Military & Wartime

Cooper, TX

Thomas A. Lambeth joined the Confederate Army at sixteen and served as a captain in the escort of General John B. Magruder, commander of the District of Texas. Elected sheriff of Delta County in 1879, he served six years in which the jail was set afire twenty-five times without a single escape, broke up horse-thief relay stations, and cleared the county of cattle rustlers. Remembered as an exacting lawman who taught Sunday School, he shot only one man in all that time.

Brenham, TX

Scottish-born Thomas Affleck emigrated in 1832 and became one of America's best-known agriculturalists, championing scientific farming through his widely read "Affleck's Southern Rural Almanac," published yearly from 1845 to 1861. In the late 1850s he established Glenblythe, a large, highly organized Washington County plantation that even ran a wagon factory turning out wagons and ambulances for the Confederacy. After the Civil War he worked to rebuild Texas's economy, traveling to Britain to encourage investment and emigration before his death in 1868.

East Brandywine Township, PA · est. 1948

Thomas Buchanan Read, born in this corner of Chester County in 1822, won fame in the 19th century as both a painter and a poet. He is best remembered for "Sheridan's Ride," a galloping verse that immortalized a Union general's dramatic dash to rally his troops during the Civil War. Read spent much of his life abroad in Europe before dying in New York and being laid to rest in Philadelphia.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1949

About 1764, Thomas Butler set up his home and gunshop on this lot, the workshop still standing behind the house. When war came, Butler and his five sons all served as officers in the Revolution, earning the family its lasting nickname, the "Fighting Butlers." Their gunmaking trade tied the household directly to the arming of a rebellion.

Edenton, NC

Thomas C. Manning (1825–1887) began his career teaching at Edenton Academy before moving to Louisiana, where he served as that state's Confederate adjutant general from 1863 to 1865. After the war he became chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court and later U.S. Minister to Mexico. This marker notes the North Carolina home where his remarkable public life began.

Ennis, TX

Georgia-born Thomas C. Neel brought his family to Texas in 1854 and to Ellis County in 1855, founding a cotton-and-wheat plantation he called "Will's Town" for his wife Willia—later shortened to Wilton. As secession loomed he was named a delegate to the 1861 Secession Convention, then won election to the Texas House and later the Senate, but fell ill and died in 1863 before he could take his seat. His plantation post office served both U.S. and Confederate governments.

Weatherford, TX

An English immigrant who reached Texas in 1834, Thomas C. Snailum enlisted in the Texas Army in 1836 and fought in the revolution that won the young republic its independence. He married, raised a family across a string of frontier counties, and settled at Weatherford around 1866, ranching cattle before running the St. Charles Hotel until his death in 1884.

Athens, TX

This small family cemetery began with the 1877 burial of Mary Thomas Hall, who died young, likely in childbirth, on the family farm. Its patriarch, Jacob Thomas, was a planter born in North Carolina in 1800 who moved through Georgia, Alabama, and Arkansas before reaching Henderson County, Texas, by 1860. His son Sylvester volunteered for the Confederacy but died of influenza in training, leaving Jacob to raise his grandchildren. Generations of the family lie buried here on the hilltop above the creek.

Walker County, TX

This burial ground marks the site of the Thomas Plantation and its steamboat landing on the river, settled by Alabama native John R. Thomas in 1854. Thomas served in the Confederate army, was captured at the 1863 Battle of Arkansas Post, and died a month later as a prisoner at Camp Chase, Ohio; his mother and two brothers, one also a Confederate veteran, lie here as well. By 1883 a nephew had sold the land and moved on, leaving the cemetery as the family's last mark on the place.

Galveston, TX

This two-story Greek Revival home in Galveston dates to the 1850s and belonged to Commodore Thomas Chubb, a veteran of the Texas Revolution. During the Civil War, Chubb was captured by Union naval forces operating on Galveston Bay, and after the conflict he returned to serve as the city's harbor master. Later owners tied the house to Galveston's mercantile and political life, including a wholesaler and a district attorney.

Brenham, TX

Born near Baltimore in 1776 to a prosperous planter and ironmaster family, Thomas Deye Owings built a fortune in Kentucky's Bourbon Iron Works, founded Owingsville, and even laid an "Iron Road" to ship his goods. Commissioned a colonel in the War of 1812, he led the 28th U.S. Infantry and supplied ammunition for the Battle of New Orleans. Later he backed the Texas Revolution, financing companies of soldiers—roughly eighty of whom, including his son Robert, died at Goliad—and settling near Brenham, where he died in 1853.

Bastrop, TX

Born in Virginia in 1802 and arriving in Texas from Tennessee in 1830, Thomas H. Mays became Bastrop's first municipal surveyor in 1834 and laid out the young town's streets. He was wounded in the leg at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836 while serving with Edward Burleson's "Mina Volunteers," then returned to a life of public service as county deputy surveyor, city alderman, and associate justice. He and his wife raised their family on a large Bastrop homestead that included this site.

Waco, TX

Born in Virginia in 1796, Thomas Hudson Barron fought at the Battle of New Orleans with the Kentucky Militia before joining the stream of settlers into Mexican Texas, appearing in Stephen F. Austin's 1831 registry of families. As a Ranger captain he oversaw the building of Fort Fisher on the Brazos in 1837 and became one of the earliest settlers of what would grow into Waco, later serving as the county's first court clerk. A street, a school, and a creek in the city still carry his name.

Boston, MA

This marker notes the site of the mansion of Thomas Hutchinson, built about 1687 in Boston's North End. Hutchinson served as the colony's royal governor in the tense years before the Revolution, and his fine home stood as a symbol of Crown authority. It was famously ransacked by a mob during the Stamp Act protests of the 1760s.

Corsicana, TX

Born in Virginia in 1800, Thomas Ingles Smith soldiered in the War of 1812 under his father before coming to Texas in 1836 to join the Republic's army. He was wounded at the Battle of the Salado in 1842 and figured in the "Archive War" when Austin residents blocked his Rangers from removing the Republic's records. A frontier Ranger, Indian scout, and treaty commissioner, he lent his name to Fort Smith and helped found Corsicana before his death in 1848.

Somerville, TX

Born in 1922 and schooled in Somerville, Thomas J. Gary, Jr., enlisted in the U.S. Navy at eighteen and was assigned to the USS California, flagship of the Pacific Fleet. When Japanese planes struck Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Gary gave his life rescuing several crewmates and was lost at sea. Honored with the Purple Heart, Bronze Star, and a Navy Citation, he had two ships named for him, including the destroyer escort USS Thomas J. Gary.

Milford, TX

Thomas J. Jordan carried a rifle for the fledgling Texas Army in 1836, the year Texian forces won independence from Mexico at San Jacinto. Tennessee-born like so many who poured into the new republic, he lived out his days on the Blackland Prairie of Ellis County, where he and his wife Stacy are remembered side by side. Their joined dates trace a full pioneer lifetime spanning frontier Texas from revolution to the Gilded Age.

Lewis County, WA

This marker honors Thomas J. Kinsman, a United States Army soldier awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for valor in Vietnam in 1968, along with all who served across the armed forces. The nation's highest military decoration recognizes actions above and beyond the call of duty, and Kinsman's stands among the acts of gallantry from America's long, divisive war in Southeast Asia.

Liverpool, TX

Illinois-born Thomas Jefferson Callihan fought in the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, the swift and decisive clash that won Texas its independence. He lived to 1880, and rests here alongside his German-born wife Johanne, whose life stretched into the 1920s.

Liberty, TX

This residence went up in the 1860s for Thomas Jefferson Chambers (1840–1929), a Virginia-born newspaper editor, Confederate veteran, and nephew of the Texas colonial leader of the same name. Over a long public life he served as state representative, justice of the peace, city councilman, and mayor. Known as the "octagon house" for its central chimney and unusual form, the home has since been reshaped by remodeling.

Nacogdoches, TX

Thomas Jefferson Rusk passed the bar at twenty-one and, drawn to Nacogdoches, threw himself into the Texas independence movement, signing the Declaration of Independence and serving as secretary of war. He fought beside Sam Houston at San Jacinto and briefly commanded the Republic's army, then helped bring Texas into the Union and served in the U.S. Senate, where he worked to fix the state's boundary and promote a transcontinental railroad. Grief-stricken after his wife's death, the ailing statesman took his own life in 1857.

Richmond, TX

Born in Virginia in 1808 and raised in Georgia, Thomas Jefferson Smith joined the fight for Texas independence in 1836, serving under James W. Fannin at Refugio. Captured at Goliad, he was spared to repair weapons for the Mexican army and escaped amid the confusion of the Battle of San Jacinto. He settled in Richmond after the war, running a blacksmith shop, hotel, and livery stable, and served as Fort Bend County sheriff in the 1850s.

Sweeny, TX

This marker honors Thomas Jefferson Sweeny, a Tennessee-born settler who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive 1836 clash that won Texas its independence from Mexico. He lived out his years in the young Republic and early state of Texas, dying at La Grange in 1869. The State of Texas erected the marker in 1936 during the centennial of the revolution.

Kane, PA · est. 1980

Thomas L. Kane was one of 19th-century America's most fascinating idealists: a Civil War general who raised and led the famed "Bucktail Regiment" of Pennsylvania riflemen, and an outspoken friend of the persecuted Mormons when few others would defend them. He founded the borough of Kane in the northern Pennsylvania wilderness and was breveted major general in 1863. He died in 1883 and lies buried at the chapel he directed to be built here in the late 1870s.

Franklin Township, PA · est. 1974

This Chester County farm was the 1734 birthplace of Thomas McKean, one of the most consequential founders few remember. A signer of the Declaration of Independence, he served simultaneously in the politics of two states and famously urged Caesar Rodney's dramatic ride to break Delaware's tie for independence. He later became Chief Justice and then Governor of Pennsylvania.

Shillington, PA · est. 1947

Thomas Mifflin was one of the most active political figures of the Revolutionary generation, serving in the Continental Congress and as a soldier before becoming Pennsylvania's first governor under the state's 1790 constitution. His country estate here, called Angelica, was his home through the turbulent 1770s and 1780s when the new nation was being forged. Today the Berks County Farm and Home occupies the ground where his estate once stood.

Red Rock, TX

Thomas Osborn was one of the settlers-turned-soldiers who took up arms in the Texas Revolution of 1835–1836, the uprising that severed Mexican Texas from Mexico. The battles named here trace the war's arc: the early clash at Gonzales and the fight at Velasco, the grinding Siege of Bexar that drove Mexican forces from San Antonio, and the disastrous defeat at Coleto that led to the Goliad massacre. Texas erected the marker in 1962 to honor a veteran of that founding struggle.

New York, NY · est. 1923

Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet "Common Sense" helped ignite the drive for American independence, died in 1809 at a site here in New York City. The marker quotes his creed from "The Age of Reason" — "The world is my country. To do good is my religion" — words that captured his belief in reason, human brotherhood, and liberty across the Atlantic world. Born in England in 1737, Paine wrote for revolutions in America, France, and his native British Isles.

Bordentown, NJ

In 1783, as the Revolution he had championed drew to a close, Thomas Paine bought this Bordentown house and lived in it off and on until his death in 1809. The author of "Common Sense" and "The American Crisis" had done as much as any writer to rally colonists to independence. Here in New Jersey he kept up his restless pursuits in politics, science, and invention between travels to Europe.

Morristown, NJ

Thomas Paine was the pamphleteer whose words helped turn a colonial rebellion into a revolution. His American Crisis series, begun in the dark winter of 1776, opened with the immortal line about times that try men's souls and was read aloud to Washington's cold, discouraged troops across New Jersey's Revolutionary landscape. An Englishman by birth who later became a French citizen and an adopted American, Paine went on to write Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, works that carried the era's arguments about liberty and reason far beyond the new nation's borders.

Austin, TX

Thomas Pliney Plaster, born in Tennessee in 1804, helped work one of the celebrated "Twin Sisters" cannon at the Battle of San Jacinto, the artillery that pounded the Mexican line in Texas's decisive 1836 victory. He later served in the Mexican War of the 1840s. The State of Texas set this marker at his grave during the 1936 Centennial.

Lampasas, TX

Thomas Pratt served as a captain in the army of the Republic of Texas in 1836 and, decades later, in the Texas militia and Confederate service during the Civil War. In private life he farmed and ranched land in Coleman and Lampasas counties, and his wife Susan belonged to one of the first Anglo colonies in Texas. Remembered as a kindly man, he left funds in his will to provide meat for poor and reputable widows.

Leming, TX

Born in Missouri in 1824 and raised in Bastrop County, Thomas Ransdell Brite came of age amid the conflicts of early Texas. He volunteered against Mexican incursions in the 1842 Vasquez, Woll, and Somervell campaigns, served in the Mexican War under Captain McCulloch in 1846, and joined the Texas Rangers in 1855 to counter frontier raids. Settling in what became Atascosa County, he was elected its first tax assessor-collector and later county treasurer before his death in 1859.

Corpus Christi, TX

Philadelphia-born Thomas S. Parker came to Texas at twenty, and in 1839 he and his parents received large land grants near present-day Corpus Christi, where they raised cattle. He allied with trader Henry L. Kinney, and when Zachary Taylor's army camped near Kinney's post in 1845 — the staging ground for the war with Mexico — Parker won the contract to supply the soldiers' beef. "Col. Tom" went on to become the first sheriff of Nueces County, later a Texas Ranger and Confederate soldier, and finally Corpus Christi's city marshal, shaping the young city's commerce and law until his death in 1886.

Alamo, TX

After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War in 1848 and set the Rio Grande as the international boundary, Major William Emory led a survey to map that new border. Thomas W. Jones, a young surveyor from Washington, D.C., joined the effort at El Paso in 1850 and worked as an assistant surveyor on the Lower Rio Grande. In July 1853 he drowned nearby and was buried on a local ranch, one of many who gave their lives to the exacting work of charting the frontier.

Lake Creek, TX

Thomas Wilson Stegall was born in North Carolina in 1832, served as a Confederate private late in the Civil War, and moved his large family through Tennessee and Mississippi before settling in Delta County, Texas, in 1873. A Baptist preacher remembered for his kindness—he once cut a gap in his prized rose hedge just to give a neighbor a shortcut—he built a blacksmith shop that became the gathering place at the heart of the new town of Lake Creek. From that community nucleus a town grew.

Nacogdoches, TX

A South Carolina native who came to Texas in its revolutionary days, Thomas Young Buford fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the clash that secured Texas independence. He died young, in 1839, only a few years after the victory. The State of Texas honored his service with a marker in 1936.

Forest, TX

Wiley and Cynthia Ann Thompson brought their children and a number of enslaved people from Alabama in 1847, buying a 636-acre tract along Larrison Creek and building a log home overlooking the bottomland. The community that grew nearby, called Forest, included a family-owned store, saloon, mills, and cotton gin. The cemetery began around 1850 with the burial of two of their children and holds more than thirty unmarked graves as well as veterans of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1947

During Colonel Daniel Brodhead's 1779 expedition against the Seneca, an advance party clashed here with thirty or forty Native warriors in a brief but sharp skirmish. It was the only fighting of the entire campaign and, by the marker's reckoning, the sole Revolutionary War engagement in northwestern Pennsylvania. The rest of Brodhead's march met little resistance as it moved through the Allegheny country.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1986

When Congress moved to build a Continental force in June 1775, it authorized its very first battalion — nine companies of riflemen raised here in the Pennsylvania backcountry under Col. William Thompson of Carlisle. These frontier marksmen marched to join the siege of Boston, and the unit later became the First Pennsylvania Continental Regiment. Their muster placed Carlisle at the founding of the American army.

Reading, PA · est. 1989

In June 1775, with war just underway around Boston, the Continental Congress took a momentous step: it authorized its first troops raised directly under national authority—rifle companies drawn from the frontier. Captain George Nagel's company, filled with Berks County marksmen, mustered at Reading that July and then set off on a grueling march of roughly 350 miles to reinforce the American siege of Boston. These backwoods riflemen, prized for their accuracy, were among the first soldiers to serve the united colonies rather than a single province.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 1991

In June 1775, as war with Britain flared, Congress authorized the colonies' first battalion, and Capt. James Chambers raised a company here in what was then Cumberland County. These frontier riflemen marched roughly 450 miles to help besiege the British in Boston, among the earliest Pennsylvanians to answer the call to arms. The battalion evolved into the 1st Pennsylvania Regiment, with Chambers commanding as colonel from 1777 to 1781.

Sunbury, PA · est. 1987

In June 1775, as war with Britain began, men recruited around Sunbury joined Captain John Lowdon's Company—part of Thompson's Rifle Battalion, the first battalion Congress authorized in all the colonies. Among its riflemen was Timothy Murphy, whose extraordinary marksmanship would later make him a legend of the Revolution.

Granbury vicinity, TX

This roadside marker points travelers three miles south to the grave of Elizabeth Crockett, widow of the frontiersman and Alamo martyr David Crockett. Left behind in Tennessee when David went to Texas, Elizabeth later claimed the land granted for his sacrifice and lived out her years in Texas, dying in 1860 at seventy-four. The marker keeps her memory, and her famous husband's, on the map of the Texas landscape.

Pine Creek Township, PA · est. 1947

According to local tradition, settlers of the West Branch frontier gathered beneath the Tiadaghton Elm on July 4, 1776, and drew up their own resolves declaring independence — reportedly before word of the Continental Congress's action had reached them. These pioneers, governed by the self-organized "Fair Play men," lived beyond the formal reach of the colony and made their own rules. Their bold declaration became a cherished symbol of frontier self-government.

Pine Creek Township, PA · est. 1947

This marker honors the Tiadaghton Elm, where tradition holds that pioneer settlers of the Susquehanna's West Branch resolved their independence from Britain on July 4, 1776. Living on the far frontier beyond the colony's official authority, these settlers governed themselves and acted on their own convictions. The famous tree associated with the event long stood near the junction of the Susquehanna and Pine Creek.

Martins Mill, TX

Pioneer L. H. Hobbs settled this part of Van Zandt County around 1850 and let a grieving family bury their two-year-old daughter on his land, quietly founding a cemetery. The graveyard took the Tidmore name after John Tidmore—who died in 1866 of afflictions carried home from the Civil War—and his family came to own the ground and were laid to rest there in turn. Around the Tidmore and Hobbs graves gathered generations of a farming community, including a dozen Confederate veterans and later soldiers of both World Wars.

Paducah, KY

This was the Paducah home of Gen. Lloyd Tilghman (1816–1863), a Maryland-born West Point graduate who served in the Mexican War and helped build the New Orleans and Jackson Railroad, the first to reach Paducah. Living here from 1852 to 1861, he left to join the Confederate Army at the Civil War's outbreak and was killed by a shell at the Battle of Champion Hill near Vicksburg in May 1863. The marker was sponsored by the Tilghman High School Class of 1929.

Baytown, TX

Family tradition holds that Charles Nathan Tilton served as a cabin boy for the pirate Jean Laffite before settling in Texas around 1829 and marrying Anna Barber in 1831. He fought in the Texas Revolution, received a large headright land grant, and traded in cattle and shipping—even lending his brand to the famed rancher Samuel Maverick. The family cemetery he established in the 1850s holds veterans of conflicts from the Texas Revolution through Vietnam, chronicling generations of early Texas pioneers.

Pender County, NC

A self-made patriot from North Carolina's Cape Fear region, Timothy Bloodworth rose to serve in the first U.S. Congress and later in the U.S. Senate from 1795 to 1801. He is best remembered as a leading Antifederalist who fought against ratifying the new U.S. Constitution in 1788 and 1789, fearing it handed too much power to a distant central government. His stance placed him at the heart of the great debate over how the young nation should be governed.

Lower Providence Township, PA · est. 1969

Timothy Matlack was a firebrand of the Revolution who helped shape Pennsylvania's new government while taking up arms for independence. He sat in the Continental Congress, served as a colonel of Philadelphia Associators at the Battle of Princeton, and helped found the Society of Free (or "Fighting") Quakers for those expelled from the pacifist Meeting for supporting the war. Long a fixture of Pennsylvania's revolutionary government, he was reinterred near this spot in 1905, decades after his death.

Seguin, TX

Timothy Pickering Jones entered Texas on his twenty-first birthday in 1835 and promptly took up arms as an officer in the Texas War for Independence. His long soldiering life spanned three conflicts: he captained a company in the Mexican War and later commanded the Sixth Tennessee Regiment as a Confederate colonel in 1861. He died in Texas in 1904, and the state erected this Confederate-style marker over his grave in 1962.

Freeport vicinity, TX

During the Civil War, the tangled willow-lined waterways around this coastal island gave Confederate blockade-runners a place to hide. Captains like the shipbuilder H. C. Wedemeyer slipped cotton-laden vessels out on dark or stormy nights, sometimes towed to open water by men working from shore, evading the Federal ships watching from offshore. The cotton they carried overseas bought guns, powder, medicine, and cloth for a Confederacy short on manufacturing of its own.

Mt. Pleasant, TX

Organized in 1846 and named for pioneer road-builder Andrew Jackson Titus, this Northeast Texas county threw itself into the Confederate cause, voting 411 to 275 for secession and sending ten military companies to war. Its farms and mills supplied the Confederate commissary with beef, corn, leather, and lumber, while a transportation depot at Mount Pleasant kept blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and harness makers busy outfitting wagons and teams. The county's home front fed both its own tables of wild game and the armies in the field.

Austin, TX

Josephus Hornsby, son of pioneer Reuben Hornsby, grew up on the exposed Colorado River frontier east of Austin, settling in 1832. As a young Ranger he fought in the Indian and Mexican clashes of the Republic era — the Flores and Brush fights, Plum Creek in 1840, and the Vasquez and Woll campaigns — and in 1842 rescued two captives from an Indian raid in Austin.

Saint Louis County, MO

This tender inscription imagines fallen soldiers reunited after death in their old army quarters — a note of longing and comradeship raised to the Confederate dead. Erected in the St. Louis region, it belongs to the wave of memorials that sought to honor those who died in the nation's costliest war.

Fort Mill, SC

Erected in the 1890s in Fort Mill's Confederate Park, this is one of the earliest and most striking monuments in the South to commemorate enslaved African Americans — though it does so through the lens of the 'Lost Cause,' framing the enslaved as loyal servants of the Confederate war effort. In reality, the roughly four million people held in bondage experienced slavery as coerced labor, family separation, and violence, and many thousands escaped to Union lines or took up arms for their own freedom. The monument's language of 'faithful' devotion reflects the memory its white patrons wished to preserve in the decades after Reconstruction, not the lived experience of the people it claims to honor.

Marshall, TX

Walter Paye Lane's long fighting life spanned nearly every armed struggle of nineteenth-century Texas. He won distinction as a young man at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, later rode as a commander of Texas Rangers during the Mexican War, and served as a Confederate brigadier general in the Civil War. Born in 1817 and dying in 1892, he was honored with this state marker in Marshall in 1936.

Houston, TX

John Grant Tod, a Kentuckian who went to sea at seventeen, came to Texas in 1837 and served the Republic's second navy as naval agent, Galveston yard commander, and commodore; in January 1846 he carried the official notice of annexation to President Anson Jones. He later served in the U.S. Navy during the Mexican War and helped organize Texas's first railroad, the Buffalo Bayou, Brazos and Colorado. He bought a cottage here in 1866, and his son-in-law C.H. Milby's additions turned it into the brick "Milby House," a landmark until its 1959 demolition.

Elkton, KY

Todd County, formed in 1819, remembers a Virginia-born frontier soldier who helped wrest the Illinois country from British control. John Todd fought at Point Pleasant in 1774, came to Kentucky in 1775, and rode with George Rogers Clark's daring 1778 campaign, afterward serving as civil commandant of the new Illinois County. A champion of setting aside land for public schools, he was killed at the disastrous Battle of Blue Licks in 1782.