Transportation

Hardwick Township, NJ

Before mechanical refrigeration, Americans kept food from spoiling with natural ice cut from frozen lakes and ponds each winter. Crews sawed the surface into heavy blocks, slid them along docks like this one, and packed them in sawdust-insulated icehouses to be shipped to distant cities through the warm months. The Knickerbocker Ice Company was one of the region's well-known ice enterprises, and the weathered remains near this shore mark where that now-vanished trade once met the water.

Knippa, TX

The dark basalt beneath Knippa formed from volcanic lava that cooled more than 60 million years ago into the hard igneous stone known as trap rock. A prospector's 1907 search for gold turned up little of the metal but vast quantities of high-quality rock instead, and by 1919 the quarry here was the largest trap-rock operation in Texas, capable of producing about 100,000 tons a year and shipping it out by spur line to the Southern Pacific. So woven into the town was the plant that Knippa High named its team the "Rockcrushers" in 1946.

New Summerfield, TX

In 1854 Tennessee native Thomas Norman and partners platted the town of Knoxville, selling lots and setting aside ground for a community church. Stores, a mill, a distillery, a blacksmith, and a school soon followed—though residents proudly noted the town never had a saloon, even as every store sold whiskey. When the International Railroad bypassed it in 1872, business drained away to Troup, and today only the Knoxville cemetery marks the spot.

Brownsville, TX

Completed in 1937, the Kraigher House is a nationally known example of International Style architecture, designed sight unseen by Austrian-born modernist Richard Neutra using his nature-attuned 'biorealist' approach in concrete, glass, and steel. Its owner, George Kraigher, was chief pilot and operations manager for Pan American Airways' western division and a decorated aviator in both world wars. After years of decline, the city bought the house in 1999, and a restoration completed in 2008 turned it into a center for training young artists and designers.

Franklin Park, PA · est. 2008

Long before paved roads crossed western Pennsylvania, a network of Native American trails threaded the forests, and the Kuskusky Path was one of the busiest. Through most of the 1700s it carried hunters, traders, warriors, war captives, and diplomats between the great confluence at Fort Duquesne/Fort Pitt and the Delaware (Lenape) town of Kuskusky, at today's New Castle. As European settlers pushed in, they raised homes and churches right alongside the old trace, layering a new world atop an Indigenous one.

Kyle, TX

Kyle was born in 1880 when the International & Great Northern Railroad pushed its line between Austin and San Antonio, drawing settlers from older nearby communities. Fergus Kyle and the Moore family donated 200 acres, and the first town lots were auctioned beneath a live oak. In a striking chapter, 1940s voters elected an all-woman municipal government led by write-in mayor Mary Kyle Hartson, Fergus Kyle's daughter, whose brother Edwin became a Texas A&M dean and U.S. ambassador to Guatemala.

Kyle, TX

On October 14, 1880, a giant live oak shaded the public auction that founded the town of Kyle along the International & Great Northern Railroad. State representative Fergus Kyle and the Moore family had given the railway 200 acres, free rides brought bidders out to the townsite, and nearly every lot sold that day. The railroad soon set aside four acres around the tree for a short-lived school, and the oak itself has been preserved as the town's founding landmark.

Kyle, TX

When the International and Great Northern Railroad pushed south from Austin toward San Antonio in 1880, the Kyle and Moore families donated 200 acres for a roadbed, depot, and townsite, and a canvas tent quickly gave way to a permanent station. For decades the depot was the beating heart of Kyle — shipping cotton, cattle, and lumber, carrying the mail and Western Union telegrams, and moving nearly everyone who traveled. Its waiting rooms and entrances were segregated in keeping with the Jim Crow laws of the era, and after an 1916 fire the depot was rebuilt on the same site in 1917.

Edmonson County, KY

In the hills of Edmonson County along the Nolin River, Kentucky held one of the world's richest deposits of bituminous sandstone — a natural blend of silica sand and oil known as rock asphalt. Beginning in 1920, the Kentucky Rock Asphalt Company mined and shipped this 'KYROCK,' a paving material that could be laid without the heating and mixing that ordinary asphalt required, making it the world's largest producer of natural rock asphalt for nearly four decades. Around the quarries rose a full company town: hotels, a hospital, a theater, a commissary, a school, and its own railroad, electric, and water systems, all built to serve the industry. When the deposits played out and cheaper petroleum asphalt took over, the company closed in 1957 and the town faded with it.

Badin, NC

In 1913 a French firm, L'Aluminium Français, launched an ambitious hydroelectric and aluminum venture on the Yadkin River, damming the Narrows and laying out a company town. The town took the name of Adrien Badin, president of the American subsidiary, Southern Aluminum. The First World War disrupted French investment, and the works were soon sold to the American aluminum giant that would run them for generations.

Brenham, TX

La Bahia Road began as an east-west Indian trail—perhaps older still an animal path—crossing southeastern Texas and Louisiana, and grew into one of the earliest overland routes European explorers used in Texas. La Salle likely walked it in the 1680s, the Spaniard Alonso De León followed in 1689, and over the next century and a half it carried the Gutiérrez-Magee expedition, the "Old 300" colonists of 1821, and troops of the 1836 Revolution, near which Fannin's men were massacred at Goliad. In the twentieth century its path helped guide the surveyors who mapped modern Texas highways.

Navasota, TX

Long before wagon wheels cut its ruts, this was a Native footpath threading southern Texas and Louisiana. In 1690 Alonso de León and the Franciscan Father Massanet marched a small army of men, horses, and pack-flour along it to found the Mission of San Francisco de los Tejas near the Neches—naming the church, and eventually the state, for the 'friendly' Tejas people. By the 1800s the same corridor had become the Opelousas Road, driving Texas cattle to distant markets.

Newburgh, IN

"La Belle Rivière" — the beautiful river — was the French name for the Ohio, the great water highway that French explorers, traders, and Native peoples traveled through this country long before Indiana statehood. Newburgh rose on the river's bluff precisely because that waterway carried the commerce and settlement of the early frontier. The name recalls the French colonial presence in the Ohio Valley.

Nacogdoches, TX

La Calle Real del Norte followed an eighteenth-century trail linking the villages of the Nacogdoche and Nasoni peoples in the East Texas woods. Spanish missionaries, soldiers, and settlers traveled it, as did French traders and American adventurers, long before Anglo-American colonists arrived. The old road was a thread of contact and commerce across the contested Spanish-French-American borderland.

La Marque, TX

The settlement that became La Marque grew from an 1838 Republic of Texas land grant along Highland Bayou, then boomed when the Galveston, Houston, and Henderson Railroad linked the two cities in 1860. A post office arrived in 1869, and by 1900 the community had settled on the French-flavored name La Marque, thriving on dairy farming and an interurban electric line to Houston. When the petrochemical industry rose along Galveston Bay in the mid-20th century, La Marque reinvented itself as a bedroom community for industrial workers, incorporating in 1953 after resisting annexation by neighboring Texas City.

Enochs, TX

La Pista de Vida Agua — the "Trail of Living Water" — threaded across the Llano Estacado by stringing together lakes that had drawn travelers since prehistoric times. Comanchero traders followed it by the late 1700s, and in the 1800s it carried the Fort Sumner Wagon Road and a mail route that ultimately linked toward the Santa Fe Trail. Today the once-reliable lakes hold only spring seepage, but the route remains etched into the land.

La Porte, TX

A group of Colorado land developers formed the La Porte Land and Town Company in 1890, bought over a thousand acres, and began selling lots to settlers lured from New York and the Midwest. A railroad reached the Sylvan Beach Resort in 1899, and the beach joined agriculture as the town's economic mainstay. Storms in 1900 and 1915, a nearby oil strike in 1916, and post–World War II industrialization steadily reshaped La Porte from a farming and resort town into part of the greater Houston industrial coast.

Cotulla, TX

Travelers had crossed this land on the old Presidio Rio Grande Road for centuries before the U.S. Army built and garrisoned Fort Ewell here in 1852 for protection. The first permanent settler, William A. Waugh, opened a rancho at the Cibolo Crossing in 1856, and in 1858 the county was created and named for the French explorer La Salle. County government organized in 1880, and Cotulla became the county seat in 1883.

Bryan, TX

When it was completed in 1928, the seven-story La Salle was the tallest building in downtown Bryan, a Classical-detailed landmark rising across Main Street from the depot on the Houston and Texas Central line. Built for businessman Robert Wistar Howell, it offered a dining room, coffee shop, ballroom, and roughly a hundred guest rooms to travelers, politicians, and military visitors to Bryan and nearby College Station. It slipped into use as a nursing home and then stood closed for two decades before a rehabilitation returned it to service as a hotel in 2000.

La Vernia, TX

Founded about 1846–47 by Claiborne Rector, who built a stage stop and blacksmith shop to serve travelers on the Chihuahua Road, this Wilson County settlement grew up along one of early Texas's major trails—still traced by Main Street today. First called 'Post Oak,' it was renamed for the green oaks of the area when mail service began in 1856. Settled largely by Southerners seeking fertile land, it became a Civil War recruiting and officer-training center.

Scranton, PA · est. 1947

Long before Scranton was a city, iron was already being forged in the woods of Slocum Hollow as early as 1797. In 1840 the Scranton family and their partners launched the works that became the Lackawanna Iron Company, and in 1847 the furnaces here rolled iron rails for the Erie Railroad — helping tie together the nation's booming rail network. The company added steelmaking in 1875, riding the Gilded Age industrial surge, before the operation finally closed in 1902.

Ladonia, TX

Settled around 1840 and first called McCownville after early resident Frank McCown, this Fannin County community was platted with unusually wide streets by carpenter-merchant James H. Cole. Local legend says the name changed in 1857 to honor Ladonna Millsay, a singer traveling by wagon train from Tennessee, and by 1858 a post office made "Ladonia" official. The arrival of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway in 1887 turned it into a booming cotton-marketing town of 2,000 before it slowly declined in the 20th century.

Clinton, CT

In 1824, the Marquis de Lafayette — the French nobleman who had fought beside Washington a half-century earlier — returned to the United States as the 'Nation's Guest,' invited to tour the young republic he had helped create. Now an old man, he journeyed through all twenty-four states to rapturous crowds, and on August 21, 1824, that triumphal progress carried him along the old Post Road through this stretch of the Connecticut shore, then part of Killingworth. The town of Clinton would later be set off from Killingworth, but the memory of the day the Revolution's last great hero passed through, greeted with militia salutes and civic ceremony, stayed with the community.

Sturbridge, MA

In 1824, a half-century after the Revolution he had helped win, the Marquis de Lafayette returned to America for a grand farewell tour and was greeted as a living link to the nation's founding. Traveling overland from Boston toward Hartford in early September, the aging general passed through Sturbridge, where townspeople escorted him to the Common and feted him at Porter's Stage House. Such welcomes—militia escorts, banquets, and cheering crowds at every town along the post road—were repeated in hundreds of communities during his thirteen-month journey through all twenty-four states.

Lagarto, TX

Lagarto Cemetery traces its origin to the early 1870s, when an unknown traveler died at the home of storekeepers Samuel and Mary Beall and was buried on their land; in 1876 they formally deeded two acres for a community cemetery. Among those laid to rest here are Texas Ranger Charles Fusselman, killed in Presidio County in 1890, and John Pollan, a veteran of the Texas war for independence. Though the ranching town of Lagarto declined after the railroad bypassed it in 1887, descendants of its pioneers have kept the cemetery in use ever since.

Lajitas, TX

Set beside a Rio Grande ford that people crossed for millennia, the Lajitas cemetery gathers the varied history of the Big Bend borderland into one flagstone-walled ground. Comanche and Apache raiders followed the crossing into Mexico, Spanish expeditions scouted it for a presidio in the 1740s, and one of the Army's experimental camel expeditions paused here in 1860. After rancher H. W. McGuirk opened a trading post in 1899 and troops manned the crossing in the 1910s, a small settlement grew—and its Hispanic and Anglo dead were laid to rest here in barrows and niche-topped grutas.

Temple, TX

When the Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railroad founded Temple, it dammed nearby Bird Creek to secure water for its trains — and the resulting reservoir soon doubled as a recreation ground. By 1900 investors had built a park honoring railroad manager L.J. Polk, where townsfolk paid a dime to boat, fish, and play croquet and tennis. Over the decades the retreat passed from private association to private club and finally to a city park.

St. Tammany Parish, LA

When its first span opened in August 1956, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway stretched nearly 24 miles across open water, and a second span followed in May 1969 to handle growing traffic. Carried on more than 9,000 concrete pilings, it pioneered large-scale use of prefabricated, prestressed concrete bridge construction in the United States. The crossing knit the lake's north shore into the Greater New Orleans area.

St. Tammany Parish, LA · est. 2013

The original 1956 span, designed by Palmer & Baker and now carrying southbound traffic, opened as the longest bridge in the world by more than 15 miles. Built in just fourteen months, it used assembly-line, mass-production methods for the first time in bridge construction — identical hollow pilings, caps, and pre-stressed deck sections cast onshore and barged into place. Engineering News-Record hailed the project as a bold venture of unusual foresight and resourcefulness.

Hudson, MI

Built in 1871–72 from Berea, Ohio sandstone, this bridge carried the main line of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway over Bean Creek near Hudson, Michigan. By 1892 it was one of only twenty-two stone bridges among 223 along more than 1,400 miles of that railroad's line—making its masonry construction a notable rarity. It stands as a durable relic of the railroad age that knit the Midwest together.

Denison, TX

Completed in 1944, Lake Texoma was formed when Denison Dam impounded the Red River, creating one of the largest reservoirs in the nation for flood control, power, and recreation. Its creation was championed by Congressman Sam Rayburn, the long-serving Speaker of the House, and it flooded historic sites including Preston, once the Red River crossing of the Butterfield Stage. Straddling Texas and Oklahoma, it drew millions of visitors and gave its name to a nearby state park honoring President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Eagle Lake, TX

Texas sugar-making, born before the Civil War, roared back to life around 1900 thanks to cheaper refining methods and the drive of Colorado County planter William Dunovant. He and his partners built the Cane Belt Railroad to haul cane, then erected this refinery about 1902; at its height it processed up to 1,000 tons of cane a day and turned out five million pounds of refined sugar a year. A little train nicknamed the "Whangdoodle" fed the mill from surrounding fields. But after a peak season in 1908–09, tropical storms, an early freeze, and a new law banning convict labor broke the industry, and the plant was dismantled in 1918 and shipped off to Jamaica.

Carson City, NV

By 1863 two hotels and their stables stood here, and in 1872 one became a station on the newly finished Virginia & Truckee Railroad between Carson City and Reno. Beneath the highway run three inverted-siphon pipelines of the Virginia and Gold Hill Water Company, whose 76-mile box-flume and pipeline system — begun in 1873 to carry Sierra water to the Comstock — became world-famous engineering. From 1881 Lakeview also served as a lumber storage yard, fed after 1887 by a V-flume and shipped by rail to the mines until activity ceased in 1896.

Lamkin, TX

Founded in 1870 on the Leon River and named for landowner George Lamkin, this Comanche County town weathered repeated floods and fires as its pioneer merchants stubbornly rebuilt. After the 1908 flood forced a move to higher ground, the arrival of the Cotton Belt Railroad turned Lamkin into a booming shipping center, with gins, banks, stores, and a school whose basketball team ran off four straight county titles. Fire in 1922 and the railroad's departure in 1936 finally emptied the town, leaving a ghost of its bustling heyday.

Elko County, NV

When heavy traffic stripped the grass from the main California Emigrant Trail along the Humboldt River, many wagon parties detoured along a Shoshone path around the Ruby Mountains to rest their livestock in the grassy Lamoille Valley before rejoining the river. John Walker and Thomas Waterman settled the area in 1865, and Waterman named it for a place in his native Vermont. A crossroads settlement grew up around a hotel, store, and blacksmith shop where wagons were repaired and supplies obtained, though those early buildings and the later hotel, creamery, and mill are now gone.

Lampasas, TX

Lampasas County was organized in 1856, formed from Travis and Bell counties as Anglo settlement pushed up the Texas rivers in the years before the Civil War. Its name derives from Lampazos, the Spanish name for the local river, said to refer to the cockle-burs that grew thickly along its banks. First settled around 1850, the county grew steadily and gained its first railroad in 1882, with the town of Lampasas as its seat.

Lampasas, TX

After the legislature created Lampasas County in 1856, business shuffled through borrowed rooms until the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad reached the county seat in 1882 and touched off a boom. The commissioners hired Waco architect Wesley Clark Dodson, whose Second Empire and Italianate design — crowned by a clock tower and mansard roof — was completed in 1884 with a Seth Thomas clock installed the same year. Floods in 1936 and 1957 damaged but never displaced the stately building.

New Braunfels, TX

Joseph Landa bought this land around the Comal Springs—the largest springs in the American Southwest—in 1859 and harnessed the Comal River to power gristmills, textile factories, an ice plant, and a brewery, even a Civil War saltpeter works. His son Harry opened Landa's Park as a tourist resort in 1898, and excursion trains soon brought crowds for picnics, dancing, and steamboat rides. After financial troubles closed it, New Braunfels citizens voted overwhelmingly to buy the park in 1936, and WPA crews added lasting improvements.

Castroville, TX

These weathered limestone buildings rose beside the Medina River ford on the old Eagle Pass–San Antonio road, where Alsatian colonist Michel Simon settled in 1844 as part of Henri Castro's immigrant colony. Later owners turned a home and store into a wash house, residence, and two-story hotel, while a riverside mill built in 1854 was modernized over the years and even generated hydroelectricity by the 1920s. Ruth Lawler kept up the old tradition of hospitality at her "Landmark Inn" before deeding it to the state in 1974.

Los Angeles County, CA

On September 5, 1876, Southern Pacific president Charles Crocker drove a golden spike at Lang Station to complete the railroad's San Joaquin Valley Line, joining Los Angeles by rail to San Francisco and the transcontinental network for the first time. The ceremony ended Los Angeles's isolation and opened Southern California to the flood of settlers, freight, and commerce that would transform it. This spot in the rugged Soledad Canyon witnessed a turning point in the region's fortunes.

Middletown Township, PA · est. 2006

When Langhorne Speedway opened in 1926, its perfectly circular one-mile dirt oval was unlike anything else in American racing, earning the fearsome nickname the "Big Left Turn." For nearly half a century its turns tested the greatest names in the sport, from Lee Petty and A.J. Foyt to Mario Andretti, and it hosted racing across stock, midget, sprint, and Indy classes. Reshaped and paved in 1965, the track finally fell silent after its last race in 1971.

Langtry, TX

Langtry sprang up in 1882 as a water stop for the Southern Pacific's steam locomotives, built on land deeded by the Torres family and named most likely for a railroad crew boss. It gained lasting fame through saloonkeeper Roy Bean, the self-styled "Law West of the Pecos," who so admired British actress Lillie Langtry that legend tied her name to the town she eventually visited. Ranchers, a rock-crushing plant, and even tuberculosis patients seeking dry air passed through before a 1920s rail rerouting left it a quiet tourist stop.

Stanislaus County, CA

This marker locates the vanished town of Langworth, founded in 1860 by Henry Langworthy on a branch of the old Mariposa Road where it crossed the Stanislaus River at Islip's Ferry. The land had been part of an eight-square-league rancho granted by Mexico to A. B. Thompson in 1846. Once a stop tied to river ferries and overland roads, the town has since faded from the map.

Laredo, TX

When Laredo introduced streetcars in 1889, the border city joined a nationwide wave of urban rail that reshaped how Americans moved through growing towns. Mule- and later electric-powered cars connected neighborhoods to businesses, spurring residential construction and knitting the economy of this Rio Grande trade center more tightly together. Streetcar lines like Laredo's were engines of Gilded Age urban growth before automobiles displaced them in the twentieth century.

Laredo, TX

Long before any bridge spanned the Rio Grande here, the river's shallow ford drew Native peoples who crossed it for centuries, and later Spanish conquistadores who favored it as the shortest route between Bahía del Espíritu Santo and Nuevo León. That ancient crossing point eventually anchored Laredo's first international bridge, formalizing a passage that human travelers had used for generations. The site layers Indigenous trails, Spanish colonial expeditions, and the modern border into a single spot on the river.

Larwill, IN

Laid out in 1854 and first known as Huntsville, this Whitley County community owed its existence to the iron rails that were then knitting the Midwest together. The Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad gave the young town a lifeline to distant markets, and settlements like it commonly sprang up wherever the tracks ran. In time it took the name Larwill.

Milam, TX

Las Boregas Creek marked the eastern edge of an 1794 Spanish land grant to Juan Ignacio Pifermo—the oldest grant in Sabine County—where El Camino Real, the main road into Spanish Texas, crossed the water. A well-used campsite grew up beside the creek, and around 1800 a Spanish army post was posted upstream to guard settlers and travelers. According to his journal, Stephen F. Austin, the 'Father of Texas,' spent his very first night in Texas near this creek in July 1821.

Las Vegas, NV

Artesian springs once rose from this desert floor, sending streams across the valley to water lush meadows — the vegas, or "meadows," that gave Las Vegas its name. For generations the oasis was the winter home of Southern Paiutes, and it became a vital resting stop on the Old Spanish Trail after Antonio Armijo's trading party passed nearby in 1829–30. John C. Fremont camped here in 1844 and mapped the site; Mormons founded a mission and fort in 1855; and in 1905 a railroad company acquired the water rights and platted the City of Las Vegas.

Lavon, TX

Drawn by the rich Blackland Prairie soil and Bear Creek's water, settlers reached the Lavon area in the 1850s, and the town proper took root when the railroad arrived in 1886. Originally called Thompson or Thompson Switch after early postmaster and merchant Elbert Thompson, it was renamed Lavon for his son to avoid confusion with another town. WPA crews built a school here in the late 1930s, and in the 1950s Lavon Dam turned the area into a fishing and boating retreat—one restaurant even appeared in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde.

Terrell, TX

When the Texas and Pacific Railroad pushed through in 1873, a group of investors formed a colony association to promote the new town of Lawrence, named for one of their directors. The town's cemetery began the same year with the burial of a seven-month-old child and has since grown to hold more than four hundred graves, many of them the area's earliest pioneers.

Fort Worth, TX

Born in Greenville, Texas, in 1901, Lawrence Clifton Elliott showed his knack for flight by building an experimental airplane in high school. After training as an Army pilot, he began a 35-year federal aviation career in 1928, based for 25 years at Fort Worth, where he helped mark domestic flight routes, develop aviation weather broadcasting, and set standards for aircraft maintenance and safety. During World War II he served as a regional manager of the U.S. Civil Aviation System.

Raleigh, NC

Lawrence O'Bryan Branch built a public life across business and politics before the Civil War, serving as president of the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad and three terms in Congress. When war came he became a Confederate brigadier general. His home stood near this marker, and his grave lies to the east.

League City, TX

When Galveston developer John Charles League platted his townsite in 1890, he set aside land not just for a school and church but for this park, established in 1895 through a sale to the railroad. For decades League Park was the beating heart of the community—hosting campaign speeches, medicine shows, revivals, and summer band concerts from a two-story bandstand rebuilt after the catastrophic 1900 hurricane. During World War I it became a rallying ground for Red Cross drives, and residents funded a new bandstand for the American Bicentennial.

Bastrop, TX

In an era when engineering was almost entirely a man's profession, Leah Moncure of Bastrop apprenticed at her surveyor father's side, earned a civil engineering degree from UT Austin, and in 1938 became the first woman in Texas to register as a professional engineer. Born with a congenital heart condition doctors thought she wouldn't survive, she instead built a 32-year career with the Texas Highway Department in research, right-of-way, and road design. A UT scholarship in her name still supports women studying engineering.

Leander, TX

Leander began as a relocation of the older town of Bagdad, founded in 1854, after the Austin & Northwestern Railroad bypassed the original site in 1882. A new town was platted along the rail line and named for railroad official Leander Brown, and homes and businesses simply picked up and moved to it. The post office followed in 1882, and the school that opened in 1893 grew into the county's largest district.

Leander, TX

Organized in 1857 by the Rev. R. M. Overstreet as Pleasant Hill Presbyterian Church, this congregation first worshipped in the town of Bagdad. When the railroad bypassed Bagdad in 1882 and the new town of Leander sprang up along the tracks, the members voted to follow, erecting a building in 1884 on land given by church member Sarah J. Walker. The church's move captures how the railroad reshaped the map of Central Texas.

Leander, TX

This Methodist congregation was organized around 1860 in Bagdad, a Williamson County community a mile to the west. Early worshipers met with circuit preachers and missionaries in a log schoolhouse and a Masonic hall until they built a sanctuary in 1879. When the railroad drew settlement to Leander in 1901, the church followed, and the old Bagdad sanctuary was moved to land deeded by Sarah J. Walker.

Leechburg, PA

This blue-and-gold cast-iron sign is one of Pennsylvania's Keystone Markers, a statewide series from the early twentieth century that fixed the identity and origin of towns along the roadside. Leechburg took its name from David Leech, an enterprising figure of the early republic who developed the settlement on the Kiskiminetas River in the era when the Pennsylvania Canal threaded freight and passengers through the state's interior. A canal town by birth, it later grew into a busy iron and tin manufacturing community as industry followed the water and rail routes west.

Dennison Township, PA · est. 2001

Long before roads crossed these mountains, a Native American footpath threaded through this rugged country, one strand in a network of trails linking villages of the Delaware and Susquehanna watersheds. The Lehigh Path ran from the Forks of the Delaware near present-day Easton northwestward to the Wyoming Valley on the Susquehanna near Wilkes-Barre. The Lenni-Lenape and Susquehannock traveled its steep grades until roughly 1800, when European settlement finally displaced the old ways of moving through the land.

Boston, MA

Around AD 1000, five centuries before Columbus, Norse seafarers sailing out of Iceland and Greenland reached the shores of North America — a landfall remembered in the Icelandic sagas as "Vinland." Leif Erikson, son of Erik the Red, became the figure most associated with that voyage of discovery. This bronze, raised on Boston's Commonwealth Avenue Mall in the late 19th century, grew out of a New England enthusiasm for the idea that Vikings, not later explorers, first crossed the Atlantic to the continent.