Military & Wartime

Seymour, TX

Baylor County was carved out on the Texas frontier in 1858 but not formally organized until 1879, once settlement had pushed westward. It honors Dr. Henry W. Baylor, a physician who served as a Ranger captain and fought in the Mexican War before dying young in 1854. Seymour became its county seat.

Village of Bayville, NY

Standing in the seaside village of Bayville on Long Island's North Shore, this memorial honors local residents who served in four of the twentieth century's defining conflicts — the First and Second World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam. Like thousands of hometown monuments raised across America, it turns a village green into a place of civic remembrance, binding a small community to the nation's larger sacrifices from 1917 through the 1970s.

Sonoma, CA

On June 14, 1846, a band of American settlers known as the Bear Flag Party raised a homemade flag on this spot and declared California's independence from Mexican rule, launching the short-lived Bear Flag Republic. Weeks later, on July 9, 1846, Lieutenant Joseph W. Revere lowered the Bear Flag and raised the American flag, following the U.S. seizure of Monterey by Commodore John Drake Sloat. This monument, erected by the Native Sons of the Golden West and the State of California, commemorates those events.

Sonoma, CA · est. 1907

This monument, dedicated on Independence Day in 1907, commemorates the raising of the Bear Flag at Sonoma on June 14, 1846. On that day American settlers declared an independent "California Republic" in what was then Mexican territory. The gesture lasted only weeks before U.S. forces asserted control during the Mexican-American War, but its bear-and-star emblem endured as California's state symbol.

Sonoma, CA · est. 1914

In June 1846, a small band of American settlers in Mexican Alta California seized the town of Sonoma and raised a hastily made flag bearing a grizzly bear and a lone star, proclaiming a short-lived "California Republic." The uprising, remembered as the Bear Flag Revolt, unfolded just as the United States and Mexico slid into war. Within weeks U.S. forces took control, and the improvised banner became the ancestor of California's state flag.

Sonoma, CA

On June 14, 1846, a band of American settlers in Mexican Alta California seized the town of Sonoma and raised a hastily made flag bearing a grizzly bear and a lone star, declaring the short-lived 'California Republic.' The Bear Flag Revolt lasted only weeks before U.S. forces folded it into the Mexican-American War, but it gave California its lasting emblem. This monument, erected on Independence Day 1907 near Sonoma Plaza, commemorates that day.

Sonoma, CA

Set at the very spot where the Bear Flag was raised in 1846, this time capsule was sealed in 1996 during the 150th-anniversary commemoration of that event, to be opened at the bicentennial in 2046. It links the founding moment of California's short-lived republic to the community that still gathers on Sonoma's plaza to remember it. The marker turns a historic site into a bridge between generations.

Columbus, TX

Benjamin Beason, one of Stephen F. Austin's original 300 colonists, settled by a busy Colorado River crossing in 1822 and built an inn, gristmill, sawmill, gin, and ferry that grew into a small settlement. In the spring of 1836 the crossing became a pivot of the Texas Revolution: Sam Houston camped his army on the east bank as a Mexican force approached from the west. Houston abruptly withdrew toward the Brazos, and his troops burned the settlement to the ground just before the enemy arrived.

Bedford, PA · est. 1982

One of Pennsylvania's oldest western counties, Bedford was formed in 1771 and once stretched across much of the state's frontier. In 1758, during the French and Indian War, Fort Bedford rose here as a key link in the British campaign against the French, and the Forbes Road was cut through the wilderness to reach the Ohio country. That military road became one of the great early highways carrying settlers and commerce west.

Bedford Township, PA · est. 1947

Founded around 1750 as Raystown, this frontier settlement guarded the wilderness gateway to the Ohio country. In 1758 the British raised Fort Bedford here and used it as a staging base for the Forbes and Bouquet expeditions that drove the French from the forks of the Ohio during the French and Indian War. A generation later, in 1794, President Washington reviewed his militia army here on the march against the Whiskey Rebellion.

Bedford Township, PA · est. 1947

Founded around 1750 as Raystown, this frontier settlement guarded the wilderness gateway to the Ohio country. In 1758 the British raised Fort Bedford here and used it as a staging base for the Forbes and Bouquet expeditions that drove the French from the forks of the Ohio during the French and Indian War. A generation later, in 1794, President Washington reviewed his militia army here on the march against the Whiskey Rebellion.

Bedford, PA · est. 1947

Founded around 1750 as Raystown, this frontier settlement guarded the wilderness gateway to the Ohio country. In 1758 the British raised Fort Bedford here and used it as a staging base for the Forbes and Bouquet expeditions that drove the French from the forks of the Ohio during the French and Indian War. A generation later, in 1794, President Washington reviewed his militia army here on the march against the Whiskey Rebellion.

Kyle, TX

During the Civil War, Hays County's established cattle industry became a supply line for the Confederate army, with ranchers designated as "Government Stockraisers" tasked with feeding the Commissary Department. Driving herds across quicksand-bedded, flooded rivers while dodging raiders and enemy patrols, men like the Day brothers, Jesse Driskill, and Mexican War veteran William Washington Moon turned Texas beef into a war effort — some of them serving in uniform besides.

Houston County, TX

In the years after Texas won its independence, families like the Beesons and Boxes carved farms out of the East Texas woods, and their private burial grounds became the enduring record of that first generation. Established in 1852 with the burial of William R. Box, this family graveyard gathers together settlers who arrived in the early 1840s, three brothers who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, and Confederate soldiers of the next generation. The Beeson descendants who still tend the plot keep an unbroken line of memory stretching back to Houston County's founding families.

Spokane, WA

This Spokane memorial honors the 283 American service members who lost their lives in Beirut on October 23, 1983, when a suicide truck bomb destroyed the barracks housing U.S. peacekeepers in Lebanon. It was the deadliest single day for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima, and it stunned a nation grappling with a new kind of conflict far from any declared front line. Memorials like this one carried that grief home to communities across the country.

Bedford, MA

This memorial gathers four of America's late-Cold-War and post-Cold-War deployments onto a single stone: the 1982–84 peacekeeping mission in Beirut, where a barracks bombing killed 241 U.S. service members; the 1983 invasion of Grenada; the 1989 operation in Panama; and the 1990–91 Persian Gulf War. Each was a short, sharp conflict of the 1980s and early 1990s, fought by an all-volunteer force far from home. Set in Bedford, Massachusetts, the marker honors local men and women who answered the call across these scattered campaigns.

Belton vicinity, TX

Settlement along the Lampasas River began in 1847, and Bell County was created in 1850, taking its name from Peter Hansbrough Bell—a San Jacinto veteran, Mexican War officer, and governor of Texas. The county seat soon moved from Nolanville to Belton, and by 1860 nearly 4,800 people lived there. When the Civil War came, the county sent a dozen troop companies and supplied its cause with flour mills, a hat factory, tanneries, and workshops.

DeBerry, TX

This East Texas farming community grew up around the early Kinlock post office, its settlers sharing a five-acre burial ground deeded to the Bell-Fountain Baptist Church, founded before the Civil War. The earliest marked grave, a child who died in 1850, and the several Confederate veterans laid to rest here mark the sweep of pioneer life through the war years. After the church burned in 1880 and the congregation dispersed, descendants preserved the site, fencing the plot and raising a tabernacle where the church once stood.

Rockett Community, TX

Founded in 1875 on land given by John and Elizabeth Gibbons, this cemetery and its associated church took the name of Confederate veteran Jodie M. Bell, a church and civic leader in the Rockett Community and the first person buried here in 1877. The Red Oak Masonic Lodge helped raise a two-story chapel and meeting hall on the deeded ground. The lodge later moved to Red Oak in 1894.

Des Plaines, IL

This memorial gives the name Belleau Wood to a grove once called Senne Wood, honoring the American soldiers of the Second Division who fought in the World War of 1917–1918. At the real Belleau Wood in France, U.S. Marines and soldiers halted a German advance in 1918 in some of the fiercest fighting of the war. The renaming carries that hard-won battlefield memory home to Illinois.

LaGrange, GA

Bellevue, completed in 1855, was the Greek Revival home of U.S. Senator Benjamin Harvey Hill, a leading orator who hosted Jefferson Davis and other Confederate figures. Hill became a fierce champion of the South during Reconstruction, and it was partly at his urging that President Hayes withdrew federal occupation troops. The LaGrange Woman's Club has maintained the house since 1942.

LaGrange, GA

Benjamin Harvey Hill rose from a Troup County farm to become one of Georgia's foremost orators — a Whig legislator who opposed secession yet became a staunch defender of the Confederacy in its Senate. After the war he vigorously fought the Reconstruction Acts and, with Senator John B. Gordon, pressed President Hayes to remove federal troops from the South, later serving in the U.S. Senate until his death in 1882. His home, Bellevue, was built in 1854–55.

Fitzgerald, GA

Ben Hill County was carved from Irwin and Wilcox Counties in 1906 and named for Benjamin Harvey Hill, the celebrated orator who backed the Confederacy in its Senate and later served in the U.S. House and Senate. Its first officers were commissioned in January 1907.

Columbus, TX

Ben Marshall Baker and his brothers founded the "Colorado Citizen" newspaper in 1857, and all three joined the Confederate Army when the Civil War came — one brother, Hicks, was killed in the fighting. Ben returned to publish the paper from 1873 until his death in 1907, making this house the center of the town's press. His widow Virginia lived on here until 1916.

Cameron, TX

Kentucky-born Benjamin Rush Milam fought in the War of 1812, traded with the Comanche, and became an empresario recruiting settlers to Mexican Texas before joining the fight for independence. In late 1835 he rallied hesitant Texian volunteers with the cry 'Who will follow Old Ben Milam into San Antonio?' and led the assault that took the town—though he was killed by a sniper on December 7 before it fell. The State of Texas raised this monument in 1936 for the independence centennial.

Upshur County, TX

Raised in 1872 of broad-axe-hewn boards and square nails, this home became a gathering place where, as the marker recalls, "a stranger never passed." Its builder, Ben F. Phillips—Confederate veteran, Church of Christ minister, and self-styled philosopher—performed many marriages here and represented Upshur and Camp counties in the Texas Legislature from 1890 to 1894. He and his wife Mattie raised nine daughters under its roof.

Laredo, TX

The three Benavides brothers descended from Tomás Sánchez, who founded Laredo in 1755, and became the town's best-known Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. Santos Benavides rose to colonel—the highest rank achieved by a Mexican-American in the Confederate army—while his brothers Refugio and Cristóbal earned captaincies; together they defeated a raiding party under Juan Cortina at Carrizo in 1862 and, badly outnumbered, held Laredo against Union sympathizers in 1864. Their victories helped keep open the vital Confederate cotton trade with Mexico, and they were leading merchants and politicians in Laredo.

Starks, ME

This marker commemorates Colonel Benedict Arnold's 1775 expedition to Quebec, a grueling march that pushed hundreds of Continental soldiers up through the Maine wilderness and along the Kennebec River. The campaign aimed to seize Quebec and bring Britain's northern province into the Revolutionary cause. Cold, hunger, and rough country made the trek one of the war's most punishing ordeals.

Columbus, TX

For a week in March 1836, this Colorado River crossing was the campsite of the Texas Army under General Sam Houston during the anxious retreat that followed the fall of the Alamo. Houston paused here before continuing the withdrawal from Gonzales that would end in triumph at San Jacinto. The marker fixes one waypoint in that fateful spring march.

Greenville, TX

Benjamin D. Martin came to Hunt County from Virginia in the 1850s and, during the Civil War, organized the Texas Sharpshooters known as "Ben Martin's Company." After the war he became Greenville's first mayor in 1873, helped draft the Texas Constitution of 1875, and served in the state senate. His public life spanned the wrenching passage from Confederacy to Reconstruction-era Texas.

Evant, TX

Benjamin F. Gholson, born in 1842 to early Texas settlers, served with the Texas Rangers as a young man and in 1860 took part in the company that recovered Cynthia Ann Parker, the Anglo woman taken by the Comanche as a child in 1836. He went on to serve in the 2nd Texas Cavalry during the Civil War before becoming a prominent stockman. In later life he was active in the Texas Ex-Rangers Association, helping to preserve the memory of the frontier era he had lived.

Utopia, TX

Benjamin F. Highsmith came to Texas as a young Missourian and threw himself into the fight for independence, serving in the Army of Texas in 1835–36 and later riding as a Ranger under the famed Captain John Coffee Hays. He joined the 1842 Somervell Expedition against Mexican forces and lived on into the twentieth century, a link to the founding generation of the Republic.

Wilson, NC

This monument honors Benjamin Farmer, one of the countless ordinary men who took up arms during the American Revolution and served through the long war between 1775 and 1783. The inscription places him in Captain Lyttle's Company, the kind of local militia and Continental unit that formed the backbone of the Patriot war effort across the Carolinas, where the Revolution's final campaigns were bitterly fought. The stone was set by the Thomas Hadley Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, part of the early-twentieth-century movement to locate and mark the graves and service of Revolutionary soldiers before their memory faded.

Boston, MA

Here, beginning in 1719, James Franklin ran the printing office of the New England Courant, one of colonial America's boldest and most independent newspapers. His younger brother Benjamin Franklin served here as an apprentice, learning the printing trade that would help make him famous. Later, from 1769 to 1776, Edes and Gill published the Boston Gazette on this spot — a fiercely patriotic paper that helped fan the flames of revolution.

New Orleans, LA

Purchased in 1853 by Judah P. and Joseph Benjamin, this Hurstville-suburb house sheltered their widowed sister Rebecca Benjamin Levy until the U.S. Treasury confiscated it in 1889 as enemy property. Its frequent visitor, Judah P. Benjamin, rose from U.S. Senator for Louisiana to Secretary of War and then State for the Confederacy. The house once faced St. Charles Avenue and was relocated to this spot in 1892.

Sabine Pass, TX

Benjamin Johnson, born in Louisiana in 1815, settled in Texas in 1832 and took up arms in the fight for independence. He fought in the Texas army's capture of Bexar in December 1835 and served in Captain James Gillaspie's company at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836. He lived out his days as a respected farmer and stockman in the Sabine Pass area.

Macon, GA

This Blue Star Memorial Highway marker near Macon honors the U.S. Armed Forces and singles out Colonel Benjamin H. Purcell for recognition. Placed by the Meadowbrook Garden Club with the Garden Club of Georgia, it joins a national network of blue-star tributes to those who have defended the country. The dedication personalizes the memorial by naming a local officer's service.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2002

Benjamin Rush, born on this Philadelphia site, was a physician, teacher, and reformer whose signature joined the Declaration of Independence. A tireless humanitarian, he spoke out against slavery and championed public health and social reform in the young republic. His pioneering study of mental illness earned him the lasting title "Father of American Psychiatry."

San Antonio, TX

Kentucky-born Benjamin Rush Milam packed a lifetime of frontier daring into his years: a soldier in the War of 1812, a trader among the Comanches, a colonizer, and the first to navigate the upper Red River. When the Texas Revolution erupted, he helped take Goliad and then rallied volunteers with the cry to storm San Antonio, planning the attack that would capture the town. He was killed leading that assault on December 7, 1835. This monument was raised by the State of Texas in 1936 for the independence centennial.

Ravenna Township, OH

Benjamin Tappan arrived in the wooded Connecticut Western Reserve in 1799 and laid out Ravenna Township while northeastern Ohio was still raw frontier, barely settled by Americans pushing west of the Alleghenies. Over a long public life he wore many hats—militia officer during the War of 1812, state judge, and U.S. senator—while helping steer the canal boom that stitched Ohio's farms to eastern markets. His most lasting mark was national: in 1844 he shepherded the legislation that turned James Smithson's mysterious bequest into the Smithsonian Institution.

Connellsville, PA · est. 1994

Near this spot in Fayette County stood the home of Benjamin Wells, a federal collector of the deeply unpopular excise tax on whiskey. In the summer of 1794, as the Whiskey Rebellion turned violent across western Pennsylvania, an angry crowd burned his house after he ignored their warnings. The attack was part of the frontier resistance that ultimately drew a federalized militia and President Washington's personal attention.

Carthage, NC

Benjamin Williams served his state and country across a remarkable career—first as an officer in the Revolution, then in Congress, and four separate times as governor of North Carolina. A leading figure of the early republic, he helped guide the young state through its formative decades. His grave lies to the north at the Alston House.

Groveton, TX

Georgia native Micajah Y. Bennett reached Texas by 1850, and family tradition holds that while clearing this hilltop he chose a spot beneath a great tree for his own grave. When he died in 1856, kin honored the wish, and the site grew into a burying ground first called Pleasant Hill, though local history traces burials here to 1843. Renamed for the Bennetts after his son donated the land to the farming community of Crecy, the cemetery now holds more than 1,500 graves, including pioneer settlers and military veterans.

Durham, NC

At this modest farmhouse belonging to James Bennett, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered his army to Union General William T. Sherman on April 26, 1865. Coming seventeen days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, it was the largest surrender of the war and ended Confederate resistance across the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida.

Bennington, VT

On August 16, 1777, New England militia under General John Stark and Vermont troops led by Colonel Seth Warner routed British and German forces sent by General Burgoyne to seize American supplies near Bennington. The victory stripped Burgoyne of men and provisions and helped set the stage for his surrender at Saratoga weeks later. A century afterward, Americans raised this 306-foot stone shaft to mark the ground where the tide turned.

Lytle, TX

Established in 1870 on land given by pioneer James M. Jones, this was the first public cemetery in the once-thriving frontier town of Benton City, known in its day for a fine school, busy businesses, and its own newspaper. Jones and his family had settled here in 1869, when Atascosa County was still a raw edge of South Texas. Buried in its grounds are pioneers and veterans reaching from the Indian-frontier era through the Civil War and both World Wars.

Atlanta, GA

On July 22, 1864, during the Battle of Atlanta, Benton's Mississippi and Coltart's Alabama brigades of Cheatham's corps struck the Federal line east of here, dislodging Union brigades and briefly seizing ground astride the Georgia Railroad before reinforced counterattacks recovered it. Colonel Samuel Benton was mortally wounded in the fighting and died days later at a hospital in Griffin.

Dudley, MA

Beresik Square honors Stephen E. Beresik, a young sailor from the mill town of Dudley, Massachusetts, who became the community's first resident killed in World War II. He died on August 9, 1942, aboard the heavy cruiser USS Quincy, which was sunk that night in the ferocious Battle of Savo Island off Guadalcanal — one of the U.S. Navy's costliest surface defeats of the Pacific war. Barely twenty-three, Beresik was among the hundreds lost when Japanese warships caught the Allied fleet by surprise in the war's early, uncertain months. His hometown answered that loss by naming a public square in his memory.

Berkeley, CA

In the early 1920s Alameda County voters taxed themselves to build halls honoring the veterans of the Great War and to give their organizations a home. Completed in 1928 to county architect Henry Meyers's Classic Moderne design, Berkeley's Veterans Memorial Building anchored the city's harmonious Civic Center around the park. Decades later it even hosted one of the first indoor Grateful Dead concerts, in 1966.

Berkeley, CA

This building was dedicated by the Berkeley War Council to the city's young men and women who gave their lives in World War II. Across the country in the 1940s, communities built 'living memorials' — halls and youth centers rather than statues — to honor their war dead by serving the next generation. Berkeley channeled its grief into a place devoted to its youth.

Baltimore, MD

This fragment of the Berlin Wall once stood near the Lichterfelde district before being broken free on November 11, 1989, days after East Germany opened its borders. Brought to Baltimore and dedicated to all who crossed — and those who died trying — it is a tangible piece of the barrier that divided a city and the Cold War world.

Galveston, TX

Virginia-born Bernard Moore Temple served in the Confederate army before heading west to build a career in civil engineering. As chief engineer for the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad in the early 1880s, he oversaw much of the line's expansion across Texas and insisted on quality construction, and the railroad town of Temple, Texas, was named in his honor in 1881. This marker commemorates the engineer whose work helped stitch the state together by rail.

Round Top, TX

Bernard Scherrer left his native Switzerland at 22, wandering for years before reaching Texas in 1833, and fought in Burleson's regiment during the Texas Revolution. Granted land but settling in the Biegel community of Fayette County around 1838, he served as justice of the peace and county commissioner, married in 1845, and later took up arms again for the Confederacy in the Civil War. This cabin, his first Texas home, was relocated here in 1975.

Nashville, GA

Berrien County was created in 1856 and named for John MacPherson Berrien, "the American Cicero," a judge, U.S. senator, and attorney general. Its county seat, Nashville, honors General Francis Nash of North Carolina, a Revolutionary War soldier. The first county officers were commissioned that April.

Alto, TX

The land around Berryman Cemetery traces back to a 1802 Spanish grant sought by James Dill, who would become the first alcalde of Nacogdoches under Mexican rule. His daughter Helena and her husband, West Point graduate Capt. Henry Berryman, built the plantation home 'Forest Hill' and encouraged farmers to settle the area; after Henry's death in 1859, Helena stayed on and raised thirty orphans alongside her own children. The burial ground that grew here holds the family, former slaves Sally and Alex Berryman, a Civil War veteran and county commissioner, and even a former Cleveland Indians ballplayer.

Welfare, TX

Carl Joseph and Augusta Beseler brought their family from Germany to Texas in 1848 and settled on a Kendall County land grant, where the community of Welfare took root. The family's story tracks Texas's divided loyalties: their son Ernst died at the Battle of the Nueces, where Confederate forces killed German Unionists, while his brother Carl Philipp went on to build Welfare into a railroad shipping point and hold a string of county offices in the 1880s. The old general store is among the few remnants of the community they founded.

Appleby, TX

Bethel Cemetery has served Appleby since the 1880s, taking its name from the Bethel community that grew up as the focus of the future town, complete with a church and school by 1878. As the railroad arrived and lumber and cotton industries flourished, John A. Hunt conveyed land for the cemetery in 1903, though the earliest interment dates to 1887. Its expansive grounds hold obelisks, curbed plots, Woodmen of the World markers, and veterans reaching back to the Civil War.

Henderson, TX

Bethel Cemetery grew up beside a community, school, and Methodist church at Bethel Springs, with its earliest marked grave dating to 1879 and likely older burials before it. Among those laid to rest are founders of Henderson and veterans of the Texas War for Independence, the U.S.-Mexico War, and the Texas Indian Wars—including A.K. Van Sickle, who served in all three. Today, one of the oldest cemeteries in Rusk County, it is the last trace of a community that has otherwise vanished.

Coppell, TX

Set aside before 1853 by Peters Colony pioneer James Parrish on his farm along the Elm Fork of the Trinity, this cemetery holds the layered history of a vanished community—smallpox victims, Confederate veterans, former slaves, and six people killed in an 1869 lynching. Of an estimated two hundred graves, all but two have been lost to vandalism and development, leaving the resting places of two small children as almost the only visible markers.

Bethel, TX

This ground began as part of an 1828 Mexican land grant and passed to settler Henry Rampy, who in 1859 deeded five acres for a community cemetery and church. The Bethel community thrived from the late 1840s, home to a Cumberland Presbyterian minister who helped found the Science Hill academy, and the burying ground holds pioneers, their descendants, and Confederate veterans. As the town faded after the Civil War, the cemetery became its last visible trace.