Military & Wartime

Gonzales, TX

Despite its name, this rise — once the DeWitt Mound and now a family cemetery — marks a moment in the Texas Revolution, not an ancient site. Here Mexican troops camped from September 29 to October 1, 1835, waiting for the Gonzales colonists to hand over their small cannon. When the Texans refused, the soldiers withdrew toward Béxar; the colonists overtook them, and on October 2 the Battle of Gonzales opened the revolution in Texan victory.

Goliad, TX

After Texas forces shattered Santa Anna's army at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, the Mexican second-in-command, Gen. Vicente Filisola, marched his surviving troops southward toward Mexico. Texan couriers overtook him near Goliad, and at Mujerero Creek on May 26, 1836, Filisola and his fellow officers signed the ratification of peace with Texan representatives — a quiet creekside act that helped seal the outcome of the revolution.

Killeen, TX

Killeen was born in 1882 as a shipping point on the Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railroad, taking its name from railway official Frank P. Killeen. After fire destroyed the first depot, Santa Fe crews raised this building from standard plans in 1913. That rail connection later proved decisive: it helped persuade the U.S. Army to establish Camp Hood — later Fort Hood — nearby during World War II, transforming the quiet farm town.

Santa Fe, NM

Raised by a local Veterans of Foreign Wars post, this memorial in New Mexico's capital honors those from the Santa Fe area who served in the Vietnam War. More than 58,000 Americans died in that long Southeast Asian conflict, and community-built markers like this one gave returning veterans and grieving families the public recognition that was often slow to come.

Banquete, TX

This ford on the Nueces River grew out of an 1804 Spanish land grant and the scattered ranch settlement of Santa Margarita. It became a strategic crossing on the Matamoros Road: Mexican forces fortified nearby Fort Lipantitlán, General Urrea defeated Texan troops here in 1836, and Zachary Taylor staged his army in the region in 1845 before advancing to the Rio Grande and touching off the U.S.-Mexican War. During the Civil War the same route served as the Confederacy's 'Cotton Road' to Mexico.

San Diego, TX

South of San Diego in Duval County, this cemetery grew from two Spanish-Mexican land grants, El Señor de la Carrera and La Huerta, whose grantee families gave the ground to keep their dead near the land they loved. The oldest legible stone dates to 1908, though unmarked and eroded graves reach back further, into the years when this was still part of Mexico. Anglo and Mexican Americans lie buried side by side here, among them veterans of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

Laredo, TX

Born in Laredo in 1823, a great-great-grandson of the town's founder, Santos Benavides rose to become its mayor and Webb County's chief justice before the Civil War. He raised a cavalry company for the Confederacy, defeated Juan Cortina at the Battle of Carrizo in 1861, and in March 1864 held Laredo with just 42 men against a Union force of more than 200. The highest-ranking Tejano officer of the Confederacy, he later served in the Texas Legislature and as a state commissioner.

Bedias, TX

Sarah Bradley came to Texas as a child with Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred and, newly married in 1835, sewed a flag of blue, white, and red calico with a single white star for her husband's Harrisburg company as revolution loomed. Reportedly the first Lone Star flag, it was shown at Gonzales, flew during the Siege of Bexar, and is believed to have waved over the convention where Texas declared independence. She settled in Grimes County and donated land for Bethel Cemetery, where she was buried in 1848.

Bedias, TX

A Kentucky native who came to Texas with Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred in 1823, Sarah Bradley married Archelaus B. Dodson in 1835 and stitched a blue, white, and red banner bearing a single white star for her husband's company during the Texas Revolution. Believed to be one of two flags flying as the Texas Declaration of Independence was signed, it is remembered as Texas's first tricolor Lone Star flag. The Dodsons donated the land for this cemetery, where she was later buried.

Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1992

During the Revolution, thousands of women followed the Continental Army as it marched, cooking, sewing, washing, and nursing the men who fought—labor without which the army could not have stayed in the field. Sarah Mary Benjamin was one of these camp followers, accompanying a New York unit from 1780 to 1783 and, by her own vivid later account, even standing sentinel duty at Kingsbridge and carrying food to soldiers under fire at Yorktown. Living past the age of 100, she settled in this Wayne County township after 1822, where her firsthand memories of the war made her a living link to the founding generation.

Gonzales, TX

Sarah Seely DeWitt came to Texas in 1826 with her husband Green DeWitt, the empresario who colonized the Gonzales area, and their five children. When Mexican troops demanded the colonists' cannon in 1835, Sarah and her daughter Evaline sewed the defiant "Come and Take It" banner flown at the Battle of Gonzales — the first battle flag of the Texas Revolution. She is buried on the DeWitt land that bears her name.

San Francisco, CA

This sarcophagus marks the resting place of Thomas Starr King, the Unitarian minister whose fiery oratory helped hold California in the Union during the Civil War. Designated California Registered Historical Landmark No. 691, the tomb stands in San Francisco, the city where King preached and rallied support for the Union cause and for the U.S. Sanitary Commission. He died in 1864, worn out at just 39, and was mourned across the state.

Sardis, TX

The oldest marked grave here belongs to a young woman who died in childbirth in 1871, a stark reminder of frontier life's hazards. Settler Robert Mayfield gave the land so families of the Sardis community would have a burial ground, and over the decades it gathered the graves of area pioneers and veterans of several wars. A cemetery committee formed in 1924 to care for the rural plot, long tied to the neighboring Methodist church.

Rusk, TX

Several families from the Edgefield District of South Carolina settled here in 1848, drawn by a landscape that reminded them of home, and founded the Edgefield community and Sardis Baptist Church. The cemetery's marked burials begin with Rebecca Bolton Neal in 1873, and among those interred is Peter Berry — a veteran of the Seminole War and Confederate service, and a great-grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Unmarked graves are believed to hold early settlers and enslaved people.

Union Township, PA · est. 1980

German immigrants began settling this part of Lebanon County as early as 1729, part of the great wave of Pennsylvania Dutch migration to William Penn's tolerant colony. In the wilderness they were served by traveling missionaries, among them John Caspar Stoever, Jr., a pioneering Lutheran pastor who ministered to scattered frontier congregations. A log church rose around 1756, replaced by the present building in 1872, and the congregation honors Peter Sattazahn, a Revolutionary War soldier buried here.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2003

During the Civil War, the Union Army needed hospitals on a scale the nation had never before contemplated, and Satterlee was among the largest and most complete. From 1862 to 1865 its long one-story wards and sprawling tent city treated thousands of sick and wounded soldiers across more than sixteen acres of West Philadelphia. Named for Gen. Richard Satterlee, the army's medical purveyor, it reflected a wartime revolution in military medicine and sanitation.

Savoy, IL

This memorial honors the men and women of the community who answered their nation's call in both war and peace. Central Illinois towns like Savoy sent generations of citizens into military service across many conflicts, and memorials such as this gather that collective sacrifice into a single place of gratitude. It stands as a communal thank-you rather than a tribute to any one battle.

Houston, TX

This family burial ground marks the homestead of Johann Schlobohm (1807–1882), a Hanover-born German immigrant who enlisted in New Orleans in 1836 and reached Texas in time to help guard the captured General Santa Anna after the Battle of San Jacinto. After further service in the Texian army, he married Charlotte Caroline Kleibrink in 1850 and in 1856 bought 82 acres along Greens Bayou, where the cemetery began with his daughter Fredericka's burial in 1873. At least ten veterans rest here—spanning the Texas Revolution, the Confederacy, and both world wars—among generations of Schlobohm descendants who still tend the graves.

Marietta, OH

This handsome Marietta residence dates to 1868, the busy post-Civil War years when Ohio River towns were rebuilding and expanding with new brick and frame homes. Marietta, founded in 1788 as the first organized American settlement in the Northwest Territory, had by this era grown into a prosperous river port shaped in part by German and other immigrant families whose surnames — like Schmincke — still mark its streets. A house of this vintage reflects the confident domestic architecture of a settled, growing community along the upper Ohio.

Middlecreek Township, PA · est. 1947

As the Revolutionary War reached the Pennsylvania backcountry, settlers along the Susquehanna's West Branch valley faced raids that made an isolated homestead perilous. Around 1770 a fortified refuge rose on Matthias Schoch's tract beside a reliable spring, a place where scattered farming families could gather behind timber walls when danger threatened. Such blockhouses served the frontier through 1783, until the fighting finally ebbed and the surrounding country grew safe enough to abandon them.

Kerrville, TX

Kerrville's dream of a college took shape when rancher and businessman Charles Schreiner pledged 140 acres and a major endowment to the Presbyterian Synod of Texas, a plan delayed by World War I before the school finally opened in 1923. Blending military discipline with religious and general education, the institute admitted girls as day students in 1932 and sent many students and faculty into service during World War II, when a naval flight school operated on campus and sixty-six alumni died in the war. Military training became optional in 1957 and ended in 1971, and the school grew into a four-year college by 1984.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2004

The Schuylkill Arsenal, built in the early 1800s, was where Meriwether Lewis gathered and stored the supplies he purchased in Philadelphia before shipping them west to Pittsburgh for the start of his great expedition. For more than a century afterward the arsenal outfitted American soldiers, supplying military goods through the Civil War and both World Wars. It stood until 1963, when it was finally razed.

East Bradford Township, PA · est. 1915

At Sconnelltown, the division under Lord Cornwallis paused on September 11, 1777, midway through the long looping march that carried the British around the American flank at Brandywine. The halt was one link in a day of hard, dusty marching that let Howe's wing arrive undetected behind Washington's line. The marker traces the route of that famous flanking column through the Chester County countryside.

Greene Township, PA · est. 2013

Opened in 1895 as the Pennsylvania Soldiers' Orphans Industrial School, this state-run residential institution educated the children of veterans, giving roughly 10,000 boys and girls both schooling and a strong sense of patriotism that led many into military careers. Students earned distinction in the classroom and on the playing field, where the Cadets and Red Devils claimed many championships. The school served its mission until closing in 2009.

Georgetown, KY

Formed from Woodford County in 1792, Scott County was the second created after Kentucky became a state. It honors General Charles Scott, a Virginia-born Revolutionary officer who saw action at Trenton, Germantown, Monmouth, and Stony Point, settled in Kentucky in 1785, and later served as the state's fourth governor.

Williamsburg, KY

In July 1863, Confederate Colonel John S. Scott led some 1,600 cavalry up from East Tennessee on a raid to wreck Union communications and seize livestock and arms. At Williamsburg on July 25, a hundred pickets of the 44th Ohio Infantry met his advance; after a sharp skirmish Scott drove them toward London before pressing on to Winchester and retreating into Tennessee with heavy losses. The raid was one of many mounted thrusts that made the Kentucky mountains a war of movement.

Exeter, NH

Senior Chief Petty Officer Daniel R. Healy was a U.S. Navy SEAL who died in Afghanistan in June 2005, when the helicopter carrying a quick-reaction force to reinforce a SEAL team under fire in the mountains was shot down — among the costliest single days in Naval Special Warfare history. This memorial stands in his New Hampshire hometown, where he grew up before volunteering for one of the most demanding paths in the U.S. military. It marks not a distant abstraction but a local son who did not come home.

Cisco, TX

Settled in the 1870s, Scranton grew into a full community with a post office, stores, cotton gin, blacksmith, school, and academy. In 1896 Joseph Jackson Ray and his wife Sarah donated land for a Baptist church and graveyard, though the first burial — an infant of the Sprawls family — had already taken place that July. A cemetery association formed in 1968, and the nearby community center still hosts services and an annual homecoming. Veterans from the Civil War onward lie here alongside the settlement's pioneers, educators, and officials.

Geneva, TX

This cemetery honors North Carolina native William Scurlock, a Texas Revolution veteran remembered as the 'Man with the Charmed Life.' He and his brother Mial settled here in 1834, enlisted the next year, and William survived the Siege of Bexar, the Matamoros Expedition, and escape from the Goliad Massacre before fighting at San Jacinto; Mial died at the Alamo. William later sat in the Republic's Congress, fought in the Mexican War, and settled here, where he lies alongside Confederate veteran W. J. Walton.

Snyder, TX

Scurry County was created in 1876 from older Texas territories and organized in 1884, with Snyder as its seat. It honors General William R. Scurry, a member of the last Congress of the Republic of Texas and a Confederate officer killed in 1864. The county's founding was part of the steady organization of West Texas as settlement pushed onto the plains.

Seadrift, TX

Seadrift Cemetery was established in 1912 when land promoter A.D. Powers deeded five acres to trustee J.L. Knight for a community burial ground. Among its first interments were infants lost to a measles epidemic in 1912–1913, and the earliest dated adult grave is that of Daisy E. Watkins, who died in 1913. The cemetery holds generations of local leaders and veterans of conflicts from the Texas Revolution through Vietnam, and a 1967 reorganization of its association brought fencing, a water well, and improved care.

Seagoville, TX

After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government not only relocated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans but also detained thousands of German, Italian, Japanese, and Latin American "enemy aliens" through the Justice Department and State Department. Originally built in 1941 as a women's reformatory, the Seagoville site was transferred to the immigration service in 1942 and held German and Italian couples and single women, plus Japanese Latin Americans housed in a "colony" of 50 Victory Huts. By 1943 its population peaked at 650 internees before it closed in May 1945 and reverted to a federal prison.

Chicago, IL

James Humbert served as a Seaman First Class in the U.S. Navy during World War II and was killed in action in the Philippines on January 10, 1945—as American forces fought to retake the islands in the war's final year. Chicago honors such fallen sons with neighborhood memorials that keep an individual name attached to the vast sacrifice of the war.

Searcy, AR

Erected in 1917, this monument honors the Confederate soldiers of White County, Arkansas, who served in the Civil War (1861–1865). Arkansas seceded in 1861, and thousands of its men fought for the Confederacy; a half-century later, aging veterans and their descendants across the South raised memorials like this one during the era's wave of Confederate commemoration.

Temple vicinity, TX

The Lost Prairie–Seaton community was settled in the 1880s by Czech immigrants and once supported a post office, school, store, and saloon. After Tomas Ondrasek died in 1896, Charles Motl Sr. donated two acres for a community cemetery, and a burial association formed the next year. Among its roughly 1,150 graves are veterans of both World Wars and the Korean conflict, and the cemetery still serves the surrounding community.

Mayfield, KY

In May 1861, delegates from the westernmost counties of Kentucky and Tennessee—the region known as the Jackson Purchase—gathered at Mayfield, frustrated by Kentucky's stubborn adherence to the Union and by Tennessee's slowness to leave it. Strongly sympathetic to the Southern cause, the convention voted to secede and form a new Confederate state. When Tennessee itself voted to secede in June, the separatist proposal was dropped.

Killeen, TX

Organized at Fort Benning in July 1940 as German panzers overran France, the 2nd Armored Division earned the name 'Hell on Wheels' from General George S. Patton Jr. in 1941. As the first U.S. armored force in combat, it fought from the 1942 North Africa landings through Sicily, Normandy, and the Battle of the Bulge, and provided the honor guard for President Truman at Potsdam. Fort Hood has been its permanent home since 1945.

Spotsylvania County, VA

On the morning of May 9, 1864, during the brutal Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Major General John Sedgwick—commander of the Union's Sixth Army Corps—was killed by a Confederate sharpshooter while positioning his artillery. Famously, moments before he fell he is said to have reassured nervous troops about the distant marksmen. This memorial, raised after the war by the soldiers who had served under him and their friends, marks the very spot where one of the highest-ranking Union officers to die in the Civil War lost his life.

Norristown, PA · est. 1949

Selma was the home of Andrew Porter, a general of the Revolution, but it is best remembered as the birthplace of his remarkable sons. David R. Porter became governor of Pennsylvania from 1839 to 1845; James M. Porter served as U.S. Secretary of War in 1843; and George B. Porter was governor of Michigan Territory from 1831 to 1834. From one Montgomery County household came a striking concentration of public service in the early republic.

Brackettville, TX

Established on the Fort Clark reservation in 1872, this cemetery holds the graves of the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts and their families. Descendants of Seminoles and formerly enslaved people who had come from Florida around 1850 and lived in Mexico and Texas, these scouts served under Lieutenant John L. Bullis and Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie in the frontier campaigns of the 1870s, and four of them earned the Medal of Honor.

Brackettville, TX

For decades the descendants of Africans who had fled slavery for Spanish Florida — where they joined the Seminole people and forged the distinct Black Seminole community — carried their hard-won freedom across the continent. After removal to Indian Territory and a sojourn in Mexico, one group crossed back into Texas in 1870 to serve the U.S. Army as the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts. They made their home at 'the camp' on Fort Clark, building jacal houses and digging irrigation ditches along Las Moras Creek while scouting the border country until their disbandment in 1914.

Del Rio, TX

From 1870 to 1881, roughly a hundred Seminole-Negro Scouts served the U.S. Army along the Texas border at Forts Duncan and Clark and Camp Del Rio. Mostly descendants of runaway slaves who had intermarried with Florida Seminoles before removal to Indian Territory, they were prized for extraordinary tracking skill, courage, and endurance on the trail. Under Lieutenant John L. Bullis they fought for eight years without losing a single scout, and four earned the Medal of Honor.

Lometa, TX

Pioneer Reuben S. Senterfitt arrived in the 1860s, and a town bearing his name grew up around him—at its height boasting hotels, mills, stores, saloons, a school, churches, and a stage stop. When the railroad bypassed the town in the 1890s, it withered away, leaving this cemetery as one of its few surviving traces. Among the graves are early settlers and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War through Vietnam, the oldest being three-year-old Joseph C. Howell, who died in 1877.

Menard, TX

Built in 1852 by soldiers of the 8th Infantry, this cypress-and-limestone structure served as an officer-of-the-day station and sentry post along the road toward Fort Concho. It was part of the network of frontier posts—anchored here by nearby Fort McKavett—that the U.S. Army maintained to shield settlers pressing into the Texas Hill Country. The building is a rare survivor of the everyday military architecture that guarded the mid-19th-century frontier.

Mariposa County, CA

This memorial marks the attacks of September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 people were killed in the coordinated assaults on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Communities across the country, including this one in the Sierra foothills of Mariposa County, erected local tributes bearing the vow "We Will Never Forget" to keep the memory of that day alive far from the sites themselves.

Martinez, CA

This memorial commemorates the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when nearly 3,000 people were killed in coordinated strikes on New York, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field. Its reflective inscription invites passersby to look toward the flag in remembrance and shared grief. Communities across the country erected such local memorials to keep the memory and resolve of that day alive.

Davidson County, NC

This small memorial in Davidson County keeps faith with a single date — September 11, 2001 — when coordinated terrorist attacks on New York, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field killed nearly 3,000 people. Markers like this one appeared in towns far from the attack sites, local expressions of a national wound. It asks passersby simply to remember.

Medina, WA

This marker in Medina commemorates September 11, 2001, the day coordinated terrorist attacks struck the United States and killed thousands. Communities across the country raised memorials in the years that followed, turning a shared national trauma into places of quiet reflection. This one gathers that remembrance close to home.

Scranton, PA

This memorial remembers the innocent victims and the heroes of September 11, 2001, with special honor to those tied to Lackawanna County. Among them are county native Laura Lee (DeFazio) Marabito, a passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 11; Jerry Moran, Jr., who died at the Pentagon; and Daniel Christian Schaufler, a paramedic who volunteered at Ground Zero. Their names bind a small Pennsylvania region to the national tragedy of that day.

Chicago, IL

Sergeant Gregory J. Sintic (1947–1968) enlisted in the U.S. Army and was killed by a land mine in Vietnam on January 28, 1968, at the height of the war during the Tet Offensive year. Awarded the Bronze Star for valor and the Purple Heart, he was just twenty-one. Chicago's honor-roll memorials keep such young lives from fading into a statistic.

Groesbeck, TX

Born in 1811, Seth H. Bates served as an early Texas Ranger during the struggle for Texas independence, enrolling in Captain Seale's Company in 1835–1836 — a unit raised, as his marker notes, by order of the provisional Council of Texas. He lived on until 1886, his gravestone erected by the State of Texas in 1962. His service placed him among the volunteer fighters who secured the young republic.

Matagorda County, TX

Seth Ingram, born in Vermont in 1790, served as a sergeant in the 11th U.S. Infantry during the War of 1812 before heading to Mexican Texas. As one of Stephen F. Austin's surveyors, he helped lay out San Felipe de Austin, the capital of Austin's colony and the administrative heart of Anglo settlement. He died in 1857, his grave marked in Matagorda County.

Liberty, TX

Benjamin Franklin Hardin arrived in the Atascosito District of Mexican Texas in 1826 and became surveyor of the district in 1834. As a member of the Liberty Volunteers he fought at Concepcion, the Siege of Bexar, and the decisive Battle of San Jacinto that won Texas independence, then built a home on this site in 1839. The place, later known as Seven Pines, stayed in the Hardin family for four generations, and in 1858 the legislature created Hardin County in the family's honor.

Temple, TX

Established in the 1860s along the MKT rail line near Temple, this burial ground has gone by many names but is remembered today as Seven Star Cemetery — a reference to the North Star and the constellation traditions said to have guided people escaping slavery toward freedom. Though fewer than 100 of its roughly 500 graves keep their original markers, those buried here include formerly enslaved people and veterans of the Spanish-American War and World War I. The local Juneteenth Association tends the site.

Smyrna, TN

During World War II the airfield outside Smyrna became one of the many training bases that transformed sleepy Southern towns into hubs of the American war effort. This memorial honors Major Allan J. Sewart, Jr., a Tennessee airman lost in the Pacific theater in 1942, whose name the installation later carried in tribute. It is a reminder that behind every base name stood a real person and a real loss.

Goldsboro, NC

This Goldsboro airfield was first used from 1942 to 1946 for flight training by the Army Air Forces during World War II, then reopened in 1956 as a permanent Air Force base during the Cold War. It was named for Seymour Johnson, a Goldsboro native and naval aviator. The base remains an active military installation today.

Las Cruces, NM

This highway interchange near Las Cruces is dedicated to Sergeant First Class Antonio Rey 'Rod' Rodriguez, honoring his service and sacrifice in the U.S. Army. Naming a stretch of road for a fallen service member is a common way New Mexico communities keep a local soldier's memory before daily travelers. The dedication ties a busy modern interchange to one family's and one town's loss.

Town of Oyster Bay, NY

This pier honors Sergeant James A. Harrington Jr., a longtime Oyster Bay bayman who worked the local waters before serving in the Vietnam War. He was killed in action in the Republic of Vietnam on March 28, 1968, one of the war's costliest years for American forces. Naming a working waterfront spot for him ties his hometown life and his sacrifice together.

Franklin, PA · est. 1986

Born in Czechoslovakia and raised in the coal-country borough of Franklin, Michael Strank became a Marine sergeant in the Pacific war. On February 23, 1945, he was the oldest and senior man among the six who raised the flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima — the moment Joe Rosenthal's camera froze into one of the most famous images in American history. Strank was killed in action days later and now rests at Arlington, his likeness cast into the Marine Corps War Memorial.

Villa Hills, KY

Born in Covington in 1948, Sergeant Ronald L. Niewahner served as a squad leader in the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam. Under heavy fire he carried a fallen comrade to safety, then was fatally wounded returning to rescue a second soldier. His valor earned him the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Gallantry Cross, and Purple Heart.