Battles, service, and the memorials a country builds to remember them.
5,438 markers in this collection, across every conflict below — showing 5,221–5,280.
Gonzales, TX
This state marker honors William A. Matthews, who served the Texas cause during its war for independence as a volunteer soldier, freighter, quartermaster, and courier. Erected by the State of Texas in 1962, it remembers the varied and unglamorous roles — hauling supplies, carrying dispatches — on which a rebel army depended.
Millett, TX
Ohio-born William A. Waugh joined the 1849 gold rush to California before settling near the Cibolo Creek Crossing on the Laredo–San Antonio Road in 1856, years before La Salle County existed. He briefly served as a Texas Ranger during the border troubles known as the Cortina War, then made his mark as a merchant, district court clerk, and justice of the peace. He and his family helped build up this stretch of South Texas frontier before his death in 1901.
Bigfoot, TX
William A. A. Wallace—known far and wide as "Big Foot"—became a legend of the Texas frontier as a soldier, ranger, and mail rider. Through decades of hard service he helped guard the advancing line of settlement against raids and danger until his death in 1899. His nickname and exploits made him one of the most storied figures of nineteenth-century Texas.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2009
William Allen was one of colonial America's richest men, and his fortune helped build the institutions of early Philadelphia. He backed construction of the State House, now Independence Hall, and helped found Pennsylvania Hospital and the college that became the University of Pennsylvania. He established Allentown and served as Chief Justice of Pennsylvania's Supreme Court, but as revolution neared he broke with the patriot cause and remained a Loyalist until his death at his Mount Airy estate.
Boston, MA
This memorial honors William Amerena, a Boston-area soldier of Company A, 50th Infantry, killed in France on November 10, 1918 — a single day before the Armistice that ended the First World War. Dedicated by a local American Legion post and rededicated by an East Boston veterans' council in 1953, it keeps alive the name of one of the neighborhood's fallen doughboys. His death on the war's last full day is a quiet reminder that the fighting continued to the final hours.
Schulenburg, TX
As one of Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred," William B. Bridgers received a Texas land grant in 1824 among the first Anglo colonists in Mexican Texas. During the Texas Revolution he served in Capt. John Alley's company, which rushed to aid Col. John H. Moore of Fayette County. A farmer, rancher, and hatmaker, he later served as a Fayette County justice of the peace and postmaster of Lyons.
Belmont, TX
Born in Georgia in 1830, William B. Fleming came to Texas before 1850 and rode with the Texas Rangers' mounted volunteers before serving in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Settling afterward in Gonzales County, he built a black-walnut log cabin along the Guadalupe River and turned to horse breeding. His stallion "Old Billy" founded the celebrated line of "Billy" quarter horses prized by cowboys, rodeo riders, and racers.
Elgin, TX
Illinois-born William B. Standifer fought at San Jacinto in 1836 as a member of Capt. Jesse Billingsley's company, one of the units in Sam Houston's decisive army. His marker records a life (1819–1876) spent in the young Texas he had helped bring into being.
Moscow, TX
Born in Tennessee in 1806, William Barnett Hardin came to Texas in 1826 and carved out a plantation near Moscow as the area's first permanent Anglo settler. When the fight for Texas independence came, he served as a first lieutenant and was wounded at the Battle of San Antonio in December 1835, earning a 640-acre land grant signed by President Sam Houston. He later helped survey the region's first county roads, literally laying the lines of the community he had helped begin.
Anahuac, TX
William Barret Travis came to Texas in 1831 and was drawn into the resistance at Anahuac before rising to co-command the defense of the Alamo. When James Bowie fell ill, the 26-year-old Travis took charge, defied Santa Anna's demand for surrender, and—by legend—drew a line in the dirt asking who would stay. He and roughly 182 defenders, including Davy Crockett, died on March 6, 1836, exacting a heavy toll on Santa Anna's far larger army.
Clarksville, TX
Born in Virginia around 1787, William Becknell became one of the great pathfinders of the American frontier. A veteran of the War of 1812 who fought at the Battle of Credit Island, he organized a trading party in 1821 that reached Santa Fe just after Mexico won independence from Spain, opening legal commerce along what became the Santa Fe Trail. He later settled in Red River County, where he led a militia company protecting frontier settlers.
Iredell, TX
William Berry Smith came to Texas from North Carolina in 1834, served as a soldier in the Texas War for Independence, and went on to fight as a veteran of the frontier Indian wars. He lived to the age of 84, dying in 1876, and was honored with this state marker in 1957.
Clearfield, PA · est. 2004
William Bigler rose through Pennsylvania politics from state senator to governor in the 1850s and then to the United States Senate on the eve of the Civil War. Though he opposed slavery, he belonged to the camp that hoped a compromise with the South might hold the Union together and avert war. In a striking family coincidence, his brother John was elected governor of California the same year William won Pennsylvania; William made his home here.
Newton, TX
Georgia-born William Blewett came to Texas in 1849, worked as a district surveyor, and by 1858 had opened a mercantile in Newton with his cousin. When the Civil War came, he helped raise a company of local volunteers and served as a captain in Company G, 13th Texas Cavalry. He died in Arkansas in 1862, one of the many Texans who never came home.
Henderson, TX
William C. Davis came to Texas from North Carolina in 1835, settling in what was then part of Nacogdoches County during the era of the Republic of Texas. He earned a land grant for service in the frontier conflicts of the late 1830s and became patriarch of a large family, setting aside part of his homestead as a family cemetery after his first wife Caroline died in 1852.
Minden, TX
Born in 1806, William C. Hays cast his lot with the Texas independence movement, enlisting in Kentucky in December 1835 and fighting in the decisive victory at San Jacinto in April 1836. Rewarded with land grants, he brought his family to settle the East Texas frontier, where he helped General Sam Houston negotiate with the Cherokee leader Chief Bowles and became a founding church elder and Masonic lodge master. Five of his sons later took up arms for the Confederacy.
Houston, TX
Kentucky-born William C. Swearingen sailed into Velasco aboard the schooner Pennsylvania on January 28, 1836, to fight for Texas independence, and served in Captain Amasa Turner's company at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. He died in Houston on Christmas Eve, 1839. A tender line from a letter home — asking that his son be kissed and told "Pappy will be there in the fall" — survives him.
Houston County, TX
This marker honors William Calvert Hallmark, a Tennessee-born settler who fought in the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive clash that won Texas its independence from Mexico. He lived out his years in Houston County, dying in 1880 among the generation of veterans whose service founded the Republic of Texas.
Davilla, TX
Tennessee native William Carroll Sypert joined the army of the Republic of Texas in 1836 at just twenty, in the year Texas won its independence. After marrying and making two covered-wagon journeys between Tennessee and Texas, he settled permanently in 1849 and built a life of public service—working as a schoolteacher and musician while serving as justice of the peace, postmaster at Bryant's Station, and later Milam County Judge.
Bigfoot, TX
William Carvin Winters was born in Tennessee in 1809 and came to Texas in 1834, on the eve of its war for independence. He was among the men wounded at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the decisive fight that won the Republic of Texas its freedom. He lived on until 1863, one of the early Anglo settlers whose lives spanned the birth and growth of Texas.
Houston, TX
Born in England in 1814, William Daniel Durham threw himself into the Texas Revolution, joining the storming of Bexar in December 1835 and then fighting at San Jacinto in Captain William J. E. Heard's company. He rose to second lieutenant in the Milam Guards, a Houston militia unit, before his early death in 1838, just two years after independence.
Hallsville, TX
At sixteen, William Delafield served in a Virginia militia company during the Revolutionary War in 1779, then joined the great westward migration — moving to Georgia in 1785, Alabama by 1832, and finally to Harrison County, Texas, by 1850. Awarded land for his war service, he was remembered by neighbors as an old man in a rocking chair, one leg lost in frontier fighting, who spun tales of times long past.
Corpus Christi, TX
Born William Düry in Würzburg, Bavaria, this chemist, geologist and photographer fled to America after the failed 1848 uprising against King Ludwig I, remaking himself as William DeRyee. He built cottonseed mills, investigated copper mines, and pioneered photographic techniques among Texas's German immigrant community before serving the Confederacy as a state chemist developing nitrates and explosives. After the Civil War he opened a Corpus Christi drugstore and, during the 1867 yellow fever epidemic that killed his own son, developed remedies and an effective antiseptic.
Bastrop, TX
William Dunbar, born in Tennessee in 1819, was a member of the ill-fated Mier Expedition of 1842–43, when Texans crossed the Rio Grande in a raid against Mexico and were captured and imprisoned. He survived that ordeal and lived until 1855, his grave in Bastrop marking a participant in one of the Republic of Texas's most dramatic military misadventures.
Austin, TX
Born in Montgomery County, Texas, in 1839, William E. Collard served the Confederacy in the 10th and 15th Texas Infantry during the Civil War. After the war he built a legal career in Robertson County, winning election as district judge in 1880 and later serving on the Court of Civil Appeals from 1887 until his death in Austin in 1902.
Sanger, TX
A Virginian who surrendered with Robert E. Lee's army at Appomattox, W. E. Partlow came to Texas after the Civil War and married into a pioneer Denton County family. A merchant by trade, he was elected the first mayor of Sanger when the town incorporated in 1892 and built this home in 1904. He later served as a federal court commissioner in New Mexico before returning to Sanger to serve as justice of the peace.
Hallettsville, TX
Born in South Carolina in 1811, William E. Summers received a quarter-league land grant in the DeWitt Colony in 1835 and joined the fight for Texas independence. He mustered into the Gonzales Ranging Company of Mounted Volunteers, which slipped into the besieged Alamo on March 1, 1836, and he died there five days later among the reinforcements remembered as the Immortal 32.
Crockett, TX
Alabama-born Buck Mayes came to Texas in 1856 and served in the Civil War before returning to Houston County to build a career in lumber and merchandise. His enterprises included one of the area's earliest banking operations, helping knit together the local economy in the difficult years after the war. He remained a leading businessman until his death in 1915.
Charlotte, NC
In the summer of 1898, the Spanish-American War carried American soldiers to the hills outside Santiago de Cuba, where the fighting on July 1 around San Juan Heights became the war's defining land battle. William Ewen Shipp, a North Carolina–born West Point graduate serving as a first lieutenant with the 10th Cavalry—one of the celebrated regiments of Black 'Buffalo Soldiers' led by white officers—was killed that day as his men pressed the assault. This monument in his home city of Charlotte gathers his short life into a single elegant image, calling him 'the very straightest plant' amongst a grove.
Cotulla, TX
Born in Louisiana in 1831, W. F. Evans moved through several Texas counties before the Civil War, when he served in the state's coastal defenses on Galveston Island with the 2nd Texas Volunteer Infantry and Mann's Regiment. He made Cotulla his home in the final years of his life, from 1903 until his death in 1917.
Fort Worth, TX
German cotton exporter Herman Frerichs built this grand house in 1910–1911, only to be stranded in Germany when World War I erupted in 1914. Branding him an enemy alien, the U.S. government seized the property under the Trading with the Enemy (Alien Property) Act and held it until the war's end. Frerichs sold it in 1923 to Mrs. William G. Newby, who gave it to the Fort Worth Woman's Club in her husband's memory.
Houston, TX
Born in Scotland, William Gammell fought at the Battle of San Jacinto in Captain A.H. Wyly's company, sharing in the decisive 1836 victory that won Texas its independence. He lived out his years in Houston, and later research traced his remains through several reinterments — from the old Masonic Cemetery to what is now Washington Cemetery. The layered plaques record a community's care in getting a veteran's story right.
La Grange, TX
William Gorham served in the Texas Army in 1835–36 during the revolution that won Texas its independence, and he fought at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. The "Star and Wreath" emblem marks him as a veteran of that founding struggle. The State of Texas placed this marker at La Grange in 1962.
De Leon vicinity, TX
William H. Pate, a Georgia-born pioneer, was a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto, the 1836 clash in which Texian forces won independence from Mexico in a fight of less than twenty minutes. His grave marker, alongside that of his wife Jane, ties an ordinary Erath County family to one of the defining moments of the Texas Revolution.
Clute, TX
Virginia-born William Harris Wharton became a leading advocate for Texas independence during its turbulent 1830s. He took part in the 1832 Battle of Velasco, presided over the Convention of 1833, and after independence served as the young republic's minister to the United States. A member of the Fifth Congress of the Republic, he died in 1839 at just 33.
Corpus Christi, TX
Ohio-born William Henderson Maltby came to Corpus Christi in 1859 to help his brother publish the Ranchero, beginning a lifelong career in the frontier press. He served the Confederacy as an artillery officer until his battery was captured in 1863, survived the 1867 yellow fever epidemic that killed his first wife, and in 1877 co-founded the Corpus Christi Free Press, forerunner of the Corpus Christi Caller.
Wallis, TX
Kentucky natives William and Lydia Guyler married in 1845 and made the journey to Austin County in 1859, where William built a log cabin, trading post, sawmill and cotton gin that served settlers for twenty miles around. He served the Confederacy while Lydia nursed the sick through the 1867 yellow fever epidemic and aided soldiers at home. When the Santa Fe railroad came in 1875–76, the Guylers sold land that became the town of Wallis.
Hillsborough, NC
William Hooper made his home in Hillsborough, and from this town helped launch a nation. One of North Carolina's three signers of the Declaration of Independence, he pledged his name to the break with Britain in 1776. His house still stands just to the west, and he was buried only steps away, tying this ground directly to the founding generation.
Duplin County, NC
Appointed North Carolina's stamp master in 1765, William Houston resigned his post under pressure from a public demonstration in Wilmington, one of the colony's fierce protests against the Stamp Act. A physician who practiced at Sarecta, four miles east, he became an unlikely figure in the colonial resistance to British taxation. His retreat helped ensure the hated stamps were never distributed in the colony.
Freeport, TX
Born in Edgefield, South Carolina in 1808, William Jarvis Cannan came to Texas in 1835 and joined the army in time to fight in the decisive victory at San Jacinto in April 1836. For his service he received headright and bounty lands across several Texas counties, and he raised eleven children by his two marriages before his death in 1881.
Baird, TX
Born in Illinois in 1829, William Jeff Maltby lived one of the great frontier lives of 19th-century Texas—soldier in the Mexican War and the Civil War, Texas Ranger, and builder of frontier forts for the U.S. Army beginning around 1850. Retiring to Callahan County in 1878, he reinvented himself as a nationally recognized horticulturist and nurseryman, and in 1906 co-authored a partial memoir titled 'Captain Jeff.' His story spanned the sweep of the Texas frontier from open-range danger to settled cultivation.
Chappell Hill, TX
Born in Tennessee in 1803, William Jones E. Heard came to Texas and led Company F of the 1st Regiment of Texas as a volunteer at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. That decisive engagement won Texas its independence from Mexico. Heard settled at Chappell Hill, where he died in 1874, honored with this marker erected by the State of Texas.
Egypt, TX
William Jones Elliot Heard came to Mexican Texas on one of Stephen F. Austin's land grants and settled in 1832 on rich bottomland his neighbors dubbed "Egypt" for its biblical fertility. He commanded a company at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, then built a cotton gin, ran cattle, and raised the crops of a working plantation, later serving as chief justice of Wharton County. The brick home he built in 1849-54 sheltered six generations of his family.
Greenville, TX
William Lane was born in 1843 near present Wolfe City, when Hunt County lay within the independent Republic of Texas and Anglo-American families were only beginning to settle its blackland prairies. Remembered as the first Anglo-American child born in the county, he was the son of one of the men who helped organize it. Like many young Texans of his generation, he served in the Confederate army during the Civil War before settling into a long life in the Vansickle community.
Hurst, TX
Tennessee-born William "Uncle Billy" Hurst fought for the Confederacy in the 61st Tennessee Infantry, surrendered near Vicksburg to Grant in 1863, and spent the war's final stretch in Northern prison camps after his capture in Tennessee. In 1870 he joined a migration of Claiborne County families to Texas, where he prospered as a land speculator. When he granted a right-of-way to the Rock Island line in 1903, the railroad named its stop for him—and the town of Hurst grew up around it.
Parkersburg, WV
This flag honors Colonel William Lowther, a frontier militia leader on the western Virginia border in the era of the Revolution. Along the upper Monongahela and West Fork rivers, settlers like Lowther built forts and mustered militia to defend scattered cabins during the Revolutionary years and the Indian conflicts that swept the trans-Allegheny frontier. He became one of the region's best-remembered pioneer defenders around what is now Parkersburg and Harrison County.
Azle, TX
William M. Rice reached Texas in 1834 and served as an alcalde under Mexican rule before joining the Texas Revolution, where he was wounded at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. Over a long life he farmed and traded across Texas and Kansas, and during the Civil War supported the home front by making soldiers' hats and hauling supplies. He spent his final years in Tarrant County, a living thread through Texas's founding and its wars.
Cedar County, IA
On this Cedar County ground stood the home of William Maxon, a stop on the Underground Railroad. Here in the winter before the 1859 Harpers Ferry raid, the abolitionist John Brown drilled a small band of recruits, preparing the men who would follow him east in his violent bid to end slavery.
Beaumont, TX
Born in 1819, William McFaddin fought in the Texas War for Independence, serving at the first siege of the Alamo and at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in 1836. He later worked as a supply agent during the Civil War and, known for his hospitality and generosity, founded a Southeast Texas ranching empire that endured long after his death in 1898.
Silverton, TX
William Moten Vaughan, born in Missouri in 1841, rode with the Texas Rangers on the eve of the Civil War before serving the Confederacy from 1862 to 1865. He was a corporal in the last Confederate army to surrender east of the Mississippi. Afterward he raised a large family across McLennan, Coryell, and Briscoe counties, living until 1928.
Raleigh, NC
William N. H. Smith served in the U.S. Congress, then the Confederate Congress, before becoming Chief Justice of North Carolina from 1878 to 1889. His career carried him through secession, war, and the rebuilding that followed. His home stood a block west, and his grave lies to the east.
Fort Smith, AR
William O. Darby, a Fort Smith native, organized and led the first U.S. Army Ranger battalions into the fiercest fighting of World War II — the amphibious landings and mountain campaigns of North Africa and Italy. His hard-driving 'Darby's Rangers' became the model for America's modern special-operations forces, and the defiant line on this monument captures the outnumbered spirit that made their name. Darby was killed in Italy in the war's final days, still leading from the front.
Fort Smith, AR
This grave marks the resting place of a Fort Smith native who rose to become one of the most celebrated combat leaders of World War II. He organized and led America's first Ranger battalion, forging an elite raiding force that saw hard fighting in North Africa and Italy. Promoted to brigadier general while serving as assistant division commander in the mountains of northern Italy, he was killed in the Po Valley just days before the German surrender there in the spring of 1945.
Tool, TX
Born in Alabama in 1826, William Avant came to Texas with his family in 1834 and grew up on the frontier of what is now Henderson County, serving alongside his father as a Texas Ranger at just fourteen. He took up a land grant in the Mercer colony in 1849, raised a family with his wife Rutha, and helped build the road from Athens to Palestine. Enlisting in the Confederate Army, he died after only a year of service in 1863.
Austin, TX
Known affectionately as "Old Gotch," William P. Hardeman was a frontiersman and Indian fighter who fought in the Texas Revolution, the Cordova Rebellion, and the Mexican War before joining the Confederate army in 1861. Serving in the New Mexico campaign, he helped lead the celebrated cavalry charge at the Battle of Valverde, which earned him a colonelcy, and later commanded a brigade in the Red River campaign. Promoted brigadier general in 1865, he afterward became the first president of the state Confederate Home.
Sharp, TX
Born in Germany in 1844, William Persky came to the United States with his family at age eight and grew up to enlist in the Confederate army, spending part of the Civil War as a prisoner of war. He farmed in Austin and Bell counties before settling in the Milam County area in 1925. Living to 100, he was at his death in 1945 both the oldest resident and the last surviving Confederate veteran of the county.
Raleigh, NC
William Polk served as an officer in the Revolutionary War, then helped steer the new nation's economy as first president of the State Bank from 1811 to 1819. In 1825, at a house that once stood here, he hosted the Marquis de Lafayette during the aging general's celebrated farewell tour of the United States. Polk's life bridged the fight for independence and the institution-building of the Early Republic.
Person County, NC
Born near here in 1842, William R. 'Sawney' Webb served as a Confederate soldier before founding a school in 1870 that, relocated to Bell Buckle, Tennessee, became the celebrated Webb School. Late in life he served briefly as a United States Senator in 1913.
Edgecombe County, NC
William R. Cox rose to become a Confederate general whose brigade is remembered for taking part in one of the last infantry actions at Appomattox in April 1865, in the final hours before Lee's surrender. After the war he returned to public life as a congressman and later served as Secretary of the U.S. Senate. His home stood here in the Edgecombe County countryside.
Smithville, TX
This state marker honors William Redfield, who served as a soldier in the Texas War for Independence during 1835–1836. That struggle, fought by Texian colonists against the Mexican government, ran from the first clashes of 1835 through the decisive victory at San Jacinto in 1836 and the birth of the Republic of Texas. The monument, topped by the Lone Star and wreath, was erected by the State of Texas in 1962 to mark his grave and service.