Military & Wartime

Nacogdoches, TX

Set aside as a community graveyard in 1838—the same spring the Union Baptist Church, later the Old North Church, was organized—this burial ground reads like a ledger of early East Texas. Its more than 950 graves hold veterans of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Texas Revolution, alongside forty-seven Confederate and twenty-one Union soldiers, many of the latter lost to a Reconstruction-era dysentery epidemic. The cemetery was long divided, with an east section for the burials of enslaved people, many of them church members, which grew into a separate graveyard.

Weimar, TX

This quiet park in Weimar marks a spot that helped decide the Texas Revolution. Jesse Burnam opened a trading post here in 1820, and his ferry across the Colorado River sped Sam Houston's army toward San Jacinto in 1836 — after which Houston burned the crossing to slow Santa Anna's pursuit. The town that later rose here took its name from the Osage orange trees nearby, and in 1861 it became a Confederate recruiting center that raised most of Company A, 5th Texas Cavalry.

Shirley, MA

On the eve of the Revolution, Shirley was a young Massachusetts farming town, and its first settled minister, Phineas Whitney, made his home in this parsonage. In 1773 it welcomed a notable guest: John Hancock, one of Boston's most prominent patriots, who came to escort home his aunt, Madam Lydia Hancock, and Dorothy Quincy — the woman he would later marry. More than a century afterward, in 1906, the old house was moved to this site and given new life as the rectory of St. Anthony's Church.

Port Isabel, TX

Raised by the federal government in 1852, this lighthouse guided the busy commerce of the Rio Grande's mouth, where steamboats and coastal traders converged. Its light went dark during the Civil War and flickered in and out of service for decades before being permanently extinguished in 1905, a small monument to the rise and decline of Gulf maritime trade.

Exeter, NH

On the eve of the American Revolution, colonial towns built small, thick-walled 'powder houses' set safely apart from homes to store the community's gunpowder and munitions. This one went up in 1771 in Exeter, a town that would soon serve as New Hampshire's Revolutionary capital, where its provincial congress met and governed once royal authority collapsed. A marker like this points travelers across the river to the surviving structure—a modest building that speaks to how seriously townspeople took the business of arming and defending themselves in a tense pre-war decade.

San Antonio, TX

Early Spanish settlers first ground gunpowder here—charcoal from Hill Country wood, saltpeter scraped from bat guano in caves like Longhorn Cavern, and sulphur hauled by ox-cart from Mexico—to hunt game and defend against raids. The work was dangerous: even dampened powder sometimes sparked fires at the mill. During the Civil War the mill supplied powder to state troops, frontier defenders, and the home guard, worked by boys and men too old for military service.

Marshall, TX

This ground first served a Confederate gunpowder factory, and its burials began with enslaved people laid to rest on the mill's acreage. After the factory fell with the Confederacy in 1865, the land passed into private hands, and by 1880 a local mortician began recording graves here. The cemetery became the resting place of many of Marshall's Black leaders — educators, ministers, businesspeople, war veterans, and legislator David Abner among them.

Quintana, TX

Perched at the mouth of the Brazos River, Quintana passed through nearly every chapter of Texas history—an early village site, a port of entry under the Republic of Texas, and a strategic harbor during the Civil War. In the late 19th century it shipped cattle and cotton and blossomed into a fashionable summer colony, only to be largely swept away by the catastrophic 1900 hurricane. Today it endures as a quiet resort and fishing community.

Rio Grande City, TX

Kentucky-born Henry Clay Davis came to Texas in the late 1830s and served with Zachary Taylor's army during the Mexican-American War in 1846. Marrying into the prominent Garza family of the lower Rio Grande, he established a home around which Rio Grande City grew, fed by steamboat trade up from Brownsville and by the founding of nearby Ringgold Barracks in 1848. The town became the seat of Starr County.

Rio Grande City, TX

The hospital at Ringgold Barracks on the Rio Grande was a striking piece of frontier military architecture — Moorish in style, wrapped in wide porches trimmed with fifteen-foot arches, and built to the surgeon general's own plans. First occupied in November 1870, it cared for soldiers for seventy-five years until the post was inactivated in 1944. It is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Brownsboro, TX

The oldest grave in Old Rock Hill Cemetery is that of Thomas Clark, buried in 1851 on land still in the public domain, six years before A. J. Laymance received title to the surrounding survey. Here rest many of the pioneer families of the Horn Branch and Kickapoo Creek country, including namesake Martin Horn, a War of 1812 veteran and county commissioner, and Civil War soldiers. After bad-weather roads made the site unreachable, a new cemetery was opened nearby, and the last burial here came in 1913.

San Antonio, TX

Built about 1890 by builder T.R. Hertzberg to a design by architect M.T. Eckles, this late Victorian house was purchased in 1909 by Judge Sidney J. Brooks, first judge of the 57th District Court. His son, Sidney Brooks Jr., became one of the first U.S. cadets killed while training for World War I aviation duty in 1917. San Antonio's Brooks Air Force Base was named in the young flier's honor.

San Antonio, TX

The springs at Old San Pedro, five miles from the city, were a favored camping ground long used by U.S. troops during the Mexican War of 1846–48 and by picnickers and stump-speakers in the 1850s. When federal forces in Texas surrendered to the Confederacy in 1861, the site briefly held prisoners of war in dugouts and brush arbors. Thereafter it served as a staging camp for Confederate soldiers bound for the western frontier, the Arizona–New Mexico campaign, and camps of instruction for raw recruits.

Lott, TX

Organized on July 4, 1908, about 75 years after pioneers first opened the region, the Old Settlers Association of Falls County soon merged with the Willis L. Lang Camp of Confederate veterans, chartering a joint body in 1911 to honor pioneers and preserve Southern history. In 1912 it acquired a 17.9-acre reunion ground, and in 1936 relocated a historic log cabin there for pioneer memorabilia. A 1946 charter renamed it the Old Settlers and Veterans Association, opening its ranks to soldiers of later wars.

McKinney, TX

This McKinney ground hosted its first Collin County Fair in 1858 and, but for the Civil War years, an annual fair thereafter — a showcase of livestock, handicrafts, and grandstand riding competitions where, it is said, Frank James once took first prize. From 1883 the Ex-Confederate and Old Settlers Picnic Association gathered across the road, drawing as many as 15,000 people a day in the 1910s and 1920s for speeches, races, and even balloon ascensions and air shows. The last picnic was held in 1941, when Collin County's final Confederate veterans had grown too old to attend.

Kennard, TX

John Hallmark, a signer of the 1837 petition that called Houston County into being, died just three years after reaching Texas and was buried by his wife on land the family occupied but did not own. His son George, also a signer, lies here too, along with six Confederate veterans and Shadrack 'Shade' Carlton, killed in action in France in August 1918. Long lost to the public in its remote woods, the cemetery is now recorded and cared for by descendants and volunteers.

Boston, MA

This National Historic Landmark plaque honors Old South Church in Boston, whose congregation traces a long lineage in the city's civic and religious life. The present sanctuary, completed in 1875, is a celebrated example of Northern Italian Gothic architecture. The church's history connects to figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, and the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley, and to the ferment surrounding the Boston Tea Party.

Boston, MA

This plaque designates the Old South Meeting House, built in 1729, as a National Historic Landmark. As Boston's largest colonial building, it hosted the fiery mass meetings that preceded the Revolution — most famously the gathering on December 16, 1773, from which colonists marched to dump British tea into the harbor. The designation was made under the Historic Sites Act of 1935.

Mexia, TX

Set aside as a ten-acre burial ground when Moses Herrin platted Springfield in January 1838, this cemetery served the once-thriving Limestone County seat and the surrounding frontier. Its oldest legible stone dates to 1849, and among those laid to rest are veterans of the Texas War for Independence, the Mexican War, and other conflicts, along with travelers who died far from home — including a New Yorker recorded as slain in 1854 violence over his gold. Long after the railroad bypassed Springfield in 1870 and fire hastened its decline, descendants kept returning to bury their dead beside pioneer forebears.

Scott Township, PA · est. 2001

After the French and Indian War, veteran Maj. William Lea founded this congregation on his land grant, making it the oldest Episcopal church in southwestern Pennsylvania, with Francis Reno as first vicar. Its members included Gen. John Neville, the deeply unpopular federal tax collector whose office helped spark the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion that convulsed the surrounding country. A revival of interest in 1852 produced the stone church that stands today, home to an 1823 English pipe organ said to be the first carried over the Alleghenies.

Frankfort, KY

Kentucky's third capitol, built of Kentucky River marble in 1827-1829 after fire claimed its two predecessors, introduced the Greek Revival style to the state through architect Gideon Shryock, whose self-supporting circular stone stairway remains its marvel. To speed construction, penitentiary keeper Joel Scott invented a wire saw to cut the rough stone. It served as the seat of government for eighty years and witnessed history's turns — Daniel and Rebecca Boone lay in state here in 1845, Confederate forces captured it in 1862, and Gov. William Goebel was assassinated on its grounds in 1900.

DuBois, PA · est. 1955

Opened to the Allegheny River in 1804, the Old State Road was the first route to Pennsylvania's northwestern frontier, and in this section it traced the course of the older Chinklacamoose Path used by Native travelers. During the War of 1812 it carried troops under Major McClellan toward the fighting at Erie. Where the modern highway crosses here, it meets the line of that pioneering road.

Matamoras, PA · est. 1948

Around 1740, when the upper Delaware valley was a raw and contested frontier, Dutch settler Simon Westfael raised a sturdy stone house here that neighbors could flee to when violence flared. Structures like this doubled as homes and fortifications in an era when European farming families lived amid the tensions of frontier warfare. Local memory long called it the Old Stone Fort, or Fort Matamoras.

Nacogdoches, TX

Around 1788–91, civic and military leader Don Antonio Gil Y'Barbo built a stone house at the crossing of El Camino Real and La Calle del Norte, its walls quarried from local glauconite. Over the next century the building served as home, store, courthouse, jail, saloon, and fortress against filibustering raids, and Sam Houston opened his first Texas law office here in 1833. Demolished in 1902, its stones were reused for a faithful replica built in 1936 on the Stephen F. Austin campus.

Leavenworth, KS

This stone wall dates to 1827, the founding year of the military post that became Fort Leavenworth, and reflects the frontier fortifications raised in the earliest days of the U.S. Army's westward presence. Built during a period of tension between the government and Plains nations, it stands as a physical trace of the fort's origins on the edge of settled America.

San Marcos, TX

James Gray Storey (1830–1911) was one of Hays County's most active public servants, serving as district clerk, county judge, and state legislator, and commanding Company A of the 32nd Texas Cavalry during the Civil War. He was county clerk in 1890 when he and his wife Sarah built this home. The house was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1970.

Chester, PA · est. 1954

This ground in Chester marks the site of the first St. Paul's Episcopal Church, built in 1702 in one of Pennsylvania's oldest settlements with roots in New Sweden. Just south lies the grave of John Morton, the Pennsylvania delegate whose vote helped tip the colony toward independence and who signed the Declaration of Independence.

Surfside, TX

During the Civil War, the port of Velasco at the mouth of the Brazos River was fortified with troops and eight gun batteries to shelter the blockade runners vital to the Confederacy. Slipping in on dark, smooth nights and burning smokeless hard coal to outrun Federal patrols, these runners traded Texas cotton for European guns, ammunition, and medicine. Texas coastal defenders kept Union vessels—forced to sail to New Orleans for fresh water and supplies—away from the shore, making Velasco one of the South's busiest and most dramatic ports.

Waco, TX

Built around 1853 of locally made Waco sand brick, this Texas take on Greek Revival style was the work of James Walker and his son W. C. Walker. Both men were veterans of the Battle of San Jacinto, the 1836 clash that won Texas its independence. Their home is remembered as the first brick house in the rural part of the county.

Evergreen, TX

Settled largely by Alabamans between 1835 and the 1850s, Waverly took its name from Sir Walter Scott's wildly popular novels and became an early center of culture for the region. Its Waverly Institute, founded in 1854 with separate departments for boys and girls, aimed to offer schooling equal to any. A plantation society flourished until the 1860s, and during the Civil War Federal troops camped in the community's heart on Soldier's Hill.

Winnsboro, TX

Among the oldest burial grounds in East Texas, this cemetery holds the graves of early sawmill owners, pioneer ministers, and country doctors who built up the Winnsboro area from the mid-19th century onward. Its dead include veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and both World Wars, marking generations of local service.

Forksville, PA · est. 1951

A short distance southeast along Loyalsock Creek, Samuel Rogers, Jr. established a factory in 1810 that put the region's water power to work. During the War of 1812 it wove kersey — a coarse, sturdy woolen cloth — to clothe American soldiers, tying this remote valley to the national war effort. A flood in 1816 halted the works, cutting short one of the area's earliest industrial ventures.

Zapata County, TX

This marker recalls the founding of Old Zapata, whose settlers came in 1770 from Revilla, one of the Spanish colonial towns established along the Rio Grande under José de Escandón's colonization of Nuevo Santander. A nearby Spanish fort guarded the frontier village, and in 1842 the ill-fated Texian soldiers of the Mier Expedition passed through, foraging as they marched toward a disastrous defeat in Mexico. The site layers Spanish colonial settlement over the turbulent border conflicts of the young Texas republic.

Jacksonville, TX

Begun in Texas colonial style in 1857, this house was largely built in 1874 by W.A. Brown, a veteran of Nathan Bedford Forrest's Confederate cavalry, using hand-sawn heart pine, square nails, and brick of local iron-ore clay. Victorian additions followed in the 1890s, and a resident craftsman built its fine walnut staircase. It was the boyhood home of "Lem" Brown, a merchant and author of a local history.

Boys Ranch, TX

Carved from Young and Bexar lands and created in 1876, Oldham County was organized in 1881 in the far Texas Panhandle. It honors Williamson Simpson Oldham, an Arkansas lawyer and jurist who served in the Confederate Senate representing Texas. Its first county seat was Tascosa, a rowdy cow-town of the open range, before the seat moved to Vega in 1915.

Palestine, TX

Settlers from the Brushy Creek country of South Carolina reached this part of Anderson County in the 1850s, carrying the name with them to the local streams and community. By 1858 a one-room building served as church and school, with an adjoining graveyard whose earliest marked burial dates to 1856. Among those interred are pioneer families and veterans, including James Eastland, who fought in the Mexican and Civil Wars and later sat in the Texas Legislature.

Mentone, TX

Kentucky-born Oliver Loving came to Texas in 1845 to farm, freight, and deal in cattle, and in 1858 drove a herd all the way to Chicago—the first time Texas cattle reached a northern market. With Charles Goodnight after the Civil War, in which he served as a Confederate beef contractor, he blazed the route to New Mexico that bears their names. Wounded by Comanches on the trail in 1867, he died of gangrene at Fort Sumner; Goodnight packed his body home for burial, and Loving County was named in his honor in 1887.

Cleburne, TX

Oliver Perry Arnold's life traces the arc of frontier Texas: a South Carolina native who came west in 1847, chased the California gold rush for six years, then settled in Johnson County to raise livestock and a family of twelve. He took up arms in 1861 with a Confederate regiment and later kept the peace as county sheriff through the tumultuous 1870s, capping his career by founding the county's park and fair association.

Hampden Township, PA · est. 2018

A Scots-Irish immigrant, Oliver Pollock built a merchant fortune — in part through the slave trade — and poured the modern equivalent of millions into the American Revolution. Convinced that the young nation's future lay in the West, he worked to open trade along the Mississippi River, channeling arms and supplies to the frontier and financing George Rogers Clark's Illinois Campaign. The crushing debts he took on for the cause led to imprisonment and the loss of much of his wealth; he spent his later years, from 1792 to 1806, living here in Cumberland County.

Lindale, TX

In the summer of 1839 the young Republic of Texas waged war on the Cherokee and allied tribes living in its eastern reaches, culminating in the Battle of the Neches in mid-July. Nearby, on Burleson Lake, stood the last camp of the Republic's army under generals Douglass, Rusk, and Burleson before Secretary of War Albert Sidney Johnston ordered it mustered out. From here the soldiers departed for home on July 25, leaving behind a campaign that drove the Cherokees from Texas.

Milwaukee, WI

In May 1921, the Milwaukee County chapter of the American War Mothers dedicated a stand of trees to the local men who had died on land and at sea in the World War. Living memorials of trees were a common and tender form of remembrance after 1918, chosen by grieving mothers and communities as a growing tribute to a generation lost. The dedication speaks to the raw, recent grief of a nation still counting its war dead.

Anahuac, TX

On this bluff first called Perry's Point, General Manuel Mier y Terán established a fort in 1830, naming it Anahuac after the Aztec name for Mexico City. The post was meant to halt Anglo-American colonization, but the imprisonment of settlers from Stephen F. Austin's colony provoked the first open rebellion against Mexican rule in 1832.

Banquete, TX

Fort Lipantitlán was a Mexican garrison thrown up in 1831 along the Nueces to choke off further Anglo-American colonization. When the Texas Revolution erupted, Texan volunteers under Ira Westover seized the earthwork in November 1835, and in 1842 a small garrison held it against a far larger force led by General Antonio Canales. The state acquired the ground in 1937 through a donation from the Bluntzer heirs.

San Felipe, TX

San Felipe de Austin was the unofficial capital of Anglo Texas, the seat of Stephen F. Austin's colony — and this was the only home Austin, the "Father of Texas," ever owned in the region. In March 1836, as Santa Anna's army advanced during the Texas Revolution, Texans deliberately burned San Felipe to deny it to the enemy, and Austin's house went up with the town. The scorched-earth retreat was part of the desperate "Runaway Scrape" that preceded the victory at San Jacinto.

Ozona, TX

Established by the U.S. Army in 1855 above the junction of Live Oak Creek and the Pecos River, Fort Lancaster guarded travelers and mail on the long overland road between San Antonio and the far West. Garrisoned by the Second Cavalry, it was abandoned in March 1861 after Texas seceded from the Union, then briefly reoccupied by federal troops in 1868. Nearby, the deep ruts of one of the most-used pioneer fords of the Pecos are still visible where wagon wheels dragged down the hillside.

Banquete, TX

This roadside marker points to the site of Fort Lipantitlán, a mile to the northeast, where Mexican soldiers garrisoned the Nueces frontier beginning in 1831. Texan volunteers under Captain Ira Westover captured the post in November 1835 during the Texas Revolution, and in 1842 it withstood an attack led by General Antonio Canales. The state raised the marker in 1936, the centennial of Texas independence.

La Porte, TX

Nathaniel Lynch, one of Austin's "Old Three Hundred," established a ferry in 1822 where Buffalo Bayou meets the San Jacinto River, charging a few cents to carry travelers and stock across. In the spring of 1836, as settlers fled the advancing Mexican army in the "Runaway Scrape," hundreds crossed here, the prairie thick with wagons and tents. Days later, at the nearby Battle of San Jacinto, Santa Anna — hoping to cut off the Texan retreat at this very ferry — was instead defeated, and a modern ferry still runs at the site today.

Camp Verde, TX

Established by the U.S. Army in 1855, this frontier post became the headquarters of one of the nineteenth century's most unusual experiments: a herd of camels imported at the urging of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to test overland transport across the arid Southwest. The scheme proved impractical, and the post changed hands with the times — surrendered to the Confederacy in 1861, reoccupied by the U.S. Army in 1865, and abandoned in 1869.

Fieldton, TX

In the summer of 1872, Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie of the U.S. Army marched 240 men and eight officers along the draw near this spot as part of the Army's campaign to force Native peoples off the Texas frontier. His swift, secret movement toward New Mexico aimed to break up a network of traders who paid Indians to raid settlers' cattle and horses. The track his soldiers beat across the plains served later scouts and settlers and is still remembered as Mackenzie's Trail.

Del Rio, TX

From Laughlin Air Force Base near Del Rio, Strategic Air Command and CIA crews flew high-altitude U-2 and RB-57 aircraft on secret Cold War reconnaissance. In October 1962 their cameras captured the Soviet missile sites in Cuba that touched off the Cuban Missile Crisis, and under 'Operation Brass Knob' U-2s photographed nearly all of the island. The crisis peaked on October 27 when a surface-to-air missile downed Maj. Rudolf Anderson Jr., the confrontation's only combat death.

Malden, MA

This memorial honors Lance Corporal Garvin, remembered here as 'Eddy' and as the community's first service member to fall in Operation Enduring Freedom, the American campaign in Afghanistan launched after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Dedicating everyday public spaces — a ballfield, a playground, a set of tennis courts — to fallen hometown heroes is a long American way of keeping a name alive in the places where neighbors gather. Here, a young Marine's sacrifice is woven into the daily life of Malden.

Lometa, TX

In the spring of 1952, at the height of early Cold War anxiety over communism and nuclear attack, the U.S. Army and Air Force staged Operation Long Horn across the Texas Hill Country—one of the largest war games ever held on American soil. More than 115,000 troops swarmed ranches whose owners had signed easements, simulating an invasion, an atomic strike, and a massive airborne drop pitting infantry and armor against the 82nd Airborne. Aggressor forces even "captured" nearby Lampasas before the mock war ended, swelling little Lometa from 900 people to 22,000.

New Haven, CT

The stern motto carved here — 'Opposition to tyrants is obedience to God' — echoes a Revolutionary-era American ideal, a version of a sentiment famously proposed for the national seal in 1776 and embraced by generations who held that resistance to unjust power was a sacred duty. Set on a monument dated 1896, the words carried that founding conviction into the Gilded Age, when Americans often looked back to the founders' language of liberty.

Canton, TX

Oran M. Roberts came to Texas from Alabama in 1841 and became one of its most consequential public men — a judge who presided over the secession convention in 1861, a Confederate colonel, a state Supreme Court justice, and, from 1878, governor. In retirement he taught law at the new University of Texas and helped found the Texas State Historical Association in 1895. His career bridges the Old South, the Confederacy, and the making of modern Texas institutions.

Orange, TX

After Texas voters approved secession in 1861, Orange County raised three companies for Confederate service and later added coast-guard and state-troop units for local defense. Lying just ten miles from Camp Pleasant across the Louisiana line, the county became a link in the Confederate supply route, gaining a post office, a supply depot, and a military hospital as fears of a Federal coastal attack mounted in 1863. Local readiness helped deter Union forces at the Battle of Sabine Pass, and after the 1865 surrender occupation troops of the 37th Illinois arrived and Reconstruction began.

Orlando, FL · est. 1924

Erected in 1924, just a few years after the guns fell silent in Europe, this memorial gathers the names of Orange County's sons who died in what its generation simply called "the World War" — the First World War. Communities across America raised such monuments in the 1920s, transforming private grief into public remembrance on courthouse lawns and town squares. The phrase "Lest we forget" was the era's watchword for a war meant to end all wars.

Lubbock, TX

Charles Lindbergh's 1927 solo Atlantic flight set off a nationwide aviation fever, and Lubbock answered by buying land north of town and completing a stylish art deco brick hangar in 1930. A WPA grant paved concrete runways in 1938, and as the nation edged toward World War II the city handed the field to the Army, where the South Plains Army Airfield trained glider pilots for the USAAF from 1942 to 1945. The city reclaimed the airport after the war and opened a new terminal in 1950.

Huntsville, TX

The whimsical "Steamboat House" — built in the 1850s and named for its double-decker resemblance to a riverboat — is best remembered as the place where Sam Houston died. Removed from the governorship for refusing to swear loyalty to the Confederacy, the aging hero of Texas independence rented the house and died there of pneumonia in July 1863. The home passed through Bailey, Kittrell, and Goree hands before being moved in 1936 to the Sam Houston Memorial Museum grounds.

Fort Worth, TX

A Fort Worth auto mechanic before the First World War, Ormer Locklear enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Service in 1917 and became a flight instructor famous for heart-stopping precision stunts, including walking from wing to wing in midair. He left the Army in 1919 for the barnstorming and Hollywood stunt-flying circuit, thrilling crowds and cameras alike. In 1920 he was killed filming a night dive for "The Skywayman" when studio lights are believed to have blinded him, and the fatal plunge appeared in the finished movie.

Crawford, TX

Settlers of the Osage community began burying their dead here around the mid-1870s, and the ground was formally platted as a cemetery in 1885. For decades it was privately owned by the Kimbell family before passing to a community association in 1970. Among its more than 800 marked and unmarked graves lie the area's pioneer founders and veterans of the Civil War, both World Wars, and the Korean War.