Military & Wartime

Sandwich, MA

This trail climbs a rise in Sandwich, on Cape Cod, where the layers of the past sit one atop another. Long before Europeans arrived, Sagamore Hill served as a council gathering place for the region's Native people — a "sagamore" being a subordinate chief among the Algonquian nations of the Northeast. Centuries later, during World War II, the same commanding ground was pressed into service as a coastal military installation, part of the chain of defenses that watched the Atlantic shoreline for enemy ships and submarines.

Doña Ana County, NM

This display label marks an early surface-attack guided missile, one of the many weapons systems tested and evaluated on the vast ranges of southern New Mexico during the Cold War. White Sands Missile Range became the nation's premier proving ground for guided-missile and rocket technology after World War II. Static displays like this preserve the hardware of that arms-race era.

Austin, TX

Saint Edward's University grew from a Catholic school founded in 1873 by the Congregation of Holy Cross for local farm boys. Master architect Nicholas J. Clayton designed this Gothic Revival Main Building in 1888 and rebuilt it after an 1903 fire. The school became a university in 1925, trained flyers as an academy during World War II, and admitted women in 1966.

Harford County, MD

In the rolling farmland of Harford County stands a church whose roots reach back to the Jesuit missionaries who kept the Catholic faith alive in Maryland — a colony founded as a rare haven of religious tolerance in early America. Completed in 1792 by Father Sylvester Boarman, a Jesuit tending the nearby mission of St. Joseph at Priest's Ford, Saint Ignatius rose in the first years of the new republic, when Catholics were only beginning to worship freely and openly. It is remembered as the oldest Roman Catholic church in continuous use in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, the founding see of American Catholicism. Its early pastors even ministered to the family of Charles Carroll, the Maryland statesman whose name is woven through the nation's founding.

San Antonio, TX

Built on former Alamo lands, Saint Mark's grew out of an 1850 mission and was organized as a parish in 1858, with Col. Robert E. Lee — then stationed in San Antonio — active in its early affairs. The Civil War halted construction, which resumed only in 1873 and finished in 1875; designed by noted architect Richard Upjohn, the Gothic Revival church later served as a cathedral and cradle of Episcopal bishops.

Salado, TX

Established in 1856 on land given by E.S.C. Robertson, this Bell County cemetery holds a remarkable roll of Texas history. Among its graves are the Rev. G.W. Baines, great-grandfather of President Lyndon B. Johnson; the parents of Governor James E. Ferguson; a Grand Master of Texas Masons; and two presidents of Salado College. Veterans of every American conflict from the U.S.-Mexican War through World War II rest here as well.

San Antonio, TX

Fertile and well-watered, the Salado Valley was a favored dwelling place of South Texas Indian peoples long before Spanish explorers named Salado Creek in 1709 and Canary Island colonists made it a town boundary of San Antonio in 1731. It witnessed Santa Anna's march in 1836 and, in 1842, both the victorious "second battle of the Salado" and the tragic Dawson Massacre. Crossed by the great roads to Goliad, Gonzales, and Nacogdoches, the valley later became home to Fort Sam Houston in 1876 and Brooks Field in 1917.

Llano, TX

Dr. William Leggette Lewis, a physician and Methodist minister who had served in the Civil War, brought his family to Texas in 1878, and his land soon became a community burial ground. The earliest marked grave dates to 1884, and by 1888 the Lewises had deeded the plot to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Among its more than 200 graves lie twelve Civil War veterans alongside others who served in the World Wars and Korea.

Tomball, TX

This burial ground began as the Scherer family cemetery among the German immigrants who settled the Rosehill community of northwest Harris County beginning in 1846, arriving by way of the port of Galveston. The families who worshipped at Salem Lutheran Church laid their dead here, including three men killed in an 1864 powder-mill explosion and veterans reaching back to the Civil War. When George Scherer deeded the ground to the church in 1869, the cemetery took the congregation's name, and its German-language stones and obelisks still record the community's founding generation.

Salisbury, NC

The Salisbury Confederate Prison held Union captives on a 16-acre enclosure that at times crowded some 10,000 men behind its walls. Overcrowding, disease, and scarcity made it one of the war's deadliest prisons before Federal forces destroyed the site in 1865.

Refugio, TX

In Civil War Texas, the Confederacy was cut off from Northern goods and blockaded at sea, making the overland "Cotton Road" to Mexico a lifeline. Sally Scull ran freight wagons down that dangerous route, trading baled cotton for guns, ammunition, medicine, and everyday supplies. A crack shot who dressed in trousers, carried a rifle and two pistols, and bossed her own armed crews, she did wartime work few men would risk.

Montague, TX

Settlers began arriving in the Bethel community in the 1870s, opening the Salona School by 1881 and, in 1889, setting aside land for a burial ground. A Civil War veteran was among the first laid to rest here in 1890, followed by many more, and beginning in 1897 residents gathered each May to tend the graves and share a potluck—a Decoration Day tradition still kept on the first Sunday of May. As the school consolidated and the settlement faded, the cemetery remained the community's living memory.

Jacksboro, TX

James N. Jonas and his wife Caroline settled the Salt Creek community around 1876. Two years later, when a child in a wagon-traveling family died nearby, the Jonases offered a place on their land to bury it — and later gave acreage for a full community cemetery, also known as Dark Corner. The historic Salt Creek schoolhouse still stands to the east and hosts the cemetery association's annual workday. Among nearly 200 graves are veterans reaching from the U.S.-Mexico War to the Korean conflict.

Sonoma, CA

This adobe was the home of Captain Salvador Vallejo, brother of Sonoma's founder Mariano Vallejo, built with Indian labor between 1836 and 1846. The Vallejo family lived here until the Bear Flag Party seized Sonoma in June 1846. In the following decade it served a second life as Cumberland College, a Presbyterian coeducational boarding school, from 1858 to 1864.

Moulton, TX

When the Sam and Will Moore Institute opened in 1901, this bell tolled the school day and soon doubled as the town's fire alarm. Its proudest moment came on November 11, 1918, when it rang out the news of the armistice ending World War I. Cast aside in 1939, the bell was restored in 1973 by former students and friends.

Huntsville, TX

Born in Virginia in 1793 and raised in Tennessee, Sam Houston fought under Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812 and rose to serve in Congress and as Tennessee's governor before heading west. Settling in Nacogdoches, he led the Army of the Republic to victory at San Jacinto in 1836, served twice as president of the Republic of Texas and later as U.S. senator and governor, and in 1861 refused to swear loyalty to the Confederacy, dying at Huntsville in 1863.

Gonzales County, TX

In March 1836, as Santa Anna's army pushed east after the fall of the Alamo, General Sam Houston pitched his headquarters beneath a great oak near Gonzales during the anxious retreat known as the Runaway Scrape. Here his small, ragged force gathered volunteers streaming in from the eastern settlements. From this camp they marched on toward the decisive fight at San Jacinto.

Gilmer, TX

In the tense years before the Civil War, the aging hero of Texas independence returned to a spot along the old Cherokee Trace — ground he had known decades earlier while living among the Cherokee. Speaking here first as a U.S. Senator in 1857 and again as governor in 1861, Sam Houston warned his fellow Texans against leaving the Union, a stand that would soon cost him his office.

Marshall, TX

On May 23, 1857, during his first run for Texas governor, the Unionist Sam Houston came to Marshall—hometown of two of his fiercest secessionist critics—to debate his opponent Hardin Runnels. Speaking beneath an oak in overwhelmingly pro-secession country, Houston was so commanding that Runnels declined to answer. Houston lost the election but still carried nearly half the Harrison County vote.

Cochran, TX

In the anxious weeks after the fall of the Alamo and the Goliad massacre in the spring of 1836, Sam Houston's outnumbered Texian army fell back east and made camp along the Brazos. Here Houston drilled his raw recruits, absorbed fresh reinforcements and supplies, and took delivery of the "Twin Sisters" cannon that would soon see action. From this staging ground he crossed the river and marched to the decisive victory at San Jacinto on April 21.

Nacogdoches, TX

When Sam Houston left Washington for Texas in late 1832, he chose Nacogdoches as his first home, drawn by fellow Tennesseans and Masons like Adolphus Sterne and Henry Raguet. He boarded with the Sternes, set up a law practice, and was baptized Catholic so he could own property under Mexican law. From here he was elected a delegate to the conventions that led toward revolution, and his lifelong friendship with Thomas J. Rusk — later a fellow Texas senator — was forged in this town.

Boston, MA

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) was one of Boston's most relentless agitators for independence, turning taverns and town meetings into engines of revolution. A master organizer behind the Sons of Liberty and the committees of correspondence that knit the colonies together, he helped stage the Boston Tea Party and pushed the cause toward open defiance of the Crown. He signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and later served as governor of Massachusetts, never losing his reputation as a champion of ordinary people.

Lexington, KY

Here lies Samuel Boone (1728–1816), eldest brother of the famed pioneer Daniel Boone. Born in Pennsylvania, he came to Kentucky from South Carolina in 1779 and settled at Boone's Station, joining the 1782 defense of Bryan's Station during a period of intense frontier warfare. That same year his son Thomas was killed at the Battle of Blue Licks, one of the last engagements of the Revolution in the West.

Ganado, TX

Virginia-born Samuel C. A. Rogers took up arms with the Texan army and fought in the Siege of San Antonio in 1835, an early campaign of the Texas Revolution. He lived to 1892, and he lies buried in Jackson County alongside his wife, Mary. His marker keeps the memory of one of the ordinary volunteers who won Texas independence.

Huntsville, TX

Samuel Calhoun, born in South Carolina in 1788 and a cavalry captain in Georgia during the War of 1812, came to Texas in 1845 and acquired land near the ferry that bore his name in Walker County. He raised a large family across two marriages and saw sons serve in the Mexican War and the Civil War. Generations of his descendants lie buried on the ground he established, though his own tomb was carried by steamer to Cincinnati in 1872.

New Bern, NC

Samuel Cornell was a wealthy New Bern merchant, a Loyalist, and a member of the royal Governor's Council. He helped finance the construction of Tryon Palace and Governor Tryon's 1771 campaign against the backcountry Regulators. His house stood two blocks from this marker before the Revolution drove many Loyalists like him from the colony.

West Columbia, TX

Massachusetts-born Samuel Damon came to Texas in 1831 and joined the fight for independence, serving as a wagonmaster for Stephen F. Austin at the Siege of Bexar and famously taking the mission bells to be melted into bullets for the rebel cause. He aided Sam Houston's 1836 campaign and later earned a Republic of Texas land grant. Settling in Brazoria County, he gave his name to the mineral-rich Damon Mound and worked half a century as the town brickmaker.

Dallas, TX

Born in Dallas in 1906 and raised in Oak Cliff, Samuel David Dealey, Jr. became one of the most daring submarine commanders of World War II. Leading the USS Harder on a legendary run of Pacific war patrols, he sank many enemy vessels and earned his crew a Presidential Unit Citation before he and his men were lost off the Philippines in 1944. He was awarded the Medal of Honor, ranking among the most decorated sailors of the war.

Willow Point, TX

A Tennessee native, Samuel G. Evetts came to Texas in the 1830s and was wounded at the Siege of Bexar in December 1835, an early clash of the Texas Revolution. He later lived in several counties, earning land grants for his Republic of Texas military service and a state pension in 1870, before moving to Wise County, where he died in 1884. Thrice married and father of eleven, he saw his name spelled variously as Evetts and Evitts over the years.

Orange, TX

Born in northern Ireland in 1832, Samuel H. Levingston left home at fourteen and learned ship carpentry in Apalachicola, Florida, before moving near present-day Orange just before the Civil War. He served the Confederacy as a ship carpenter and blockade runner, then returned to build paddle-wheel boats hauling cotton down the Sabine. His son George later grew the family trade into the Levingston Shipbuilding Company, and the land the family once farmed became a city park.

Waco, TX

Born in Sweden in 1828, Samuel Johan Forsgard joined the first wave of Swedish immigration to Texas in 1855 and settled in Waco, where he opened a bakery, restaurant, and confectionery. He served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, then returned to business, patented farming equipment, and helped establish a sporting goods company. Over more than fifty years he became a well-known figure in the city's 19th-century growth.

Edenton, NC

Samuel Johnston was among the most influential leaders of Revolutionary-era North Carolina, presiding over provincial congresses, serving as governor, and later representing the state in the U.S. Senate. His plantation home, "Hayes," and his grave lie about a mile to the southeast. Few figures did more to guide the colony through independence and into statehood.

Houston, TX

Samuel McCarley, his wife Celia, and their ten children settled on Spring Creek in 1831, and by 1836 their home sat on a well-traveled road between Washington-on-the-Brazos and Harrisburg. On April 15, 1836, Sam Houston's Texas Army arrived at dusk and, over one hungry night, consumed the family's cattle, corn, and bacon and burned some four thousand fence rails for fuel. The next day Houston took the Harrisburg road and, on April 21, won independence at San Jacinto; decades later the state paid the widowed Celia $460 for the damage.

Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1948

This memorial honors Samuel Meredith, a Revolutionary-era patriot and financier who became the first Treasurer of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1801 under the new federal government. Together with fellow signer George Clymer, Meredith held extensive lands in this corner of northeastern Pennsylvania, and he died at his estate, Belmont, in 1817. His life spanned the war for independence and the building of the nation's earliest financial institutions.

Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1949

Samuel Meredith was a Philadelphia merchant and Revolutionary patriot who served in the militia and helped finance the struggle for independence. In 1789 President Washington named him the first Treasurer of the United States, a post he held through the government's fragile founding decade. He retired to his estate, Belmont, in the quiet hills of northeastern Pennsylvania, where he died in 1817.

Seguin, TX

This marker honors Samuel Millett, who took up arms in the Texas Revolution of 1835–1836 and fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. In eighteen minutes of fighting on the San Jacinto plain, Sam Houston's outnumbered army routed Santa Anna and secured Texas independence. Millett was among the ordinary soldiers who made that victory possible.

Breckenridge, TX

Samuel P. Newcomb traveled alone from Connecticut to Texas at seventeen, settling by 1857 on the Clear Fork of the Brazos, where he taught school, held county offices, and served in a state ranger unit during the Civil War. What outlasted his brief life was his pen: his diaries vividly recorded frontier daily life, buffalo herds, and the fort where he lived, as did those of his wife Susan Reynolds. He died in 1870 at just thirty-one.

Houston, TX

Samuel Paschall, born in Tennessee in 1815, served as a private in Captain Amasa Turner's company at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive clash that won Texas its independence. He remained in the Army of Texas from early 1836 into 1837 during the young republic's most fragile years. He lived until 1874, and the state raised this marker to his memory in 1957.

Corsicana, TX

Samuel R. Frost, born in Huntsville in 1846, grew up in Navarro County and enlisted in the Confederate army in 1863 as a teenager. After the Civil War he studied law, joined the bar in 1870, and built a long public career as county attorney, county judge, district judge, and state legislator. The nearby town of Frost was named in his honor, marking the imprint one dedicated jurist left on his corner of Texas.

San Antonio, TX

Boston-born Samuel S. Smith rode with the Woll and Somervell expeditions of 1842, the volatile border campaigns that followed Mexican incursions into the young Republic of Texas. He lived until 1882 and is remembered here alongside his wife Sarah.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2025

Samuel V. Merrick was one of Philadelphia's great early industrialists, helping found the Franklin Institute in 1825 to advance the mechanical arts and later bringing coal-gas street lighting to the city through the Philadelphia Gas Works. His Southwark Iron Foundry turned out steam engines, turbines, and ship machinery—work that supplied the Union navy during the Civil War. In 1847 he became the first president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, a line that would remake American commerce.

Orange, TX

Born in Alabama in 1847 and raised in the East Texas piney woods, Samuel Sholars served in the Confederate army before earning his medical degree in 1872. He built a full civic life in Orange — practicing medicine, founding a drugstore, sitting on the city council and school board, and helping lead the region's medical society. His helping organize a local volunteer militia company reflects how a country doctor often became a pillar of a small Gulf Coast town.

Weatherford, TX

Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham carried his life across the great fault line of 19th-century America: a South Carolina teenager who enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861 and was wounded at Spotsylvania, then a young lawyer who rebuilt in postwar Weatherford. From the Texas bench and the courtroom of the Warren Wagontrain Raid cases he rose to five terms in Congress and two terms as governor of Texas beginning in 1902.

Rockne, TX

Samuel Wolfenberger came to Texas in 1831, while it was still part of Mexico, as one of Stephen F. Austin's colonists, and received a Spanish league of land — some 4,444 acres — in this area. When revolution came he took up arms, joining the storming of Bexar in 1835 and riding with Robert Coleman's Rangers in 1836. He settled at Bastrop, helped campaign to make it capital of the young Republic, and served as a town official before his death in 1860.

Rockne, TX

Samuel Wolfenberger came to Texas from Virginia in 1831, arriving as Anglo colonists and Mexican authorities edged toward open conflict. He fought under Lt. W. J. Russell at the 1832 clash at Velasco, took part in the 1835 storming and capture of Bexar, and served in Colonel Robert M. Coleman's Rangers during the 1836 revolution. His grave and that of his wife Caroline were marked by the State of Texas in 1956.

Port Lavaca, TX

Chartered in 1850, the San Antonio & Mexican Gulf was among the very first railroads in Texas, built by San Antonio investors hoping to link the interior to Gulf trade. As tracks pushed west from Port Lavaca, wagons met the trains out on the open prairie to exchange freight. Confederates tore up the line in 1863 to deny it to Union forces; rebuilt and absorbed by larger companies, it later carried weekend beachgoers well into the 1930s.

San Antonio, TX

Organized in November 1862 and incorporated by the Texas Legislature the next year, the San Antonio Mutual Aid Association worked to hold down the price of wartime necessities—candles, flour, cloth, shoes, coffee—for a strained Confederate home front. Its capital included $8,000 the city subscribed to help the needy and the families of soldiers away at war, and it aided some 10,000 people. To buy goods, the group sold cotton in Mexico, a trade so vital that the Confederate army detailed soldiers to drive its wagons.

San Augustine, TX

This East Texas burial ground began as the private cemetery of the J. C. Anderson family, its oldest graves dating to the 1830s, when Texas was still winning its independence. Among those interred here is Col. Stephen William Blount, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, alongside a Confederate captain killed in the Civil War and a noted Episcopal clergyman-historian. The city bought the cemetery in 1911, and an association has cared for it since 1921.

San Elizario, TX

Founded in 1789 as the Spanish Presidio de San Elceario, this outpost was relocated northward to shield settlers from raids, guarding the El Paso district through the twilight of Spanish rule and the Mexican War for Independence. After the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo drew the border at the Rio Grande, the town became El Paso County's first seat and, in 1877, the flashpoint of the violent Salt War over access to communal salt beds.

San Elizario, TX

This spot marks a Spanish presidio whose roots reach back to 1683, when a fort of the crown was established near the Guadalupe mission in what is now Ciudad Juárez. Relocated to this stretch of the Rio Grande valley in 1773 and renamed for San Elzeario, it anchored Spain's frontier defenses on the far northern edge of New Spain. Franciscan missionaries served its chapel, binding military garrison and Catholic mission together in the borderland pattern typical of the era.

San Elizario, TX

When Spain governed the far reaches of northern New Spain, it strung presidios—fortified garrisons—along the Rio Grande to guard settlements and trade routes. This chapel belonged to the Presidio de San Elzeario, relocated to this site in 1789 after floods battered its earlier home downriver. Rebuilt from fresh adobe and salvaged presidio bricks, it still carries the name of a 13th-century French patron saint of soldiers.

San Marino, CA

The San Marino War Memorial carries the scriptural words, "The greatest love one can have is to lay down one's life for a friend," a benediction over the community's fallen. Like countless memorials raised in prosperous 20th-century American towns, it honors residents who served and died in the nation's wars without singling out one conflict. It offers a place of reflection at the civic heart of San Marino.

San Patricio, TX

This ground carries three centuries of change, from Spanish exploration beginning in 1519 through Mexican independence in 1821. In 1828 empresarios James McGloin and John McMullen won a Mexican land grant and brought Irish colonists to settle it, and the county—named for St. Patrick—was created in 1836 and organized the next year. Its southern edge, the Nueces River, became a flashpoint in the run-up to the Mexican-American War, crossed by Zachary Taylor's army as it marched south.

San Patricio, TX

Founded in 1830 by empresarios John McMullen and James McGloin as the capital of their Irish colony, San Patricio de Hibernia—named for the patron saint of Ireland—stood as a lonely frontier outpost when the Texas Revolution erupted. On February 27, 1836, General José Urrea's division of Santa Anna's army surprised and overwhelmed a small Texan party under Johnson, killing several and marching the survivors to Matamoros as prisoners. After the Texan victory at San Jacinto the town was destroyed and its people scattered, and this 1936 monument names its early settlers, soldiers, and notable descendants.

Bleakwood, TX

After the Texas Revolution, Lieutenant John T. Lewis — son of a War of 1812 veteran — and his wife Sarah Mariah Stark helped found a settlement near Cow Creek and chose this high sand ridge, safe above the floods, as a burial ground. The oldest marked grave dates to 1886, though burials began decades earlier, and many rest here unnamed, including one stone simply marked "Stranger." More than two dozen veterans lie here, from the 1835 Siege of Bexar through the Vietnam War, near a monument to Colonel Samuel S. Lewis.

Mexia, TX

Sanders Walker served in the Texas War for Independence of 1835–1836, the campaign that won Texas its break from Mexico and established the Republic of Texas. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1962 to honor his part in that founding struggle. His grave is one of the scattered resting places of the men who fought for Texas independence.

Nixon, TX

This burial ground began with the family of Joseph and Catherine McCoy, pioneers of Green DeWitt's colony, and later served the Sandies Chapel community, with graves reaching back to the 1860s. Among those laid to rest here are a San Jacinto veteran, citizens of the Republic of Texas, Civil War soldiers of the local home guard, and four pioneer Methodist ministers. In one small plot lies a cross-section of early Texas history.

Rosharon, TX

Started before 1845 on land carved from great sugar and cotton plantations, Sandy Point Cemetery is a layered record of early Texas conflict and settlement. Among those laid to rest are veterans of the 1836 Texas Revolution, the Civil War, and members of the ill-fated Mier Expedition of 1842. It once held the grave of Col. B. F. Terry, founder of the famed Terry's Texas Rangers, before his remains were moved.

Groesbeck, TX

Soon after the Civil War, a group of settlers from Mississippi — among them Dr. J. L. Sansom, P. K. McKenzie, and Allen Goodwin — came to this creekside spot on a tributary of the Navasota River and built a church and school, founding a community they called Mount Joy. Around 1870, Dr. Sansom donated two acres for a cemetery; its oldest marked graves date to 1873. The stones record area pioneers, several Confederate veterans, and a sobering number of infants whose short lives testify to the hardships of frontier settlement.

Santa Anna, TX

When the Santa Fe Railroad arrived in 1886, Santa Anna boomed as a cattle-shipping point, and this cemetery grew with it—its oldest dated monument marking sixteen-year-old Mary Ashley, who died in 1885. Among the buried are the town's first station agent and Texas Rangers John R. Banister and John Benecke Bachman, along with veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam. Fraternal sections for Masons, Odd Fellows, Woodmen of the World, and the Eastern Star reflect the social fabric of the community.