Military & Wartime

North York, PA · est. 1949

Philip Livingston, a wealthy New York merchant, put his name to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and continued to serve in the Continental Congress until his death in June 1778, while Congress was meeting in York. He was buried here, hundreds of miles from home, a casualty of the demands of wartime public service. His grave lies about 300 feet west of this spot.

Austin, TX

Philip Walker was one of the soldiers who reached San Jacinto in April 1836, the decisive battle that secured Texas independence. Born in South Carolina in 1815, he lived out his life in Texas and died in Johnson County in 1897.

Ennis, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1813, Phillip R. Pierce came to Texas and took up arms in the war for independence as a member of the Madisonville Cavalry, Texas Volunteers. He lived out his days in Ellis County, dying in 1891. The state erected this marker to his service in 1962.

West Columbia vicinity, TX

Zeno Phillips was one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred," the first legal Anglo-American colonists in Texas, and he and his brothers took up land here and served in the Republic of Texas Army. The cemetery began in 1835 with the burials of Zeno and his brother John. Later generations of the family were laid to rest at Waverly Place before the land passed out of Phillips hands in 1887.

Liberty Township, PA · est. 1966

In July 1780, as the Revolution's violence spilled across the Pennsylvania frontier, Captain William Phillips and eleven men of his militia company were captured near this spot by a Native war party. Ten were killed and later buried by a search party, while Phillips and his son Elijah were taken prisoner and not freed until the British released them at war's end.

Phillipston, MA

This monument honors a living American Liberty Elm planted in tribute to Boston's original Liberty Tree. On August 14, 1765, colonists in Boston hung effigies of a stamp officer and a British official from a great elm near the Common, launching a wave of protest against Parliament's Stamp Act. That tree became the rallying point for the Sons of Liberty, and elms and poles like it sprang up across the colonies as living emblems of resistance to taxation without representation.

Phoenixville, PA · est. 2005

For more than two centuries the ironworks at Phoenixville turned Schuylkill Valley ore and skill into the hard goods of a growing nation — nails and rail in the early years, then cannons and armor as the country went to war. The Griffen Gun of 1861 and the patented Phoenix Column of 1862 made the works a byword for American iron engineering, and its structural steel later helped raise buildings and bridges nationwide. The plant ran from the era of the young republic until it finally closed in 1987.

Plum, PA

This site in Plum, Pennsylvania once held a battery of a dozen Nike Ajax missile launchers, part of the ring of air-defense installations that guarded Pittsburgh's steel-making region during the early Cold War. Operational from 1955 to 1960, it belonged to a nationwide network built to shoot down Soviet bombers before they could reach America's industrial heartland. The launchers are long gone, but the ground where they stood recalls a tense chapter of homeland defense.

Manor, PA

At this location in Manor, Pennsylvania stood a Cold War Nike missile battery, its launchers later upgraded from the Ajax to the longer-range, nuclear-capable Hercules. Active from 1955 into 1968, it was one link in the chain of anti-aircraft sites encircling the Pittsburgh industrial area against the threat of Soviet air attack. Its long service life traces the evolution of American air defense across the height of the Cold War.

Millhousen, IN

This monument honors Corporal Lester Louis Picker of a bombardment squadron, born in 1919 and killed in action on November 12, 1942, in the first full year of American combat in World War II. Across small towns like Millhousen, families sent their sons into a global war, and communities raised markers to those who did not return. Picker was one of the many young Americans lost in the war's early, costly campaigns.

Marietta, OH

This stone marks the southern corner of the palisaded, or "picketed," defensive point where Marietta's early settlers sheltered during the Indian War of 1791–1795 — the frontier fighting that followed the founding of Ohio's first permanent American settlement. Behind such stockades families lived under threat during years of conflict between the new settlers and the Native nations of the Ohio country. The Woman's Centennial Association placed the marker in 1903, and its reverse recalls the Marquis de Lafayette's landing at Marietta.

Graford, TX

Capt. William Carroll McAdams left Tennessee for Texas in the 1840s, rangered on the frontier, and fought in the Mexican War before he and his wife Ann settled this land in 1854 to raise cattle. The burial ground that grew up here served the Pickwick community, later drowned beneath Possum Kingdom Lake, and in 1940 gathered in graves relocated from Carter Bend Cemetery ahead of the reservoir.

Picture Rocks, PA

In the small Loyalsock Creek village of Picture Rocks, tucked into the wooded ridges of Lycoming County, this memorial gathers the community's remembrance of the men and women who served in the nation's armed forces. Towns like this across rural Pennsylvania raised such monuments so that neighbors who left the valley for distant wars—and those who did not return—would keep a permanent place at the heart of local life. The simple pledge "Never Forgotten" speaks to that enduring bond between a small place and its service members.

Gatesville vicinity, TX

Serving the ranching communities of Pidcoke and Harman, this cemetery dates to at least 1885, when six-year-old Mattie Jeter was buried here after a fatal fall from a wagon. Local landowners deeded the ground formally in 1896, and generations of the founding families lie here, their stock-raising economy sustaining the area until the 1942 creation of Camp Hood forced many families to relocate. Among the graves are veterans of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

Greensboro, NC

Built between 1862 and 1864 to serve the Confederacy, the Piedmont Railroad closed a crucial gap between Greensboro and Danville, Virginia. In the war's final years the line became a vital supply artery for Confederate armies—and in 1865 the route taken by Jefferson Davis's fleeing government as the Confederacy collapsed. Its terminus stood nearby.

Galveston, TX

This stretch of Galveston waterfront has carried nearly every current of Gulf history — Jean Lafitte's pirate ships, the Republic of Texas Navy, Confederate marine assaults that broke Federal occupation in 1863, and, so the story goes, Prohibition-era rum runners. In calmer years it became the berth of the Mosquito Fleet, small fishing boats named for their insect-like profiles. Their crews blended Asian and European fishing customs into a distinctly American trade, still honored in the yearly blessing of the fleet.

Piketon, OH

Piketon, the seat of Pike County in south-central Ohio, carries the name of Zebulon Montgomery Pike, the army officer and explorer best remembered for the 1806 expedition that gave Pike's Peak its name. By the War of 1812 Pike had risen to brigadier general, and on April 27, 1813, he was leading American troops in the assault on York (present-day Toronto) in Upper Canada when a retreating British garrison detonated its powder magazine. The blast mortally wounded Pike, and he died soon after — reportedly with a captured enemy flag beneath his head. Ohioans laying out this county and town in the war's aftermath honored the fallen general by attaching his name to the land.

Pilot Grove, TX

Founded in the early 1850s on the Bonham-McKinney stage line and first nicknamed Lick Skillet, this Grayson County community was renamed Pilot Grove in 1858. It became the flashpoint of the Lee-Peacock feud (1865–1871), a bitter Reconstruction-era conflict between former Confederate captain Bob Lee and Union supporter Lewis Peacock. Even after Lee was killed in 1865, his followers fought on until Peacock too was shot.

Flatonia, TX

Pin Oak Cemetery's first, now-unmarked, burials were two soldiers who died here after the 1842 Battle of Salado Creek near San Antonio, and its oldest marked grave is that of Lee F.T. Cottle, who died in 1845. Set on land once held by the Routh family, the ground served the neighboring Black Jack Springs and Pin Oak communities and carries both names. A cemetery association more than a century old has cared for graves that include Republic of Texas-era settlers, enslaved people, and veterans of the War of 1812, the Texas Revolution, and the Civil War.

Gause, TX

Stretching along Pin Oak Creek, this cemetery served a farming settlement whose earliest families, many related and drawn from Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, and Alabama, were in place by the 1850s. Walker P. Perkins deeded the land to trustees in 1896, though the earliest known burials, of Charles Shafer and James D. Faubion, date to 1861, and older unmarked graves may lie beneath. Its obelisks, curbing, and veterans' graves reach back to the Civil War, and the community declined after World War II as families moved to the cities.

Cooke Township, PA · est. 2011

Deep in the Michaux forest, on a site that once served an 18th-century iron furnace and later a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, the U.S. War Department ran a secret World War II interrogation center — one of only three in the country. Behind its fences, military intelligence officers questioned thousands of German and Japanese prisoners, drawing out details about enemy weapons and operations. After the war the quiet clearing found a gentler use as a church camp.

Town of Shandaken, NY

In the Catskill hamlet of Pine Hill, this honor roll records the local men who left their mountain community to serve in the armed forces during World War I and World War II. Honor rolls became a fixture of American towns in the early twentieth century — a public ledger of service that neighbors passed by every day. The modest monument ties a small upstate village to the nation's greatest conflicts.

Garland, TX

This Garland burial ground grew out of the churchyard of Duck Creek Methodist Church, organized in the 1850s, and gathered sections laid out by the local Masonic and Knights of Pythias lodges. Its oldest marked graves date to the 1870s, though earlier death dates appear on stones moved here from another cemetery. Beneath its turf lie officeholders, victims of a 1927 tornado, and veterans of every American conflict from the War of 1812 to Vietnam.

Lexington, KY

In the summer of 1775, long hunters ranging through the Kentucky wilderness made camp at a spring on this ground and, hearing that the first shots of the Revolution had been fired at Lexington, Massachusetts, borrowed that name for their bivouac. The camp they christened would grow into the city of Lexington, one of the earliest permanent settlements west of the Appalachians. This tablet was placed by the city's citizens in 1925, on the 150th anniversary of that naming, to mark where the story began.

Lexington, TX

Born in Tennessee in 1811, David Ervin Lawhon learned the printing trade young and came to Nacogdoches in 1835 to answer the call for volunteers in the Texas struggle for independence. Pressed into service, he printed the "Texean and Emigrant's Guide" along with war proclamations, handbills, and patriotic songs for the revolutionary army of 1835–36. In the decades that followed he turned frontiersman, ranger captain, and judge, serving as a county chief justice during the days of the Republic before his death in 1884.

Fort Worth, TX

This burial ground began in the summer of 1850 with the deaths of two young children of Major Ripley A. Arnold, commander of the troops at frontier Fort Worth, when his friend Dr. Adolphus Gouhenant set aside three acres for graves. A cemetery association expanded the grounds in 1871, and the site became the resting place of many of Fort Worth's earliest settlers, including some seventy-five Civil War veterans. Among those buried here are Major Arnold and General Edward H. Tarrant, for whom Tarrant County is named.

Lock Haven, PA · est. 2024

What began as the Taylor Brothers company in 1927 became an American aviation giant after William T. Piper bought the firm and moved it to Lock Haven in 1937. At its height Piper Aircraft employed more than 2,000 people and built nearly 77,000 general-aviation planes here, including some 20,000 of the iconic yellow J-3 Cub. During World War II, thousands of Cubs were adapted into L-4 Grasshoppers that trained pilots and flew reconnaissance for the U.S. Army.

Muldoon, TX

The Muldoon area traces its name to Father Miguel Muldoon, who held a Spanish land grant here in the 1830s, and settlers steadily filled the county through the century. In 1871 Methodist trustees bought land for a church and burial ground, and the graves that followed hold a cross-section of frontier Texas—San Jacinto veteran Simon Peter Ford, Civil War soldiers, pioneer families, and James Chambers Coulson, the English stonemason whose "Muldoon Blue" sandstone went into the Galveston Seawall and buildings across the state. An old Baptist church moved to the grounds in the 1940s still serves for funerals and meetings.

Pittsburg, TX

This burying ground was begun by William Harrison Pitts, the founder of Pittsburg, with the 1862 grave of his wife Sarah. The Pitts family had left their Georgia plantations to reestablish themselves on the Texas frontier in the mid-nineteenth century, and the plot soon held a Confederate corporal, Pitts's mother, and several of his siblings. Their arrival helped shape the young community of Camp County.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1946

When British General John Forbes captured the smoldering ruins of French Fort Duquesne in 1758, he renamed the strategic point where three rivers meet in honor of British statesman William Pitt. The little town laid out in 1764 sat at the literal doorway to the trans-Appalachian frontier, and by the time it became a city in 1816 it was already funneling settlers and goods westward. In the century that followed, its furnaces and mills earned it a global reputation as the steel capital of the world.

Forest Hills, PA · est. 1946

The forks of the Ohio, where the Allegheny and Monongahela join, were among the most fought-over ground in colonial America. After General John Forbes forced the French to abandon Fort Duquesne in 1758, the point was renamed for William Pitt, laid out as a town in 1764, and chartered as a city in 1816. From that frontier outpost grew the steelmaking colossus that supplied the nation's rails, bridges, and armaments.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2000

Founded in Pittsburgh by Grant McCargo in 1885, this plant became a major producer of the lubricating grease that kept American industry, railroads, and machinery running. Its most storied contribution came during World War II, when it supplied five million pounds of "Eisenhower grease" deemed vital to the war effort. Absorbed into Standard Oil of New Jersey after 1929, the works kept operating until 1999 — more than a century of quiet but essential industrial labor.

Pittston, PA · est. 1947

Begun in 1772 by Connecticut proprietors settling the contested Wyoming Valley, Pittston Fort sheltered families on the west bank of the Susquehanna. Caught up in the British and Loyalist descent on the valley, it was forced to surrender on July 4, 1778, and partly destroyed—only to be rebuilt in 1780 and manned through the rest of the Revolutionary War.

Fulshear, TX

Planters wary of the flood-prone Brazos bottoms settled Pittsville on the open prairie in the 1840s, naming it for storekeepers A. R. and Amanda Pitts. By 1860 it was a thriving commercial hub, and during the Civil War local home guard and Confederate cavalry—among them men who helped retake Galveston—camped nearby. When a new railroad bypassed the town to the south in 1888, trade drifted to the newly founded Fulshear, and Pittsville faded away by the late 1940s.

Chatham, VA

Standing on the courthouse grounds in Chatham, this monument honors the Confederate soldiers from Pittsylvania County who died during the Civil War of 1861–1865. Like hundreds of similar memorials raised across the South, it was erected in the decades after the war—largely through the efforts of memorial associations and groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy—during the era when the "Lost Cause" narrative shaped how white Southerners remembered the conflict. Its inscribed verses frame the dead as heroes who "died for truth and right," language that reflects that commemorative movement rather than a neutral account of the war's causes.

San Antonio, TX

Placido Olivarri, born in San Antonio in 1815, served as a guide to the Texas Army in 1835 during the opening campaigns of the Texas Revolution. A Tejano who knew the country intimately, he lent that knowledge to the cause of Texas independence. The state marked his grave, alongside that of his wife Micaela, during the 1936 centennial.

Newton County, AR

This plaque in the Arkansas Ozarks remembers five servicemen killed when a B-25 bomber crashed on February 6, 1948. In the years just after World War II, the military continued flying twin-engine aircraft like the B-25 Mitchell on training and transport missions, and mechanical failures and mountainous terrain claimed crews far from any battlefield. The marker names the pilot, co-pilot, crew chief, and passengers who died in the Newton County hills.

Hempsted, TX

Edwin Waller lived on this Hempstead-area property, acquired during the Republic, from 1846 for many years. His public life bracketed the era's great turning points: a member of the 1835 Consultation and a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, he went on to serve as the first mayor of Austin. In 1861 he sat as a member of the Secession Convention, tying his long career to Texas's entry into the Civil War.

Platte City, MO

On Veterans Day 1994, VFW Post 4055 dedicated a 155mm howitzer on the courthouse grounds of Platte City to honor the men and women of Platte County who served in the armed forces. Displaying a retired field gun as a community war memorial is a long American tradition, turning a weapon of war into a place of gratitude and remembrance.

Gonzales, TX

When Gonzales was laid out as a four-league town tract, its inner city held 49 squares, seven of them reserved for public use. This particular square was meant for a municipal building but instead became a public plaza. Today it bears the name Texas Heroes Square, honoring the men of Gonzales who took up arms in the Texas Revolution.

San Antonio, TX

First explored by Spaniards in 1691, this plaza became the site of the Presidio of Bexar and for years was ringed on three sides by adobe fortifications. It witnessed executions of captured rebels during the Mexican independence struggle of 1813 and, in quieter times, teemed as a raucous market of oxcarts, vendors, guitarists, and the famed "Chili Queens" serving Mexican food at open-air stands. Though City Hall rose here in 1892 and its military and market roles faded, the ancient plaza remains the municipal heart of San Antonio.

New York, NY

In the bitter winter of 1944, German forces launched their last great offensive on the Western Front, striking through the snow-covered Ardennes forest and bulging deep into Allied lines — the shape that gave the Battle of the Bulge its name. American soldiers, often outnumbered and surrounded, held key crossroads and eventually turned the assault back, in what became one of the largest and costliest engagements U.S. forces fought in Europe. This Staten Island plaza was dedicated on December 16, 2001 — the anniversary of the day that battle began — naming a piece of the New York cityscape in honor of the men who endured it.

Princeton, TX

Pleasant Grove Cemetery took its first burial in 1891 with Malissa Sides, believed to be half Native American and a survivor, with her Cherokee half-sister, of the U.S. government's removal of the tribe. The pair came to Collin County from Indian Territory, and later that year a Methodist family donated the land — including Mrs. Sides' grave — as a public burial ground. Among its thousand-plus graves lie 141 infants, testament to harsh pioneer life, alongside Confederate and other war veterans.

Coryell County, TX

After Fort Gates closed in 1853, soldiers like Irish-born Hugh Sheridan and families such as the Browns and Powells settled the Leon River lowlands and named their community for its groves of post oak. They built a school district, held farmers' union meetings and a Democratic club, and buried their dead in ground Walter Worthington deeded in 1899 "to be used...as a graveyard forever." The graves range from an 1867 burial to veterans of every war from the Civil War through World War II.

Pleasant Grove, TX

Shaded by live oaks along Simms Creek, Pleasant Grove was settled after the Civil War by veterans of both the Union and Confederate armies, who put their old enmities aside to build a community. The cemetery opened in 1876 with the burial of Tom Berry's young daughter, and alongside it stood a Methodist church and a school; today more than 400 graves, many unmarked, hold the area's early settlers.

Fulshear, TX

In 1910, land from the Mason Briscoe estate passed to the Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church, and by about 1930 the ground behind the sanctuary was serving as a community cemetery. The first marked grave, that of Will Brown, dates to 1933, though unmarked burials may reach back earlier. The site once held a school and church as well, and its many handmade concrete markers and veterans' graves reflect a close-knit rural community.

Nolanville, TX

One of Bell County's oldest cemeteries, Pleasant Hill has received burials since 1855, beginning on the farm of Missouri-born pioneer Fleming Trigg Cox. Cox descendants formally deeded the grounds in 1907, and a cemetery association organized in 1901 has cared for it ever since, gathering each June beneath a tabernacle raised that same year. Its graves hold veterans from the Mexican War through Vietnam alongside the hard-working families who first settled western Bell County.

Nevada, TX

This burial ground, also known as South Church Cemetery, grew up beside Pleasant Hill Baptist Church, formed after a congregation near Lavon and Farmersville split in 1882. The Gooch family sold the land for both church and graveyard, and among those laid to rest are veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War. The church disbanded in 1947, and by 1950 the cemetery had ceased active burials.

Silverton, TX

Civil War veteran Pleasant Lafayette Crawford built this Queen Anne home, with its inviting wraparound porch, in 1904 on the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle. He had come from Arkansas in the late 1880s to buy ranch land and open a mercantile store, and his family followed by covered wagon to join him. One of Silverton's founders, Crawford opened the town's first hotel in 1894, and his family kept the house until 1917.

Buffalo Springs vicinity, TX

The community of Pleasant Valley grew up in the years after the Civil War, its one-room schoolhouse doubling as a church for scattered Clay County settlers. This cemetery was established in 1883 on land donated by pioneer Jim Draer, near the school site, though its earliest burial dates to 1873. Among the graves are veterans of conflicts spanning the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and Korea, tended today by a cemetery association.

Pleasanton, TX

Founded in 1858 and named for early settler John Pleasants, this town became the seat of Atascosa County at the junction of the Atascosa River and Bonita Creek. During the Civil War local men mustered here to form a Confederate cavalry company, but the town's lasting fame came from cattle: set amid Longhorn country, it grew into a cattlemen's capital where drovers gathered before pushing huge herds north to Kansas railheads. In the spring of 1873 alone, cowboys drove 43,000 county cattle up the trail.

Whitemarsh Township, PA · est. 1955

The Plymouth Friends Meetinghouse has gathered worshippers since about 1708, making it one of the region's oldest continuously used houses of worship. During the hard winter march to Valley Forge, it sheltered Washington's soldiers as a hospital and campsite. Its Quaker congregation later made it a hub of the abolition movement, and an eastern wing added in 1780 replaced the original log school.

Port Bolivar, TX

Point Bolivar served as headquarters for James Long's 1819 expedition, a bold attempt to wrest Texas from Spanish rule, and was named for the South American liberator Simón Bolívar. Here Mrs. Long and a small band waited until word arrived in 1822 that her husband had died. Years later the Republic of Texas raised a lighthouse on the point.

Port Isabel, TX

After Texas joined the Confederacy, the U.S. Navy blockaded this Gulf port in late 1861, choking off commerce and driving customs offices and civilians away. The old lighthouse became a watchtower for blockade runners who used Laguna Madre as a haven, and the port changed hands repeatedly — Federal forces occupied it in 1863, Confederates drove them out in 1864, and in 1865 Union General Lew Wallace, later author of "Ben Hur," met Confederate officers here to discuss peace. Mexican lighters even ran Confederate arms ashore in defiance of both French and U.S. patrols.

Grand Saline, TX

During the Civil War, families fleeing the war's front lines settled unattended land here, forming a community that became Poletown, perhaps for the poles used in building homes. In 1895 Tom Alexander laid out the town of Rhodesburg to honor populist Jacob C. Rhodes, who organized the Socialist Party of Texas and hosted its first state convention. Socialist encampments met west of Grand Saline for over a decade, and the party drew thirty percent of Van Zandt County's vote in 1912 before fracturing.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1960

On April 3, 1917, as the United States stood on the brink of entering World War I, the celebrated pianist and patriot Ignacy Jan Paderewski addressed Polish Falcons delegates in a hall on this site. His speech galvanized a drive to raise a Polish army from immigrants in America to fight alongside the Allies in Europe. Their goal was as much political as military: to help resurrect an independent Poland, then partitioned among three empires.

Livingston, TX

During the Civil War, Polk County was a stretch of piney woods, farms, and thickets that included an Alabama-Coushatta reservation. Though it counted only 600 voters in 1860, it sent some 900 soldiers into the Confederate Army, furnishing four companies to Hood's famed Texas Brigade and organizing several other infantry units; twenty-one Alabama-Coushattas enlisted in an Indian cavalry company. On the home front, old men, women, children, and enslaved people raised food and cotton, while the county's ferries and river landings moved troops and supplies until Livingston became headquarters for the federal Army of Occupation in 1867-68.

Ponce Inlet, FL

This memorial gathers a community's gratitude toward the men and women who have worn the uniform of the United States Armed Services across generations of both war and peace. Rather than marking a single battle or unit, it honors the broad tradition of American military service and the sacrifices that tradition has demanded. Such civic memorials became common gathering points for remembrance in towns across the country.

Ponchatoula, LA

Ponchatoula's first depot went up about 1854 for the New Orleans, Jackson & Great Northern Railroad, later part of the Illinois Central. Union forces burned it when they captured the town in March 1863, and it was rebuilt around 1865. The present depot dates to 1894, remodeled in the 1920s, and was placed by the state tourism department in 1982.

Edgar County, IL

This marker commemorates the July 18, 1765 peace council between the Ottawa chief Pontiac and British agent George Croghan, which helped bring an end to the sweeping Native uprising against British rule that followed the French and Indian War. Pontiac's War had erupted as Indigenous nations resisted harsh British policies and encroachment after France's defeat, and Croghan's negotiations were pivotal in restoring an uneasy peace.