Military & Wartime

Cleburne, TX

With its wood and water, this shaded ground served the community around Camp Henderson for public gatherings after 1854. When the settlement became the county seat in 1867, men at a Fourth of July picnic here chose the town's name — Cleburne — in honor of the Civil War commander whom many local veterans had served under.

Brackettville, TX

From 1856 into the 1880s this limestone-walled ground was the burying place for Fort Clark, a frontier Army post guarding the Texas–Mexico border country. Among the dozens laid to rest here were a young West Point lieutenant who died in 1857 and Pvt. Peter Corrigan, the lone fatality of Col. Ranald Mackenzie's 1873 cross-border raid into Mexico. When a new cemetery opened south of the post in 1880 the site fell inactive, and in 1946 all its dead were reinterred at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.

Owensville, TX

Owensville served as Robertson County's third county seat from 1855 to 1869, on land donated by D. H. Love and named for pioneer county clerk Harrison Owen. Sitting on the Houston-to-Waco mail, stage, and freighting road, the town drew officials, doctors, lawyers, and merchants, and during the Civil War it armed and dispatched soldiers. When the Houston & Texas Central Railway bypassed it in 1868, the county records moved to Calvert and the town faded, leaving only its cemetery to mark the site.

Palestine, TX

During World War II the railroad town of Palestine sat more than a hundred miles from any base, yet trainloads of soldiers rolled through daily. In June 1942 local residents — led by Zula Hanks and staffed by scores of women — opened a service club in the O'Neil Hotel offering refreshments, music, dancing, and letter-writing, and carried sandwiches out to troops who could not leave the trains. The group also helped fund a separate Negro Service Club for the African American soldiers who often rode farther down the line.

Pampa, TX

In the early 1940s Pampa's mayor and chamber of commerce lobbied Washington to bring a military base to the Panhandle, and the Army—drawn by the flat terrain and clear skies—broke ground in June 1942. The Pampa Army Air Force Base trained thousands of pilots and mechanics for World War II, boasting one of the best safety records in the Training Command. It closed in 1945 after just three years, having trained 6,292 cadets and 3,500 mechanics.

Greenville, TX

Opened in 1929 with a gift from Eula Lasater Phillips in memory of her husband, this field hosted Greenville's football triumphs—including a 1933 state championship—before being remade for baseball. Rechristened for Truett Majors, the first local man killed in World War II, the minor-league Majors drew huge crowds and once beat a barnstorming New York Yankees team fielding Casey Stengel and Joe DiMaggio. Hometown pitcher Monty Stratton also took the mound here before the stadium's demolition in the 1960s.

Anderson, TX

By 1850 the sulphur springs near Anderson had drawn health-seekers to Piedmont Springs, where bathhouses and drinking pavilions let guests take the waters. A grand four-story, hundred-room hotel built around 1860 became the social heart of the region — billiards, poker, horse races, and, by legend, a minuet danced by Sam Houston himself. War transformed it in 1865 into a hospital and headquarters for John G. Walker's Confederate "Greyhound Division," and financial panic shuttered it in the 1870s.

Hungerford, TX

In the summer of 1837 the young Republic of Texas established Post West Bernard Station as an ordnance depot, stockpiling cannons, rifles, muskets, powder, and shot. Sited on the West Bernard River, it helped shield Houston — then the capital — against the threat of a Mexican invasion. Officers like Lt. H. L. Grush and Capt. Martin K. Snell held the post under harsh conditions until 1838–39, when its arms were transferred to the new Houston Arsenal.

Bonham, TX

Gideon Smith, an Alabama native, moved to Fannin County in 1851 and bought a 3,000-acre tract, later sharing half with his brother John, who came to practice medicine. Gideon served a term in the Texas Legislature and went to war as a Confederate colonel, while both brothers built one of the area's earliest large plantations. Part of that land has stayed in continuous grain and cattle production since 1851.

Beaumont, TX

From 1862 to 1864, Colonel A. W. Spaight's Battalion of the 2nd Texas Infantry camped on Spindle Top Hill, its ranks drawn from Jefferson, Liberty, and Chambers counties. Their presence helped guard this stretch of the Texas coast against Federal invasion during the Civil War. The state erected this marker in 1936.

McLean County, IL

In 1730, during the long and brutal Fox Wars, a coalition of French soldiers and their Native allies besieged and defeated a band of the Fox (Meskwaki) people on the Illinois prairie, a bloody episode in France's campaign against the nation. This marker, placed in 1951, records that clash and preserves the Native place-name 'Etnataek.' It stands as one of the few reminders on the landscape of the imperial and inter-tribal warfare that convulsed the region a quarter-century before American independence.

Saint Jo, TX

In 1759, Spanish commander Diego Ortiz Parrilla marched north from San Antonio with some 600 soldiers and Indian allies to punish the Comanches and their French-armed allies after the destruction of Mission San Sabá. At this bend of the Red River he found a fortified Taovaya (Wichita) village flying a French flag, its defenders well supplied with guns. After a four-hour battle cost him 52 men, Parrilla withdrew under cover of night and was harried for days on his retreat—a stinging defeat for Spain on its northern frontier.

Columbus, TX

For a week in March 1836, this ground held a division of Santa Anna's advancing Mexican army under General Joaquín Ramírez y Sesma, which had crossed the Colorado River at Atascosita Ford eight miles below Columbus. The camp belongs to the tense campaign that swept across Texas after the Alamo, as Sam Houston's outnumbered forces retreated eastward toward their eventual stand at San Jacinto.

San Antonio, TX

In late October 1835, as the Texas Revolution ignited, Stephen F. Austin camped here while gathering volunteers for the campaign against the Mexican garrison at San Antonio. Soon after Austin left to serve as commissioner to the United States, Texan forces under Ben Milam and Frank W. Johnson stormed the town, capturing it on December 10, 1835. This ground marks a pivotal staging point in the fight that would lead toward Texas independence.

Moulton, TX

In the anxious spring of 1836, as Santa Anna's army advanced after the fall of the Alamo, General Sam Houston led the small Texian army eastward in a strategic retreat that settlers called the Runaway Scrape. This site marks one of the camps along that march from Gonzales toward the Brazos, part of the maneuvering that would culminate weeks later in the decisive victory at San Jacinto.

Marshall, TX

Business leader George B. Adkins built a fine three-story brick hotel on this Marshall site in 1857, and "Adkins House" quickly became a stage depot serving the southern branch of the Butterfield Overland Mail. During the Civil War, the exiled Confederate governor of Missouri met here with the Confederate governors of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, making the hotel a quiet crossroads of Confederate wartime politics. Later renamed "The Capitol," it hosted celebrities for decades before its first floor turned to shops and the building was finally razed in 1971–72.

Marshall, TX

With Texas nearly devoid of factories when it joined the Confederacy in 1861, Marshall became a hub of wartime manufacturing and, by 1863, headquarters for Confederate operations west of the Mississippi. In the basement of a dwelling here, some forty workers blocked and finished high-quality fur-felt military hats and stitched blankets to outfit Texas soldiers. The site later passed through generations of the Edmund Key family before becoming a memorial park.

Corpus Christi, TX

As Corpus Christi worked to become a deepwater port in the late 1850s, the U.S. Lighthouse Service bought this site in 1857 and built a brick lighthouse to guide approaching vessels. The Civil War halted the harbor plans, and Confederate forces turned the tower into a powder magazine — until a band of young Confederate loyalists, fearing Federal capture in 1863, secretly packed a butter churn with gunpowder and tried to blow it up. The blast scorched the tower but spared the powder store; the battered beacon limped on until it was dismantled as a nuisance around 1878.

New York, NY

This spot in what is now Prospect Park marks ground contested during the Battle of Long Island in August 1776, the first major engagement after the Declaration of Independence. American troops held a redoubt with two cannon on the rise nearby, guarding a pass through the hills — the old "gate-way" road the early Dutch settlers had used. To slow the advancing British, patriots felled the great Dongan Oak that stood at the gap, blocking the road.

El Paso, TX

On September 14, 1849, Brevet Major Jefferson Van Horne established this post with four companies of the Third U.S. Infantry, first calling it Post El Paso. Re-garrisoned in 1854, it was renamed Fort Bliss to honor Brevet Major William Wallace Smith Bliss. The original post was finally abandoned in 1868 as the shifting Rio Grande encroached on its grounds.

Gonzales County, TX

Near this spot on October 2, 1835, Texas colonists answered the Mexican government's demand to surrender their small cannon with a defiant "come and take it." The skirmish at Gonzales — the "first shot" of the Texas Revolution — sent Mexican troops retreating toward Bexar and set the colonies on the road to independence. This granite-and-bronze monument, designed by Waldine Tauch, was raised generations later to mark the ground.

New Orleans, LA

This corner holds layers of New Orleans's legal and civic past. A Spanish colonial boys' public school stood here from 1792, and after the Louisiana Purchase the building became the first United States District Court for the Louisiana Territory. In 1815, in a famous clash between military and civil authority, General Andrew Jackson was fined $1,000 for contempt after refusing to lift martial law until news of peace was confirmed following the Battle of New Orleans.

Deer Park, TX

This was the 1836 homesite of Dr. George Moffit Patrick (1801–1889), a pioneer surveyor of early Texas. After the decisive Battle of San Jacinto, the victorious Texas army encamped here, and the young Republic's cabinet met on the grounds. The State of Texas marked the spot in 1936, the centennial of independence.

Refugio, TX

Captain Ira Westover was a committed soldier of the Texas Revolution, taking part in the capture of Goliad in October 1835 and, with just 14 Texans, seizing Fort Lipantitlán from a much larger Mexican force weeks later. He served in the General Council of Texas in 1835 as a representative of the Goliad municipality. Leading a company raised in Refugio as part of Fannin's command, he was among those massacred at Goliad on March 27, 1836.

Yorktown, TX

Captain John York came to Texas as a member of one of Stephen F. Austin's ranging companies, and in 1835 commanded a company at the capture of San Antonio during the Texas Revolution. The town of Yorktown, laid out on his land in 1848, was named in his honor. Born on Independence Day in 1800, he was killed by Indians that same year, 1848.

Utley, TX

Robert M. Coleman was one of the founding figures of the Texas Republic — a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, an aide to General Sam Houston at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto, and a commander of frontier Rangers. He drowned in 1837, but tragedy followed his family: in 1839 his widow Elizabeth and son Albert were killed and young Thomas captured in an Indian raid near their homesite. The State of Texas honored him with this marker in 1936, and a supplemental plate added in 1968 records his role as an early official and namesake of Coleman County.

Beasley, TX

By the time Elizabeth Powell received this land grant in 1831, the Texas frontier was filling with Anglo-American colonists under Mexican rule — settlers whose grievances would soon erupt into revolution. Five years later this spot became a hinge point of that war: it marked the farthest eastern reach of General Urrea's column and the southern turn of Santa Anna's army toward the Brazos and San Jacinto. After Sam Houston's decisive victory at San Jacinto in April 1836, the defeated Mexican forces camped near here as they withdrew.

Point Blank, TX

This site marks the home of George Thomas Wood, a Georgia-born leader who rose to prominence in the young state of Texas. He commanded a regiment as a colonel in the Mexican War, served in the Congress of the Republic, and was elected the second governor of the State of Texas, holding office from 1847 to 1849. He died in Texas in 1858, and the State erected this memorial in 1936, the year of the Texas Centennial.

Brazoria, TX

John Austin lived at the turbulent birth of Anglo Texas. He rode with the ill-fated Long Expedition of 1819, settled among Stephen F. Austin's colonists, and served as alcalde of Brazoria before commanding at the 1832 Battle of Velasco, one of the first armed clashes between Texas colonists and Mexican troops. He signed the Turtle Bayou Resolutions that same year, declaring the colonists' grievances, and died in 1833 — just before the revolution he had helped set in motion.

Nacogdoches, TX

John S. Roberts, a Virginia native who reached Texas in 1826, threw himself into the fight for Texas independence—fighting at the Battle of Nacogdoches, sitting as a delegate to the 1835 Consultation, helping storm Bexar, and finally signing the Texas Declaration of Independence in March 1836. His home once stood on this Nacogdoches site, marked by the state during the 1936 centennial of Texas independence. He represents the ordinary settlers who became revolutionaries.

Nacogdoches, TX

A native son of Nacogdoches, Juan Antonio Padilla rose to serve as land commissioner in 1829 and as vice-governor of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas, then took an active part in the Texas Revolution. He died in Houston in 1839, and his wife, Maria Montes del Padilla, died at their Nacogdoches home in 1846. A 1936 state marker honors the site where they lived.

Richmond, TX

Randal Jones joined James Long's filibustering expedition into Texas in 1819, served as a militia captain under Stephen F. Austin in 1824, and sat in the 1835 Consultation that set the Texas Revolution in motion. On land granted to him in 1824 he built a house where the famed scout Erastus "Deaf" Smith died in 1837. The state marked the site during the 1936 Texas centennial.

Meyersville, TX

Robert Justus Kleberg, born in Germany in 1803, came to Texas in 1834 and fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in Captain Moseley Baker's company during the Texas Revolution. He went on to serve in the state legislature as a senator and lived in the Meyersville area until his death at Yorktown, Texas, in 1888. A Texas county was later named in his honor.

Nacogdoches, TX

Thomas J. Rusk was one of the towering figures of the Texas Republic—a hero of San Jacinto, commander-in-chief of the army in 1836, chief justice of the Supreme Court, president of the 1845 annexation convention, and then a U.S. senator. He called Nacogdoches home from 1835 until his death in 1857, and the state marked his home site during the 1936 centennial. Few careers span so completely the passage of Texas from rebellion to republic to statehood.

Edna, TX

On this ground in February 1837, two generals of the young Republic of Texas' army, Albert Sidney Johnston and Felix Huston, settled a bitter dispute over command in the era's brutal fashion — a pistol duel that left Johnston seriously wounded. Johnston survived to become one of the Confederacy's most senior generals, only to be killed leading the attack at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862.

Frankston, TX

During the years of the Republic of Texas, conflict between settlers and Native peoples flared repeatedly across the eastern frontier. On October 16, 1838, General Thomas J. Rusk led about 200 Texans in an attack on a band of Native Americans and allied Mexicans near this spot, dispersing them in what became known as the Kickapoo battle. The clash was one of many in the Republic's campaigns to push Indigenous nations from the settlement line.

Vidor, TX

In 1908, Kichimatsu Kishi—a Japanese native and veteran of the Russo-Japanese War—founded an agricultural colony here, bringing Japanese tenant farmers who found the wet Orange County soil ideal for rice. The settlers became American citizens and adopted Western ways while keeping their homeland's traditions, and Kishi gave land for a church, a school, and a cemetery as Mexican and French Louisiana workers joined them. Falling prices and the Depression broke the colony in the 1930s, though many families stayed and their descendants remain in Southeast Texas.

Snyder, TX

After the Civil War, the U.S. Army pushed to secure the West Texas frontier, and Colonel Ranald S. MacKenzie became the central figure in the campaigns against the Comanche and their allies. From forts like Griffin and Concho he blazed supply routes across the Plains toward Palo Duro Canyon, where in 1874 his troops broke the power of the Southern Plains tribes. The trail crossing near Snyder was so well known that the town's 1881 townsite abstracts referenced 'The MacKenzie Trail' as a landmark.

Cleburne, TX

This reliable spring drew explorers, soldiers of the Confederate Camp Henderson, and early settlers who traveled many miles to wash, haul water, and visit. Enterprising boys "toted" buckets to town merchants at a nickel apiece, and though the brick-lined pool was often dipped dry, the spring always refilled it. It supplied Cleburne until the town's first city well finally tapped the same source.

Monterey, CA · est. 1997

This spot in Monterey marks where the original flagstaff stood when Commodore John Drake Sloat raised the American flag on July 7, 1846, claiming California for the United States. The seizure came during the war with Mexico, and the territory was formally ceded two years later under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. A 1997 dedication by the state park commission and the Native Sons of the Golden West preserves the memory of that morning.

Forreston, TX

War of 1812 veteran and Republic of Texas frontier commander Edward H. Tarrant built his home on this Ellis County land in 1845 and raised the county's first mill nearby. A statesman and campaigner against Native peoples, he lived here until his death in August 1858. The State of Texas marked the plantation site in 1936.

Bayside, TX

Copano took its name from the Native people of this coast and served as an important Texas port from the early 1700s into the 1870s. Colonists bound for the interior came ashore here, and in 1835 it sheltered the winter quarters of the army of the Texas Revolution. The town is gone now, its marker moved from the original site on Copano Bay in 1978.

Fulton, TX

Founded in 1838 and named for Mirabeau B. Lamar, the second president of the Republic of Texas, this coastal town on the Aransas Bay was made a port of entry in 1839 during the heady early days of Texan independence. Its fortunes never rose far, and Union troops sacked the settlement in February 1864 during the Civil War. Though it clung to life until 1914, Lamar quietly faded into one of the Gulf Coast's many vanished towns.

Richmond, TX

On April 14, 1836, part of the Mexican Army under General Antonio López de Santa Anna crossed the Brazos River here at Thompson's Ferry as it pursued the Texan forces during the Texas Revolution. Just one week later, that campaign ended in stunning fashion at the Battle of San Jacinto, where the Texans won their independence. The State of Texas placed this marker in 1936 for the revolution's centennial.

Freeport, TX

Long before Freeport rose nearby, the town of Velasco stood at the mouth of the Brazos River as one of the earliest gateways into Anglo Texas, funneling more than 25,000 settlers into Stephen F. Austin's colonies between 1821 and 1835. In 1832 it became the scene of an early armed clash between colonists and Mexican forces, an ember of the coming Texas Revolution. By the mid-1800s the same coastline had reinvented itself as a breezy resort for wealthy plantation families, before the Civil War and an 1875 hurricane hollowed the town out for good.

Midway, TX

On this bluff above the Trinity River stood the Spanish fort and town of Trinidad, later called Spanish Bluff, established as early as 1805. In October 1812 the Magee-Gutiérrez Expedition—an early filibuster to wrest Texas from Spain—captured the post, and nearby the survivors of the 1813 Battle of Medina were executed. Spanish forces then butchered the town's inhabitants and left it desolate.

Sweetwater, TX

At dawn on April 20, 1945, a C-47 transport carrying 25 Army Air Corps officers and enlisted men left Midland Army Air Field bound for Nashville, Tennessee. Sweetwater cab drivers spotted the plane afire in mid-air, and it disintegrated and crashed 0.6 miles east of this spot, scattering wreckage along a two-mile line and killing all aboard — men aged 20 to 37 from across the nation. Investigators concluded the aircraft, worn from 4,000 hours of glider-towing duty, had broken apart in a thunderstorm's severe turbulence while flying on a single engine.

Galveston, TX

In January 1847, seven Ursuline nuns arrived from New Orleans at a bishop's request and opened a convent and girls' academy in a former judge's home in Galveston, beginning with twenty-five students. Through hurricanes and repeated yellow fever epidemics the sisters sheltered orphans and, during the Civil War, nursed wounded soldiers from both sides. Later generations knew the towering Gothic academy designed by architect Nicholas Clayton, which stood as a place of refuge in storms until Hurricane Carla forced its end in 1961.

West Point, TX

From 1828 to 1842 the fortified residence of Zadock Woods served the colonists of this vicinity as a refuge against Indian attacks during the turbulent years of Mexican Texas and the Republic. Woods, a veteran of the War of 1812 and one of Stephen F. Austin's original "Old Three Hundred" colonists, was by then an old man. He was killed at the Dawson Massacre on September 18, 1842, remembered as the oldest man to fall in that fight against invading Mexican forces.

Brownwood, TX

During World War II, Camp Bowie near Brownwood was a sprawling training base capable of holding 45,000 soldiers and home to the Texas 36th Division along with armored, cavalry, and headquarters units. Operating from 1940 to 1946, it helped prepare countless troops for the fighting overseas. The camp took its name from Alamo hero James Bowie.

Orange, TX

During World War II more than 50,000 German prisoners of war were held in over 70 camps across Texas, and in 1944 about 140 of them were housed in an Army tent camp near this site, branching off the base camp at Huntsville. Trucked out each day to the rice fields, the prisoners helped bring in harvests for farmers whose own workers had gone to war, often forming good relations with their employers. Their labor proved crucial to wartime food production, and prisoners returned to work Orange County farms again in 1945.

Wharton, TX

This Wharton County land began as part of an 1824 grant to Martin Allen, one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred" colonists, and later belonged to Albert Clinton Horton, Texas's first lieutenant governor. During World War II, when more than 50,000 German prisoners of war were interned across Texas, Camp Wharton was established here in 1943 as a branch of Camp Swift. Converted from old county-fair buildings, it housed prisoners who worked as farm laborers throughout the surrounding counties.

Princeton, TX

Dedicated in 1941 with House Speaker Sam Rayburn in attendance, this began as a camp for migratory farm laborers. Once World War II arrived, federal officials converted it to hold German prisoners of war, who worked the surrounding Princeton-area farms and helped fill a wartime labor shortage. After the prisoners were released in 1946, the grounds returned to their original purpose, sheltering migrant workers for years afterward.

China, TX

As World War II drained America's labor force, the government put prisoners of war to work on the home front. This site held a branch of the huge Huntsville base camp, opened in September 1944 on land leased from an oil company and coordinated through the Texas A&M extension service. German soldiers—many first captured from Rommel's Afrika Korps—were picked up each morning by local farmers to harvest rice, log, and do general farm labor for a few cents an hour; at its August 1945 peak the camp held 403 prisoners before closing that December.

Center Point, TX

Dr. Charles De Ganahl built this home in 1856 and named it Zanzenberg after his family's ancestral seat in the Austrian Tyrol. A signer of the Texas Articles of Secession in 1861, he went on to serve as a surgeon for the Confederacy. The house also held Kerr County's first post office, established in 1857 with his wife Virginia serving as the county's first postmaster.

Llano, TX

Six Mile Cemetery has served this farming and ranching community since the early 1880s, on land donated by early residents in 1883. The earliest marked grave belongs to an infant who died that December, and the ground has since gathered generations of area families. Among those buried here are veterans of the Civil War, frontier battles with Native Americans, and both World Wars.

Belton, TX

In November 1836, some twenty Rangers under Lt. George B. Erath built this Republic of Texas outpost, raising seven or eight cabins, a blockhouse, and a picket stockade around a half-acre near a spring. Rations were spare — an ear of corn a day, plus game, honey, and a little coffee. The Rangers withdrew by mid-1837, and settlers and hunters later used the site before its remains were cleared in the 1840s.

Dinwiddie County, VA

In the darkness before dawn on April 2, 1865, Union forces launched a massive assault on the Confederate lines defending Petersburg, Virginia. The Sixth Maryland Infantry charged across this ground, with a portion of the regiment under Major Clifton K. Prentiss breaking over the Confederate earthworks at heavy cost. This breakthrough was part of the final collapse of Lee's defenses that forced the evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, leading to the surrender at Appomattox just a week later.

Clark County, AR

This marker recalls a small Civil War engagement fought near the site on April 1, 1864, during a period when Union and Confederate forces skirmished across south-central Arkansas. That spring saw the Union's Camden Expedition push through the region, sparking numerous clashes as troops maneuvered through the countryside. Such skirmishes, though modest in scale, shaped the war's course far from its famous battlefields.

Boone County, KY

During the Confederate invasion of Kentucky in 1862, cavalry under Gen. Basil W. Duke probed for routes toward Cincinnati. On September 25, more than 500 Confederates attacked a Union camp here commanded by Brig. Gen. Quincy A. Gillmore. Captured Federal soldiers were marched to Falmouth and shipped to Lexington, then the Confederacy's regional headquarters.