Military & Wartime

Morristown, NJ

This marker commemorates Morristown's role as the site of George Washington's military headquarters during two winters of the Revolutionary War — early 1777 and again from December 1779 into June 1780. The winter of 1779–80 was one of the harshest of the century, and the Continental Army endured brutal cold and shortages while encamped nearby at Jockey Hollow. From Morristown, Washington held his army together and directed the war effort through some of its most desperate months.

Halifax, NC

In the spring of 1791, President George Washington undertook a grand tour of the Southern states to strengthen unity in the young nation, and on April 16-17 he stopped in the historic town of Halifax. Crowds turned out to greet the president, who recorded his travels in his diary. The visit tied this Roanoke River town to the nation's first chief executive.

Auburn, MA

In the small central-Massachusetts town of Auburn, this riverside park was set aside to honor local residents who served in the Second World War and the Korean Conflict. Communities across New England raised memorials like this one in the years after 1945, when nearly every town had sent its sons and daughters overseas and wanted a permanent, public place to remember them. Naming the park for Water Street roots that national sacrifice in a specific neighborhood, turning an ordinary green space into a place of civic memory.

Brenham, TX

In the spring of 1862 Thomas N. Waul recruited some two thousand men from Washington and surrounding counties into a legion of infantry, cavalry, and artillery for Confederate service, drilling them here along New Year's Creek before they departed for active duty that August. Part of the legion was caught up in the defense of Vicksburg and surrendered after the siege, while other units served in Arkansas, Louisiana, and along the Texas Gulf Coast through the end of the war.

Monticello, KY

Wayne County, established in 1800, honors General "Mad Anthony" Wayne, the fiery Revolutionary War hero who stormed Stony Point in 1779. His deepest mark on the future West came in 1794, when his victory at Fallen Timbers and the resulting Treaty of Greenville in 1795 broke Native resistance in the Old Northwest and opened the frontier—including Kentucky—to a surge of settlement. Wayne died in 1796, soon after his triumph.

Mineral Wells, TX

Rail reached Mineral Wells in 1891, and this Romanesque revival depot was built about 1903 after fire destroyed its predecessor. For a quarter-century it welcomed the hundreds of thousands of visitors who came to "take the waters" at the town's famous mineral baths and spas. During World War II, the depot took on a new role moving soldiers to and from nearby Camp Wolters.

Gatesville, TX

On land the Rev. John Wilson gave to Methodist trustees in 1879, Weaver Chapel Cemetery has gathered the scattered families of the Leon River valley for well over a century. Its graves trace a mosaic of frontier settlement—Swedish rancher Charles Peter Liljeblad, German immigrant August Wilhelm, and the founding Wilson, Weaver, and Pruitt families among the earliest. Civil War, World War I, and World War II veterans lie here, including one man who took part in the planned invasion of Japan.

Orange, TX

Joe Weaver opened his shipyard on the Sabine at Orange in 1897, and for generations the Weaver family built barges, tugboats, and shrimp boats along the Texas Gulf Coast. During World War II the yard turned out wooden minesweepers and sub chasers — vessels built of wood precisely because they would not trip the magnetic mines the enemy laid in coastal waters. Sold and then reclaimed by the family, the site remains in Weaver hands and in maritime use to this day.

Preston County, WV

On this ground — once the old Webster farm and later owned by Bowen Grady Trowbridge — the last militia company in the county was mustered for the War of 1812. Across the western Virginia backcountry, farmers left their fields to form volunteer companies for a conflict that tested whether the young United States could defend its sovereignty against Britain.

Weehawken, NJ

This memorial honors the men of Weehawken who served and died in the World War, when the United States sent its sons overseas into a conflict of unprecedented scale. Its inscription frames their sacrifice as the price of a peace enjoyed at home — the memory of the fallen living on in 'a world saved from destruction.'

Weir, TX

Weir Community Cemetery began when John Breneke, a Confederate veteran from Fayette County, bought 365 acres here in 1875 and set aside two acres for a graveyard — perhaps after his sister-in-law died in childbirth in 1889, the earliest dated burial. Many soldiers rest here, and the ground preserves the memory of a community once known by names like Towns' Mill, Townsville, and Buffalo Springs.

Henderson, TX

When Georgia-born Anna Welch chose this East Texas hillside for her own grave in 1877, she started a family burial ground that would gather generations of pioneers around her. Her son, Civil War veteran Andrew Jackson "Jack" Welch, owned the land, and in 1898 the family formally set aside the tract as a cemetery in his will. Enlarged by descendants into the twentieth century, it holds settlers and veterans of four wars.

Houston County, TX

When the Thompson Brothers Lumber Company deeded four acres to the Weldon community in 1912, the new burial ground opened with a heartbreak: its first graves held two small children, Louise and Leo Driskell, lost within a single year to diphtheria. Set in the piney woods of East Texas timber country, the cemetery gathered generations of area pioneers alongside veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam. A civic club and cemetery association have tended the grounds ever since.

Newmarket, NH

Wentworth Cheswell was a remarkable figure of Revolutionary-era New Hampshire — a schoolteacher, town official, and patriot of African and English descent. Widely counted among the first Americans of African ancestry elected to public office, he served his town of Newmarket for decades and is remembered for a Revolutionary alarm ride carrying word of British movements. He bridged the worlds of scholarship, public service, and the fight for independence.

Canton, TX

The Watkins community took root in the mid-1800s, and in 1872 the Crosby family deeded land here to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for a church and burial ground — though the first grave was dug two years earlier. Over more than a century the five-acre cemetery filled with some 400 graves, among them pioneer founders, church trustees, and veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars. Its rows also hold more than fifty children and infants, some laid to rest beside mothers lost in childbirth.

Bethlehem, PA

When the men and women of West Bethlehem returned from the Second World War—or did not—their neighbors set this memorial in their honor. It speaks to a moment when an entire steel-making community, like thousands of American towns, sent its sons and daughters into a global conflict and then gathered to remember their service. The inclusion of women reflects how total the war effort had become, reaching far beyond the traditional battlefield.

Conroe, TX

The West Fork of the San Jacinto carries thousands of years of history: Patiri and other Native peoples lived along it in the Archaic and later eras, and Spanish explorers named the river in the 1700s. American pioneers settled here even before Stephen F. Austin extended his colony over the area in 1824, and just downstream, on April 21, 1836, Sam Houston's volunteers defeated Santa Anna to win Texas independence. In later years riverside farms grew into cotton plantations shipping by keelboat, and today the united forks feed the Houston Ship Channel.

Eatontown, NJ

This gate marks an entrance to Fort Monmouth, the U.S. Army post that from 1917 served as the home of Army communications and electronics research. Generations of Signal Corps soldiers passed through its gates while the fort helped pioneer radar, radio, and other technologies that shaped modern warfare. The installation stayed active until its closure in 2011, and its gates endure as landmarks of that long history.

West Peoria, IL

This West Peoria memorial gathers the community's service members across a long arc of American conflict — from World War II and Korea through Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the War on Terrorism. Rather than mark a single battle, it honors successive generations who left this Illinois neighborhood to serve. Such rosters turn a small town's sacrifices into a shared, ongoing act of remembrance.

Eldorado, TX

Sheep flooded the West Texas range after 1883, and by the 1930s wool was big business around Eldorado. Banker Joseph B. Christian and his textile-engineer son built this native-stone mill to spin that wool, opening in 1941 with Governor W. Lee O'Daniel on hand. The next year the plant won a major wartime contract to weave Army blankets, then converted successfully to peacetime work and anchored the local economy until its sale in 1963.

Wheeling, WV

This Wheeling landmark — now a National Historic Landmark — is where the movement to create West Virginia took shape during the Civil War. In conventions held here in the early 1860s, delegates from Virginia's western counties rejected secession, formed a loyal 'Restored Government,' and set in motion the birth of a new state, admitted to the Union in 1863. Originally built as a federal custom house, the building became the cradle of the only state formed by breaking away from the Confederacy.

Milano, TX

Ervin Westbrook and his wife Rachel, joined by her brother John Walker, left the Deep South in 1858 to build new farms on the Texas prairie near present-day Milano. Their family graveyard opened in 1864 with the burial of John Walker's wife and served the two clans and their neighbors into the 1920s. Among the two to three dozen laid to rest here are three Civil War veterans of the founding families.

Dallas, TX

Burials on this Dallas ground reach back to the 1850s, and in 1881 pioneers Z.E. Coombes and W.R. Fisher formally set the land aside as a 'graveyard forever.' Early settlers, along with veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars, rest here. So do Clyde and Buck Barrow, the Depression-era outlaws of Bonnie-and-Clyde infamy.

Town of Oyster Bay, NY

On the morning of September 11, 2001, hijacked airliners struck the World Trade Center, and Long Island — within sight of the Manhattan skyline — lost scores of commuters and first responders. This waterfront memorial in the Town of Oyster Bay marks the exact minute of the first impact, fixing a shared moment of shock in stone. Communities all along the North Shore built such places so neighbors would have somewhere to gather and grieve.

Greensburg, PA · est. 1981

Carved from Bedford County in 1773, Westmoreland was for a time the sprawling frontier of southwestern Pennsylvania and the first place English law reached beyond the Allegheny Mountains. At its early seat of Hanna's Town, backcountry settlers gathered in 1775 to adopt the "Hanna's Town Resolves," a defiant pledge of resistance drafted as revolution stirred in the colonies. Greensburg later rose as the county seat, incorporated in 1799 as the region settled into peacetime governance.

Charleston, SC

In a cramped three-room house on a Charleston back lot, two brothers born into slavery began lives that would carry them to the front ranks of the fight for Black equality. Archibald and Francis Grimké were the sons of an enslaved woman, Nancy Weston, and grew up amid the hard aftermath of the Civil War before finding their way to Northern educations and national influence. Archibald became a lawyer, writer, and civil-rights leader, while Francis grew into one of the era's most respected ministers and moral voices. From this modest Charleston lot rose careers that shaped African American advocacy well into the 20th century.

Edgecombe County, NC

Westray Battle Boyce Long led the Women's Army Corps in the immediate aftermath of World War II, directing the branch from 1945 to 1947 as the military demobilized and reckoned with the permanent place of women in its ranks. Her Legion of Merit recognized service in the North African theater in 1943–1944, when the WAC first proved itself close to the front. This roadside marker points to her grave a short distance south.

Wharton, TX

When Wharton County was organized in 1846, its seat was laid out on the Mexican land grant of 'Old 300' colonist William Kincheloe, and in 1866 the commissioners formalized a cemetery already in use just blocks from the courthouse. Its oldest marked grave dates to 1843, and among those buried here is Amanda Armstrong Watts, Wharton's first public schoolteacher and its postmistress in 1881. More than 140 veterans of conflicts from the Civil War through Vietnam rest amid the obelisks, cairns, and decorated ironwork that make the grounds a study in cemetery design.

Lancaster Township, PA · est. 1947

Wheatland was the gracious country home of James Buchanan, the only U.S. president from Pennsylvania, who lived here from 1849 until his death. Before reaching the White House in 1856, Buchanan had built a long career as congressman, senator, secretary of state, and minister to England — a seasoned diplomat whose single term nonetheless foundered on the sectional crisis that led to civil war.

Manheim Township, PA · est. 1971

Wheatland was the beloved country home of James Buchanan, the Lancaster lawyer and diplomat who became the fifteenth President of the United States. He bought the estate in 1848 and made it his base through a long career—minister to Russia and Britain, secretary of state, and finally president from 1857 to 1861, presiding over the nation as it slid toward disunion. He returned here after leaving office and died at Wheatland in 1868.

Dallas, TX

Wheatland Cemetery grew out of land donated in the mid-1800s by Ohio-born farmers Tom Branson and H.K. Brotherton, and it became intertwined with the local Methodist congregation of Wesley Chapel, which moved to the renamed community of Wheatland in 1864. Formally established in 1872, the grounds hold earlier burials, some reinterred from the chapel's original yard, along with pioneers, community leaders, and veterans reaching back to the Mexican-American War. Its fraternal gravestones and curbing, and graves of victims of flu, malaria, and diphtheria epidemics, record the joys and hardships of an early Dallas-area farming community.

Corrigan, TX

This rural graveyard began in 1875 with a family's grief: Alabama-born Jefferson Wheeler and his wife Hannah buried their daughter Vina here after a hunting accident. The Wheelers later gave an acre around her grave to the community as a "neighborhood burying ground," and it remains active today. Among those interred are pioneer families and veterans of conflicts stretching from the Civil War to Korea.

Wheeler, TX

Deeded to the community in 1907, Wheeler Cemetery holds more than 2,700 graves, the earliest stone dating to 1904. Its rows include veterans of every American war from the Civil War to Iraq, a Fort Elliott soldier of the 1880s, civic founders, and even local characters remembered by legend.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2006

When Henry Whitaker raised a waterwheel-powered textile mill on this spot in 1813, he was joining the young republic's first great industrial wave, when running water was the engine of American manufacturing. Whitaker's mill proved remarkably long-lived, operating for 157 years and turning out canvas and wool blankets for Union soldiers during the Civil War, the nation's first mill-made bed ticking, and patented chenille processes. Production ended in 1970, and arson claimed the buildings in 1975, though several originals still stand nearby.

Highlands, TX

Reuben White was one of Stephen F. Austin's original "Old 300" colonists, taking a Mexican land grant here in 1824 as part of a large family that settled the area later called White Settlement. Though his 1848 burial is the earliest recorded, older graves are thought to exist nearby. Formally set aside as a family cemetery in 1850, it grew into a community burial ground holding pioneers and veterans of conflicts from the Texas Revolution to Vietnam.

White Deer, TX

On the Texas Panhandle plains, where the International & Great Northern Railroad had laid out its survey blocks, a burial ground took shape in the early 1900s—perhaps beginning with a railroad worker killed in an accident around 1905. A cemetery association formed in 1923, buying its five acres for a single dollar, and after years of neglect was revived by local citizens in 1991. Those interred here include early pioneers and veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Camp Hill, PA

In the years after the Civil War, Pennsylvania established a network of Soldiers' Orphan Schools to shelter and educate the children of Union soldiers who had died or been disabled in the conflict. White Hall was one of these institutions, blending classroom learning with vocational training. Decades later its former students — who called themselves the 'Sixteeners' — returned to honor the school that raised them, erecting this marker in 1926.

Ross, TX

Local lore says this graveyard began with a drifter's burial in 1855, but the first recorded interment was Elizabeth A. Bennett in 1856. For generations it gathered the dead of a cluster of small McLennan County communities, and among its more than 1,600 graves lie many of the area's first settlers alongside veterans of every American conflict from the Texas Revolution to Vietnam.

Dallas, TX

As Dallas outgrew its springs, wells, and the Trinity River in the early 1900s, the city acquired thousands of acres and built a dam on White Rock Creek, completing the reservoir and pump house by 1911 though drought delayed a full lake until 1914. Over the following decades the shoreline became a beloved city park with an Art Deco bathhouse, a swimming beach, and facilities built by the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. During World War II the former CCC camp served as an Army Air Corps center and a camp for German prisoners of war.

Southlake, TX

Tucked into a corner of what was once rural Tarrant County, this pioneer burying ground took root around 1851, when—by local memory—a child who died on a passing wagon train was laid to rest in the raw prairie soil. Its oldest documented grave dates to 1872, and many of the earliest are marked only by native red sandstone or unlettered fieldstones. Among the dead are Civil War veterans and a former state legislator, silent witnesses to the settlement of this stretch of North Texas.

Springfield Township, PA · est. 1947

In the autumn of 1777, with Philadelphia fallen to the British, George Washington made the Emlen House his headquarters from early November into December. From this ground his army fought its last engagement of the year, repulsing a British probe on December 5–6 in what became known as the Battle of White Marsh. Days later Washington marched his weary troops to the winter encampment that would test them: Valley Forge.

Columbia City, IN

This memorial honors the men of Whitley County who died in the Korean War (1950–1953), the hard-fought conflict on the divided peninsula that Americans often called the "Korean Conflict." Four local names are inscribed here, each a young life given in a war fought far from the Indiana farm country they called home.

Williamsburg, KY

Whitley County was formed in 1818 and named, like its seat of Williamsburg, for Colonel William Whitley—a famed Indian fighter credited with leading more than seventeen battles and helping drive Native peoples from southeastern Kentucky by 1794. He joined the Kentucky militia in the War of 1812 and was killed at the Battle of the Thames in 1813. The county's first court met in 1818 in the home of Samuel Cox, Williamsburg's first citizen.

Whitney, TX

When Whitney Dam impounded the Brazos River in 1950, the rising waters of Lake Whitney threatened to submerge six pioneer graveyards scattered across Hill and Bosque counties. To save them, workers carefully relocated some 1,260 graves and their monuments to nearly 24 acres of higher ground here. Among the reinterred were settlers dating back to the 1850s and 1860s, including a Civil War veteran and legislator, several early officeholders, and whole families like the Dyers and Basyes whose descendants shaped the region.

Whitt, TX

Permanent settlers arrived here in the mid-1850s, and the town of Whitt was formally established in 1877 as a farming community and stagecoach stop between Weatherford and Jacksboro. It grew into a regional education center, home to Whitt Seminary and Parker Institute. The community cemetery, in use since at least 1879, now spreads over eight acres with more than 1,000 graves, including pioneers and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War through Vietnam.

Franklin Township, OH

Built in 1800–01 by Revolutionary War veteran Peter Wickerham, this sturdy inn stood as a stagecoach stop on Zane's Trace, the pioneering road that opened the Ohio country. Over the decades it sheltered a remarkable range of travelers, from freedom seekers escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad to Confederate cavalry under Gen. John Hunt Morgan, who lodged here during his daring 1863 raid across Ohio.

Kent County, MD

Lambert Wickes was a Kent County mariner who became one of the earliest captains of the fledgling Continental Navy during the Revolution. Commanding the sloop-of-war Reprisal, he carried Benjamin Franklin across the Atlantic to France in 1776 and then boldly cruised European waters, taking British prizes almost within sight of England and helping press the case for a French alliance. In 1777 the Reprisal foundered in a storm off the Newfoundland banks, and Wickes was lost with nearly all his crew — a death this memorial in his home county still marks.

White Deer Township, PA · est. 1967

In 1774 Catherine Smith, a widow, established a stone house and a complex of saw and grist mills along this stretch of the West Branch frontier. When the Revolution came, she built a boring mill in 1776 that finished gun barrels for the Continental Army, turning a backwoods industrial site into a small arsenal for the war effort. Running such works alone in a contested wilderness was a formidable undertaking for anyone, and remarkable for a woman of her day.

Marshall, TX

The oldest part of this Marshall house went up around 1856 and soon sheltered the family of Louis Trezevant Wigfall, one of the era's most flamboyant fire-eating politicians. A relentless champion of secession and states' rights, Wigfall served as a Texas legislator, a United States senator, and a Confederate senator. During the Civil War, Confederate officers were frequent guests here.

Galveston, TX

A New York-born young man who came of age with the Texas Republic, Wilbur Cherry served in the Texas army during the revolutionary year of 1836 before turning to the printed word. In 1843 he purchased the Galveston News, joining the ranks of the frontier newspapermen who knit together public life in a scattered new nation. His Irish-born wife, Catherine, outlived him by decades, their intertwined lives marking Galveston's growth from Republic-era port to Gilded Age city.

Chicago, IL

In Chicago's Edgebrook neighborhood, community groups — a Boy Scout troop, an American Legion post, and the neighborhood association — came together to honor local veterans and their families. Dedicated in gratitude rather than to any single war, the memorial reflects a distinctly American tradition of neighborhood remembrance. It marks the countless residents who served across many generations of conflict.

Port Lavaca, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1797, Wiley George enlisted in the Georgia militia at seventeen and fought in the War of 1812. After years in Georgia and Alabama he came to Texas in 1840, settling first in San Antonio and then moving to Port Lavaca in 1848, where he speculated in horses and built a fine home. He died in 1862 and lies in an unmarked grave in the Port Lavaca Cemetery.

Richmond, VA

Wilfred Emory Cutshaw rose from a Virginia Military Institute graduate (1858) to a Confederate artillery officer during the Civil War, then turned his energies to rebuilding and modernizing the defeated capital of the Confederacy. As Richmond's long-serving city engineer from 1873 until his death in 1907, he shaped the postwar city through an ambitious program of civic planning—paving streets, laying out parks, and improving public infrastructure during the Reconstruction and Gilded Age decades.

Wilkes-Barre Township, PA · est. 1949

Wilkes-Barre was laid out in 1770 by settlers from Connecticut, who claimed this Susquehanna valley land under their colony's sea-to-sea charter—a claim Pennsylvania hotly disputed. The rival claims erupted into the Pennamite Wars of 1769–72 and again in 1784, while the Revolution brought the brutal Wyoming Massacre of 1778 nearby. Organized as the seat of Connecticut's "County of Westmoreland" in 1776, the town sat at the center of one of early America's fiercest boundary struggles.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1949

Wilkes-Barre was laid out in 1770 by settlers from Connecticut, who claimed this stretch of the Susquehanna under their colony's charter in defiance of Pennsylvania. The dispute boiled over into the Pennamite Wars of 1769–72 and 1784, and in 1778 the surrounding Wyoming Valley suffered the infamous Wyoming Massacre during the Revolution. Made the seat of the Connecticut-created "County of Westmoreland" in 1776, the settlement stood at the heart of a bitter contest over who owned the land itself.

Swoyersville, PA · est. 1947

Finished in 1778, this fort enclosed the courthouse of Westmoreland—the county Connecticut had carved out of the disputed Wyoming Valley. It stood only briefly: with the valley overrun by British and Loyalist forces that same summer, it surrendered alongside nearby Forty Fort, another casualty of the campaign that broke the Yankee settlement.

Smithland, TX

This family burial ground served the people of the old Wilkinson Plantation and takes its name from Seaborn Jones Wilkinson and his wife, Elizabeth Ann. The earliest grave, from 1854, is an infant daughter of Confederate veteran Abner Pulaski Moseley. Also interred are the Confederate minister William Hilary Moseley and Samuel Fountain Moseley — a U.S.-Mexico War veteran, lawyer, and owner of the Jefferson Herald newspaper. A cemetery association formed in 1994 to maintain the site.

Felicity, OH

Felicity sits in Clermont County in southwestern Ohio, only a short distance from the Ohio River — the line that separated the free state of Ohio from slaveholding Kentucky. In the tense decades before the Civil War, this borderland became a frontline of the Underground Railroad, where freedom seekers who crossed the river depended on a hidden network of conductors and safe houses to guide them northward. Will Sleet's home stood as one node in that clandestine web, and the fact that his role is remembered here points to the courage such work demanded in a community close enough to slavery's reach to make sheltering the escaping dangerous.

Houston, TX

This marker recalls that at San Jacinto on April 21, 1836, the Texan army advanced to the popular tune "Will You Come to the Bower," crying "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!" The furious assault—fought with cannon, gunshot, clubs, and Bowie knives—routed Santa Anna's army completely.

Franklin, NH

This square in Franklin honors a young New Hampshire soldier who served with the Machine Gun Company of the 103rd Infantry, part of the 26th 'Yankee' Division — a New England National Guard division that was among the first American units sent to France in World War I. Wounded in action on July 22, 1918, during the summer when Allied and American forces launched the counteroffensives that finally turned the war, he lingered for three months before dying of his wounds that October, just weeks before the Armistice. Naming a public square for one local man was a common way American towns turned private grief into permanent civic memory after the Great War.