Military & Wartime

Marshall, TX

This Marshall house grew in layers from before the Civil War through the early 20th century. Mary Britt bought the land in 1856 and married Judge William S. Todd, a signer of Texas's 1861 secession ordinance; a later owner, Gilchrist McKay, also signed the ordinance and died fighting for the Confederacy at the 1864 Battle of Mansfield. Victorian-era owners added the ornate two-story porch in the 1880s, and a railroad engineer expanded the house again in 1909.

Jefferson, TX

Built in the late 1850s in the Greek Revival style with a broad central hallway, this house was soon sold to District Judge William S. Todd, who took part in the 1861 Secession Convention. From 1869 to 1912 it was home to the family of Dr. Archibald A. Terhune, a popular local physician who added a small room for his office, while his wife Mary Frances earned a reputation as a noted gardener. The dwelling reflects the prosperity and social standing of Jefferson's leading families in the Civil War era.

Columbus, TX

Native Texan and Civil War veteran James A. Toliver, a civic and political leader in Columbus, is said to have built this house around 1870 using the finest pine and cypress from his own lumber yard. Its two-story wrap-around porch and jig-sawn woodwork mark it as a showpiece of the era; Sallie Cone bought it in 1916, and it stayed in her family until 1974.

San Angelo, TX

Thomas Green came to Texas from Tennessee in 1833 and fought at San Jacinto in 1836, helping man the celebrated "Twin Sisters" cannons that won Texas independence. He built a long public career as a court clerk and legislator, served in frontier Indian campaigns and the Mexican War, then rose to prominence as a Confederate cavalry commander. Leading the 5th Texas Cavalry and later his own division, he fought at Val Verde and in the campaigns to hold Louisiana before he was killed in 1864 at Blair's Landing during the Red River Campaign. The West Texas county where this marker stands bears his name.

San Juan, TX

Tom Mayfield's life reads like the closing chapter of the Texas frontier turning into the modern Rio Grande Valley. Leaving his parents' Gonzales County farm in 1898, he helped buy horses for Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, then spent decades as a city marshal, Texas Ranger, and deputy sheriff along the border. His role in exposing a wartime German-Mexican intrigue and a legendary escape from a Mexican firing squad in 1921 made him a beloved local figure right through his final years in the San Juan Hotel.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2002

As the First World War drew to a close in October 1918, the scholar-statesman Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk gathered delegates from a dozen Central and Eastern European peoples at Philadelphia's Independence Hall — the very birthplace of American independence — to proclaim a Declaration of Common Aims. Within weeks he would become the first president of a newly independent Czechoslovakia. Choosing Independence Hall was no accident: these emerging nations consciously drew on the American revolutionary example as they broke free from the collapsing empires of Europe.

Clinton, CT

The words carved here echo the most solemn line in American commemoration — the inscription of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, dedicated in 1921 to a nameless serviceman brought home from the battlefields of the First World War. The phrase 'known but to God,' borrowed from Rudyard Kipling's epitaph for the unidentified war dead, gave a nation a way to grieve the countless soldiers who fell without their names ever being recovered. Across the country, towns raised their own memorials in that same spirit, turning a distant tomb in Virginia into a place of remembrance on the village green. This monument in Clinton stands in that tradition, honoring the anonymous dead who gave everything and asked for no recognition in return.

Devine, TX

Washington Allen Tomerlin set aside this ground for family and neighbors when this corner of Medina County was still remote and thinly settled, the earliest marked grave dating to 1875. Beneath its stones rest veterans of four American wars, three brothers said to have ridden as Texas Rangers, and the Brackens family, freed slaves who made their home nearby. Many older markers bear only initials, their stories now half-remembered.

City of Tonawanda, NY

This memorial in the City of Tonawanda honors the local servicemen who died during the Vietnam War, a conflict that drew American forces into Southeast Asia from the late 1950s through 1975. Communities across New York and the nation erected such markers in the decades following the war to ensure their fallen neighbors were remembered. The dedication speaks plainly of "the greatest sacrifice" — the lives given by young men sent far from the industrial towns along the Erie Canal and Niagara River.

Newcastle, TX

During the Civil War the Tonkawa people allied themselves with Texans, serving as scouts along the frontier defense line from the Red River to the Rio Grande and watching for both hostile raiders and Federal incursion. Commanders prized their skill so highly they sometimes fed the scouts at personal expense. The Tonkawa paid dearly for that loyalty: in October 1862 a devastating attack on their camp near present Anadarko killed 137 of about 300 people, and the survivors were later resettled near Fort Griffin before removal to Oklahoma in 1884.

Moore County, NC

In February 1776, as North Carolina's Loyalists rallied to the Crown, area Tories gathered at Alexander Morrison's home in the Cross Hill community before marching toward the coast. Their advance ended at the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge, where Patriot militia routed the Loyalist force in one of the Revolution's first Southern victories.

Mexia, TX

Gen. José Antonio Mexía was a Mexican military officer and promoter of Texas colonization who served in his country's legation to the United States and its senate in the early 1830s. Though he first backed Santa Anna, he turned against the general when he seized dictatorial power, fleeing to Texas in 1834 and leading expeditions against him until he was captured and executed by Santa Anna's order in 1839. His son and daughter later settled the family's Limestone County land and donated the site for the town that bears his name in 1871.

Stockdale, TX

Fletcher S. Stockdale, a Kentucky-trained lawyer who came to Texas in the 1840s, rose through railroads and the state senate to sit on the committee that drafted Texas's Ordinance of Secession. He served the Confederacy as a military aide and staff officer and, as lieutenant governor, became the last governor of Confederate Texas in 1865 when Pendleton Murrah fled to Mexico. After the war he pioneered refrigerated shipping of Texas beef and helped lead the 1875 constitutional convention.

Bryan, TX

William Joel Bryan came to Texas in 1831 as a grandson of Moses Austin and nephew of Stephen F. Austin, placing him at the center of the family that founded Anglo Texas. He fought in the 1835 Battle of Bexar during the Texas Revolution and, upon Stephen F. Austin's death in 1836, inherited leadership of the influential Austin-Bryan clan. A lifelong planter near Peach Point, he later donated the land for the town of Bryan, which became the seat of Brazos County in 1866.

Calvert, TX

Calvert began as "Sterling" in Sterling C. Robertson's 1820s colony and became a rowdy, booming cotton-export and trade center — its inscription conjures ox-carts, saloons, and casino tables piled with gold. It served as a Civil War mustering and supply point, then moved two miles to meet the Houston & Texas Central Railroad in 1868, taking a new name from Judge Robert Calvert, a landowner descended from Lord Baltimore. The railroad cemented its place as a regional cotton hub.

La Feria, TX

This land was surveyed in 1777 as part of Spanish grants to Don Juan Hinojosa and José María Balli, ancestors of the priest for whom Padre Island is named, and by the 1790s the ranch hosted a fairground—giving La Feria its name—for fiestas, horse racing, and sport. After the Mexican War of 1846–48, the Balli heirs had their Texas title confirmed, and in 1850 cattleman Nathaniel White opened Anglo ranching here. The town of La Feria was platted under its old name in 1906 and grew into a trade center for the farming country of the Rio Grande Valley.

Midway, AL

This granite boulder in Midway marks both the memory of Confederate soldiers and the route of the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway, a named road promoted in the 1910s by the United Daughters of the Confederacy as a coast-to-coast counterpart to the Lincoln Highway. Monuments like this one, placed decades after the Civil War, fused transportation boosterism with Lost Cause commemoration, planting Confederate memory along the emerging national road network. Its placement reflects the early automobile age as much as the war it names.

Troy, IN

This memorial wall in the small town of Troy, Indiana, honors local men and women who served in the nation's armed forces. Its simple dedication, "To All Who Served," reaches across generations of veterans without naming a single war. Community memorials like it are gathering places on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, where a town's collective sacrifice is remembered.

Columbus, TX

The front of this Columbus house dates to the mid-1800s, when it was owned by Stephen Townsend, a member of a prominent local family and a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto who, as the county's first sheriff in 1837, took part in a court held under a famous nearby oak. A later owner joined a second structure to the first in 1902 and added a porch, and since 1951 the home has belonged to former State Representative Homer Koliba and his wife Bernice, a Townsend descendant.

Paris, TX

Born in Alabama in 1836, Travis Clack Henderson moved to Paris, Texas, in 1856 to farm and joined the local militia in 1860. During the Civil War he served as a captain and staff officer with the 32nd Dismounted Texas Cavalry, was taken prisoner in 1864, and was released in 1865. Back in Lamar County he married, raised seven children, and went on to represent the area for twelve years in the Texas House and two in the State Senate.

Austin, TX

Created in 1840 and organized in 1843, Travis County honors William Barrett Travis, the young South Carolina-born commander who died at the Alamo in 1836. Its seat, Austin, was chosen as the capital of the Republic of Texas in 1839 and confirmed as the permanent state capital by popular vote in 1850. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1936, the centennial of the revolution Travis helped ignite.

Town of Clarkstown, NY

In the tense autumn of 1780, American General Benedict Arnold conspired with British Major John André to hand over the strategic Hudson River fortress at West Point — one of the most infamous acts of treason in the nation's history. André was captured while trying to reach British lines, and the plot unraveled, turning Arnold's name into a byword for betrayal. This marker stands near where that fateful meeting took place.

Village of Haverstraw, NY

On a September night in 1780, American General Benedict Arnold met secretly with British Major John André along the Hudson to arrange the surrender of the vital fortress at West Point. André was seized while attempting to return to British lines, exposing the conspiracy and cementing Arnold's reputation as the archetypal American traitor. This marker recalls the wooded ground tied to that betrayal.

Dallas, TX

A Georgia-born widower, Trezevant Calhoun Hawpe came to Dallas County with his young son and won election as county sheriff in 1850, later serving as justice of the peace and coroner. A prominent voice in the county's secession movement, he organized the 31st Texas Cavalry in 1862 and led it as its first colonel, helping secure a Confederate victory at Newtonia, Missouri. His life ended violently in 1863 when a friend stabbed him to death after a quarrel on the courthouse steps.

Takoma Park, MD

This memorial offers an 'eternal tribute to those who fought our country's battles,' honoring the men and women who served in the nation's armed forces. Without naming a single war, it gathers the sacrifice of generations of service members into one place of remembrance. Community war memorials like this one became gathering points for honoring veterans of many conflicts.

West Bradford Township, PA · est. 1915

Here at Trimble's Ford, the British army under Howe and Cornwallis waded across the west branch of the Brandywine on the morning of September 11, 1777. The crossing was part of the wide, secret flank march that would bring them down on Washington's exposed right by afternoon. A quiet country ford became, for one day, the hinge of a major Revolutionary battle.

Socorro County, NM · est. 1965

In the pre-dawn desert of southern New Mexico on July 16, 1945, scientists of the secret Manhattan Project detonated the first nuclear device, code-named the Gadget. The blast lit the Jornada del Muerto with a light brighter than the sun and left a crater of green glass, proving the physics that would soon be used over Japan. The remote site was chosen for its isolation, and its name, Trinity, was drawn from the poetry of John Donne.

Newton, TX

Carved from the James West Survey, this East Texas graveyard dates to the early 1860s, with oral tradition holding that its first burials were area Indians or enslaved people from the nearby Salem community. Its oldest documented graves belong to John and Christina Barnett, and among those resting here are six Civil War veterans alongside men who served in World War I, World War II, and Korea. Descendants have tended the grounds since the turn of the century, chartering a cemetery association in 1973.

Slatington, PA · est. 1952

A sawmill standing here before 1755 turned the forests of the Lehigh Valley into lumber for a growing frontier. When the French and Indian War set the backcountry ablaze, the sturdy mill — also called Kern's Fort — became a defensive station and shelter for troops. Sitting at the crossing of two pioneer roads, it commanded a position of real military value in a dangerous borderland.

Madisonville, TX

Born in the tiny Madison County community of Cottonwood in 1918, Truman Kimbro was drafted in 1941 and shipped to Europe with the 2nd Engineer Battalion, landing at Omaha Beach on D-Day. In December 1944 he was killed while laying anti-tank mines directly in the path of advancing German troops — a final act of courage that earned him the Medal of Honor. He rests in the American military cemetery at Henri-Chapelle, Belgium.

New Bern, NC

Completed in 1770, Tryon Palace served as the colonial capitol and residence of North Carolina's royal governors, and then as the first state capitol until 1794. Its lavish construction, funded by taxes, stirred backcountry resentment that fed the Regulator movement. The building burned in 1798 and was meticulously reconstructed in the 1950s.

Gaston County, NC

In the tense summer of 1775, as news of Lexington and Concord rippled south, the citizens of Tryon County in the western Carolina backcountry gathered to put their defiance in writing. Their resolves pledged resistance to what they called British tyranny and affirmed their rights as free people — one of a wave of local declarations that swept North Carolina that year, well before the Continental Congress declared independence. Signed here in August 1775, the Tryon Resolves joined kindred documents like the Mecklenburg and Tryon-area resolutions in giving the Revolution its grassroots voice in the Piedmont.

Centerville vicinity, TX

This East Texas burial ground grew up around the graves of early landowners the Tubb family and the pioneer Leathers family, whose first interment dates to 1849. Oral tradition holds that Joel Leathers, who could speak several Indian dialects, was sent to the area by General Sam Houston — a hint of the frontier's uneasy meeting of settlers and Native peoples. Later headstones mark veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars, so the cemetery reads like a layered record of the communities of Malvern, Nineveh, and Oakwood.

Clarksville, TX

Tennessee farmer Andrew Jackson Tuggle set aside this ground as a cemetery in 1864, after a mother and infant died, also reserving land for a church and school. Named for Tuggle and the nearby springs, the burial ground took in the area's settlers and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War. Since 1960 a cemetery association has cared for the site, with its Woodmen of the World markers and weathered grave slabs.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2005

Near this spot stood Tun Tavern, a colonial Philadelphia public house that operated from 1693 until 1781 and, by tradition, served as the recruiting ground for the first battalions of Continental Marines. When the Continental Congress authorized two battalions of Marines on November 10, 1775, the fledgling corps drew its first volunteers here—a birthplace the Marine Corps still honors with its motto, Semper Fidelis.

Dublin, TX

Chesley Turnbow and his wife Sabra worked their way west from Kentucky and Tennessee through Arkansas before settling on this Erath County land in the 1850s. The burial ground began in 1879 with the grave of an infant grandchild, and within months it held the family patriarch himself; seven of his ten children rest here as well. It became the resting place of pioneer families, longtime rural neighbors, and veterans of America's wars beginning with the Civil War.

Unity Township, PA · est. 1946

In 1758, as British and colonial forces cut Forbes Road through the wilderness toward the French stronghold at the Forks of the Ohio, a young George Washington helped set up an encampment near this spot. The rough military road was a decisive artery of the French and Indian War, opening the western country to armies and, later, settlers. A generation on, in 1774, Fort Shippen rose on the same ground as the frontier remained contested.

Salado, TX

Twelve Oaks is a Greek Revival mansion in Salado, its walls raised from stone quarried on the adjacent land for Dr. B.D. McKie, a Texas physician who served and was wounded in both the Mexican War and the Civil War. Generations later the house was restored by the family of Lt. Henry Clay de Grummond, Jr., and dedicated to his memory as a World War II combat hero. Named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1964, the home links three eras of American conflict through the lives tied to its stone walls.

Tulia, TX

After U.S. cavalry under Mackenzie routed Southern Plains tribes at Palo Duro Canyon in September 1874, the troops slaughtered roughly 1,450 captured horses two miles north of this marker. Destroying the herd left the surviving warriors afoot, forcing them back onto their reservations.

Newcastle, TX

Established in 1850, Fort Belknap became the largest military post in northern Texas, anchoring the line of frontier defense against raids on the settlements. It served as the first county seat of Young County and, from 1858 to 1861, as a station on the Southern Overland Mail linking St. Louis to San Francisco. This marker points travelers two miles southwest to its site.

Brazoria County, TX

This Greek Revival frame house on the Brazoria County coast traces the long life of Ariadne Gautier, who came from Florida in 1841 and buried three husbands—one of them a Terry's Texas Ranger who died at Shiloh in 1862—before building the original house around 1872. It later passed to Frank Chilton, a captain in Hood's Texas Brigade, and then to Austin Bryan, grandnephew of Stephen F. Austin, whose family added a vernacular two-story wing. The Weems family held the home from 1919 until 2000.

Murray, TX

Pioneers called this settlement Fish Creek until 1880, when a post office took the name of local postmaster J.J. Murray. The community cemetery began in 1884 with the burial of two neighbors' infants on land set aside by the Tyra family, formally donated in 1898 and later enlarged by the Price and Dozier families. Its graves tell the community's story — a cluster of deaths around the 1918 influenza pandemic, and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Minneapolis, MN

This monument honors the University of Minnesota students who served in the Spanish-American War of 1898–99. That brief conflict thrust the United States onto the world stage, and college men across the country volunteered for service in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The marker ties a young state university to the nation's emergence as an overseas power.

Del Rio, TX

A scheme to use camels for transport across the arid Southwest, floated in the 1830s, became reality under Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, and the first animals landed on the Texas Gulf Coast in 1856 for training at Camp Verde. Several expeditions passed westward through Del Rio, camping in this very park. Officers praised the experiment, but the Civil War ended it — and confirmed sightings of wild camels persisted into the mid-20th century.

Texas City, TX

As revolution and border unrest spread from Mexico after 1910, local boosters persuaded federal officials to plant a major army camp at Texas City as a staging point for possible operations across the Rio Grande. In March 1913 some 14,000 troops—infantry, cavalry, artillery, engineers, and the nation's first military aviation squadron—pitched camp in an open field north of town. The camp's pilots set distance and speed records and thrilled crowds with flying exhibitions until a 1915 hurricane destroyed the encampment and scattered its soldiers to the border.

Louisville, KY

In the anxious middle years of World War II, the home front reached all the way to the Ohio River. From November 1942 to November 1944, a company of 134 Coast Guard temporary reservists — volunteer citizens, not career servicemen — ran continuous patrols from this Louisville station, crewing a fleet of more than twenty boats to guard the vital river traffic. Led by Lt. J.C. Theobald and Lt. (j.g.) W.T. Duvall, they were part of a nationwide auxiliary that freed regular forces for combat overseas.

Hitchcock, TX

During World War II, German submarines prowled the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, and the U.S. Navy answered with a fleet of lighter-than-air blimps that could hover patiently over shipping lanes to spot and deter them. The flat Texas coastal plain made Hitchcock an ideal home for one of nine such bases, commissioned in 1943 with a massive hangar for six airships and dozens of support buildings that sparked a local wartime boom. When the submarine threat faded the base was repurposed, and its great hangar was finally razed after hurricane damage in 1961.

Orange, TX

In September 1940 a federal contract sent Consolidated Steel to build twelve Fletcher-class destroyers at Orange, lifting the city out of the deep decline that followed the closing of its sawmills. The keels of the Aulick and the Charles Ausburne were laid in 1941, and on Texas Independence Day in 1942 the Aulick — the first naval destroyer built in Texas — was launched before a crowd of thousands, part of more than four hundred wartime vessels completed on the riverfront.

Berkeley, CA

Dedicated by the graduating classes of 1945, 1946, and 1947, this memorial honors University of California, Berkeley students, faculty, and staff who served in World War II. Those classes came of age in the shadow of the war, many leaving campus for the armed forces before returning to finish their degrees. The memorial ties a great university community to the global conflict that reshaped their generation.

Brackettville, TX

From 1932 to 1944 this stone-veneered building was Fort Clark's communications nerve center, later expanded to house enlisted barracks. During World War II mobilization the 3rd Signal Troop of the 2nd Cavalry Division and a Signal Detachment ran the post telephone system, film library, and photo lab from here. When Fort Clark closed on August 28, 1944, the Signal Corps soldiers were the very last troops to march out.

Fayetteville, NC

Authorized by Congress in 1836, the U.S. Arsenal at Fayetteville was seized by the Confederacy in 1861 at the outbreak of the Civil War and became an important Southern munitions site. In March 1865, General Sherman's army destroyed it during the march that helped end the war, leaving ruins that still stand nearby. The arsenal's arc traces the whole span of the sectional conflict.

Mobile, AL

Long before it was a branch of the modern armed forces, the U.S. Coast Guard began as scattered predecessor services — the Revenue Cutter Service, the Lighthouse Service, the Life-Saving Service — that patrolled America's coasts and rivers. This monument traces Mobile's link to that lineage back to 1819, when the revenue cutter Alabama was stationed at the young Gulf port to chase smugglers and enforce the new nation's customs laws. From that single cutter grew two centuries of unbroken service watching over one of the busiest harbors on the Gulf of Mexico.

Port Aransas, TX

To tame the treacherous Aransas Pass, the government established the first Aransas Life Saving Station on Mustang Island in 1878; when the 1919 hurricane destroyed it, successors carried on the work into the modern era. Woodrow Wilson's 1915 merger of the Revenue Cutter and Life Saving services created the U.S. Coast Guard, whose Mustang Island duties expanded from rescue to hunting enemy saboteurs with canine beach patrols in World War II and, later, to escorting military cargo and inspecting vessels in the War on Terror.

Miami, FL

Built in 1932 at Dinner Key, this seaplane hangar anchored the first permanent Coast Guard Air Station in the country. From here, seaplanes lumbered off Biscayne Bay to carry out rescues and evacuations across Florida's coasts and the Straits beyond. It stands from the pioneering days when aviation was still being folded into the nation's maritime lifesaving service.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 2006

When the great "Grand Review of the Armies" paraded through Washington in May 1865, the United States Colored Troops who had fought and bled for the Union were pointedly left out. In answer, Black regiments from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts assembled here at State and Filbert Streets on November 14, 1865, for their own triumphant review. Grand Marshal T. Morris Chester led them through Harrisburg to Senator Simon Cameron's home, where leaders including Octavius Catto and William Howard Day honored their service.

Monroe Township, OH

In a modest one-story timber cottage in the Clermont County hamlet of Point Pleasant, the future general and eighteenth president of the United States entered the world in the spring of 1822, the first child of a tanner and his wife who had settled along the Ohio River only a year before. Named Hiram Ulysses at birth, the boy would grow up around his father's tannery trade before a clerical error at West Point permanently rechristened him with the initials that history remembers. The Ohio frontier of these years was a rising country of river commerce and small industry, and this humble house marks the starting point of one of the most consequential American lives of the nineteenth century.

Young Township, PA

In November 2010, two of Punxsutawney's oldest civic institutions — the Groundhog Club's Inner Circle and the local Elks lodge — dedicated a flag and memorial honoring everyone who has worn the nation's uniform. Set in the farm country of Jefferson County, it joins the countless community-raised tributes that dot small-town Pennsylvania. Rather than marking a single battle, it gathers the service of veterans across all of America's wars into one quiet spot.

Kingsville, TX

With war looming, the Naval Expansion Act of 1940 fueled a two-ocean navy, and Kingsville leaders won a station by touting their open skies, flat terrain, and year-round flying weather. Commissioned on July 4, 1942, the Naval Auxiliary Air Station trained cadets in carrier landings, practicing touch-and-go on strips built to mimic flight-deck length and running bombing runs over Padre Island, while a unit of Navy WAVES served in support roles. The base helped prepare aviators for both the Pacific and Atlantic before it was decommissioned in 1951 and later reborn as a full Naval Air Station in 1968.

New York, NY

For more than a century the United States Naval Hospital in Brooklyn cared for sailors and Marines who passed through the great Navy Yard on the East River, one of the oldest naval medical facilities in the country. This plaque records a gift from the Burke Foundation, a charitable endowment, offered as a lasting tribute at the hospital. Such dedications turned a working medical institution into a place of remembrance for those who served at sea.

Hyde County, NC

On this rise—still called Loop Shack Hill—the U.S. Navy ran the Advanced Amphibious Training Base at Ocracoke from December 1943 to January 1946. Here it trained the Beach Jumpers, special units that used sound, lights, and pyrotechnics to stage diversionary 'phantom' landings meant to deceive the enemy during World War II.