Military & Wartime

Town of Elmira, NY

In the late summer of 1779, the Sullivan Expedition swept through the heart of Iroquois country in what is now western New York. The village referenced here, christened "Newtown" by General John Sullivan's troops, was a Loyalist and Native settlement that lay in the army's path. After the nearby Battle of Newtown on August 29, 1779 — the campaign's only major engagement — Sullivan's forces razed villages and crops as part of a scorched-earth strategy ordered by George Washington to break the power of the British-allied Iroquois nations.

Nacogdoches, TX

Born in Germany and arriving in New Orleans in 1817, Adolphus Sterne was a Jewish emigrant who settled in Nacogdoches in 1826 and threw himself into the turbulent birth of Texas. A merchant and early Scottish Rite Mason, he backed the Fredonian Rebellion and the Texas Revolution with money and influence, then served in public office and the state legislature. His home became a gathering place in a raw frontier town on the edge of a new republic.

Banquete, TX

Born in 1835 in Alsace, Nicholas Bluntzer came to Texas at nine with the Alsatian families led by empresario Henri Castro. He rode as a scout on Robert E. Lee's 1856–57 expedition against the Comanche, fought for the Confederacy at Palmito Ranch—the war's last battle—in 1865, and afterward became an influential South Texas rancher and cotton grower, lending his name to the settlement of Bluntzer.

Galveston, TX

Born in Canada in 1802, Nicholas Descomps Labadie trained first for the priesthood, then for medicine, before coming to Texas in 1831 to serve as a post surgeon. During the Texas Revolution he served as surgeon and infantryman, and at the decisive battle of San Jacinto he interpreted Santa Anna's surrender to Sam Houston. He settled in Galveston, where he became a leading physician, businessman, and supporter of the city's Catholic church and charity hospital.

Smithfield Township, PA · est. 1947

Nicholas Depuy came to this stretch of the Delaware around 1727, among the very first Europeans known to settle the region. When the French and Indian War brought raiding to the frontier after 1755, his stockaded and garrisoned home was pressed into service as Fort Depuy, one of the fortified farmsteads that dotted the wartime backcountry. Such homes-turned-forts show how thin the line was between domestic life and frontier warfare.

Tivoli, TX

Nicholas Fagan came to Texas in 1829, settling in Power's colony along the Gulf Coast, and served as a private in Fraser's Refugio company during the Texas Revolution. Captured after the Battle of Coleto in 1836, he escaped the fate of the Goliad Massacre when Mexican friends intervened to spare his life. The state honored him with this marker in 1956.

Dallas, TX

Nicholas Henry Darnell arrived in Texas in 1838 and was almost immediately swept into public life, winning election to the Republic of Texas Congress and serving as Speaker of the House. He was a delegate to the 1845 convention that brought Texas into the Union and later served again as Speaker in the state legislature. In 1863 he resigned to lead the 18th Texas Cavalry, and after the Civil War he returned to office and helped draft the state's 1875 constitution.

Rockne, TX

Born in 1804, Nicholas W. Eastland came to Texas in 1834 and, in the spring of 1836, joined Captain Horton's company under Colonel James Fannin during the Texas Revolution. When Fannin's command was captured and largely massacred after the Battle of Coleto, Eastland was among the fortunate few who escaped. He lived on until 1891, and the State of Texas raised this memorial to him in 1957.

Winona, TX

Nicholas Wren came to Texas in 1833 and joined its army in 1836, later commissioned a lieutenant of Rangers by President Sam Houston. He fought during the Vasquez and Woll incursions of the Republic era and reportedly had a horse shot from under him at the Battle of the Hondo. Settling in Smith County by its organization in 1846, he died in the Mount Carmel community in 1859, his grave later marked by his grandsons.

Commerce Charter Township, MI

During the tense early decades of the Cold War, the U.S. Army ringed major cities with Nike surface-to-air missile batteries meant to shoot down Soviet bombers before they could reach their targets. Site D-87 was part of the defensive ring guarding the Detroit metropolitan area, one of dozens of such installations that stood ready across suburban America in the 1950s and 1960s before advances in missile technology made them obsolete.

Anchorage, AK

Perched atop Mount Gordon Lyon above Anchorage, Site Summit was a U.S. Army Nike Hercules surface-to-air missile installation active during the Cold War, part of a ring of batteries meant to defend the city and its bases from Soviet bombers flying the polar route. Decommissioned in the late 1970s, it survives as one of the best-preserved Nike sites in the country.

San Jose, CA

A single stark date—February 19, 1942—marks this Nikkei (Japanese American) lantern in San Jose's historic Japantown. On that day President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal and incarceration of some 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, into remote wartime camps. The lantern stands as a quiet 'Day of Remembrance' for a community torn from its homes and businesses.

Sabine Pass, TX

A New Yorker who came to Texas with Robertson's colony in 1834, Niles F. Smith fought in the Texas Revolution and then helped build the young Republic, serving as its first banking commissioner along with posts as customs collector and land agent. Settling at Sabine Pass in 1841, he erected Jefferson County's first steam sawmill and its first church, and backed annexation to the United States in 1845. He rests here beside his wife Abigail and their two sons.

Fredericksburg, TX

Charles Henry Nimitz bought this property in 1855 and by 1860 was running a hotel that fed and housed frontier travelers while sheltering his own large family. An 1870s expansion gave it a whimsical steamboat-shaped facade, and it became a hub of community life. In 1964 the building became a museum honoring the founder's grandson, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and those who served with him in the Pacific during World War II.

Nacogdoches, TX

A frontier gateway for centuries, Nacogdoches has flown nine flags rather than the six familiar to Texas history. Beyond Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the United States, and the Confederacy, three short-lived banners rose from failed bids for independence: the emerald flag of the 1812-13 Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition, the star-and-stripes of James Long's 1819 republic, and the red-and-white flag of Haden Edwards's 1826-27 Republic of Fredonia. Each rebellion collapsed, but together they marked the town as a crucible of revolutionary ferment on the Texas frontier.

Sherman, TX

About a thousand mounted volunteers from a cluster of North and East Texas counties gathered at Brogdon's Springs in October 1861 to form the Ninth Texas Cavalry under Colonel William B. Sims. The regiment fought across Indian Territory and at Pea Ridge before joining Lawrence S. Ross's celebrated cavalry brigade, which saw near-constant action through Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. Worn down to barely a hundred men, its survivors surrendered in Mississippi in May 1865.

Anchorage, AK

On September 26, 1971, a sitting U.S. president and Emperor Hirohito of Japan met briefly at Elmendorf Air Force Base as the emperor's flight paused in Anchorage — the first face-to-face meeting between a reigning Japanese emperor and an American president. Coming just a generation after the Pacific war, the encounter carried heavy symbolic weight as a gesture of reconciliation between former adversaries.

Socorro, NM

This memorial, dedicated by the Class of 1947, honors students of the New Mexico School of Mines who died in World War II. Small technical colleges like this one emptied their classrooms into the armed forces, and mining expertise proved vital to a wartime economy hungry for metals. The graduates who returned raised this tribute to the classmates who did not.

Terrell, TX

Foreseeing war with Germany, Britain arranged to train pilots overseas, and in August 1941—months before the U.S. entered World War II—the Royal Air Force's No. 1 British Flying Training School opened just south of Terrell with enthusiastic local backing. Over the war civilian instructors put some 2,200 RAF cadets and 138 U.S. Army Air Forces cadets through 20 weeks of flight and ground school, and the town embraced them under the school's motto, 'the seas divide, but the skies unite.' The last cadets left Terrell's railroad station in September 1945, and a museum opened in 2002 to keep the story alive.

Greene County, NC

Nooherooka was a fortified Tuscarora stronghold and the site of the decisive battle of the Tuscarora War in March 1713, when a colonial and allied force overwhelmed the fort. The inscription records that some 950 Indians were killed or captured over the three-day fight. The defeat broke Tuscarora power in eastern North Carolina and pushed many survivors north to join the Iroquois Confederacy.

Portsmouth, VA

Founded in 1767 on the Elizabeth River, the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia, is one of the oldest and largest shipyards in the United States. Despite its name, the yard sits in Portsmouth, and over two centuries it built, repaired, and outfitted vessels through the American Revolution, the Civil War — when the ironclad CSS Virginia was rebuilt there from the burned USS Merrimack — and both World Wars. This marker was unveiled in 1967 to commemorate the yard's 200th anniversary, dedicated by senior Navy officers including the Commander in Chief of the Atlantic Fleet.

Belton, TX

Norman Austin's long life traced the arc of early Anglo Texas. A New York-born wanderer who farmed and clerked his way south, he was ranching in Matagorda County when the Texas Revolution broke out in 1835. Riding with Horton's cavalry attached to Fannin's command, he was one of only a handful who escaped the fate of the more than 300 men captured and executed near Goliad in 1836, and he spent his later decades as a Belton merchant hauling goods by oxcart.

San Diego, CA

The North American A-5 Vigilante was one of the fastest carrier-based aircraft of the Cold War, entering U.S. Navy service around 1961 as a supersonic bomber before being reworked into the RA-5C reconnaissance platform. From the decks of aircraft carriers it flew dangerous photo-reconnaissance missions during the Vietnam era, its sleek twin-engine design pushing the limits of naval aviation. Preserved here in San Diego, near the city's carrier-museum waterfront, it stands as a survivor of the jet age's rapid ambitions.

Halifax County, NC

On December 18, 1776, months after the Declaration of Independence, delegates meeting at Halifax adopted the first constitution of the independent state of North Carolina, together with a declaration of rights. It established the framework of state government for the newly sovereign state. Halifax was already a hotbed of Revolutionary sentiment, having earlier produced the Halifax Resolves calling for independence.

Charlotte, NC

Opened in 1859 with future Confederate general Daniel Harvey Hill as its first superintendent, this Charlotte military academy trained young men in the tense years before the Civil War. When war came, the campus was pressed into service as a Confederate hospital, and after the conflict the building served as a public school from 1883 to 1950. It stood near this spot.

Suffolk, VA

This boundary marker stands where two of America's foundational colonies meet, each summarizing its origin story on stone. Virginia points to Jamestown in 1607, the first permanent English colony, while North Carolina reaches back to the ill-fated 1585–87 Roanoke ventures before its own permanent settlement around 1650. The marker also notes North Carolina's Halifax Resolves of April 1775, when it became the first colony to formally authorize its delegates to vote for independence.

Groveton vicinity, TX

North Cedar Community took root in 1856 as pioneers like Abner Womack and the Burke family carved farms from the East Texas woods—some reportedly sleeping in tree houses for fear of animals while their cabins were built by enslaved laborers. After the Civil War it became a small enclave of Confederate supporters, many fleeing the ruined states of the Deep South, and slowly gained a church, a cemetery, and Womack School. Lumber companies, then the Civilian Conservation Corps, shaped its later years, but by the twenty-first century only a few scattered houses remained.

Milam County, TX

Settlers from Alabama began arriving at North Elm in 1867, among them John George Lagrone, whose 1870 stone is the oldest here. Land was deeded for the cemetery beginning in 1883, with later additions. The graves include fourteen Confederate soldiers and two Texas Rangers, brothers Ellzey and James Perkins—a roll of the pioneers and veterans who settled the area.

Beaumont, TX

As Beaumont boomed after the 1901 Spindletop oil gusher, residents of the fast-growing North End organized a Methodist congregation in 1912, first meeting in a shed at Live Oak and Cable streets. Renamed Wesley United Methodist Church, the congregation moved several times — including a 2004 "Move of Faith" to a new sanctuary — while sewing garments for soldiers in World War I and serving its community for over a century.

Dundalk, MD

In the late summer of 1814, fresh from burning Washington, a British army pushed toward Baltimore, the young nation's third-largest city and a nest of the privateers that had harried British shipping. On September 12, Maryland militia under General John Stricker met the advancing column here at North Point, and in the opening skirmishing the British commander, General Robert Ross, was mortally wounded. The militia's stubborn delaying action bought precious hours for Baltimore's main defenses to prepare.

North Yarmouth, ME

This memorial highway in North Yarmouth, Maine, is dedicated to the townsmen who served in the defense of their country across generations of American conflict. Rather than naming a single war, it honors the collective military service and sacrifice of a small New England community.

Uintah County, UT

The Northern Ute people of Utah's Uintah Basin have sent their sons and daughters into the U.S. armed forces through every major conflict from the world wars onward — a tradition of service common to Native nations across the country. This memorial honors those tribal members who died in uniform, placing them in the long line of American patriots. It speaks to both loss and enduring pride within the Ute community.

Sunbury, PA · est. 1982

When Northumberland County was formed in 1772 from pieces of five older counties, it sprawled across a vast frontier that would later be divided into some twenty-seven counties. At its heart lay Sunbury, laid out that same year at the confluence of the Susquehanna's branches. The site was already strategic: Fort Augusta, built in 1756–57 during the French and Indian War, stood here as a key military post guarding the colonial frontier.

Salado, TX

Built about 1872 by Edward R.A. Buckles, this two-story Salado house pairs Doric columns below with Victorian turned woodwork above. Confederate veteran Colonel Nimrod Lindsay Norton bought it in 1873; a member of the Capitol Building Commission, he donated Burnet County granite for the state capitol's exterior. In 1882 it passed to educators John and Kate Orgain, who taught at Salado College and area schools and left their own mark on the town.

San Antonio, TX

Edward Miles arrived in Texas in 1829, when the region was still a far northern frontier of Mexico, and threw in with the Anglo colonists who would soon fight for independence. He was present at Anahuac and at San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 battle that won the Republic of Texas, then went on to serve in the frontier Indian conflicts, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War. A Natchez-born settler who became prominent in civic life, his long career spans nearly every armed struggle that shaped nineteenth-century Texas.

Corpus Christi, TX

Nueces County takes its name from the 'River of Nuts' that forms its northern border, a country touched early by Spanish explorers and marked by the frontier post of Lipantitlan. The area passed into Anglo-American hands during the Texas Revolution, and in 1845 U.S. Army forces camped here on their way to the fighting of the Mexican-American War. The county itself was created in 1846 and organized the next year with Corpus Christi as its seat.

Cumberland Township, PA

New York sent more men to Gettysburg than any other state, and this monument was raised by the State of New York to honor its corps, division, and brigade commanders not already commemorated elsewhere on the field. In July 1863 those officers helped direct the Union defense across the three-day battle. The monument fills the gaps among Gettysburg's many memorials, ensuring New York's leaders were remembered.

San Marcos, TX

Built in 1878, this ornate Victorian home became the residence of O. T. Brown, a Georgia native who had served in the Confederate army and endured captivity as a prisoner of war before rebuilding his life in Reconstruction-era Texas. In San Marcos he became a respected attorney and civic leader, marrying into the prominent Belvin family. The house stayed with his descendants until 1967.

Felicity, OH

In the decades before the Civil War, the Ohio River formed the border between slavery and freedom, and Clermont County sat squarely on the paths that freedom seekers followed north out of Kentucky. Oliver Perry Spencer Fee turned his Felicity store into a quiet refuge, feeding and clothing escapees while sending pursuing slave-hunters off in the wrong direction. Small, deliberate, and dangerous acts like his formed the human network later remembered as the Underground Railroad.

Russellville, KY

Lieutenant Presley N. O'Bannon of the U.S. Marines is remembered as the first American to raise the flag on foreign soil, on April 17, 1805, when his attack helped overcome Barbary Coast forces holding American seamen for ransom. He settled in Logan County in 1807 and served in the state legislature and senate before his death in 1850.

Nacogdoches, TX

Once called the "American Cemetery," Oak Grove sits on land granted in 1826 to empresario Haden Edwards, leader of the Fredonian Rebellion, who is buried here. Its graves read like a roster of the Texas Republic: signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, veterans of San Jacinto, Sam Houston's secretary of war and personal physician, early millionaires, a master architect, and formerly enslaved men and women. Burials relocated from an older Spanish cemetery reach back to a stone marked "Father Mendoza, 1718."

Lampasas, TX

Hartwell Fountain sold ten acres to the City of Lampasas in 1872 to create what was first called City Cemetery, renamed Oak Hill in 1908. For more than half a century the ground was tended by the Ladies Cemetery Association, a group of local women who cared for it from 1891 until the city took over in 1948. Buried here are pioneers, prominent citizens, and veterans reaching back through the Civil War to the Texas Revolution.

Sipe Springs, TX

Named for its abundant live oaks, the Oakland community took root in the early 1860s, and in 1875 circuit-riding Methodist minister H. S. 'Brother' Anglin arrived, building the local church while serving nine congregations nearby. The first burial came in 1891, and the Anglins deeded the church-and-cemetery land to trustees to serve Oakland and the neighboring communities. Now spanning five acres, the cemetery holds the graves of pioneer families and more than forty veterans of World Wars I and II, and it still serves the area today.

Terrell, TX

When the railroad made Terrell a town in 1873, residents soon needed a burial ground, and in 1878 land was sold for a community cemetery. A perpetual-care association formed in 1925, and the name Oakland Memorial Park was adopted in 1931. Among those resting here are the noted artist Frank Reaugh and twenty British Royal Air Force cadets killed while training near Terrell during World War II.

Somerville, TX

This Burleson County cemetery began in 1900 when J. W. Lauderdale bought land to bury his two-year-old son, and was renamed Oaklawn in 1913. Among its more than two thousand graves are 22 Civil War veterans, a cluster of children who died in 1900–1905, and victims of a 1903 typhoid epidemic. When the Somerville dam was built in 1963, sixteen people were reinterred here from other graveyards.

Raleigh, NC

Oakwood Cemetery, a few blocks east, holds some of North Carolina's most consequential dead, including governors Aycock, Bragg, Fowle, Holden, Swain, and Worth, alongside Confederate soldiers and other notables. Established in the Civil War era, it became a resting place for the state's political and military figures. Its grounds read like a roll call of North Carolina history.

Cisco, TX

Oakwood Cemetery in Cisco began by accident in 1883, when a family traveling to Fort Worth for lumber buried a stillborn son beneath an oak in their pasture. A cemetery association organized in 1899 fenced and beautified the grounds, and during the Depression the Works Progress Administration raised a 2,517-foot rock wall and a signature stone archway. Today more than 7,000 graves rest here, including over 600 veterans spanning the Civil War through Vietnam.

Tyler, TX

Tyler's Oakwood Cemetery began in the 1840s as Lollar's Cemetery on land first used for burials before Texas was a decade into statehood. It holds a raised section of Confederate dead from the Civil War, a separate Jewish Beth-el Cemetery, and the graves of many leading citizens, including a Texas Supreme Court justice and Governor Richard B. Hubbard, who later served as U.S. Ambassador to Japan. WPA crews expanded and improved the grounds in the 1930s.

Honey Grove, TX

Begun in 1846 as the Walcott Graveyard around the grave of Kentucky-born pioneer James G. Gilmer, this ground became a public cemetery when the Walcott family deeded it to the Honey Grove community. Beneath its oaks lie the town's founding families and more than 275 veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars, some memorialized because their bodies never came home. Members of the area's pre-Civil War enslaved community and later freed Black citizens are buried here as well.

Comanche, TX

When Texas redrew Comanche County in 1858 and moved its seat, land developer Captain John Duncan donated 200 acres in 1859 for a new townsite, setting aside ground for a graveyard, churches, and schools. Named Oakwood for its stand of oaks, the cemetery's earliest marked grave is a one-year-old boy who died in 1861, and it has since gathered pioneers, civic leaders, and veterans of every conflict from the Republic of Texas onward — including both Union and Confederate dead of the Civil War. The city has owned it as a community burying ground ever since.

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth pioneer John Peter Smith — later a mayor, civic leader, and philanthropist — founded this cemetery in 1879 with a gift of 20 acres, since grown to 100. Bringing together the Oakwood, Calvary, and Trinity grounds, it holds many of the city's and county's notable dead, with plots held by lodges, unions, and churches, and separate tracts for Union and Confederate soldiers. Its chapel dates to 1914.

Bertram, TX

This burial ground holds some of the earliest settlers of the Oatmeal community, with its oldest documented graves — a mother and her infant daughter — dating to 1854. Land was formally deeded for the cemetery in 1871, and it grew over the following century as an association took up its care. Among those laid to rest here are veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.

San Luis Obispo County, CA

In the small farming and dune town of Oceano on California's Central Coast, this memorial honors the local young men who died in World War II. Like thousands of rural American communities, Oceano sent a generation of its sons overseas between 1941 and 1945, and marked their loss with a permanent tribute at home.

Perryton, TX

When Jim McLarty and J. V. Stump fenced ninety acres for a cemetery in the town of Ochiltree in 1902, McLarty himself became its first occupant, killed at twenty-one in a fall from his horse. The county took the deed in 1927 and an association formed in 1930, and during the Depression the Works Progress Administration built its entry gate. Its graves hold veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Perryton, TX

Ochiltree County, in the Texas Panhandle, was carved from Young and Bexar territories, created in 1876 and formally organized in 1889. It honors William Beck Ochiltree (1811–1867), a Texas Supreme Court justice, treasury secretary, and the last attorney general of the Republic of Texas who later served in the legislature, backed secession in 1861, and became a Confederate colonel. The county seat moved from Ochiltree to Perryton in 1920.

Sherman, TX

Built in 1875, this Odd Fellows Hall was the third home of a Sherman lodge organized in 1854, and it doubled as the town's civic heart — opening a 74-student school a decade before Sherman had a public one. Its Civil War story is striking: at a June 1862 meeting, every member but one aging brother left to join the Confederate army, and the lodge kept that meeting formally 'open' until the war ended. From its ranks came three Grand Masters of Texas and a Sovereign Grand Master of the World.

Littlefield Township, MI

This memorial honors the men and women of Oden, a small community in Michigan's Emmet County, who served in the nation's armed forces. Like countless small-town veterans' memorials, it gathers the community's service across generations of wars into a single place of remembrance. It speaks to how rural America has long borne its share of military service.

Valley Mills, TX

Tennessee-born pioneer John Odle brought his family to this Bosque County country in 1856 and about 1860 raised a cabin of oak logs, living in it until he could build a sturdier rock house for his thirteen children. During the Civil War he rode with a frontier ranger company charged with guarding the settlements, fighting at the Battle of Dove Creek against the Kickapoo in January 1865. The surviving cabin is a rare relic of frontier homebuilding.

Orange, TX

Orange's position at a bend in the Sabine River beside vast pine forests made it a natural shipbuilding town, but by 1930 the timber was exhausted, the sawmills closed, and the Depression bore down. In 1940 Texas lawmakers secured a federal appropriation to build landing craft and destroyers there, establishing the Navy's Office of Supervisor of Shipbuilding and a sprawling yard operated largely by Consolidated Steel. Beginning in 1941 the yard launched the first warships built on the Gulf Coast for the U.S. government, ultimately producing 39 destroyers and 100 destroyer escorts during World War II.

Dallas, TX

On November 22, 1963, less than an hour after President Kennedy was assassinated at Dealey Plaza, Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit stopped a man walking through his Oak Cliff patrol area and was shot dead at this intersection by Lee Harvey Oswald. A citizen used Tippit's own radio to call for help, and the manhunt that followed led witnesses to trail Oswald into the nearby Texas Theatre, where he was arrested. Tippit, who left a wife and three children, was posthumously honored for valor and is remembered for the events his death set in motion.