Women's History

Dallas, TX

Juanita Craft joined the Dallas NAACP in 1935 and became one of Texas's most influential civil rights organizers, mentoring generations of young activists as advisor to the South Dallas NAACP Youth Council. From this 1925 craftsman bungalow she hosted Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins, and touring artists like Duke Ellington and Marian Anderson, who could not stay in the hotels of Jim Crow Dallas. Her home became a hub of activism, community, and hospitality that shaped the city's struggle for equality.

Wimberley, TX

Julia Ann Ragsdale was a well-educated widow who had taught school in Arkansas before bringing her family to Texas during the Civil War. After her daughter's early death, she moved to Wimberley in 1875 to raise four grandchildren, and her son-in-law built this board-and-batten home for them on the banks of Cypress Creek in 1879. Her story traces a familiar frontier arc of loss, migration, and family perseverance.

Williamsport, PA · est. 2010

Julia C. Collins was a Black essayist and teacher in Civil War–era Williamsport whose serialized novel, The Curse of Caste, is regarded as among the first published novels by an African American woman. Appearing in 1865 in the AME Church's Christian Recorder, a paper read across the nation, her fiction and essays reached a wide Black readership at the very moment of emancipation. She died that same year, her story left tantalizingly unfinished.

Galena, IL

Julia Dent Grant served as First Lady from 1869 to 1877 alongside her husband, Ulysses S. Grant, and later called their Gilded Age years in the White House the happiest of her life. Galena, Illinois, was the Grants' adopted hometown, the place Ulysses answered the Civil War's call and returned to as a national hero. This monument honors the woman at the center of that family's remarkable rise.

Houston, TX

Houston's public library grew from a Lyceum, local women's clubs and Andrew Carnegie's philanthropy into a 1904 Carnegie building, guided by Julia Bedford Ideson, hired in 1903 as the city's first librarian. When the collection outgrew that home, Ideson and her committee spent the 1920s planning a grander library, choosing noted architect Ralph Adams Cram, who gave the 1926 building its Spanish Renaissance Revival tile roofs, arches and ornate metalwork. After more than four decades of service, Ideson died in 1945, and the city renamed the building in her honor.

Berkeley, CA · est. 1977

Organized in 1927, the Berkeley City Club was among the region's earliest efforts by women to advance civic and cultural life, and in 1929 it opened this striking building. It was designed by Julia Morgan, one of California's most accomplished architects, who blended Moorish and Gothic elements into a monumental landmark. The club and its home together embodied women's growing public ambition in the early 20th century.

Dallas, TX

After losing her husband and children in the early 1860s, Juliette Peak Fowler devoted herself to charitable work in Dallas, caring for orphans and elderly women and providing for their support in her will. Following her death in 1889, her sister carried out that vision, founding the Juliette Fowler Homes in 1892. Transferred to the Disciples of Christ in 1903, the institution has continued her mission ever since.

Harker Heights, TX

In 1912 in Savannah, Georgia, Juliette Gordon Low gathered eighteen girls for the first Girl Scout meeting, launching a movement built on the outdoors, self-reliance, and civic service. This marker, dedicated on the organization's 1912–2012 centennial, honors her founding vision. From those first troops the Girl Scouts grew into one of the largest organizations for girls in the United States.

Marshall, TX

In 1909 three Marshall physicians pooled their resources to answer a growing need for a hospital, opening a small facility in the former home and sanitarium of Dr. John H. Pope. A patient's estate funded the bulk of the effort, giving the twelve-bed hospital the Kahn name, and nursing training began in 1911. Sustained again and again by community and county support, it expanded across the decades and integrated its staff, hiring its first female physician in 1957 and welcoming African American doctors in 1964.

Jefferson, TX

Built in the early 1860s as a boarding house and mercantile, this Jefferson landmark became the Kahn Saloon around 1900, a lively gathering place in a busy East Texas river town. Temperance crusader Carrie Nation was turned away at its door during a Texas campaign, and young Marion Try Slaughter — later famous as country recording pioneer Vernon Dalhart — got an early start singing here. Local prohibitionists shuttered the saloon after an 1907 election, and the building went on to serve as a newspaper office, lodge, furniture store, and funeral home.

Austin, TX

The Beta Xi chapter of Kappa Kappa Gamma was chartered at the University of Texas in 1902, and its house association formed in 1936. Construction of this three-story Georgian Revival sorority house began in 1938 to a design by noted Houston architect Birdsall P. Briscoe, complete with a two-story entry porch, Ionic columns, and Greek detailing along the cornices.

Nacogdoches, TX

From the early 1900s, the East Texas town of Nacogdoches was home to Karle Wilson Baker, one of the state's most celebrated writers. Arkansas-born and college-trained, she first published a poem in Harper's in 1903 and went on to become the most frequently published poet in the Yale Review, with collections issued by Yale University Press. Dubbed "The Poet of Quiet Things," she wrote poems, essays and historical novels set in East Texas, saw her 1931 collection nominated for a Pulitzer, and taught for a decade at Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College, for which she wrote an early school song.

Salado, TX

Kate Crawford, a Salado schoolteacher, married pastor Zachary Clay Taylor on Christmas Day 1881, and their church commissioned them that same day as missionaries to Brazil. Arriving in 1882, they helped organize a Portuguese-speaking Baptist congregation, with Kate translating evangelistic writings into Portuguese until her death from cancer in 1894. Zachary remained in Brazil until 1909, returning to Texas only to drown in the great 1919 hurricane that devastated Corpus Christi.

Sabine Pass, TX

Georgia native Kate Dorman ran the Catfish Hotel at Sabine Pass from the late 1840s, weathering widowhood and remarriage before turning her hotel into a hospital during an 1862 yellow fever epidemic. A fierce Confederate supporter, she braved enemy fire to carry food to Lt. Dick Dowling's men during the 1863 Battle of Sabine Pass. Her wartime courage made her a local legend of the Texas coast.

Town/Village of East Rochester, NY

Kate Gleason (1865–1933) was a Rochester-area pioneer who broke barriers in engineering, machine-tool manufacturing, and real-estate development at a time when few women entered such fields. She worked in her family's Gleason Works, an internationally known gear-cutting machine company, and later became the first woman admitted to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the first woman to head a national bank. After her death, her estate funded community improvements, including this memorial erected in 1949.

New York, NY

From 1921 to 1952, the acclaimed stage actress Katharine Cornell and her director husband Guthrie McClintic made their home here, building a creative partnership that reached across the Broadway stage. Their production company mounted celebrated shows including The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Romeo and Juliet, and The Three Sisters, and toured for American troops through the U.S.O. during World War II. Together they helped define the golden age of the American theater.

Brownwood, TX

Born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek in 1890, the writer who became Katherine Anne Porter lost her mother young and left Texas in 1915 for a restless life as actress, teacher, reporter, and publicist across Chicago, Denver, Mexico, and New York. Her first collection of stories appeared in 1930, and she won lasting fame with the novel "Ship of Fools" and a Pulitzer Prize for her collected stories in 1965. When she died in 1980 her ashes were returned home, buried beside her mother in Indian Creek Cemetery.

Kyle, TX

Born Callie Russell Porter in 1890, the future writer spent her Texas childhood in Kyle after her mother's death, raised in part by the grandmother whose name she would later adopt. She left the state in 1915, became a journalist, and rose to the front rank of American fiction with collections like "Flowering Judas" and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Collected Stories." By her wish, her ashes were returned to Texas to rest beside her mother's grave.

Wilmot, NH

This quiet spot in the hills of Wilmot was once the beloved country retreat of Katherine Raynore, a New York City stage actress of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When she died in 1931, the land she had cherished passed to the Douglass family of Belmont, Massachusetts, who in 1933 gave it to the State of New Hampshire in her memory. A later member of the family, Donald C. Douglass, added this remembrance in 1972, keeping her name attached to the place she loved through the decades.

Ennis, TX

Katie Litty Daffan built a remarkable public career at a time when few women did, working as a teacher, author, journalist, and clubwoman. She served as an officer of the Texas State Historical Association, wrote several books including a Texas history textbook, and edited the literary pages of the Houston Chronicle from 1921 to 1928. Deeply active in the United Daughters of the Confederacy, she led the Confederate Woman's Home in Austin from 1911 to 1918, and later taught and wrote a column in Ennis, where she died in 1951.

Yoakum, TX

Czech immigrant women worked farms as equals to men, yet insurers refused them life policies, leaving families exposed to the costs of illness and death. In 1894, Anna Jakubik and Marie Yurek of Yoakum founded the Katolika Jednota Zen Texaskych (Catholic Women's Union of Texas), a mutual-aid society that grew to 60 chapters and over 8,000 members by 1917. Uniquely staffed entirely by women, it evolved into a financial institution offering insurance, loans, and scholarships—and even published a Czech-language newspaper with hard news, rare for a women's publication of the era.

Calvert, TX

When railroads turned Calvert into a cotton-trade center, its women joined the national club movement, chartering an American Woman's League chapter in 1908. On land donated by Ella Hamman, the league built this Prairie-style chapter house in 1909, complete with a commissioned bas-relief titled "Woman's Mission." Though the league soon folded, local women revived it as the Calvert Woman's Club and ran a community library from the building for decades.

Iola, TX

Katy Holland came to Texas in 1822 as a seven-year-old, part of Stephen F. Austin's celebrated "Old 300" colony of Anglo settlers. Her life laid bare the brutality of the frontier: twice widowed before she married William Cobb in the 1840s, she raised five children through hardship and loss. Her first husband was himself an Austin colonist, and her cousin Tapley Holland died at the Alamo.

Wichita Falls, TX

In the 1890s Flora Anderson Kemp and other Wichita Falls women began circulating books among friends, an early grassroots library. After years of trying, Flora asked her husband, pioneer businessman Joseph Alexander Kemp, for a public library building as a Christmas gift in 1916; in 1918 he presented the main structure to the city. Citizens donated 4,000 books and raised money to furnish it, and though enlarged over the years, the original building remains intact.

Boerne, TX

Masons in Boerne worked toward a lodge from 1904, and the Grand Lodge of Texas chartered Kendall Lodge No. 897 in December 1905. After fire destroyed their hall in 1908, members met in the county courthouse and then the Calrow Building before settling into a new home in 1969. In 1911 local women chartered Boerne Chapter No. 200 of the Order of the Eastern Star, and both bodies have long supported the community.

Sherman, TX

Founded in 1875 as North Texas Female College, a Methodist finishing school for young women, this Sherman institution was rechartered in 1919 as a junior college and music conservatory. It took its later name from Lucy Ann Kidd-Key, the celebrated educator who led the school from 1888 to 1916 and built its reputation in music, literature, and the fine arts. Through its faculty and students, the college shaped culture well beyond North Texas.

Kilgore, TX

Kilgore's first public library opened in 1933, launched by two local women's clubs. Federal Depression-era programs made the permanent building possible — funded by the Public Works Administration and built with Works Progress Administration labor, it was completed in 1939 in a style modeled on the cottages of Normandy. It still serves the community it was built for.

Temple, TX

In 1893 the Temple chapter of the King's Daughters and Sons, a Protestant charitable order made up largely of educated women, set out to provide care for the town's poor. They rented rooms in a small house and opened King's Daughters Hospital in 1896, appointing staff physicians and a superintendent, Cornelia Parsons. Considered ahead of its time, the institution grew into a lasting provider of affordable medical care.

Temple, TX

Nurse training began at Temple's King's Daughters Hospital as early as 1897, and formal classes started in 1903; by 1906 the hospital chartered an official nurses' school, extending its program to three years. Under leaders like director Mary Julia Putts, the school endured even the lean Depression years before a shortage of enrollees forced it to close in 1948. Its alumnae organized in 1921 and served in both world wars.

San Marcos, TX

This Victorian home with its distinctive central chimney rose in 1886 for the family of merchant Sam R. Kone, Jr., a San Marcos businessman, Mason, and city councilman. His wife Laura had taught art at the local Coronal Institute, and their daughter Florence, an educator, spent an extraordinary eighty years under its roof. Later stewards, the Yarbroughs, carried the house's preservation into a new generation.

Austin, TX

Built in 1896 for $4,200, this late-Victorian cottage was bought that same year by sportswoman Loula Dale Kopperl, who lived here—through her 1912 divorce from her husband Morris and up to her death in 1919. Its Eastlake ornamentation, fine milled woodwork, and pyramidal roof with a crowned deck make it one of the best surviving examples of the style in Austin.

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.

Humboldt County, CA

This grove was dedicated in honor of First Lady 'Lady Bird' Johnson, whose national campaign for conservation and roadside beautification left a lasting mark on the American landscape. The redwoods of Humboldt County were a fitting tribute to her environmental legacy. The dedication, made by President Richard Nixon, offered a rare moment of bipartisan homage across a change of administrations.

Austin, TX

Laguna Gloria is a Mediterranean-style villa built in 1916 for Henry and Clara Driscoll Sevier on a lagoon off the Colorado River, complete with a decorative window modeled on San Antonio's San José Mission. Its greater fame flows from Clara Driscoll, the philanthropist celebrated as the "Savior of the Alamo" for her efforts to preserve that shrine, who in 1943 gave the property to the Texas Fine Arts Association. Her lakeside home became an art museum, extending her legacy of cultural stewardship.

Mirando City, TX

Born near San Luis Potosí, Mexico, in 1910, Eduarda "Lala" Banda immigrated with her family and grew up in the oil boomtown of Mirando City. Widowed young with two children, she supported them by cooking for local families, mastering a wide range of dishes. On the last day of 1953 she opened Lala's Café in a small four-room house, and its handmade tortillas drew customers from miles around — including airmen from Laredo Air Force Base — earning notice in newspapers and Texas Monthly.

Greenville, TX

When her husband, the county clerk, died in 1902, Lallie P. Carlisle was appointed by the Commissioners' Court to finish his term — becoming the first woman in Texas to hold an elective public office. Remarkably, she did so at a time when women in Texas could not yet vote, and the state Attorney General had to affirm that her appointment was valid.

Mercersburg, PA · est. 1953

In this Mercersburg house in 1830, Harriet Lane was born into the family that would give her uncle, James Buchanan, a lifelong companion in public life. Orphaned young, she was raised by Buchanan and later served as his official White House hostess during his presidency—an era when a bachelor president needed a "first lady" at his side. Poised and popular, she became one of the most admired women in Washington.

Caldwell County, NC

This simple stone in the North Carolina foothills marks the grave of Laura Foster, a young woman whose death on May 28, 1866, became the seed of one of America's most enduring murder ballads. In the hard years just after the Civil War, her killing led to the arrest and eventual hanging of Tom Dula — 'Tom Dooley' — a former Confederate soldier whose case gripped the Appalachian backcountry and drew national newspaper attention. Nearly a century later the Kingston Trio's 1958 recording of 'Tom Dooley' turned this local Blue Ridge tragedy into a folk-revival sensation, sending listeners back to the very hills where Laura Foster lies.

Humboldt County, CA

This memorial honors Laura Perrott Mahan and James P. Mahan, early champions of the Save-the-Redwoods League in the 1920s. Laura Mahan in particular famously stood against loggers to protect ancient redwood groves along the Eel River, at a time when the timber industry was rapidly felling California's old-growth giants. Their activism helped spark the movement that set aside redwood parks for future generations.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Laura Wheeler Waring built her career as a portrait painter in an era when few Black women found a place in the American art world. Trained in Philadelphia and in France, she captured the faces of leading African Americans and led the art department at Cheyney State College, shaping generations of students. Her portraits now hang in the National Portrait Gallery and other major collections.

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.

Martins Mill, TX

Lexie Dean Robertson, raised in Martin's Mill where her educator father opened a school he named Lexie Academy after his eldest daughter, became in 1939 the first native-born Texan named Poet Laureate of Texas. A schoolteacher and principal before she turned to writing full time, she won a national readership with homespun collections such as Red Heels (1928) and Answer in the Night (1948). She held the laureateship until 1941 and later served as Poet Laureate of the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs.

Frankfort, KY

John Brown began this Georgian mansion in 1796, naming it for the Virginia academy he had attended, and its garden hosted what is remembered as the first Sunday School west of the Alleghenies, started by his wife Margaretta and Elizabeth Love. Brown (1757-1837) was a Revolutionary War veteran and aide to Lafayette who read law with Thomas Jefferson before becoming one of Kentucky's first two U.S. senators. Presidents James Monroe and Zachary Taylor, Andrew Jackson, and Lafayette himself were among the guests welcomed here.

San Francisco, CA

On April 19, 1894 — the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord — the Sequoia Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution planted this Liberty Tree in San Francisco. The name deliberately echoed the elms of the 1760s, beneath which colonists rallied against British rule. The planting was part of the patriotic-heritage movement that swept the country in the decades after the Civil War.

Greenville, TX

At the turn of the 20th century, a group of Greenville women turned a book-lending idea into a lasting civic institution. Beginning in 1897 with a literary circle whose members each donated volumes, they opened a small circulating library that soon outgrew its shelves; a $15,000 pledge from steel magnate Andrew Carnegie underwrote a permanent building that opened in 1904. The library has moved and grown ever since, eventually taking the name of local historian W. Walworth Harrison.

Hempstead, TX

Leonard W. Groce built Liendo in 1853 as a cotton plantation home famed for its lavish antebellum hospitality — a way of life sustained by enslaved labor. In 1873 it passed to the philosopher Dr. Edmund Duncan Montgomery and his wife, the pioneering Texas sculptor Elisabet Ney, who made it their lifelong homestead and are buried on the grounds.

Hempstead, TX

Named for Justo Liendo, the original Spanish grantee, this 1853 estate became the model plantation of Leonard W. Groce, who ringed his mansion with its own industries. During the Civil War it served as Camp Groce, first a training camp and then a Confederate prison, and in 1865 it was occupied by Gen. George Custer, years before Little Bighorn. From 1873 to 1911 it belonged to the family of celebrated sculptor Elisabet Ney, who is commemorated on the grounds.

Hilo, HI

This garden by Hilo Bay honors Queen Liliʻuokalani, the last reigning monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom, whose 1891–1893 rule ended when American business interests backed the overthrow of the monarchy. A composer and writer as well as a queen, she is remembered for her devotion to Native Hawaiian people and culture during a wrenching political transition. The Japanese-style gardens that carry her name reflect Hilo's own layered immigrant and island heritage.

Austin, TX

Raised in Jamaica by European parents who steeped them in languages, the classics, and music, Josephine and Lilia Casis came to Texas in 1890 and gave their lives to education. Josephine taught for thirty-three years at Austin's Palm School, while Lilia pursued graduate study in Europe and at the University of Texas, where in 1916 she broke ground as the university's first woman full professor. The sisters left their estates to the university, and in 1951 an Austin school was named in their honor.

Asheville, NC

Lillian Exum Clement Stafford broke a barrier in 1920 when she was elected to the North Carolina House of Representatives, becoming the first woman to serve in a Southern state legislature. She won her seat even before most women could rely on the newly ratified Nineteenth Amendment. Her Asheville law office stood just west of this marker, her home a short distance northeast.

Hawkins, TX

Born in the Fouke community in 1891, Lillian Richard left rural Wood County for Dallas and in 1925 took a job with Quaker Oats, becoming one of several African American women who toured the country portraying "Aunt Jemima" to promote pancake mix. The character drew on a demeaning minstrel-show stereotype even as the work gave Richard a 23-year career, until a stroke sent her home to Fouke, where she died in 1956. Her hometown was later named the "Pancake Capital of Texas."

Lititz, PA · est. 1980

Founded in 1746 by the Moravian Church in the tight-knit religious community of Lititz, Linden Hall is the oldest girls' resident school in the United States. The Moravians, German-speaking Protestants known for their devotion to education, believed girls deserved rigorous schooling at a time when few Americans agreed. What began as a day school grew after 1794 into a boarding academy drawing students from far and wide, and was chartered under its present name in 1863.

Brenham, TX

Founded in 1853 by Presbyterian minister James W. Miller, Live Oak Female Seminary in Brenham offered schooling to female boarding students and day students of both sexes until 1888. Miller's sister-in-law Rebecca Stuart Red served as principal until 1875, when she left to open her own seminary in Austin. The campus centered on Miller's home, "Oak Lodge," whose upper floor held classes alongside dormitories, an auditorium, and a music conservatory.

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.

Llano, TX

In 1901 music teacher Jennie Clopton gathered sixteen women to found a literary society that grew into the Woman's Culture Club, a civic force in Llano for decades. The club opened the town's first public library, funded scholarships, beautified public spaces, and coordinated a Works Progress Administration project to build a permanent library in 1938–39. It embodied the Progressive-era conviction that organized women could shape the life of a community.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2019

Lois Weber was born on this Pittsburgh site and grew up to become the first American woman to direct films—and one of the most prolific and daring directors of the silent era. Between 1908 and 1934 she wrote, directed, and acted in more than two hundred pictures, tackling controversial subjects like drug addiction, abortion, and poverty that most filmmakers avoided. She also helped pioneer cinematic techniques, including the split screen.

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.

New Orleans, LA · est. 1985

Longue Vue House is a grand country estate on the edge of New Orleans, built in the early 1940s for the Stern family and celebrated for its formal gardens and refined Classical-inspired architecture. In 1985 the city's Historic District Landmarks Commission formally recognized it, protecting the house and grounds as a treasured local landmark.

New Orleans, LA

Longue Vue House and Gardens, the Stern family's early-1940s estate, is among the last American country houses built in the grand tradition and set within meticulously designed gardens. Its designation as a National Historic Landmark places it in the small circle of sites judged to hold significance for the whole nation's story.

New Orleans, LA · est. 1991

In 1991 Longue Vue House and Gardens was added to the National Register of Historic Places under the 1966 preservation act, a legal recognition of its architectural and cultural value. The listing reflects a wider mid-century American movement to protect distinctive homes and landscapes before they were lost.