Women's History

Proctor, TX

During the Civil War, Mollie E. Moore wrote poems that Texans memorized, clipped from newspapers, and mailed to their soldiers — verses honoring fallen heroes, home units, and Confederate victories — while also nursing and doing social work at Camp Ford near Tyler. A spirited young woman who rode horseback with a pistol at her side, she went on to national fame as a poet, novelist, and columnist, married a newspaper editor, and led New Orleans society for two decades. Near this spot, at Old Mooresville (now Proctor), she often visited her brother's family.

Langhorne, PA · est. 2010

In an era when children with intellectual disabilities were too often hidden away or written off, Mollie Woods Hare devoted her life to teaching them. In 1913 she founded the Woods Schools, which grew into a nationally recognized center blending research, education, and rehabilitation for people with special needs. Her pioneering methods drew wide acclaim and helped advance the very theory of how such children could be taught.

New Orleans, LA

Molly Marine was dedicated on November 10, 1943 — the Marine Corps birthday — in the heart of New Orleans, honoring the women who joined the Marine Corps Women's Reserve during World War II under the recruiting call "Free a Marine to Fight." Believed to be among the first monuments to a woman in U.S. military uniform, she stands trim in her service dress as thousands of women stepped into stateside duties so male Marines could deploy.

Carlisle, PA · est. 1949

Mary Hays McCauley, remembered in legend as "Molly Pitcher," became one of the Revolution's most enduring heroines for her courage at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778, where women carried water to overheated soldiers and, by tradition, she took a place at the cannon. She is buried in the Old Graveyard just east of here, among many of Carlisle's distinguished early citizens.

Manalapan Township, NJ

In the sweltering heat of June 28, 1778, Continental and British armies clashed across the fields of Monmouth, New Jersey, in one of the largest battles of the Revolutionary War. Legend holds that when a soldier fell at his cannon, a woman who had been carrying water to the parched troops—remembered as Molly Pitcher—stepped forward and took his place at the gun. The name came to honor the many women who followed the army, hauling water to cool both throats and overheated cannon barrels during that brutal day.

Mount Pleasant, NC

Founded on the eve of the Civil War, Mont Amoena Seminary gave young women in the Carolina Piedmont a formal education at a time when few schools would. Run by the Lutheran church, it took a Latinized version of its hometown's name — "Pleasant Mountain" — and educated girls for nearly seventy years, closing in the 1920s. It stood as the counterpart to the men's colleges just up the street in Mount Pleasant.

Moody, TX

Soon after Moody was founded in 1881, settlers sought a burial ground nearer than the old cemetery at Perry, and bought this tract from J. Parker Naylor. It was first used in 1889 for the grave of seven-year-old Flora Welch, and hackberry trees were transplanted here from the Leon River in 1890. A women's federation, later the Moody Cemetery Association, cared for the grounds — Miss Rob McCauley presiding for thirty-five years — and many of the town's early pioneers rest here.

Ennis, TX

Built in 1905 for Malinda and Hardin T. Moore, this Neoclassical Revival house — with fluted Ionic and Doric columns, balustrades, and urns — announced the wealth of a family formed by two remarriages. Malinda had inherited substantial land and businesses from a first husband and managed them herself with notable diligence, while Hardin, a Civil War veteran and cattle merchant, brought his own holdings. She lived here until her death in 1930.

Houston, TX

In 1931–32 Edith L. Moore and her husband built this house from pine logs cut on their own land, laying up a fireplace from sandstone curbstones salvaged off Houston's downtown streets. They made their living by dairy farming and logging along Rummel Creek. Determined to keep her homesite wild, Edith Moore willed the house and 17.5 acres to the Houston Audubon Society in 1975 as a nature sanctuary.

Austin, TX

Contractor Charles Funk built this house in 1887 for John M. Moore—a former legislator and district attorney then serving as secretary of state under Governor Sul Ross—at a cost of $2,000. In 1901 it was bought by Laura A. E. Flack, a prominent Austin businesswoman who owned several buildings on Congress Avenue and who in the 1920s added a two-story neoclassical porch to the original Victorian design. Flack lived here until her death in 1933, and the house stayed in her family for another forty years.

Hood River, OR

Shizue Iwatsuki was among the Issei — first-generation Japanese immigrants — who settled the Hood River Valley in the early twentieth century, building farms and community despite exclusion laws and later wartime incarceration. A poet as well as a pioneer, she gave voice to that immigrant experience, and this poem, honored at Japan's Imperial Palace poetry ceremony in 1974, captures a quiet Columbia River morning through her eyes.

Berkeley, CA

Designed in 1906 by Charles Dickey — architect of the Claremont Hotel — the Morse Block set two floors of apartments above ground-floor shops. From 1921 to 1935 it housed Donogh Drygoods, a leading downtown "daylight store" lit by windows and skylights, run in part by Mrs. Donogh, one of MIT's first women graduates, who introduced California's first "Basement Grocerteria." The buff-brick, classically detailed upper floors remain original.

Reston, VA

During the Civil War, the wooded countryside of Northern Virginia was the hunting ground of Colonel John S. Mosby's Rangers, the 43rd Battalion of Virginia Cavalry, whose lightning raids on Union forces earned the region the nickname "Mosby's Confederacy." This boulder near Reston served as a quiet rendezvous where the Rangers gathered to regroup and divide the spoils of their raids. According to tradition, it was Laura Ratcliffe — a young woman living nearby who acted as a Confederate scout and spy — who first showed the rock to Mosby, then a captain, around 1863.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1994

In July 1903, the Irish-born labor organizer Mary Harris "Mother" Jones launched her famous March of the Mill Children from Philadelphia, leading textile workers and children maimed by factory machinery on a long walk to dramatize the toll of child labor. A fearless presence in the coal, steel, and textile struggles, she made the nation look at the young hands turning its looms. Her march helped push child-labor reform onto the American conscience.

Macoupin County, IL

This monument marks the resting place of Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, the fearless Irish-born labor organizer who spent her long life rallying coal miners and their families against brutal working conditions. She asked to be buried among the miners of Mount Olive at the Union Miners Cemetery, alongside men like "General" Alexander Bradley who led marches of striking workers. By the time she died at 100, she had become the enduring face of American labor's fighting spirit.

Corpus Christi, TX

Born in County Kerry, Ireland, in 1833, Margaret Mary Healy immigrated to America in 1845 and eventually settled in Texas, where she married future Corpus Christi mayor John Bernard Murphy. She nursed the sick through yellow fever epidemics, opened hospitals, and helped bring teaching sisters to found the state's first Catholic boarding school. In San Antonio she built a free school and St. Peter Claver Church for African Americans, and founded her own religious congregation — today the Sisters of the Holy Spirit and Mary Immaculate — recruiting young women from Ireland to teach.

The Grove, TX

In 1916 Isabella Neff willed six acres along the Leon River to Texas for community gatherings, planting the seed for a statewide idea. Her son Pat Neff, governor from 1921 to 1925, championed the cause, and in 1923 the legislature created the State Parks Board; he later deeded additional land to enlarge what became Texas's first state park.

Hiawatha, KS

In the early 1900s, Hiawatha resident Elizabeth Krebs grew tired of the vandalism that Halloween pranksters visited on her Kansas town, and organized costume parties and a parade to give young people a wholesome outlet instead. Her festivals are often credited as an early template for the community-organized, family-friendly Halloween celebrations that later spread across America.

Susquehanna Depot, PA · est. 2009

Born in 1810, Theresa Maxis Duchemin became the first American-born Black Catholic nun and a charter member of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the world's first congregation of women religious of color. In 1845 she helped found the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Michigan, a teaching order that endures today. At the invitation of Philadelphia's Bishop John Neumann she established an IHM community and Laurel Hill Academy in Susquehanna County, which operated here until 1923.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1998

In the early 1900s Philadelphia's Anna Jarvis campaigned to set aside a day honoring mothers, and the first official observance came in 1908 — a moment when American women were increasingly organizing for the vote and public influence. Retail pioneer John Wanamaker, whose great store stood nearby, lent early support, helping the idea spread. By 1914 President Wilson had signed it into federal recognition.

Hereford, TX

This park grew out of the Mothers' Club, a women's civic group founded in Hereford in 1909, which improved a 1910 land gift from Mr. and Mrs. E.O. Thomas with walks and shade trees. In 1934 the club renamed itself the Pioneer Study Club and, with the City of Hereford, has tended the grounds ever since. It stands as a small monument to the women's club movement that shaped so many American towns.

Douglas County, NV

When Hiram Mott and his son Israel settled here on the emigrant trail in 1851, their homestead became a stage for a string of Carson County firsts. Israel's wife, Eliza Ann Middaugh, is remembered as the first European-descended woman settler; she opened the area's first school in her kitchen in 1854, and the family saw the first such child born and the first burial that seeded the region's earliest cemetery. That little graveyard is all that now marks Mottsville.

Castroville, TX

Named for Rev. John Martin Moye, the 18th-century French priest who founded the Sisters of Divine Providence, this Castroville building became the order's first mother house in the United States. The Sisters opened a school here in 1868 and raised the first part of this structure in 1873, launching generations of teaching, refuge, and religious formation. Over the decades it also served as an industrial school, seminary, refuge for the persecuted, and boys' military academy.

Indianola, TX

Angelina Peyton Eberly came to Texas in 1822 and ran frontier inns and hotels through the turbulent years of the Austin colony and the Republic. In 1842 she spotted men quietly hauling the government's records out of Austin and touched off a cannon to sound the alarm, sparking the so-called "Archives War" that kept the capital—and its papers—in Austin. She later moved to the Gulf port of Indianola, and even her grave was later swept away by the flood that helped doom that town.

Dalhart, TX

Cordia Sloan Duke married into ranch life in 1907 when her husband became a division manager of the XIT Ranch, then the largest in the world at three million acres, and she "looked after" its 150 cowboys along with her own family. Sensing that a way of life was vanishing, she kept a diary of everyday ranch events and persuaded 81 others to do the same. Their collected record preserved an authentic, ground-level account of the working cowboy that might otherwise have been lost.

Cameron, TX

Edna Westbrook Trigg, a Milam County native and schoolteacher, was tapped by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1911 to supervise Texas' first Girls' Tomato Club, teaching rural girls to grow and can their own produce. Her 1912 canning exhibit at the Milano Fair was a state first, and in 1916 she became Texas' first county home demonstration agent. She went on to train other agents at the College of Industrial Arts, now Texas Woman's University.

Coleman, TX

Built in 1909 with money raised by the Self-Culture Club and other local women's organizations, this building gave Coleman a home for its library collection and a meeting place for its clubs. When funds ran out to pay a librarian in 1924, ranch woman and civic leader Mattie B. Miller stepped in and served without pay for 41 years, pouring her own time and resources into keeping the library open. The city took over operations in 1968 and named the library in her honor.

Richmond, TX

Jane Herbert Wilkinson Long, often remembered as a pioneer among Anglo-American women in Texas, made her home on this Fort Bend County site. She was the wife of Dr. James Long, who led an 1819 expedition aimed at freeing Texas from Spanish rule. Living through the turbulent years when Texas passed from Spanish to Mexican to independent hands, she became a lasting symbol of frontier endurance, memorialized here by the State of Texas in 1936.

Odessa, TX

An English professor at Odessa College, Marjorie Morris was the driving force behind the Globe of the Great Southwest, a remarkably faithful replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre built in West Texas. Named her college's Teacher of the Year in 1961 and honored the same year among the state's outstanding college teachers, she also founded the Permian Basin Museum and the area's "Writers' Roundup" contest. She was recognized in the Outstanding Women of Texas series in 1967.

Pecos, TX

Lillie W. Cole came to Pecos in 1906 with her husband, Wylie Moffitt Cole, and after being widowed in 1912 turned to teaching, a career that would last 27 years. Remembered as an outstanding and dedicated educator and public benefactor, she raised two daughters while devoting herself to the schoolchildren of this West Texas town. Her marker honors a life of quiet service to her community.

Wortham, TX

Lucy Haggard Longbotham (1793–1873) was born in the raw territory south of the Ohio River that became Tennessee, one of nine children of a Virginia-born Baptist minister. She moved to the Alabama frontier around 1814, married in 1820, and eventually came to Texas — living, the marker notes, under nine different territorial, national, and state flags in a single lifetime, and raising nine children of her own.

Lost Prairie, TX

According to family tradition, Martha Rogers was born in the 1790s as a daughter of U.S. Army General James Wilkinson, and was said to have been disinherited when she married Benjamin Rogers in Alabama in 1809. The couple raised ten children before Martha, widowed, made the long move to Texas in 1847 with three of her grown sons. She settled at the Lost Prairie community, living out her years as one of the region's early Southwestern pioneers.

Lost Prairie, TX

Born in Georgia in 1828, Mary Ellephan Hawkins married William Jay Reeves in Alabama in 1847 and moved with their young children to Texas around 1855. When her husband went off to serve in Company F of the 15th Texas Cavalry during the Civil War, she held the family together at home, shouldering the hard work of a wartime household. Her descendants went on to become physicians, lawyers, bankers, and citizens in many walks of life.

Post, TX

Marjorie Merriweather Post was the daughter of cereal magnate C. W. Post, who founded this West Texas colony town in 1906. When drought crippled the young farming community after 1917, she stepped in with relief that kept the local economy alive. Over a long life she became one of America's leading philanthropists in the arts and humanities, endowing colleges, scout camps, and youth-music programs.

Houston, TX

Rebecca Lamar was the widow of John Lamar and the mother of Mirabeau B. Lamar, a poet, soldier, and second president of the Republic of Texas. She died at "Oak Grove" in Houston in July 1839, in the earliest days of the young republic.

Belton, TX

Sarah Ann Hardin, widow of William Hardin and later wife of Dr. O. P. Kelton, is remembered for the mercy she and Judge Hardin showed to captured Mexican officers and soldiers placed in their care after the Texan victory at San Jacinto in 1836. In an era of bitter conflict, their humane treatment of prisoners stood out. Her marker preserves that act of compassion in the young Republic of Texas.

Kaufman, TX

Frances A. King came to the Republic of Texas alongside her husband, founder of King's Fort in 1840, and pioneered on the frontier with notable courage. After his death in 1846 she—by then Mrs. Tabor—campaigned to make Kingsborough the seat of the newly organized Kaufman County and won. In April 1851 she deeded 75 acres for the townsite and a matching timber tract to the county commissioners, and the fort's settlement grew into the town that shares the county's name.

New Iberia, LA

Founded in 1872 by the Sisters of Mt. Carmel, this New Iberia academy offered formal education to girls at a time when such opportunities were scarce. The teaching order itself traced its origins to Tours, France, in 1825, and the oldest building on the grounds — nearest Bayou Teche — was raised by Henry F. Duperier in 1826. The school reflects the strong French Catholic educational tradition that took root along the Teche.

Mathis, TX

In 1875, San Patricio chief justice Patrick Frances Murphy and his wife Elizabeth — daughter of the empresario James McGloin — bought "The Point at Echo" and built this modest Greek Revival house on the east bank of the Nueces, using cypress hauled by oxen from Indianola. The property later passed to Margaret Mary Healy-Murphy, widow of Patrick's brother, who devoted her fortune to founding a church campus in San Antonio with a convent and a free school for Black children, established what the marker calls the first order of nuns in Texas, and used this ranch house for retreats before selling it to sustain her mission.

San Antonio, TX

Born in Gonzales and raised in San Antonio, Myra Hemmings became one of 22 founders of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority at Howard University in 1913, and days later marched in the women's suffrage procession in Washington. Returning home, she taught English and drama in San Antonio's Black high schools for more than fifty years while founding the city's Delta Sigma Theta chapter and, with her husband, a dramatic guild. She also acted in stage productions and several feature films, shaping the cultural life of Black San Antonio.

Ennis, TX

When W.H. Parsons deeded ten acres for a cemetery in 1875, it took the name "Myrtle" from a child already buried on the tract. The grounds became a resting place for figures across generations of Texas history — Frederick Ranklin of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" and a veteran of the Texas Revolution, author Katie Daffan, and Marine Lieutenant Jack Lummus, killed at Iwo Jima in 1945 and awarded the Medal of Honor.

Lexington, KY

Myrtle Weldon spent three decades, beginning in 1924, building Kentucky's Home Economics Extension program from a modest corps of 23 agents into a statewide network of 110. Trained in home economics, she led the effort that founded the Kentucky Federation of Homemakers in 1932. Her work grew from a movement that began in 1914, when the first county agents taught rural families the practical arts of canning, food safety, and preservation.

Jacksonville, TX

This hospital began in 1919 as the nine-bed Cherokee Sanitarium in a small Jacksonville apartment house. A larger facility followed in 1925, and in 1930 it was renamed to honor Nan Travis, mother of staff physicians J.M. and R.T. Travis. Through decades of expansion it grew to serve patients across East Texas, merging in 1997 into a larger system as the East Texas Medical Center–Jacksonville.

Crews, TX

In this cabin lived "Grandma" Parker, a frontier herb doctor who brewed medicinal teas in a great pot over an open fire and walked miles across dangerous country to tend the sick. She made her home here for more than a decade before failing eyesight forced her to sell the cabin in 1888. Her story preserves the memory of the self-taught healers who served isolated settlements before formal medicine arrived.

Cuero, TX

Nancy Shows was among the pioneer settlers of the DeWitt County frontier in the 1850s, where her husband Adam Shows built the nearby Hebron Church around 1855. Mother of eight children, she represents the settler families who put down the first roots — homes, churches, and cemeteries — in this stretch of early Texas.

Beaumont, TX

In 1825 Nancy Nixon Tevis and her husband Noah settled a bluff on the Neches, becoming the first known Anglo-Americans there and later receiving a Republic of Texas land grant covering much of what became Beaumont. Widowed young, Nancy held her ground with eight children through the Runaway Scrape of 1836, ran a profitable ferry, and joined with others in 1837 to found the town — renaming it from Tevis Bluff to Beaumont. Fiercely protective of her rights, she once appealed directly to President Sam Houston over a land dispute.

Dayton, OH

Natalie Clifford Barney was born in Dayton on October 31, 1876, into a wealthy and prominent family whose earlier generations helped found local institutions such as the Dayton Academy and Cooper Female Seminary. She would go on to become a celebrated writer and the host of one of the most famous literary salons in early twentieth-century Paris, gathering many of the leading authors of her age. This marker recalls a Dayton daughter who became an influential figure in the transatlantic literary world.

Atlanta, GA

At Atlanta's Yonge Street School in 1911, Selena Sloan Butler organized a parent-teacher group that grew, through a state body formed in 1921 and a national congress in 1926, into the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers. In an era of rigid segregation, Black parents built their own network to advocate for their children's schools when the existing PTA excluded them. Butler, elected first national president, is honored as its founder.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1994

In 1941, at the Cardwell School of Music, Mary Cardwell Dawson founded the first national Black opera company in the United States. At a time when the great opera houses were closed to Black performers, the company gave classically trained African American singers a stage worthy of their talent, touring from Pittsburgh to Washington and New York. For twenty-one years it drew acclaim for its artistry and opened doors that had long been shut.

Pittsburgh, PA

This Pittsburgh house was the home of the National Negro Opera Company from 1941 to 1962 — the first Black opera company in the United States, founded by musician and educator Mary Cardwell Dawson. From this modest residence in the Homewood neighborhood, singers who were shut out of mainstream stages built a company that toured the country and gave Black artists a place to perform grand opera. The building was recognized as a Pennsylvania historic structure in 1994 and a Pittsburgh Historic Landmark in 2008.

Ogden, UT

Sarah E. Anderson was turned away from the ballot box in 1895, yet within a year she was among the first women elected to the Utah state legislature — part of Utah's remarkable early embrace of women's suffrage. Her former home stood on this spot, now marked on the National Votes for Women Trail.

Corpus Christi, TX

Commissioned in March 1941 as the nation prepared for war, Naval Air Station Corpus Christi grew into one of the country's great flight schools, graduating some 35,000 aviators and earning the nickname 'the University of the Air.' Its trainees included future president George H. W. Bush and astronaut-senator John Glenn, while hundreds of WAVES served as instructors, controllers, and technicians across its many auxiliary fields.

Dallas, TX

Marie Isabella "Belle" Boyd became one of the Confederacy's most celebrated spies, beginning her career at just seventeen when she reportedly shot a Union soldier who had threatened her mother. Charming Federal officers into revealing secrets that reached Confederate hands, she endured several imprisonments and eventual exile before reinventing herself as a lecturer and dramatic reader. In the 1880s she lived in a stately mansion near this Dallas site with her third husband before selling the house in 1887.

Azle, TX

First called O'Bar, the post office opened in 1881 and was renamed in 1883 for Dr. Azle Stewart, who donated the townsite land. For decades it doubled as a community hub — postmaster Cora Lovell settled it into a frame building on West Main, and during Elsie Gipson Parker's 38-year tenure it even housed a small public library — until Azle's growth earned a larger facility in the early 1970s.

Louisville, KY

In 1896 reformers opened Neighborhood House, Kentucky's first settlement house, to help immigrants and city dwellers with English and citizenship classes, job training, public baths, a kindergarten, and a playground. Mary Belknap donated its first permanent home on this site in 1902, at the height of the Progressive Era's movement to soften the hardships of urban industrial life. The surrounding park was renamed Settlement House Park in 1996 to honor that legacy.

Apollo, PA

This marker honors Nellie Bly, one of America's boldest early investigative reporters, who spent part of her childhood in this corner of western Pennsylvania. Writing for papers in Pittsburgh and New York in the Gilded Age, she went undercover to expose the mistreatment of the poor and the institutionalized, turning firsthand experience into front-page reform journalism. In 1889–90 she captured the nation's imagination by racing around the world in a record 72 days, a feat inspired by Jules Verne's famous novel.

Granbury, TX

Born in 1894 into a struggling Hood County family, Nellie Gray Robertson entered the University of Texas in 1912 and passed the state bar in 1918, breaking into a profession then closed to women. She returned home to win election as Hood County attorney—the first woman to hold that office in Texas—and served multiple terms, and in 1925 was named to sit on an all-woman Texas Supreme Court, though she narrowly lacked the required years of practice to serve. She later wrote law books in New York and led title companies in Houston and Beaumont.

La Joya, TX

The school's story begins in the vanished town of Havana, where from 1890 to 1944 ranch children learned in a one-room schoolhouse. Among their teachers was Nellie Leo Schunior, who taught there from 1913 to 1916 before becoming the first superintendent of the Chapin (now Edinburg) schools. After repeated Rio Grande floods forced Havana's residents to relocate and rename their town La Joya, they built a new school in 1926 and named it in Schunior's honor.

Marshall, TX

Twin brothers from Tennessee settled this area in 1847, and the family burial ground began in 1851 with the grave of one brother's wife. Susan Adeline Nesbitt, who often nursed sick neighbors when no community doctor was near, donated the land for the cemetery and later fenced it using the pension she drew from her late husband's Mexican War service. Descendants established a trust for its perpetual care in 1969.

Glasgow, KY

Elected in 1913—seven years before women could vote—Nettie B. C. Depp became the first female public official in Barren County, serving as schools superintendent from 1914 to 1917. She introduced a uniform curriculum, repaired the county's one-room schools, built seven new schoolhouses, and helped unify local schools into the county's first four-year high school. She continued teaching into the 1930s, declining a chance to run again for superintendent.