War of 1812

Erie, PA · est. 1996

When Oliver Hazard Perry's squadron met and captured a British fleet on Lake Erie on September 10, 1813, African American sailors were among the skilled seamen who made the victory possible. Their labor and seamanship were critical to one of the young United States' most decisive naval triumphs in the War of 1812. This marker at Erie, where much of that fleet was built and based, restores their names to the record of that day.

Point Marion, PA · est. 2014

Albert Gallatin was one of the young republic's most consequential statesmen, serving as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury from 1801 to 1814—still the longest tenure in the office's history. He funded the Lewis and Clark Expedition, worked steadily to reduce the national debt, and helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent that ended the War of 1812. In the 1790s his moderating influence helped defuse western Pennsylvania's Whiskey Rebellion, and his home, Friendship Hill, stands nearby.

New Orleans, LA

Standing in New Orleans, this monument to Andrew Jackson carries his ringing declaration in defense of national unity. Jackson first won fame here as the general whose ragtag force turned back the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, the climactic victory of the War of 1812. He went on to become the seventh president, and his famous toast against disunion became a byword for federal resolve.

Union County, NC

This spot in the Waxhaws country along the Carolina border marks the claimed birthplace of Andrew Jackson, born in 1767 to Scots-Irish settlers on the colonial frontier. Orphaned young during the Revolution, Jackson rose from the backcountry to national fame as the general who defended New Orleans in the War of 1812, and went on to become the seventh president. Both North and South Carolina have long laid claim to his exact birthplace.

Roanoke Rapids, NC

Andrew Joyner (1786–1856) served as a lieutenant colonel in the War of 1812 and went on to a long career in North Carolina public life, sitting in the state senate from 1835 to 1852. He was also an entrepreneur of the transportation age, leading the Roanoke Navigation Company and the Weldon & Portsmouth Railroad as the region worked to move goods by water and rail. His grave lies a short distance to the south.

Dundalk, MD

This monument honors Aquila Randall, a young Maryland militiaman who fell on September 12, 1814, at the Battle of North Point—the land engagement east of Baltimore during the War of 1812. As British forces marched toward the city, Randall and his fellow citizen-soldiers of the local militia met them on the road through the Patapsco Neck, buying time and blood for the defense that would hold at Fort McHenry the very next day. The elegant classical inscription, opening with a line drawn from Joseph Addison's tragedy Cato, frames his death in the language of Roman virtue that the young republic so admired.

Frisco, TX

Henry Cook, a War of 1812 veteran, arrived here in 1845 as a member of the Peters Colony, building a log house that became a landmark on the Shawnee Trail cattle route. He opened this family cemetery in 1847 to bury his young son Daniel, and his daughter Rachel Cook Baccus later deeded the ground to his heirs and gave land for the Baccus Christian Church. Named in her honor around 1915, the cemetery remains in use today.

Town of Riverhead, NY

During the War of 1812, the shores of Long Island's North Fork became a front line as British warships blockaded Long Island Sound and preyed on coastal shipping. This marker recalls two waterfront clashes in which local farmers, militia, and a small revenue cutter's crew stood against far larger Royal Navy vessels — saving one American sloop and putting up a days-long defense before another vessel was taken. The named British man-of-war Sylph places these skirmishes squarely in that era of raids and improvised coastal resistance.

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.

Virginia Beach, VA

During the War of 1812, Britain's Royal Navy threw a blockade across much of the American coastline, choking off trade and bottling up shipping. On February 4, 1813, that blockade reached the Chesapeake Bay, putting the great waterway and its ports under enemy guard. Standing watch at the bay's mouth was the Cape Henry Lighthouse, the first lighthouse authorized by the new federal government, whose beacon and surrounding waters became part of this contested wartime frontier.

Franklin Park, IL

Josette Beaubien lived at the very hinge of Chicago's beginnings. She survived the 1812 Fort Dearborn engagement, married Jean Baptiste Beaubien—among the settlement's earliest permanent residents—and was sister to a Potawatomi leader, embodying the mingled French, American, and Native worlds of the frontier trading post that would become a great city. When she was buried here in 1845, Chicago was still a raw young town on the prairie.

Jackson, GA

Butts County was created in 1825 and named for Captain Samuel Butts, killed in 1814 at the Battle of Calabee during the Creek War. Within its bounds lay Indian Springs, where treaties with the Creeks opened vast tracts—first the lands between the Flint and Ocmulgee, then the remaining Creek territory in Georgia—to settlement. The marker also names the county's first officers.

Whitfield County, GA

Said to have been built around 1814 of bricks made on the site, this house was home to Jesse Callaway from 1852 to 1867 and stayed in his family past 1900. Born in Wilkes County in 1796, Callaway served as a sergeant in the Georgia Militia during the War of 1812, and was the son of a Revolutionary War soldier. Married four times with eighteen children, he left descendants across the state before deeding the house to his son and moving north, where he died in 1875.

Chattanooga, TN

Near the mouth of Chattanooga Creek, where the Tennessee River loops around Moccasin Bend, this site served as a supply base for Tennessee troops during the Creek War of 1812–13. That conflict, fought largely against the Red Stick faction of the Creek Nation, unfolded alongside the War of 1812 and drew militia and volunteers deep into the Southern frontier. The river's dramatic bend here made it a natural staging ground as forces moved through the mountains.

Austin, TX

Chauncey Johnson, born in Vermont in 1798, served in the War of 1812 before coming to Texas in 1840. In 1842 he was captured when General Adrian Woll's Mexican force raided San Antonio and was carried off to imprisonment in Mexico, one of many Texans caught in the border conflicts that followed independence. His grave marker was placed by the state in 1936.

Erie, PA · est. 2003

A merchant mariner turned naval officer, Daniel Dobbins carried the alarming news of the fall of Forts Mackinac and Detroit to Washington in the opening months of the War of 1812. Commissioned a sailing master, he returned to Erie to oversee the building of the very squadron that Oliver Hazard Perry would command to victory in the Battle of Lake Erie. Dobbins spent three decades in the Navy and Revenue Cutter Service.

Bastrop, TX

Captain James Burleson served as a commissary under General Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812 and fought at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815, with his son Edward alongside him as bookkeeper. Decades later, the aging veteran took up arms again under that same son in the Army of Texas at the Grass Fight of 1835. Born in 1758, he died in early 1836 as Texas fought for its independence.

Marble Falls, TX

Kentucky-born Jesse Burnam fought as a Tennessee volunteer in the War of 1812, including the Battle of New Orleans, before bringing his family to Texas in 1821 and joining Stephen F. Austin's "Old Three Hundred." On the Colorado River frontier he built a home, fortified trading post, and ferry, served as a militia captain and delegate to the conventions leading to the Texas Revolution, and saw Sam Houston order his crossing burned in 1836 ahead of the Mexican army. In 1855 he resettled in Burnet County, raising sheep and wheat on land where the family homestead still stands.

College Station, TX

A Virginia native and War of 1812 veteran, Richard Carter came from Alabama in 1831 to claim land in Stephen F. Austin's colony, on ground that is now College Station. He grew into one of the area's wealthiest landowners and enslavers, raising cattle, corn, and cotton in the years before the Civil War. Named to Brazos County's first Board of Commissioners in 1841, he helped survey its first county seat at Boonville, and traces of his home and family cemetery survive nearby.

New York, NY

Built by the United States between 1808 and 1811 as the 'West Battery,' this fort was the last in a line of defenses guarding lower Manhattan back to the Dutch settlement of 1624. It helped protect New York Harbor during the War of 1812, was renamed in 1815 for Governor DeWitt Clinton, and briefly served as U.S. Third Military District headquarters under General Winfield Scott.

Kent County, MD

In the late summer of 1814, as British forces raided the Chesapeake in the closing months of the War of 1812, a landing party came ashore in rural Kent County on Maryland's Eastern Shore. On the night of August 31, American militia under Colonel Philip Reed met the raiders in the darkened farm fields near Caulk's house and turned them back. The British commander, the young and celebrated Royal Navy captain Sir Peter Parker, was mortally wounded in the fighting — a rare local victory won by citizen-soldiers defending their own countryside.

Covington, KY

At 'The Point,' where the Licking River meets the Ohio, Christopher Gist of the Ohio Company became in 1751 the first documented white man to set foot here. From this confluence Colonel John Bowman launched a 1777 expedition against the Shawnee, and in 1813 Governor Isaac Shelby gathered 4,000 Kentucky troops before his victory at the Thames.

Louisville, KY

A Revolutionary War veteran from Maryland, Frederick Geiger settled in the Louisville area in the 1790s and grew into a prominent landowner, ferry operator, and mill owner along Beargrass Creek. He raised a company of Kentucky Mounted Riflemen for the 1811 campaign against Native forces, was wounded at Tippecanoe, and served as a colonel in the War of 1812. The neighborhood he helped shape, Butchertown, became a bustling pork-packing district supplying the Ohio River steamboat trade.

Village of Scarsdale, NY

In 1774, near this spot in the countryside that would become Scarsdale, Daniel D. Tompkins was born into a New York on the eve of revolution. He rose to serve as the state's governor from 1807 to 1817 — the demanding War of 1812 years, when he pledged his own credit to keep New York's troops supplied — and then two terms as Vice President of the United States under James Monroe. The Westchester County Historical Society placed this marker, funded by Charles Butler, to fix the memory of where his life began.

Midway, TX

A Pennsylvania-born fur trapper who had served under Zachary Taylor in the War of 1812, Daniel Larrison became one of the earliest Anglo settlers of what is now Madison County, receiving a Mexican land grant in 1833. He and his wife Sarah settled around 1828 near the junction of the La Bahia Trail and El Camino Real—a natural waystation for travelers—and raised twelve children while hunting, trapping, and farming corn and cotton. Larrison Creek still carries the family name.

South Lebanon, OH

In the years just after the Revolution, pioneers pushed into the Ohio country, and the settlement that became Deerfield took root around 1795 in the Little Miami valley of what is now Warren County. Benjamin Stites laid out the town in 1802, and among its first residents were veterans of both the Revolution and the War of 1812, men who had traded muskets for plows on the young republic's frontier. As the community matured it folded into Union Township in 1815, took the name South Lebanon in 1871, and grew an industrial side — powder works and food businesses that gave the village a working economy well into the industrial age.

Town of Lewiston, NY

Tucked into the Town of Lewiston near the Niagara frontier, Dickersonville Cemetery holds the graves of some of the area's earliest settlers, with burials dating to the years just after 1810. The names recorded here — Hannah Mills, Isaac Woolson, and Second Lieutenant John Farley — trace the lives of pioneers who took root in western New York during a turbulent era that included the War of 1812 along the nearby Niagara River. The marker was placed by the Town of Lewiston's Historic Preservation Commission to honor this early burial ground.

Austin, TX

Dr. Gideon Lincecum, born in Georgia in 1793, served in the War of 1812 before becoming a self-taught frontier naturalist of international reputation. His studies of Texas plants and insects—especially the harvester ant—won him correspondents abroad, including Charles Darwin. He died at Long Point in Washington County, Texas, in 1873.

Whitley County, IN

This ground carries layers of frontier history: a Miami trading post stood here by 1762, and in 1779 the war leader Little Turtle fortified the place during the turbulent years of Native resistance in the Old Northwest. After the 1795 Treaty of Greenville brought an uneasy peace, a house was built for Little Turtle here. When American forces under Colonel Simrall razed the fort in September 1812, at the outbreak of the War of 1812, his dwelling was deliberately spared.

New Waverly, TX

Born in Virginia in 1778, Elijah Collard lived the westering life of his generation, settling successively on the Kentucky and Missouri frontiers and fighting in the War of 1812 before migrating to Texas in 1833. He threw in with the Texas independence movement, winning election to the 1835 Consultation at San Felipe and serving on the General Council, then helped organize Montgomery County as one of its first commissioners in 1837. He moved to Walker County in 1840 and died there in 1847, leaving a large family with his wife Mary.

Alto, TX

Peter Ellis Bean led one of the most improbable lives on the early Southwestern frontier. Arriving with Philip Nolan's mustang hunters in 1800, he was captured by Spanish troops, imprisoned in Mexico, then freed to fight—first for royalists, then for the Mexican rebels under Morelos. He even joined Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans before returning to Mexico, later serving as an Indian agent in Texas and settling near this site.

Millcreek Township, PA · est. 1946

Pennsylvania's only outlet to the Great Lakes came through the Erie Triangle, a wedge of shoreline the state secured in 1792 to gain a harbor on Lake Erie. Surveyors Andrew Ellicott and William Irvine laid out the town in 1795 on ground that had already carried French, British, and American forts. In 1813 Oliver Hazard Perry built his fleet in this sheltered harbor before sailing out to win the Battle of Lake Erie.

Summit Township, PA · est. 1946

Pennsylvania's only Great Lakes port grew out of the Erie Triangle, a strip of Lake Erie shoreline the state acquired in 1792 to gain a harbor. Andrew Ellicott and William Irvine surveyed the town in 1795 on a site layered with earlier French, British, and American forts. Here in 1813 Oliver Hazard Perry assembled the fleet that would sail to victory in the Battle of Lake Erie.

Erie, PA · est. 1981

Erie County was carved from Allegheny County on March 12, 1800, taking its name from Lake Erie and, through it, from the Erie Indians who once lived along its shores. The county seat, laid out in 1795, grew into a bustling Great Lakes port and became a city in 1851. During the War of 1812, ships of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry's fleet were built here before winning the decisive 1813 Battle of Lake Erie.

Fayetteville, TX

Fayetteville's city cemetery has served the community since its earliest days, with the first recorded burial dating to 1851. Among those interred are the surveyor who platted and named the town and donated land for the burying ground, a physician and military leader, and veterans of conflicts reaching back to the War of 1812. Its rows of graves read as a roll call of the pioneer families, tradespeople, and officials who built the town.

Erie, PA · est. 1948

During the War of 1812, control of Lake Erie was decisive for the fate of the American Northwest. On September 10, 1813, Captain Oliver Hazard Perry led a hastily built American squadron against the British fleet; when his first flagship, the Lawrence, was shot to pieces, Perry famously transferred to the Niagara and pressed the fight to victory. His terse report—"We have met the enemy and they are ours"—became one of the young republic's most quoted lines.

Baltimore, MD · est. 1914

A cannon here marks the site of Fort Babcock, one of the small waterfront batteries that helped defend Baltimore during the British assault of September 1814. Manned during the bombardment that failed to break the city, it formed part of the layered defenses that held the line. The marker was erected in 1914 for the centennial.

Port Huron, MI

Fort Gratiot was built in 1814 by Captain Charles Gratiot at the foot of Lake Huron, established in the closing months of the War of 1812 to secure this strategic frontier passage. The post served the young United States until it was abandoned in 1879. The Ottawawa Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution erected this marker in 1914 on the centennial of the fort's founding.

Baltimore, MD

This iron bomb was hurled from a British warship during the two-day bombardment of Fort McHenry on September 13-14, 1814, and fell inside the fort's walls. A defending officer later gave the spent shell to Michael Keyser as a relic of the battle that saved Baltimore. That same bombardment inspired Francis Scott Key to write the verses that became "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Defiance, OH

In the autumn of 1812, with the young United States again at war with Britain, Gen. William Henry Harrison ordered this fort thrown up at the confluence of the Auglaize and Maumee rivers in what was then contested frontier. Fort Winchester never saw a great battle; instead it did the quieter, essential work of war — stockpiling supplies, drilling troops, and marshaling men before they pushed north to the fighting at Fort Meigs. By 1815 the war had ended and the garrison marched away, but the fort's footprint lingered: the streets of Defiance, Ohio grew up along the lines it had traced.

Covington, LA

John Wharton Collins founded the town of Wharton here in March 1813, naming it for his grandfather. Three years later the Louisiana legislature renamed it Covington in honor of General Leonard Covington, a hero of the War of 1812.

Newton County, TX

Benjamin Garlington earned the land that became this burial ground as a bounty for his service as a private and musician in the Mississippi Militia during the War of 1812. He later ministered to Newton County and neighboring Louisiana parishes as a Primitive Baptist preacher. He and his wife lie here alongside an unidentified laborer who worked for them and several others whose names are now lost.

Italy, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1796, Edward H. Tarrant fought in the War of 1812 and later served in the Congress of the Republic of Texas while commanding frontier troops in campaigns against Native peoples. He died in Parker County in 1858, and his remains were reburied more than once before finding their final resting place in Fort Worth, in the county that bears his name. His life spanned the founding decades of Anglo settlement in Texas.

Coldspring, TX

General James Davis lived a life braided through America's early wars and Texas's founding. A U.S. Army officer at the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, he came to Texas in 1834 and served the young Republic on Sam Houston's staff in 1836, later as adjutant-general and a member of its Congress and 1845 constitutional convention. In 1848 he donated the land for the church that became First Baptist of Coldspring.

New York, NY

This granite obelisk at the crossing of Fifth Avenue and Broadway honors William Jenkins Worth, a soldier from Hudson, New York, whose career traced the young republic's expanding military ambitions. He earned his commission in the War of 1812, spent the 1820s shaping the officer corps as Commandant of Cadets at West Point, and won his greatest fame in the hard-fought campaigns of the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. When he died in 1849, the city he served brought him home, and the monument that rose over his grave became one of the very few burial sites in Manhattan marked by a public memorial.

Orange, TX

A War of 1812 veteran born in Georgia in 1796, George Alexander Pattillo migrated to southeast Texas in the early 1830s and threw himself into the region's revolutionary politics, serving on a Committee of Correspondence and the provisional government's General Council. He aided the Texas Army during the 1836 revolution, arriving at San Jacinto the day after the battle, and was tasked by President David G. Burnet with organizing Jefferson County. He later served in the Republic of Texas Congress, championed annexation, and became Orange County's first judge in 1852.

Frankfort, KY

George Madison came to Kentucky as a young Virginian who had already soldiered in the Revolutionary War, and he spent roughly two decades as auditor of the state's public accounts after his appointment by Governor Isaac Shelby. Distinguished service in the War of 1812 lifted him to popularity, and in 1816 Kentuckians elected him governor. He died only weeks after taking office—the first Kentucky governor to die in office—and Lieutenant Governor Gabriel Slaughter completed the term. Madison rests in the state section of the Frankfort Cemetery.

Gonzales, TX

James Jackson Hodges, grandson of a delegate to the 1835 Texas convention at San Felipe de Austin, married Martha Pritchett in 1849 and settled this area, building a schoolhouse that doubled as a Cumberland Presbyterian church. The oldest grave here is Martha's uncle John Pritchett, a War of 1812 veteran buried in 1856; Hodges deeded the land as a community cemetery in 1896. Nine of the couple's twelve children rest here in what remains a chronicle of area pioneers.

Town of Clarence, NY

In 1807, pioneer Asa Harris settled this rise of land in western New York and opened a tavern along the frontier roads northeast of Buffalo, giving the area its enduring name of Harris Hill. When British forces burned Buffalo during the War of 1812, the hill's relative safety made it a refuge for families fleeing the destruction. The marker recalls both the area's earliest white settlement and a tense chapter when the young nation's frontier was a war zone.

Port Lavaca, TX

This burial ground served the family of Captain Sylvanus Hatch, a Cape Cod–born builder who served in the War of 1812 as an adjutant under Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans before later joining the Texas War for Independence. The Hatch family reached the Chocolate Creek area by 1842, and the captain established the cemetery in 1850 when his wife Pamela died of cholera—an outbreak that also killed German immigrants who had landed at Indianola and lie buried here. Hatch and two Confederate-veteran sons are interred among other pioneering families.

Plainfield Township, PA · est. 1974

About 1800, William Henry II built a firearms works in this Northampton County valley, part of a noted gunmaking family whose craftsmanship armed Americans across generations. Rifles and muskets made here supplied troops in the War of 1812, and the Henry name endured on shotguns produced as late as 1904. The factory was one of the small, skilled arms shops that gave the young nation its firepower.

Clinton, KY

Formed in 1821, Hickman County took its name from Capt. Paschal Hickman, a Franklin County landowner and one of nine Kentucky officers killed in the aftermath of the River Raisin battle in January 1813—each later honored with a county. The original Hickman County once encompassed the whole Jackson Purchase, the vast tract acquired from the Chickasaw, and was later subdivided into eight counties. Columbus served as its first seat of government.

Frankfort, KY

Chartered by Virginia in 1799 as Hiram Lodge No. 57, this Masonic body was renumbered No. 4 in 1800 when the Grand Lodge of Kentucky formed. Its Ann Street home in Frankfort was built in the 1890s, with the cornerstone laid in 1893 and the building dedicated in 1896. Its rolls included figures of the early republic—Vice President Richard M. Johnson, Postmaster General Amos Kendall, Senator George M. Bibb, and Col. John Allen, a Grand Master killed in the War of 1812.

Carrollton, KY

This was the home of General William O. Butler, a Kentucky soldier and statesman whose career spanned the young republic's formative wars. Born in 1791, he fought at the River Raisin, Pensacola, and New Orleans during the War of 1812, served on Andrew Jackson's staff, and won praise for heroism in the Mexican War. A lawyer and congressman, he ran unsuccessfully for governor, vice president, and the Senate, and in 1861 served as a Kentucky commissioner to a last-ditch peace conference.

Madisonville, KY

Hopkins County, created in 1806, honors Samuel Hopkins, a Virginia officer who served on Washington's staff through the Revolution before coming west in 1797 as an agent of the Transylvania Company. He organized and led the first court in the sprawling original Henderson County, sat in both houses of Kentucky's legislature, and commanded American forces on the Western frontier during the War of 1812. He capped his career with two terms in Congress.

Charleston, SC

This monument honors the Irish Volunteers, a Charleston militia company drawn from the city's Irish immigrant community, whose members answered the call across half a century of American conflict. The inscription traces their service from the War of 1812 through the Florida War of 1835 — part of the long Seminole conflicts — and on into the Civil War, where the unit's men filled the ranks of Confederate companies including Co. K of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers in the Army of Northern Virginia. It stands as a communal tribute raised by Charleston's Irish to their own dead, the kind of ethnic militia company that gave immigrant newcomers a foothold and a sense of belonging in antebellum American cities.

Pattison, TX

Isaac Best (1774–1837) was one of the 'Old 300,' the first families to settle Stephen F. Austin's colony. Before coming to Texas around 1824 he had built a mill and a fortified refuge, Best's Fort, on the Pennsylvania–Kentucky frontier during the War of 1812. In Texas he received a land grant east of the Brazos and steadily expanded his holdings to some 8,000 acres; nearby Best Creek still bears his name.

Hemphill, TX

A veteran of the War of 1812, Tennessee migrant Isaac Low reached this corner of Sabine County in 1828 and, during the Texas Revolution, ran a ferry across the Sabine River to help settlers flee the advancing Mexican army. He later served as a county commissioner, and his son Jesse donated the land for this cemetery, where the earliest marked grave lies. Others buried here include a Civil War captain and a man whose 1883 murder touched off a three-year local feud.

Galveston, TX

A veteran of the War of 1812, lawyer James Love came to Texas in 1837 and helped found the city of Galveston, becoming a political ally of Mirabeau B. Lamar. He served as a delegate to the 1845 convention that approved annexation to the United States and held several judicial posts. Though in his sixties, he enlisted in Terry's Texas Rangers during the Civil War and later became the first judge of the Harris and Galveston County Criminal Court.

Daingerfield, TX

James Thompson served in the North Carolina militia in 1781, helping secure American independence, before joining the westward drift of pioneer families through Alabama and Mississippi to the young Republic of Texas, where he was revered as a patriarch. His kin carried that martial thread onward: a son-in-law fought in the War of 1812, and a grandson became a Texas Ranger and county sheriff, killed in an Indian fight. Thompson and many descendants rest in the Daingerfield Cemetery.