Transportation

Nether Providence Township, PA · est. 1955

Built in 1809-10 by Thomas Leiper and surveyed by John Thomson, the Leiper Railway ran about three-quarters of a mile to haul stone from quarries on Crum Creek down to a landing on Ridley Creek. It is remembered as the first railway in Pennsylvania and the first in America to be laid out by survey. Horses drew the loaded cars along its wooden rails decades before the steam locomotive age.

Lela, TX

Lela sprang up around 1902 along the proposed line of the Chicago, Rock Island and Gulf railway, and residents quickly organized a school, first known as Story. When flooding forced the community uphill, the school moved with it, and the discovery of natural gas in the 1920s brought new prosperity and a brick schoolhouse. After nearly ninety years, the Lela district closed in 1992 and merged with nearby Shamrock.

Cresson Township, PA · est. 1958

Samuel Lemon built this stone tavern in 1830 at the summit of the Allegheny Portage Railroad, beside the head of Inclined Plane No. 6. The Portage was an engineering marvel that hauled canal boats up and over the mountains by a series of cable-worked inclines, knitting Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. For years the Lemon House gave weary travelers, teamsters, and railroad crews a place to rest, eat, and water their horses at the roof of the crossing.

Galveston, TX

A Connecticut sea captain's son who went to sea at fourteen, Lent Munson Hitchcock left New England to join the fledgling Texas Navy around 1836. He came to Galveston in 1837 and became part of the port city's early leadership, serving as harbor master, alderman, and treasurer before volunteering for the Confederate army. Active as a Mason and Episcopalian, he left his name on the town of Hitchcock, christened for him in 1891.

Gatesville, TX

A crossing of the Leon River on the Old Georgetown Road, in use by 1854, this site began with R. G. Grant's ferry and Coryell County's first metal truss bridge, a bowstring span erected in 1882. After floods wrecked that bridge in 1899 and 1900, the George E. King Bridge Company of Iowa built the present 137-foot Pratt through-truss span in 1904, with pin-connected members, lattice railings, and stone abutments. It carried east–west traffic as part of State Highway 7 and later U.S. Highway 84, and was restored in 1994.

Leonard, TX

Settlers reached this corner of Fannin County in the 1840s and 50s, among them Solomon L. Leonard, a Confederate sympathizer who amassed 10,000 acres around Wildcat Thicket — a tangle of brush where fugitives and outlaws, and figures of the bloody Reconstruction-era Lee-Peacock feud, took cover. When the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad arrived in 1880, Leonard's heirs platted a townsite and auctioned lots at a picnic on this very square, an event still held every year. A saloon, hotel, post office, newspaper, and school followed, and Leonard became the market town of a rich farming district.

Dallas, TX

Clement LeTot, a Frenchman and Crimean War veteran, put down roots in northwest Dallas County in 1874 and by 1881 had founded the little rail-line town that bore his name. Following the frontier custom of the day, he set aside part of his land as a family burial ground, first for two young sons in the mid-1880s and eventually for himself in 1907. Long since absorbed into the sprawl of Dallas, the cemetery is one of the last tangible traces of an immigrant-founded community.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2008

On August 31, 1803, Meriwether Lewis eased a 50-foot keeled boat into the Ohio River near Fort Fayette, launching the journey that would become the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the newly acquired lands to the west, the three-year trek pushed all the way to the Pacific and back. Pittsburgh, at the head of the Ohio, was the practical starting line for that continental adventure.

Park City, MT

Near this spot on the Yellowstone River in July 1806, William Clark and part of the Corps of Discovery paused during the expedition's homeward journey to fell cottonwoods and build dugout canoes for the trip downriver. Clark's party had split from Meriwether Lewis to explore the Yellowstone, and their passage through this valley was among the first documented American ventures into what is now south-central Montana.

Brookville, PA · est. 2009

In 1912, only a few years after the Wright brothers first flew, Lewis Sandt of Brookville climbed into a fragile early aircraft and flew from Erie into Canada — the first international flight by an American. The feat thrilled crowds and helped fire the public's imagination for aviation. Like so many pioneer aviators, Sandt paid the ultimate price, dying of crash injuries the following year at just twenty-five.

Lewisburg, PA · est. 1955

When Pennsylvania built its sprawling state canal system in the 1820s and 1830s to link its rivers and markets, short connecting cuts often did the crucial work of tying a town into the network. Completed in 1833, this five-eighths-mile cross-cut with three lift locks and a slackwater dam let canal boats cross the Susquehanna and reach Lewisburg, turning the town into a busy shipping point. In the canal era, such a modest ditch could mean the difference between a sleepy village and a thriving trade center.

Granville Township, PA · est. 1996

Built in 1848-49 as a freight warehouse, this is the oldest surviving structure known to have been raised by the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad — the company that would become one of the largest corporations on earth. Its opening was toasted at a banquet in September 1849 celebrating the rails' arrival in Lewistown, part of the great mid-century push to lace the state with iron. By 1868 the freight house had been remade into a passenger station, greeting travelers where goods once moved.

Edom vicinity, TX

Along the Tyler–Porter's Bluff Road, a main artery for pioneers streaming into Texas from the East and South, Liberty Cemetery grew from land pioneer David Riley obtained in 1851. Tradition holds Riley was a charter member of the short-lived Liberty Baptist Church, which may have shared the ground, though a missing volume of county deeds leaves the transaction unproven. The earliest documented grave dates to 1855, and unmarked native red sandstone markers along the western edge hint at settlers whose names are now lost; by the 21st century the cemetery held more than 450 graves.

Kilgore, TX

This rural Gregg County community was settled before the Civil War and carried a string of colorful names — Sabine, Mount Moriah, McCrary's Chapel, Goforth, and Hog Eye, the last for a settler with a keen eye for hogs. It took the name Liberty City in the opening days of the fabled East Texas oil boom, which transformed the county's economy. The area built its reputation on good schools, farming, ranching, and an admired network of all-weather county roads.

Plainview, TX

In 1887 the Leach brothers homesteaded here after immigrating from Liberty, Kentucky, building sod houses and a windmill and naming their settlement "Liberty" for their old home. A schoolhouse rose by 1892, and when the Santa Fe placed a switch on William Finney's land in 1906, a second hamlet called "Finney Switch" took shape nearby. Irrigation, dairy farming and small businesses followed, but school consolidation in 1948 and changing agriculture drained away the population.

Liberty, TX

An old trail through this region, traveled and described by Spanish explorer Alonso de León in 1690, hardened into the 18th-century "La Bahía" or Lower Road. The first settlement, Atascocita, took root in 1757, and in 1831 Mexican authorities chartered a town with the sonorous name Villa de la Santísima Trinidad de la Libertad. When Texas organized the county in 1836, that town became the seat and lent "Liberty" its name.

West, TX

Liberty Grove was a scattered farming community in the far northeastern corner of McLennan County, its center marked by a Masonic lodge and a country school. Its cemetery holds settlers going back to 1850, including veterans of both the U.S.–Mexico War and the Civil War, and formally took shape when the Russell family began deeding land in the 1880s. When the railroad reached nearby West in 1881, the population drifted toward the tracks, the lodge and school followed, and the cemetery was left as the community's enduring reminder.

Worcester County, MD

The U.S. Life-Saving Service built the North Beach Station on this stretch of the Maryland coast in 1884, part of a national chain of stations whose surfmen patrolled the shore and rowed open boats into the surf to rescue shipwrecked crews. When the Life-Saving Service merged into the new U.S. Coast Guard, the station carried on its lifesaving work until it was decommissioned in 1952; the building itself was lost to fire in 1962.

Maysville, KY

Settled in 1784 by Edward and John Waller and George Lewis and renamed Maysville in 1787, the Ohio River landing first known as Limestone was one of the great gateways through which settlers poured into the trans-Appalachian West. It sat on lands linked to pioneer figures John May and the celebrated frontiersman Simon Kenton. From its riverbank, flatboats and travelers fanned out into the new country beyond the mountains.

Columbia, PA · est. 2003

In 1913 the Lincoln Highway Association stitched together existing roads into the nation's first coast-to-coast route, running from New York to San Francisco. The highway transformed American travel, and towns along it sprouted filling stations, tourist cabins, and roadside restaurants to serve the new motorists. In 1925 much of its Pennsylvania path was folded into Route 30.

Ames, IA

Conceived in 1913, the Lincoln Highway was one of the first roads to span the country coast to coast, and communities along its route raised markers dedicating the way to Abraham Lincoln. Iowa formed a key link in the corridor, carrying early motorists across the prairie in the dawning age of the automobile. Roadside markers like this one guided drivers and celebrated the pioneering spirit of the good-roads movement.

Town of Hempstead, NY

On the morning of May 20, 1927, a young airmail pilot named Charles A. Lindbergh lifted his overloaded monoplane off the muddy runway of Roosevelt Field and pointed it toward Europe. Thirty-three hours later, alone and sleepless, he touched down at Le Bourget outside Paris — the first person to fly solo and nonstop across the Atlantic. The crowds that mobbed him made him the most famous man in the world overnight.

Spearman, TX

At about 10:50 on the morning of September 24, 1934, a small monocoupe touched down in a pasture west of here, and the pilot taxied to a windmill and asked the startled resident if he could park in her back yard. He was Charles Lindbergh, flying from California to New York with his wife Anne and, low on fuel, choosing tiny Spearman precisely to dodge the crowds a big town would bring. Word spread anyway; schoolchildren were let out to glimpse the famous aviator before he took off two hours later.

Scott County, KY

Around 1790, as settlers pressed into the Bluegrass country, Anthony Lindsay built a fortified station near a branch of the Elkhorn named for the frontiersman Charles Lecompte, who had ranged this land as early as 1775. Sited along an old buffalo trace that ran north toward the Ohio River, the station became a dependable stop for travelers and traders threading the wilderness. Lindsay lies buried a hundred yards from where his station once stood.

Lufkin vicinity, TX

In 1899 the Southern Pine Lumber Company opened its first logging camp beside Lindsey Springs, whose reliable water made the site viable. Within a year the camp housed about 110 people and had its own store, school, and church, with a narrow-gauge railroad hauling logs to the mill at Diboll. By 1906 the marketable timber was cut out and the camp moved on — the boom-and-bust rhythm of the East Texas lumber industry in miniature.

Lipscomb, TX

Founded in 1886 by settlers betting on a proposed Santa Fe railroad across the Panhandle, Lipscomb boomed almost overnight—seven businesses opened in its first month, and it became the seat of the newly organized county in 1887. It was named for Abner S. Lipscomb, a jurist and secretary of state of the Republic of Texas. A hotel, courthouse, school, and stores soon filled the young town, whose fortunes always hinged on the rails.

Lampasas, TX

When the nearby Gracy Hotel was finished in 1870, its builders used the leftover stone to raise this smaller companion, the "Little Hotel." It gave J. L. N. Gracy and his bride a private apartment upstairs while offering rooms to travelers below. Its mason, Charles Green, also worked on the larger hotel and on the Coleman County courthouse and jail, leaving his craftsmanship across the region.

Lott, TX

Springing up just after the Civil War, the Falls County community first called Camden and then Rupee grew into Live Oak — a crossroads of stores, a cotton gin, a post office, a Masonic lodge, and a Baptist church whose log cabin doubled as a schoolhouse. The Hodges brothers donated land for the church, school, and cemetery, and the earliest marked graves date to 1877. When rail lines bypassed the settlement in the 1890s it withered away, until only the cemetery remained to mark where a farming community once stood.

George West, TX

Carved from San Patricio and Nueces Counties in 1856 and named for its live oaks, this South Texas county grew up around ranching along old roads that once carried Santa Anna's army toward the Alamo. Its first seat at Oakville gave way in 1919 to George West when the railroad reshaped the map. Ranching, farming, and petroleum have long defined its economy.

George West, TX

Live Oak County was created in 1852 with its seat at Oakville, but the railroad era reshuffled the map: cattleman George Washington West, master of a 200,000-acre ranch, platted a new town and lured the county seat to it in 1919. He promptly deeded a full block, and the 1920 courthouse rose in dignified classical revival brick and cast stone—among the last works of noted San Antonio architect Alfred Giles, who died before it was finished. For more than a century it has hosted not only trials but weddings, rallies, and county celebrations.

Liverpool, TX

The community here began in 1837, in the days of the Republic of Texas, as a Chocolate Bayou shipping point renamed for the great English port of Liverpool. Burials in the cemetery began in 1875 on three acres donated by Thomas C. Nelson, part of which once held a building that served as both school and church. The grounds preserve the memory of one of Brazoria County's early settlements.

Liverpool, TX

Founded in 1837, the coastal town of Liverpool first received its mail by boat from Galveston or Velasco, and its earliest postmaster was Warren D. C. Hall, a leader of the Texas Revolution and former Republic secretary of war. Over the next century-and-a-half the post office migrated repeatedly among homes, stores, depots, and ferry offices, chasing the town's shifting center around the iron bridge over Chocolate Bayou and the new railroad townsite. Several women served as postmaster, including one who held the post through three successive marriages.

Shelby County, OH

After the catastrophic Great Miami River flood of March 1913 drowned Dayton and killed hundreds, Ohio pioneered one of the nation's first comprehensive flood-control efforts: the Miami Conservancy District. Completed in 1921, Lockington Dam is one of five earthen 'dry dams' the District built across the valley's tributaries — structures that stand empty most of the year and only pool water behind them during dangerous high water, releasing it slowly downstream. Among the largest earthworks of its kind when it was finished, its great length and height reflect the ambitious scale of engineer Arthur E. Morgan's regional plan.

Lockport, NY · est. 1976

To lift canal boats 60 feet over the Niagara Escarpment, engineers built five paired locks — boats going up on one side while others descended. The project drew workers from across Europe and gave the city of Lockport its name.

Livingston, TX

Built in 1911 by Philadelphia's Baldwin Locomotive Works, this engine first hauled timber in Florida before being bought in the 1920s for the Carter-Kelley Lumber Company's East Texas operations. Running on the Houston, East and West Texas Railway between mill towns in Angelina and Polk counties, it carried logs and finished lumber—much of it first dragged from the woods by oxen. It stayed in service until 1952, a workhorse of the region's booming timber industry.

Lakeway, TX

John Henry Lohmans left Hanover, Germany, for the Republic of Texas in 1842, first running a dairy farm near Austin before pushing west in 1867 to carve a homestead from the timbered hills above the Colorado River. A road-builder as well as a farmer, he personally financed Lohmans Ford Road, one strand in the web of early crossings that let settlers and goods move through this rugged country. Today's Lohmans Crossing Road still traces the general path of that pioneer route.

Lometa, TX

Lometa owes its existence to the railroad: in 1885 the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe pushed northwest from Temple and planted a depot in open ranch country. Platted in 1886 and renamed Lometa, from the Spanish for 'little mountain,' the town drew residents away from nearby Senterfitt and became a thriving trade center for cotton, cattle, wool, and mohair. Rail branches and, later, state and federal highways kept goods and travelers flowing through the town for generations.

Harlingen, TX

Lon C. Hill built the first home in Harlingen in 1904—and, in a sense, built the town itself. A tireless promoter of railroads and irrigation, he helped transform the lower Rio Grande Valley from arid brushland into productive farm country. His climate-adapted Victorian house became a gathering place where valley pioneers met to plan the developments that would shape the region.

London, TX

In the early days of Kimble County a ranching couple turned their hotel and wagon yard into a trade center, where the wife gathered the neighborhood's mail. In 1882 she formalized the arrangement and became the first postmaster of the new London post office. Its central location made the settlement the direct road between Mason and Junction, and postmasters served it for well over a century.

London, TX

Laid out around 1878 as the hoped-for courthouse square of a proposed county, this town took the name London after the postmaster's first choice honoring his wife was rejected by postal authorities. Sitting astride the Western Cattle Trail, London counted trail drivers among its residents and sold supplies to crews pushing longhorn herds north, supporting a blacksmith, stores, a cotton gin, churches, and a school. A future Texas governor spent part of his childhood here.

Anahuac, TX

In the early 1900s, east Chambers County was becoming rice country, but the crop needs a steady supply of fresh water. Beginning in 1902, Berriman Richard Garland and A. L. Williams dug this canal from the mouth of Turtle Bay to irrigate the fields, and by 1904 the Lone Star Canal Company was shipping rice out by sailing vessel. Salt water intruding during dry seasons repeatedly killed crops, prompting a dam, locks, and a river district to manage the water. Through hurricanes, closures, and changing owners the canal endured and still serves the region's farms and industry.

Boston, MA

The Longfellow Bridge, opened in 1906 and named for the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, carries road, rail, and pedestrians across the Charles River between Boston and Cambridge. Its distinctive stone towers — nicknamed the "salt-and-pepper shakers" — make it one of the region's most recognizable crossings. This marker commemorates the bridge's major 2017–2018 rehabilitation, which restored the century-old structure while pairing engineering with public art.

Longview, TX

When surveyors laid out this East Texas townsite in 1870, they named it for the long view from Rock Hill, and the settlement incorporated the following year as the seat of Gregg County. Railroads, lumber, and cotton built the early town, which saw the notorious Dalton Gang stage its final raid on a local bank in 1894 and raised two future Texas governors. The 1931 Lathrop well nearby pushed the East Texas oil field into the largest in the world, transforming Longview into a petroleum and financial hub.

Longview, TX

Longview Junction sprang up in the 1870s where the Texas & Pacific and International & Great Northern railroad lines met, drawing churches, hotels, boardinghouses, and businesses to serve workers and travelers. A mule-powered street railway ran from 1883 to 1912, linking the junction to downtown Longview. Annexed by the city in 1904, the community kept its own identity until automobiles gave people the mobility to move beyond it.

Longview, TX

Longview owes its existence to the railroad: in 1870 O. H. Methvin deeded 150 acres to the Southern Pacific, and by 1871 the town had become the line's western terminus, soon a junction where the International & Great Northern crossed. The Texas and Pacific replaced an 1874 station with the Colonial Revival depot completed in 1940, whose passengers reached the platform through a tunnel and whose walls bore stylized quoins, keystones, and grey stone trim. Once boasting three depots, Longview retains only this one — the last survivor of the railway network that created the town.

Lorena, TX

Lorena Cemetery was set aside in 1881 by pioneer Daniel Aerl just as railroad financier Gen. Grenville M. Dodge bought sixty acres and platted a town along his Missouri, Kansas and Texas line. Dodge named the village for Lorena Westbrook Robertson, a local landowner's daughter who is buried here, and the ground fills with the graves of pioneer families, community founders, and veterans, its earliest burials the infant Lemuel Crook and young Jacky Pool.

Lorenzo, TX

Lorenzo sprang to life on April 10, 1911, the day the Crosbyton-South Plains Railway ran its first train to the spot. It took its name from Lorenzo Dow, an employee of the livestock company that promoted the townsite and, in 1914, urged local farmers to plant cotton. Incorporated in 1924, the little High Plains town grew into a cotton-farming center with its own churches, school, and businesses.

Lorenzo, TX

After the Texas Legislature carved out the Crosby Land District in 1876, ranchers spread across the Panhandle, and in 1890 a group of Chicago and New York investors formed the C.B. Livestock Company. Planning a rail line from Crosbyton to Lubbock in 1910, the company platted towns along the route and named this one for its attorney, Lorenzo Dow. It deeded land here for a community cemetery in 1916, where a child lost to whooping cough was reportedly the first laid to rest.

Los Ebanos, TX

This bend of the Rio Grande has been crossed for centuries, first recorded when José de Escandón's Spanish colonists forded here in the 1740s along a route that also carried a salt trail to El Sal del Rey. Over the generations it saw Mexican War troops in 1846, Texas Rangers chasing cattle rustlers in 1874, and smugglers during Prohibition. A licensed ferry and inspection station opened in 1950, and the hand-pulled crossing—named for the ebony trees on its banks—is said to be the only government-licensed, hand-operated ferry on any U.S. border.

Alice, TX

In 1831, while Texas was still part of Mexico, Marcelino Lopez of Camargo secured a land grant from the state of Tamaulipas and founded Los Preseños on San Fernando Creek. The little settlement thrived on a trade route linking Corpus Christi with Laredo, San Diego, and Eagle Pass, and appeared on maps for nearly half a century. When N.G. Collins bought out the Lopez family in 1877 and platted the town of Collins, Los Preseños faded into memory.

Lott, TX

Lott sprang to life in 1889 as a planned stop on the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railroad, laid out on a straight line between Cameron and Waco. The Texas Townsite Company bought pioneer land, gave the railroad its right-of-way, and named the new town for railroad president Uriah Lott. Businesses, a post office, a school, churches, and a volunteer fire department followed in quick succession, and the town was incorporated in 1890.

Douglass, TX

A French-Canadian trader and diplomat, Louis Juchereau de St. Denis moved with rare ease among the Spanish, French, and Caddo worlds of the early 18th-century borderlands. Sent from Louisiana after a Spanish priest sought French help, he crossed into Spanish Texas, won over authorities in Mexico City, and guided the 1716 expedition that planted missions and a presidio in East Texas. From his base at Natchitoches he supplied the missions and traded—often illicitly—with the Caddo, becoming both indispensable and, to Spanish eyes, dangerous.

Louise, TX

The town of Louise sprang up in 1881 along the New York, Texas and Mexican Railway, named for the daughter of a railroad director and soon a shipping and marketing hub. In 1891 a missionary called local Methodists together to organize a church, and its 1893 building doubled as the public schoolhouse and community gathering place. Moved to its present site in 1940, the church has served the town ever since, still counting descendants of its first families among its members.

Louisville, KY

When the steamboat New Orleans reached Louisville in the autumn of 1811, it opened a new age on the western rivers, and the city — perched at the Falls of the Ohio — quickly became a steamboat hub with six lines and hundreds of boats built nearby. Its wharf teemed with traffic through the Civil War and welcomed a remarkable procession of Americans, including eight presidents and writers from Washington Irving and Charles Dickens to Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Herman Melville.

Dallas, TX

Convinced their city's future lay in aviation, Dallas leaders drew crowds to air shows and in 1917 secured a World War I Army flying school, which the Signal Corps named Love Field for Lt. Moss Lee Love, an aviator killed in a 1913 crash. Through the 1920s it hosted flying schools and pioneering air-mail routes and welcomed the likes of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, then served in World War II with a ferrying group, WASP pilots, and a Lockheed modification center. Nearly closed after a larger airport opened in 1973, it revived into one of the nation's busiest airports.

Lovelady, TX

As Lovelady grew into a railroad hub for the surrounding farmland in the 1870s, its residents set aside ground for a community burying place, with land conveyed to the cemetery association in 1878 and again in 1896. The first grave, dated 1878, was that of young Parham Bridges Baker, and by 1885 some twenty graves dotted the ground. A textbook example of an early Texas community graveyard, it remains tended by the local cemetery association.

Mentone, TX

Loving County was carved from Tom Green County in 1887 and organized in 1893, in the last decades when the arid Trans-Pecos of West Texas was being fenced, ranched, and settled. It honors Oliver Loving (1812–1867), the pioneering cattleman whose long drives helped open northern markets to Texas herds after the Civil War. Mentone, the county seat, anchors what remains one of the most sparsely populated counties in the United States.

Stanly County, NC

Long before bridges spanned the rivers of the North Carolina Piedmont, travelers, farmers, and merchants crossed on flat-bottomed ferries poled or cabled from bank to bank. A ferry like this one, named for the local family that operated it, would have been a vital link on the roads winding through Stanly County, carrying wagons, livestock, and mail across water that was otherwise impassable. Such crossings often became small hubs of activity, where people waited, traded news, and paid their toll before continuing on.

Lowell, MA · est. 1978

Lowell harnessed the Merrimack's drop through a network of power canals to run the nation's first integrated cotton mills. Its young women workers — the 'Lowell mill girls' — wrote the first chapters of American labor history.

Lueders, TX

The town of Lueders rose along the Clear Fork of the Brazos on land granted to the heirs of Frederick Luders, a German immigrant who fought at San Jacinto. Ranching gave way to a boom in 1900 when limestone quarries opened and the Texas Central Railroad reached the new townsite. Because thick limestone made grave-digging impractical at an earlier site, landowners donated ground for this cemetery in 1907; for years pallbearers carried caskets over the adjacent railroad embankment to reach the plots.