawa, earning two Distinguished Service Crosses, before a later career as president and chancellor of the University of Houston.

Marshall, TX

Born in Marshall in 1872, George Perry Rains earned a medical degree, then enlisted in the local Marshall Light Infantry in 1890 and spent nearly half a century in uniform. He served on the Mexican border and rose during World War I as a colonel commanding the 144th Infantry within the 36th Division. Honored as both physician and soldier, he ended a 49-year career at the rank of brevet lieutenant general.

Williamstown, MA

This playground was given in 1952 by Mr. and Mrs. Harold E. Field in memory of their son, Lieutenant Herbert Allan Field, who died in the service of his country in the summer of 1945 as the Second World War drew to a close. Across the country, grieving families turned their loss into gifts for the living — parks, playgrounds, and fields where the next generation could grow up in the peace their sons had died to secure. In Williamstown, that memory took the shape of a place to play.

Del Rio, TX

Born in Del Rio in 1914, Jack Thomas Laughlin graduated from the local high school and the University of Texas before joining the Army Air Corps in 1940 and earning his wings in California. On January 29, 1942, his B-17 Flying Fortress was shot down over the Java Sea, making him the first Del Rio-born pilot killed in World War II. When the Army built an airfield in town that year, citizens successfully petitioned to name it in his honor.

Chicago, IL

Lieutenant Joseph T. McKeon, Jr., a U.S. Marine, was killed in the Vietnam War on May 18, 1967. This Chicago memorial preserves his name among the thousands of the city's young men who served and died in that long and divisive conflict in Southeast Asia.

State College, PA

Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy was a Navy SEAL and 1998 Penn State graduate who died on June 28, 2005, in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan during Operation Red Wings. Pinned down with his four-man reconnaissance team, he moved into open ground under heavy fire to get a clear signal and call for help — a decision that cost him his life but became the stuff of legend. In 2007 he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the first given for service in the Afghanistan war. The plaza carries a Greek line long attributed to Spartan mothers, 'with your shield or on it,' binding an ancient ideal of sacrifice to a modern one.

New York, NY

This plaque honors a young Marine Corps lieutenant, born in 1944, who was killed in action during the Vietnam War in 1968. By that year American involvement in Vietnam had reached its peak, and 1968 is remembered as one of the conflict's costliest years for U.S. forces. The memorial was placed by the Marine Corps League and its Order of Devil Dogs — fraternal organizations of Marine veterans who keep faith with their fallen. It stands as one community's promise that a local Marine's sacrifice would not be forgotten.

Monroe, NC

Samuel I. Parker, born just southeast of this spot in Union County, distinguished himself in the fierce fighting in France in 1918. For his valor he received the Medal of Honor, one of only two North Carolinians so honored for service in the First World War. His courage under fire made him a lasting emblem of the state's wartime sacrifice.

Whitfield County, GA

This roadside memorial marks the death of Lieutenant Theodore Marxon of the Army Air Forces, who was killed in the line of duty on February 5, 1943 — the same winter the United States was racing to build the largest air force in the world. During World War II the A.A.F. expanded from a few thousand aircraft into millions of personnel, training pilots and crews at airfields spread across the South, Georgia among them. Line-of-duty deaths like Marxon's were a grim, constant feature of that buildup, as young aviators flew unforgiving aircraft in the rush to prepare for combat overseas.

Montrose, CO

This static display honors the Colorado Air National Guard and its A-7D Corsair II, a subsonic attack jet flown from the 1970s into the Cold War's later decades. The inscription recalls the unit's championship performance at 'Gunsmoke,' the U.S. Air Force's biennial air-to-ground gunnery and bombing competition, in 1981. Retired aircraft like this one are commonly mounted as gate guardians to commemorate a squadron's service.

Lubbock, TX

Created in 1876 and organized in 1891, Lubbock County honors Colonel Thomas S. Lubbock (1817-1862), a soldier of the Texas Revolution and Republic. Lubbock marched with the New Orleans Greys at the storming of Bexar, joined the ill-fated Santa Fe and Somervell expeditions, and in 1861 helped organize the famous Terry's Texas Rangers before his death. The county he named became the anchor of the South Plains.

Cincinnati, OH

In the early 1790s the young United States was fighting to control the Northwest Territory, and the Ohio country was the front line. Ludlow Station was one of the fortified blockhouse stations ringing the frontier settlement of Cincinnati, offering shelter and a staging ground for the armies pushing north against the Western Confederacy of tribes. General Arthur St. Clair mustered here in 1791 before the campaign that ended in his catastrophic defeat, and two years later General "Mad" Anthony Wayne encamped on the same ground while building the disciplined Legion that would win the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794.

Brenham, TX

In 1849, Ludwig and Carolyn Lehmann left Hamburg for the Texas coast with their sons and Ludwig's aged mother, who died on the grueling three-month Atlantic crossing and was buried at sea. Settling near Brenham, the family farmed and helped anchor the German Lutheran community of Berlin, donating land for its Ebenezer Evangelical Lutheran Church. This burial ground holds the first family members laid to rest in their adopted country, and the German-ordered grave markers a son later commissioned still speak to ties never fully cut.

Liberty, TX

Louisiana-born Luke Bryan enlisted in the Army of Texas in 1835 and fought in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto, the eighteen-minute clash in 1836 that won Texas its independence. This marker, erected by the State of Texas in 1936 for the revolution's centennial, honors his service among the ordinary soldiers who secured the Republic.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1982

Formed in 1786 from Northumberland County and named for the French nobleman Chevalier de la Luzerne, an ally of the American Revolution, Luzerne County has long been a place shaped by conflict and coal. Its seat, Wilkes-Barre, was settled in 1769 amid the Yankee-Pennamite Wars — bitter contests between Connecticut and Pennsylvania claimants over the same Wyoming Valley land. More than a century later the region became a flashpoint again during the great Anthracite Strike of 1902, a landmark clash between miners and coal operators.

Lyme, CT

The United States entered the Great War in April 1917, and by the armistice of November 1918 more than four million Americans had been called into service. Across New England, towns like Lyme raised "rolls of honor" to record the names of the local men and women who answered that call — a civic ledger of one small community's part in a global conflict. The spare dates carved here, 1917 to 1918, mark the span of America's fight.