Military & Wartime

Losoya, TX

On August 18, 1813, Spanish royalist General José Joaquín Arredondo crushed the Republican Army of the North—a mixed force of Anglo-Americans, Mexicans, and Native fighters under José Álvarez de Toledo—in a battle remembered for its ferocity. The defeat ended an early bid to wrest Texas and Mexico from Spanish rule. It remains among the bloodiest battles ever fought on Texas soil.

San Antonio, TX

On September 18, 1842, Texas volunteers under Mathew Caldwell and John Coffee Hays met General Adrián Woll's Mexican force outside San Antonio, which the Mexican army had just seized. Fighting from a shaded creek bank, the outnumbered Texans held their ground and turned back what proved to be the last Mexican invasion to reach that far into the young Republic of Texas. Their stand shielded the capital at Austin and helped steady a nation still only six years removed from independence.

Atlanta, GA

Between July and September 1864, Union and Confederate armies fought for control of Atlanta, the Deep South's great manufacturing and railroad hub. Four inconclusive battles—Peachtree Creek, Atlanta, Ezra Church, and Utoy Creek—raged around the city before Union forces swept south and, at Jonesboro, cut the last railroad supplying it. Atlanta fell on September 2, 1864.

Brady Township, PA · est. 1950

Where two great Indian paths met — the Great Shamokin running toward Kittanning and the trail to Venango, now Franklin — travelers found a reliable spring and a natural camping ground. Generations used this junction as a resting place in the deep forests of central Pennsylvania. During the War of 1812, Major McClelland's militia force also camped at this spot, following the same well-worn crossroads that Native peoples had long relied upon.

Eastman, GA

This stretch of highway follows the old Blackshear Road, planned and cut through the wilderness in 1815 by Major Elijah Blackshear and a company of Georgia Volunteer Militia. It gained its fame as the alternate route General David Blackshear used while defending Georgia's threatened southern frontier during the War of 1812. The road later served as a route of settlement and travel.

Shelby County, KY

During the Civil War, the border state of Kentucky was plagued by guerrilla bands and marauders who preyed on divided communities. In 1858 the townspeople built a small log blockhouse in the middle of the intersection, pierced with loopholes and manned whenever an alarm sounded. In August 1864 the guerrilla captain David "Black Dave" Martin tried to raid the courthouse for its stored guns, but townsmen drove him off, killing three raiders.

Wyoming, PA · est. 1962

On the night of July 3, 1778, the day after the Battle of Wyoming, this rock became the scene of one of the Revolution's grim atrocities. Fourteen or more captured American soldiers were killed here, according to tradition by a woman remembered as "Queen Esther," though her identity has never been certain. The battle and its aftermath spread terror through the Susquehanna frontier and hardened the war on the Pennsylvania borderlands.

Sunbury, PA · est. 1967

During the French and Indian War, the Susquehanna frontier was a dangerous borderland where British colonists, French forces, and Native nations contested the land. From the garrison at nearby Fort Augusta, soldiers ventured out at their peril; here, one man is said to have been killed, his blood coloring the spring that gave the place its grim name. The story preserves the fear and violence that hung over Pennsylvania's backcountry in those years.

Albany, GA

At a crossing of the Flint River where an early ferry once ran, Albany founder Col. Nelson Tift built a toll bridge in 1857, its span raised by Horace of Columbus, a freed Black bridge-builder of wide renown. Tift's adjoining 'Bridge House' held the bridge keeper's quarters and Tift's own office below, and above them 'Tift's Hall,' a lavishly decorated theatre that drew touring actors and hosted the town's grand balls. During the Civil War its cellars were turned into packing houses, curing meat for the Confederate Navy.

Smethport, PA · est. 1949

When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Col. Thomas L. Kane rallied about 100 volunteers who gathered at Smethport on the 24th before marching off to Harrisburg. These backwoods marksmen pinned tails of buck deer to their caps as a badge of identity, giving rise to the celebrated nickname "the Bucktails." They formed the core of the famed 42nd Pennsylvania Regiment, which earned a reputation as some of the Union's finest sharpshooters.

Driftwood, PA · est. 1950

When the Civil War broke out in the spring of 1861, hardy woodsmen and hunters from Pennsylvania's northern mountains answered the call, famously pinning deer tails to their caps as a badge of their marksmanship. From this point along the Sinnemahoning they set off in April 1861 for Harrisburg to be mustered into service as the men who would become known as the Bucktails. A nearby monument, a state highway, and a state park all keep their name alive.

Sierra Blanca, TX

For centuries these natural hot springs drew people seeking their curative waters, including generations of nomadic Indian peoples. After the Civil War the U.S. Army raised regiments of Black soldiers, and troopers of the 10th Cavalry, called buffalo soldiers by their adversaries, patrolled and mapped this rugged West Texas country. At dawn on October 28, 1880, companies pursuing Mescalero Apaches were attacked on a nearby ridge; at least five soldiers were killed and buried where they fell, their graves later relocated to this vicinity.

San Antonio, TX

This Neo-Classical Revival residence was completed in 1909 for Gen. John Lapham Bullis, a New Yorker who spent much of his career on the Southwestern frontier. In 1873 Bullis took command of a company of Seminole Scouts whose skill at tracking raiders on the Texas border drew national attention. He lived in the house, designed by San Antonio architect Harvey Page, until his death in 1911; nearby Camp Bullis bears his name.

Darien, GA

On June 11, 1863, Federal troops from nearby St. Simons Island burned the largely deserted seaport of Darien, destroying churches, businesses, and nearly every home while most of its 500 residents had fled inland. The raiders included the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers under Colonel Robert Gould Shaw—among the first African American regiments to serve the Union—and the 2nd South Carolina under James Montgomery. The needless torching of an undefended town became one of the war's most controversial acts.

San Marcos, TX

Built in 1873 as Hays County's first jail, this sturdy little brick lockup earned the folk name "Calaboose," from the Spanish calabozo. Its history traces the arc of segregation in Central Texas: an annex for Black prisoners, then a neighborhood recreation center, and during World War II a U.S.O. hospitality center for Black servicemen barred from whites-only facilities. In later years it returned to community use.

Covington, GA

As the Battle of Atlanta raged to the west in July 1864, Union cavalry armed with rapid-firing Spencer repeaters swept into the undefended town of Covington. In the violence that followed, a resisting citizen and a furloughed Confederate soldier were killed, and the raiders destroyed or carried off supplies useful to the Confederacy before riding on toward Oxford.

Marietta, OH

Completed in 1855, this Gothic Revival mansion — known locally as The Castle for its castellated tower — was built for attorney Melvin C. Clarke. When war came, Clarke joined the Union army and was killed in 1862 at Antietam, the bloodiest single day of the Civil War. The house later passed to the Nye and Bosley families and today serves as a museum of period woodwork, furnishings, and changing exhibits.

Fredericksburg, TX

Christian Kraus began this stone home in 1859 after he and his wife Anna Maria settled in the German community of Klein Frankreich, or 'Little France,' near Fredericksburg. Kraus farmed and taught school, and the family raised not only their own seven children but also the seven orphaned children of Peter Burg, who was killed by the Haengebrande, the vigilante band that terrorized Unionist Germans during the Civil War. A pillar of the community, Kraus helped build Fredericksburg's St. Mary's Catholic Church and expanded his vernacular stone home in 1879.

Independence, MO

This courtyard in Independence, Missouri, was dedicated in 2004 as a community space honoring the region's military veterans, with a commemorative plaque later added by the local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter. Independence has deep patriotic roots as a frontier crossroads and hometown of a U.S. president. The courtyard gathers that civic pride into a place of remembrance for those who served.

Columbus, TX

When the state's pioneering Buffalo Bayou, Brazos & Colorado railroad routed its Houston-to-Austin line through nearby Alleyton and bypassed Columbus in the 1850s, local planters and merchants fought back by chartering their own Columbus Tap Railway in 1860 to connect the two. The Civil War intervened; though the Confederacy found the line useful and even impressed labor to work its roadbed in 1863, it went unfinished during the fighting. Completed after the war, it eventually folded into the Southern Pacific system.

Paducah, KY

When Confederate forces occupied nearby Hickman and Columbus in the summer of 1861, hopeful Paducahans raised a large Confederate flag to welcome a Southern army they believed was on its way. Instead, General Grant's Union troops, backed by gunboats, moved to occupy Paducah on September 6. As seizure loomed, Mrs. Emily Jarrett rushed to save the banner, having a boy climb the pole to drop it to her, and hid it from searching Union soldiers—keeping it until it was buried with her decades later.

Yellow Springs, OH

In the second year of the Civil War, as the future of slavery hung in the balance, the abolitionist minister Moncure Conway did something few Southern-born sons of slaveholding families ever attempted: he arranged for the people his family held in bondage in Virginia to travel north to freedom. Their destination was the countryside near Yellow Springs, Ohio, a corner of the state already known for its reform-minded, antislavery convictions. Guided by Dunmore and Eliza Gwinn, the group made a long and dangerous overland journey to build new lives as free people while the war still raged around them.

San Antonio, TX

In September 1842, as Mexican forces under General Woll occupied San Antonio, Captain Nicholas Dawson led 53 volunteers from La Grange to reinforce Texan troops fighting at Salado Creek. Cut off and surrounded by cavalry and artillery, Dawson's company was overwhelmed: 36 men were killed, 15 captured, and only 3 escaped. The bloody episode became known as the Dawson Massacre.

College Station, TX

This sculpture commemorates the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the moment the barrier dividing East and West Berlin was breached and the Cold War began to thaw. A companion piece stands in Berlin itself, linking College Station to that world-changing event. Sited near the George Bush Presidential Library, it marks an era when American leadership helped bring a decades-long global standoff to a close.

Brooklyn Township, PA · est. 2015

In 1793, Prince Perkins, a free African American veteran of the Revolutionary War, came from Connecticut to settle this land in the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania, and his descendants have held it for more than two centuries. His granddaughter Angeline Perkins Dennis and her husband Henry expanded the farm, sustaining a rare, lasting Black landholding in an integrated rural community. The property offers a window into free African American settlement and the strong antislavery currents that ran through this corner of Pennsylvania.

Bluff Dale, TX

Alfred W. Denny came to Texas in 1853 and, during the Civil War, served in a Ranger company based at Stephenville that guarded the state's exposed western frontier. In 1867 he bought 320 acres that would become both his home and his final resting place. The family cemetery holds seventeen known graves, among them his wife Mary Elizabeth and an infant grandson, and it was carefully restored in 1982.

Plumstead Township, PA · est. 2005

During the American Revolution, the Doan family of Plumstead Township turned outlaw, spying for the British and trafficking stolen horses to their army even as the war raged around them. In 1781 they robbed the Bucks County treasury, and in 1783 the Pennsylvania government formally declared six of them outlaws for a string of robberies and burglaries. The gang met a violent end: their leader Moses was killed in a shootout, two brothers were hanged, and the rest fled or vanished, with several buried nearby.

Laramie County, WY

Built between 1885 and 1888, these brick officer's quarters replaced the original wood buildings at what was then a frontier army post in Wyoming. Nicknamed "The Doll Houses," they date from the era when the U.S. Army maintained garrisons across the West to support settlement and railroad expansion. The substantial masonry construction signaled the post's permanence as the frontier era waned.

La Grange, TX

This La Grange home began in 1841 as two rooms of local pine and was later acquired and enlarged by S. S. Munger. From 1866 to 1961 it belonged to the estate of N. W. Faison, who in 1842 joined the Dawson expedition to resist a Mexican invasion of Texas; captured near San Antonio when many of the Dawson men were massacred, Faison was later pardoned by Santa Anna. As county clerk, he worked to return his fallen comrades' remains for burial at Monument Hill in 1848.

Mobile, AL

The Fallen Guardians Monument in Mobile honors United States Coast Guard personnel who died carrying out their missions in Alabama. It remembers the men and women of a service whose duties—search and rescue, maritime security, and defense—often demand the ultimate sacrifice in Gulf Coast waters. The monument gives permanent recognition to service members whose losses might otherwise go unmarked.

Bowling Green, OH

This marker recalls a lesser-known chapter of the Revolution: when British forces led by Benedict Arnold raided coastal Connecticut and burned its farms and towns, ruined families were left with nothing. As compensation, in 1792 Connecticut set aside a half-million acres at the western edge of its Reserve in Ohio — the 'Firelands' of Erie and Huron counties — for these 'sufferers.' The grant helped carry New England families westward into the Ohio country.

Center, TX

This marks the vicinity of the first clash in the Regulator-Moderator War, a bitter feud that convulsed Shelby County from 1841 to 1844 in the days of the Republic of Texas. What began as a quarrel between rival factions escalated into an unorganized war of ambush and reprisal, ending only when General James Smith led Texas forces in to restore order in August 1844—reportedly without firing a gun.

Denison, TX

George S. Fitzgerald moved his family from Virginia to Texas in 1857 and cut the building timber for this house on his own 800-acre farm in 1859. Interrupted by service in the Confederate army, he finally raised the pegged-oak house in 1866 and went on to prosper as a respected Grayson County commissioner. Its sturdy 20-foot rooms and twin staircases reflect the substance of a rebuilding postwar household.

Floresville, TX

The Flores de Abrego family came from northern Spain before the American Revolution and, through the eighteenth century, drove their cattle north to establish ranches along the San Antonio River. Grandsons of the family fought on the Texian side in the revolution against Mexico, and in 1854 Josefa Agustina Flores de Abrego married Samuel William Barker, who became Wilson County's first sheriff. In 1867 Josefa donated 200 acres for the new county seat, asking that it be named Floresville in honor of her ancestor Francisco Antonio Flores de Abrego II.

Fontana, CA

Set in Fontana's Veterans Park, this flagpole memorial gathers the city's thanks to everyone who has worn a U.S. uniform. Its Canning epigraph — "When our perils are past, shall our gratitude sleep?" — frames a community's promise not to let the memory of service fade once the danger has passed. Dedicated by the people of Fontana, it belongs to the long American tradition of hometown veterans tributes that name no single battle but honor them all.

Frankfort, KY

Established in 1871 on land known as Coleman's Spring lot, the Frankfort Barracks housed U.S. Army infantry — first the 4th and later the 16th Regiments — with barracks, a guardhouse, and two hospitals. Its purpose was to maintain a military presence and protect African Americans in the area during the volatile years of Reconstruction. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

Seattle, WA

Dedicated in 1972 at the height of the Vietnam War, this Freedom Tree in Washington State stands for prisoners of war and those missing in action. Living "freedom trees" were planted across the country during that era as rallying points for the POW/MIA movement, expressing hope that captured and missing servicemen would come home. This one is dedicated to "the sons of Washington" and to the ideal of universal freedom.

Quakertown, PA · est. 2003

The young United States was still testing whether ordinary citizens would accept federal power, and in 1799 Pennsylvania-German farmers gave their answer. Angered by a 1798 federal tax assessed on houses, they took up arms in what became known as the Fries Rebellion, until soldiers were sent to put it down. Its leader, John Fries, was tried and condemned for treason, then pardoned by President John Adams.

Kennesaw, GA

On April 12, 1862, a party of Union soldiers and civilians led by James J. Andrews seized this locomotive at Big Shanty (now Kennesaw) and steamed north, tearing up track and cutting telegraph wires in a daring bid to cripple the Western & Atlantic Railroad linking Atlanta to Chattanooga. Confederate crewmen gave chase — first on foot, then by handcar and other engines — in what became known as the Great Locomotive Chase, running the raiders down before they could do lasting damage. The General survived the war and became one of the most celebrated relics of the conflict, later preserved and displayed as a monument to that famous railroad pursuit.

Greensboro, NC

In 1808, the leaders of Guilford County went looking for a new, more central home for their courthouse, and commissioners settled on a spot near the county's geographic heart to lay out the town of Greensborough. The new county seat—later spelled Greensboro—was named in honor of Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene, whose forces had fought the nearby Battle of Guilford Courthouse in 1781. This monument marks that deliberately chosen center point, the surveyor's-eye 'genesis' from which the streets and squares of a future Piedmont city were measured out.

Navasota, TX

Beside the Houston & Texas Central Railroad depot, German immigrant R. H. Giesel and his German-born wife Fannie built this three-story stone building in 1860 to house a restaurant and hotel, fronted by a two-story frame porch. A Confederate veteran, Giesel served as temporary mayor in 1867 when yellow fever swept Navasota. Fannie renamed her restaurant "The Good Morning John" and ran the business until her death in 1881, after which later owners kept the hotel going under new names.

Glenville, WV

In the mid-19th century, communities across the rugged mountains of western Virginia raised their own volunteer companies, and the Gilmer Rifles was one such locally organized unit drawn from Gilmer County. When the Civil War came, this region was torn by fiercely divided loyalties, with neighbors and even families choosing opposing sides — the very tensions that soon carved the new state of West Virginia out of Virginia in 1863. A company like the Gilmer Rifles carried the name of its home county into a war that reshaped both the nation and the map beneath its feet.

Southbridge, MA

Gold Star monuments carry forward a tradition born in World War I, when families hung a service flag with a blue star for each member in uniform — a star that turned gold if that son or daughter died in the war. The image gave a name to the grieving mothers left behind, and by the late 1920s they had organized into a national movement that lobbied for remembrance and even sailed to visit their children's graves overseas. In a Worcester County mill town like Southbridge, whose factories and immigrant families sent many young men to the nation's wars, a memorial to the Gold Star Mother turned private loss into public honor.

Austin, TX

Albert C. Horton, a veteran of the Texas Revolution, owned this property in the 1840s and lived here as Texas's first elected lieutenant governor. When Governor J. Pinckney Henderson left to fight in the Mexican War in 1846, Horton served as acting chief of state from this house for several months.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997

In 1748 anxious Philadelphians, organized into a volunteer defense force called the Association, threw up the colony's largest fortification along the Delaware River, bristling first with 27 and soon some 50 guns. The battery guarded the river approaches to a Quaker city that had long resisted maintaining a standing military. Decades later the same strategic riverbank hosted the first Philadelphia Navy Yard from 1800 to 1875.

San Antonio, TX

In the autumn of 1835, as the Texas Revolution opened, Texan volunteers—Anglo and Tejano alike—besieged the Centralist garrison at San Antonio de Bexar. On November 26, scout Erastus "Deaf" Smith spotted an approaching Mexican pack train rumored to carry silver payroll, and a sharp skirmish erupted near the creek junctions west of town. When the captured animals were unloaded, the packs held not treasure but fodder grass, giving the clash its wry name and setting the stage for the storming of Bexar weeks later.

Paducah, TX

Around 1885, Civil War veterans of both the Gray and the Blue drifted into western Texas to tame the wilderness, grazing cattle on drought-parched grass and living in dugouts. Old adversaries refought the war verbally on the courthouse square yet built Cottle County together in peace—some 85 percent of early pioneers had worn Confederate gray, though Union men like Prussian immigrant William Frederick Liedtke, a former Nebraska state auditor, settled here too as respected officials. By the 1890s the uniform that mattered was a cowman's regalia, worn by Americans looking forward rather than back.

Gainesville, TX

In the anxious first years of the Civil War, North Texans feared invasion from the north and a Unionist uprising within. Alarm over a rumored "Peace Party" of Union sympathizers led Confederate-loyal citizens to make mass arrests around Cooke County in October 1862, convening an extralegal "Citizens Court" at Gainesville. Forty-one men were hanged after summary trials, and two more were shot, in one of the deadliest episodes of vigilante violence in American history.

Halifax, NC

On April 12, 1776, North Carolina's Provincial Congress meeting at Halifax authorized its delegates to the Continental Congress to vote for independence — the first official action by an entire colony calling for a break with Britain. Adopted nearly three months before the Declaration of Independence, the Halifax Resolves put North Carolina at the leading edge of the independence movement. The date still appears on the state flag and seal.

New York, NY

In Washington Heights, atop the ridge of hard Manhattan schist that gives the neighborhood its name, this marker fixes the island's highest natural elevation—roughly 265 feet above the harbor. Manhattan's dramatic north-end topography, carved by ancient geology and later by the street grid, reaches its crest here in what is today Bennett Park. That commanding high ground was no idle curiosity: during the American Revolution the Continental Army fortified this vantage precisely because whoever held the heights controlled the Hudson approaches to the city.

City of Troy, NY

This is a casting of "The Hiker," the celebrated statue of a common foot soldier, erected by Rensselaer County to honor its men who served in the War with Spain, the Philippine Insurrection, and the China Relief Expedition of 1898–1902. These conflicts marked the United States' abrupt emergence as an overseas power, sending young Americans to Cuba, the Philippines, and China within just a few years. "The Hiker" — the infantryman's nickname — became the standard national monument to these soldiers, cast in dozens of towns across the country. Troy's version keeps that turn-of-the-century service in local memory.

Killeen, TX

Hiram B. Reynolds came to Texas as a child in 1866, grew up farming near the community of Sparta, and built a fortune as a merchant and cotton broker. In 1915 he raised an unusually fine two-story house on one of his Killeen-area farms, complete with carbide lights and a bathroom—a mark of prosperity for its time and place. When the U.S. government took hundreds of area farms to create Fort Hood, the Reynolds house alone survived, later serving as home to visiting general officers before it was demolished in 2015.

Petty, TX

Before the Civil War, a lone grove of persimmons stood as the only trees on a hundred-square-mile Texas prairie, a natural gathering spot where settlers swapped news and livestock. When secession came in 1861, Methodist lay minister and Mexican War veteran James Hill organized a cavalry company here and drilled his men beside the grove. When militia law barred the unit from leaving Texas, they reorganized as Company E of the 9th Texas Infantry and went on to fight at Shiloh, Murfreesboro, and Chickamauga.

Austin, TX

Galveston-born Margaret Catterall married Maine native Gordon Mills in 1933, and the couple settled in Austin, where he managed her father's firm, Aus-Tex Chili, a leading maker of canned regional cuisine. During World War II, Mills secured a government contract to produce rations for Allied soldiers, while both he and Margaret threw themselves into civic life, from the Chamber of Commerce and Better Business Bureau to the Austin Symphony and their Episcopal church.

Kendalia, TX

Born in South Carolina in 1787, Samuel Boyd Patton served in the War of 1812 and held office in the Alabama legislature before moving to Texas in 1837. There he sat on the Board of Land Commissioners and in the Congress of the Republic of Texas, helped organize Blanco County, and became its first chief justice. He later served as Kendall County's second chief justice and was buried on his homestead in 1869.

Kendalia, TX

Samuel Boyd Patton's life traced the American frontier as it moved west: born in South Carolina in 1787, he came of age in Tennessee, fought in the War of 1812, and held office in Alabama before reaching Texas in 1837. There he served in the Congress of the Republic of Texas and on its Board of Land Commissioners, then helped organize Blanco County and became its first county judge. He later served as chief justice of Kendall County and was buried near this spot in 1869.

Houston, TX

Founded as a Texas militia unit in 1873, the Houston Light Guard began with parades, ceremonies, and the crack drill competitions that made its red-coated, plumed members famous across the country in the 1880s. Prize money built its first armory in 1891, but the unit soon turned to real service — the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Punitive Expedition against Mexico in 1916–17, and combat in Europe in World War I. Called up again for World War II, its members fought through seven campaigns in Africa and Europe as part of the 36th Infantry Division.

Gonzales, TX

On March 1, 1836, thirty-two men and boys from Gonzales slipped through the Mexican lines and into the besieged Alamo — the only reinforcements to answer William B. Travis's final plea for help. They ranged from a sixteen-year-old to a man of forty-eight, and all of them died in the fall of the fortress days later. This memorial names each of the Immortal 32 alongside other Gonzales men lost at the Alamo.

Towson, MD

Before it was a colonial highway, this route was a Native American footpath threading through the Maryland Piedmont. In 1695 a troop of rangers rode it out from the Garrison Fort, part of the frontier defenses meant to hold the line at the edge of English settlement. As the colony grew, the trail hardened into the main road to Joppa Town, which served as Baltimore County's seat from 1712 to 1768 and briefly outshone the young port of Baltimore as the region's commercial hub.

Richland, TX

Joseph Burleson reached Texas about 1834 and, in 1836, joined the fight for independence alongside his father Captain James Burleson, three brothers, and other kin — a family that also gave the Republic its Vice President in his brother Edward. In 1854 Joseph bought a 2,775-acre homestead surrounding this site, and the family cemetery came into use by 1867 with the burial of his son John, a Civil War veteran. His wife Mary, mother of his fourteen children, followed in 1869, and Joseph himself in 1877, among more than thirty graves of the Burlesons and allied families.