Women's History

Williamsburg, KY · est. 1964

Julia Marcum was a Tennessee teenager when the Civil War tore through the border country, and her family's home served as a way station for Southern Unionists heading north to join the Union army. Defending that home against marauders, she was badly wounded and lost an eye, and her Unionist father was killed in action before the family resettled in Kentucky. In 1884 a special Act of Congress granted her a pension as the only woman recognized as a combatant, and she was buried with military honors in 1936 at age 91.

Logansport, IN

Placed in 1936 by the Mary E. Miller Tent No. 34, Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, this memorial honors the fathers who served the Union during the war of 1861–1865. Groups like the Daughters of Union Veterans kept the memory of that generation alive well into the twentieth century, raising monuments in courthouse squares and parks across the North. Logansport, in north-central Indiana, sent many of its men into Union ranks.

Abilene, TX

Clara Bussell joined the West Texas Chamber of Commerce in 1920 and served as its office manager for four decades, working, the marker notes, up to the day she died in 1966. Her devotion to the region and to the chamber's ideals helped drive West Texas's development through the mid-twentieth century. She was honored in the Outstanding Women of Texas series in 1967.

Jefferson, TX

Lucy Ann Alley, wife of Jefferson townsite donor Dan Alley, built this handsome house in 1867 with handmade columns, hewn sills, and wide pine floors. It became a cradle of women's civic life: the 1881 Club organized here — the oldest chapter in the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs — and in 1955 the Martha McCraw chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution was founded under its roof. The home preserves both fine period craftsmanship and a legacy of women's organizing.

Brenham, TX

Founded on New Year's Day in 1866 as the weekly Southern Banner by Confederate veterans Dan McGary and John C. Rankin, this newspaper survived a rough birth in Reconstruction Texas—its outspoken editor was jailed and its shop burned that first year. It became a daily in 1876 and merged with the Press in 1912. Among its notable figures was Ruby Robertson, who in 1917 became the first woman in Texas to edit a daily newspaper.

Beeville, TX

This early-twentieth-century Baroque-style home was built in 1906 by Jane Field Jones, a philanthropist who founded a local school and teacherage and was the widow of Captain A.C. Jones, remembered as the "Father of Beeville." With its eight fireplaces, hardwood floors, and large formal rooms, the house long served as a gathering place for Texas leaders, including governors, and has remained in the family's hands.

Abilene, TX

Abilene Municipal Cemetery grew from five separate burial grounds, the oldest documented grave being that of Florence Phillips, laid to rest in the Masonic section in 1881 as the town was taking shape. Among those interred are Mary Houston Morrow, an Abilene postmistress and daughter of Sam Houston; C.W. Merchant, who donated land and helped found the town; Dr. W.H. Butler, an African American physician; and suffragist Jewel Scarborough. The city gradually took charge of the Masonic, Odd Fellows, and Cedar Hill grounds, which together hold more than 26,000 people.

Abiliene, TX

Founded in 1928, the Abilene Woman's Club met in a series of homes before commissioning noted architect David S. Castle to design a purpose-built clubhouse on what was then the town's edge. Completed in 1955, its post-World War II Colonial Revival design and its great hall drew civic and cultural groups and helped spur the growth of south Abilene.

Upper Darby, PA · est. 1985

Abraham L. Pennock lived at Hoodland, a house built by his father-in-law in 1823, until his death in 1868. A leader in the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, he lent his energy to abolition alongside the causes of woman suffrage and temperance. Reform-minded visitors, including the poets John Greenleaf Whittier and James Russell Lowell, passed through his doors.

Grand Coteau, LA

Opened in 1821 in the small Louisiana town of Grand Coteau, the Academy of the Sacred Heart became one of the state's earliest schools, founded by Mother Audé and Sister Layton of the Religious of the Sacred Heart. The order had been brought to America in 1818 by Philippine Duchesne, a French nun later canonized as a saint. For two centuries the academy has educated young women on the same grounds.

Ames, IA

This marker honors Ada Hayden (1884–1950), an Iowa State botanist and the first strong voice for preserving Iowa's native prairies. In an era when the tallgrass prairie was vanishing under the plow, she pressed to save remnants of it for future generations. A preserved prairie now bears her name.

Hearne, TX

Erected in 1896 by Horatio "Rashe" Adams, a Hearne citizen who worked as a public relations man in Washington, D.C., this Victorian house passed through a succession of owners over the following decades. Contractor A. A. White built it complete with a detached kitchen and a backyard artesian well that once supplied its water. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1968.

Graham, TX

Born in Indiana in 1843, Agnes Mary "Addie" Kinter married Edwin Smith Graham, who with his brother founded this North Texas town in 1872. After her husband's death, Addie returned to Graham and poured her fortune into it — endowing schools, building a home for the aged poor, and in 1910 funding the water-filtering plant that stood on this spot for 75 years. Her giving shaped the town's civic life for decades after her death in 1929.

San Antonio, TX

Granddaughter of Republic of Texas vice-president Lorenzo de Zavala, Adina de Zavala grew up steeped in stories of the Texas past and made its preservation her life's work. She helped save landmarks including the Alamo, the Spanish Governor's Palace, and San Antonio's missions, and in 1889 formed the De Zavala Daughters, who erected some of Texas's first historical markers. In 1908, convinced the Alamo's long barracks held the mission's original walls, she barricaded herself inside for three days and nights to stop their demolition.

San Antonio, TX

Granddaughter of the Republic of Texas's first vice-president, Adina De Zavala became a teacher, historian, and one of the state's earliest and most determined preservationists. She helped save the Alamo's Long Barracks from demolition — famously barricading herself inside in 1907 — and worked to protect the Spanish missions, the Governor's Palace, and other landmarks. In 1938 she founded an association that installed dozens of historical markers across Texas.

Fort Worth, TX

This Texas limestone hall was raised in 1902 for Polytechnic College, a coeducational Methodist school organized in 1890 on land donated by local benefactors. It served through the institution's years as Texas Woman's College from 1914 to 1934 and continued in use after the school became Texas Wesleyan College, receiving a modernization in 1963. The building remains a link to more than a century of Methodist higher education in Fort Worth.

Madison, GA

When Madison incorporated two women's colleges in 1850 — the Baptist Georgia Female College and the Methodist Madison Female College — the town became one of the antebellum South's notable centers of female education. This building opened the Georgia Female College's first session with 148 pupils and later served as the president's house. A diverse curriculum drew young women from as far as Philadelphia, until the Civil War turned the facilities into hospitals and private education never recovered its former standing.

Marshall, TX

Built around 1880 as a wedding gift for Katie Allen and Albert Van Hook, this Marshall home was designed by Katie's father, N. S. Allen, a prolific architect who shaped many of nearby Shreveport's finest buildings. Its original Italianate flourishes—a widow's walk, double chimneys, and gingerbread trim—marked it as a showpiece of Gilded Age East Texas. The house stayed in the family into the 1950s and was carefully restored in the 1990s.

Dallas, TX

Alexander Cockrell arrived in the Dallas area in 1845, fought in the war with Mexico, and by 1852 had bought the remainder of the townsite from Dallas's founder, John Neely Bryan, building brickyards, a sawmill, and a Trinity River bridge. When he was killed over a debt in 1858, his wife Sarah Horton Cockrell took the reins, finishing the St. Nicholas Hotel, running the ferry, and adding a flour mill — becoming the first woman in Dallas to wield real economic power.

San Marcos, TX

Alexander Gates Thomas, an English professor and Texas folklore authority, and Lillian Johnson, an art professor, met as teachers at Southwest Texas Normal School and married late in life. Charmed on their honeymoon by the stone cottages of England's Cotswolds, they built this Tudor Revival house themselves from native stone quarried near San Marcos, giving it 14-inch walls, a swept gable roof, and pointed lancet windows. It is a small monument to two educators' shared imagination.

Dallas, TX

Built in 1906 for $125,000 on what was then the far edge of Dallas, the Alexander Mansion was a showpiece of the city's early twentieth-century high society, hosting glittering social gatherings for businessman C.H. Alexander. In 1930 it was acquired by the Dallas Woman's Forum, a women's civic and cultural club, which restored and preserved the grand house. Recognized as a Recorded Texas Historical Landmark in 1968, it endures as a monument to a gracious era.

Boardman Township, OH

This memorial rock records a gift of land for Lake Newport, donated by Mary Baldwin Lewis in memory of her father, Jesse Baldwin, and her great-great aunt, Mary Newport. Such private donations helped assemble the public lakes and parkland that families in the Youngstown area still enjoy today, part of a broader turn-of-the-century movement to set aside natural spaces for the public good.

Andover, MA

In 1897, through what this memorial calls the "loving interest and untiring effort" of Miss Alice Buck, a tract of Andover woodland was secured for the people's permanent use. Her work belongs to the era when Americans, alarmed by rapid industrial growth, began setting aside parks and forests for public enjoyment. The stone honors one woman's quiet, lasting gift to her town.

Fort Worth, TX

Built in 1927 to a design by Fort Worth architect Wiley G. Clarkson, this Spanish Colonial Revival school — with its tile roof and wrought-iron lamps — grew with its neighborhood, expanding in 1935 with Works Progress Administration funds and again in 1953. It was named for Alice E. Carlson, a teacher who became the first woman to serve on the Fort Worth School Board. For generations the school anchored the community and shaped its children.

Jefferson, TX

Built about 1868 in the late Greek Revival style and later dressed with Victorian details, this Jefferson home was purchased in 1898 by Alice Emmert, one of the first women elected to public office in Texas. She served as county superintendent of education from 1908 to 1920. In a further brush with history, young Claudia Taylor—the future Lady Bird Johnson—boarded here from 1924 to 1926 while attending school.

Salado, TX

Born in Mississippi in 1846, Alice Gray Hamblen moved with her husband to Salado in 1868 and threw herself into the life of Salado College, the local private school. A devoted champion of education, she boarded relatives' children so they could attend. When the old college building was condemned in 1924, she offered the Hamblen family homestead as the site for the new Salado public school.

Port Lavaca, TX

Education for African American children in Port Lavaca began in a late-19th-century one-room schoolhouse and grew under a series of dedicated teachers. In 1907 a sixteen-year-old Fisk University graduate, Alice Ora Crawford, arrived from Chicago and over three decades built the school from a handful of grades into a full institution, eventually serving as principal. When she died in 1942, the district named the school in her honor; it operated until full integration arrived in 1965.

Village of Sands Point, NY

In an era when newspaper mastheads were almost exclusively male, Alicia Patterson launched Newsday from a Long Island garage in 1940 and built it into one of the nation's most respected dailies. Born into a storied newspaper dynasty, she made her own mark by championing tenacious local reporting and a crusading editorial voice that spoke to the fast-growing suburbs of postwar Nassau County. By her death in 1963 the paper she founded and edited had become a major daily and a force in American journalism.

Houston, TX

The first permanent settlers here were Dr. John Magee and his wife Alief, who arrived in 1896; the community, briefly called Dairy, was renamed in 1897 for Alief Magee, its first postmistress. When the need for a burial ground arose in 1900, this property was deeded for a cemetery, and many of the pioneer settlers — including Alief herself — were laid to rest here. Roughly half the graves are those of infants, a stark record of the hardships of childbirth and disease on the early prairie, while the 1900 hurricane scattered many discouraged families before some returned to fight the area's floods.

San Benito, TX

Episcopalians around San Benito first gathered wherever a visiting minister and a room could be found, led in part by the retired Rev. William Henry Morrison in borrowed spaces such as the King building. Church women organized guilds and raised the money that built All Saints' on this site in 1912; after a 1933 storm wrecked the building, the congregation rebuilt it in 1935.

Celina, TX

When Dr. Moses Hubbard and his wife Mary Jane found local schooling inadequate, they educated their daughter Alla at home and then sent her to a Missouri institute, where she earned a literature degree in 1880. After Alla's early death, her grieving parents founded a school in her memory in 1895, financing it entirely themselves. Opening in 1896 with 108 pupils, Alla School charged no tuition and set no age limit at a time when free public education had little support in Texas.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2007

In 1845 and 1848, women who worked the cotton factories of Allegheny City walked off the job to protest brutal twelve-hour workdays, taking a stand in one of early America's first waves of industrial labor action. Their protests helped push Pennsylvania to pass an 1848 law capping the workday at ten hours and barring children under twelve from cotton and textile mills. These were among the earliest organized efforts by American working women to demand humane conditions.

Marlin, TX

Built in 1911 for Dr. Walter and Nettie Allen, this Marlin residence showcases Greek Revival grandeur, its giant entablature carried on paired Ionic columns. The Allen family lived here until 1956, and after Nettie's death a relative gave the house to the community as a social center. It remains a stately reminder of early 20th-century Falls County.

San Saba, TX

Born in Coryell County in 1896, Alma Ward Hamrick earned a teaching certificate and taught for fifteen years across three Central Texas counties before building a long career as a writer published in newspapers and international outlets. She helped found the San Saba Garden Club, worked to save the town's historic mill, and chaired the county's centennial and historical survey committees, researching nineteen state historical markers. Her 1940 book The Call of the San Saba remains a foundational work of local history.

Atlanta, GA

Alpha Delta Pi was founded on May 15, 1851 at Wesleyan College in Macon — the first educational institution to grant an academic degree to a woman — making it the first secret society in the world for college women and the mother of the social sorority system. From that Georgia beginning the organization spread to campuses across the United States and Canada. This Atlanta building, dedicated in 1955, serves as its Memorial Headquarters honoring the founding.

Shrewsbury, PA · est. 1993

Born into slavery in Maryland, Amanda Berry Smith gained her freedom when her father purchased the family, who then settled on a farm near Shrewsbury, where she was converted as a child at this church. She became a renowned evangelist and singer whose missionary travels carried her across the United States and on to Britain, India, and Africa. She published a newspaper and founded an industrial home for Black children in Illinois.

Athens, GA

In 1891 twelve Athens women gathered in the home of Mrs. E.K. Lumpkin and founded the Ladies Garden Club, with Mrs. Lamar Cobb as its first president. What began as a small neighborhood group opened to all interested Athens women, mounted its first flower and vegetable exhibition in 1892, and drew up professional show standards by 1894. In 1936 the National Council of State Garden Clubs recognized it as America's first garden club.

New York, NY

After World War I, returning veterans chartered the American Legion in 1919, and its local posts quickly became fixtures of civic life in neighborhoods across the country. A post like Hillcrest 1078 in Queens raised a memorial such as this to honor the community's servicemen and keep faith with those who did not return. Its Auxiliary — the Legion's women's organization — carried much of that remembrance work, from dedication ceremonies to the care of veterans' families.

Johnstown, PA · est. 2014

On May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam failed and sent a wall of water into Johnstown, killing thousands in one of the worst disasters of the era. Days later, Clara Barton arrived with volunteers of the American Red Cross, the humanitarian society she had founded, to meet the survivors' needs. Over five months the Red Cross opened feeding stations, built shelters, and gave medical care to some 25,000 people.

Galveston, TX

Within days of the catastrophic 1900 Galveston hurricane — the deadliest natural disaster in American history — Clara Barton herself arrived on the island with Red Cross personnel, supplies, and relief funds, aided by local women who organized distribution centers across the storm-battered region. The Galveston County chapter was formally chartered in 1916 and mobilized again and again: for soldiers in both World Wars, for families during the Great Depression, and for victims of the 1947 Texas City explosion. In 1987 it merged into the Greater Houston Area Chapter.

Poteet, TX

The Stiggins family emigrated from Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1882, among them Mary Jane, who had studied medicine, and her fiancé Thomas Whittet, a former sea captain who named the place Anchorage as the spot where he would "drop anchor." In 1896 the couple deeded land for a church and cemetery, and Mary Jane practiced medicine across the area, delivering many of its babies. A frame church served until 1958, and the cemetery association still tends the burial ground and its chapel.

Anderson, TX

Organized in 1844, Anderson Baptist Church hosted the 1848 gathering that formed the Baptist General Convention of Texas, drawing representatives from most of the state's few Baptist churches. Its rock sanctuary, built by enslaved laborers and finished in 1855, still stands—restored after a 1955 fire using the original walls—and in 1858 the church cradled the first Baptist Woman's Missionary Society in Texas.

Cuthbert, GA

Founded at Cuthbert in January 1854, Andrew College was named for Bishop James O. Andrew, whose refusal to free his wife's slaves helped split the Methodist Episcopal Church North and South in 1844. Led first by Yale-educated Augustus Alden, it was the second college chartered to confer degrees on women and served as a Confederate hospital in 1863–65. In 1867 it became the first women's college in the South to include physical education in its curriculum.

Crockett, TX

A Tennessee native, Andrew Jackson McGown came to Texas in 1835 and fought in the revolution against Mexico, taking part in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. He went on to help plant the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Texas, serving as a pioneer circuit-riding minister until his death. McGown also founded the newspaper "The Texas Presbyterian" and helped establish Andrew Female College in Huntsville.

Goliad, TX

In the spring of 1836, as the Texas Revolution turned brutal, a woman remembered as Francisca Alavez moved among the Mexican army's prisoners performing quiet acts of mercy. She loosened cruel bindings, brought food and water, hid men, and pleaded for lives at Copano, Goliad and beyond—saving some of the very Texian captives marked for the Goliad Massacre, in which hundreds were shot on Santa Anna's orders. A survivor's memoir immortalized her as the 'Angel of Goliad.'

Nacogdoches, TX

Angelina was a Hasinai Caddo (Tejas) woman who grew up in Coahuila and at the Spanish presidio of San Juan Bautista, where—by European accounts—she was baptized Catholic and learned fluent Castilian Spanish. From 1712 onward she appears in the records of French and Spanish expeditions as a 'learned Indian woman' whose translation and diplomacy smoothed the founding of the East Texas missions. In 1721 she interpreted a pivotal meeting between the Caddo leader of the Hasinai nations and the Spanish governor, cementing Caddo-Spanish cooperation against the French; today the Angelina River, National Forest, and Texas's only county named for a woman bear her name.

Linwood, TX

The Angelina River carries one of Texas's gentlest origin stories: the name honors a young Indigenous girl of the Caddo (Tejas) world whom Spanish missionaries met around 1690, prized for her kindness, and who grew to serve as an interpreter between rival French and Spanish parties. Long an artery of travel, the river was crossed by the Camino Real and by "Smugglers' Road," and by 1799 guided settlers inland from the coast. The word "Tejas" itself—the Caddo term for friend—gave Texas its name.

Paducah, KY

Ann I. Baker came to Paducah from Kansas in 1899 to work at the Ayer-Lord Tie Company, which supplied crossties to the railroads, and spent decades as a working woman in a river-and-rail town. In 1920, the year American women won the vote, she organized Paducah's Business and Professional Women's Club and served three years as its president, later becoming the first president of the Kentucky Federation of BPW. A local boat, the A.I. Baker, was even named in her honor.

London Grove Township, PA · est. 2008

Born on this Chester County land in 1813, Ann Preston broke barrier after barrier in a world that barred women from medicine. A graduate of the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, she became its dean in 1865 — the first American woman to hold such a post — and in 1860 founded the Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia, later adding one of the nation's earliest nurses' training schools. A Quaker, she was also an abolitionist tied to the Underground Railroad.

Hamilton, TX

On a hot July day in 1867, teacher Elizabeth 'Ann' Whitney — remembered as a stout woman of engaging warmth — proved her courage when Comanche raiders attacked her frontier schoolhouse. Struck by a reported eighteen arrows, she kept working to get her pupils to safety, saving all but one boy before she died of her wounds.

Hamilton, TX

In 1867 Missouri-born Elizabeth 'Ann' Whitney took a teaching post at the newly built Leon River School, on a rise above the Warlene Valley about seven miles north of present-day Hamilton. On a hot summer afternoon Comanche raiders attacked, and according to local tradition Ann was struck again and again by arrows fired through cracks in the schoolhouse walls — yet, fatally wounded, she helped all but one of her students escape.

Boston, MA

Anna DeFronzo (1907–1998) was a community organizer and neighborhood advocate in East Boston, remembered here as a "Mother, Activist, Community Leader." She helped lead the group known as the "Maverick Street Mothers," a grassroots force during the turbulent East Boston of the late 1960s and 1970s. Working-class women like DeFronzo turned everyday neighborhood concerns into organized civic action.

Edgecombe County, NC

In 1908 Anna Easter Brown helped found Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Greek-letter sorority established by and for African American women, born at Howard University as Black students built their own institutions of leadership and service. A history teacher by profession, Brown embodied the era's belief that education and organization were paths to uplift. Her grave lies a quarter mile east.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2022

Anna Elizabeth Dickinson rose from Philadelphia to become one of the most electrifying public speakers of the Civil War era, championing the rights of women, African Americans, and working people. At just 21 she became the first woman to address the U.S. Congress, delivering a speech attended by President Lincoln himself. In an age when women were rarely permitted a public platform, her voice carried into the halls of national power.

Upper Providence Township, PA · est. 2014

Anna Howard Shaw was one of the most powerful voices of the American woman-suffrage movement, a trained physician and ordained minister who traveled the country as a lecturer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association alongside Susan B. Anthony. During World War I she chaired the Women's Committee of the U.S. Council of National Defense, organizing women's contributions to the war effort and earning the Distinguished Service Medal. She made her home near this spot from 1908 until her death in 1919—just months before the ratification of the amendment she had fought so long to secure.

Raleigh, NC

Born in 1858, Anna J. Cooper rose from the Reconstruction-era South to become a renowned educator, orator, and early Black feminist. A graduate of St. Augustine's in Raleigh, she published A Voice from the South in 1892, a landmark of Black feminist thought that argued the progress of the race depended on the education of its women. She lived to 1964, her grave now resting blocks from here.

Temple, TX

Anna Laura Cole grew up in the tiny farming community of Turney and trained as a nurse at Scott & White during the depths of the Great Depression, taking charge of its nursing school in 1933 when Texas had barely one registered nurse for every thousand people. Over a 38-year career she modernized nursing education, helped launch the state's first baccalaureate nursing program, and served on the boards that set standards for licensing vocational nurses. By her 1969 retirement she had trained close to 870 nurses across Central Texas.

Upper Merion Township, PA · est. 2021

Anna Morris Holstein served as a hospital matron and nurse during the Civil War, tending the wounded at Gettysburg and beyond, then devoted her later years to historic preservation. She led the campaign to acquire and restore Washington's Headquarters and the grounds at Valley Forge — creating Pennsylvania's first state park, now a National Historical Park — and lent her efforts to saving Mount Vernon. As Organizing Regent of the local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter, author, and state building matron at the 1893 World's Fair, she made preservation a public calling.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2019

Anna Thomas Jeanes was a Philadelphia Quaker who used her wealth to answer some of her era's hardest problems. Her bequest founded the institutions that became Jeanes Hospital and Fox Chase Cancer Center, while her Jeanes Foundation — the Negro Rural School Fund — poured money into education for Black children in the segregated South. She named Booker T. Washington a trustee, and the fund trained the traveling Black teachers known as Jeanes Supervisors.

Bellefonte, PA · est. 2002

Anna Wagner Keichline of Bellefonte broke ground in more ways than one. A Cornell graduate and suffrage advocate, in 1920 she became the first woman registered as an architect in Pennsylvania, designing buildings including the town's Plaza Theatre. She was also a prolific inventor, and during the First World War she served her country as a Special Agent in Army intelligence.