The Archive
Browse Every Story
Every tribute page on MyHistoryStone, whether it remembers a person, a place, or a thing. 105 in all, and growing.
People & Pets
Lives remembered, and the companions who shared them.
In Memory of
May Flora Washburn
November 7, 1947 - January 31, 2025 - Bridgewater, NY
Ahead of her time and the most unique in her way of thinking. Her ambitions were always beyond her surroundings and above her peers. We miss...
In Memory of
Seaman First Class Gerald "Bud" Dwyer
May 14, 1924 - February 10, 2010 - Clark Mills, NY
A permanent member of the greatest generation, Bud served his country with honor and his community with dedication. May he always and foreve...
In Memory of
Annie Jump Cannon
1863 - 1941 - Dover, Delaware, United States
She classified more stars than anyone who has ever lived, and the system she built is still the one astronomers use. It is not named after h...
In Memory of
Bass Reeves
1838 - 1910 - Muskogee, Oklahoma, United States
Every account of Bass Reeves reaches the same number: more than three thousand arrests. It is on the statues, in the encyclopedias, and in e...
In Memory of
Bessie Coleman
January 26, 1892 - April 30, 1926 - Atlanta, Texas, United States
No American flight school would take her, so she learned French. Bessie Coleman was born on 26 January 1892, the daughter of George and Sus...
In Memory of
Clara Brown
1800 - 1885 - Denver, Colorado, United States
She was sold away from her husband and three of her children at auction, and she spent the next forty-seven years looking for one of them. ...
In Memory of
Corporal Freddie Stowers
1896 - September 28, 1918 - Sandy Springs, South Carolina, United States
The paperwork was filed in 1918. The medal was pinned in 1991. He had been dead for seventy-three years. Freddie Stowers was born in Sandy ...
In Memory of
Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte
June 17, 1865 - September 18, 1915 - Walthill, Nebraska, United States
She came home from medical school to be the only doctor for more than twelve hundred people spread across hundreds of square miles, and she ...
In Memory of
Figure, called Justin Morgan
1789 - 1821 - Randolph, Vermont, United States
Every Morgan horse alive descends from one stallion, and nobody can prove who his father was. He was foaled in West Springfield, Massachuse...
In Memory of
Garrett Augustus Morgan
March 4, 1877 - July 27, 1963 - Cleveland, Ohio, United States
He had six years of school. He held the patent on the thing that got the men out. Garrett Augustus Morgan was born on 4 March 1877, sometim...
In Memory of
Homer Plessy
March 17, 1863 - March 1, 1925 - New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
His name is on one of the worst decisions the Supreme Court ever handed down, and no photograph of him is known to exist. Homer Plessy was ...
In Memory of
Ida Lewis
February 25, 1842 - October 24, 1911 - Newport, Rhode Island, United States
She did the lighthouse keeper's job for twenty-two years before anyone gave her the title. Idawalley Zoradia Lewis was born in Newport, Rho...
In Memory of
Isaac Burns Murphy
1861 - 1896 - Lexington, Kentucky, United States
Isaac Burns Murphy won forty-four percent of the races he rode. That figure appears on his gravestone marker, in every encyclopedia, and in ...
In Memory of
Lily
April 2014 - Waterville, New York, United States
Stay Gold
In Memory of
Madam C. J. Walker
1867 - 1919 - Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
She was born on a plantation in Delta, Louisiana on 23 December 1867, to Owen and Minerva Breedlove, who had both been enslaved on that grou...
In Memory of
Mary Fields
1832 - December 5, 1914 - Cascade, Montana, United States
She was about sixty years old when she took the job, and she never missed a day. Mary Fields was born into slavery in Hickman County, Tenne...
In Memory of
Owney, the Railway Mail Dog
1888 - June 11, 1897 - Albany, New York, United States
A stray terrier fell asleep on a pile of mailbags in the Albany post office around 1888, and spent the next nine years riding the trains. R...
In Memory of
Raven
July 28, 2008 - September 30, 2025 - Chesterfield, VA, United States
Sir Raven Fluffy Butt was a very caring companion.
In Memory of
Richard and Mildred Loving
1958 - 1967 - Central Point, Virginia, United States
They were arrested in their own bedroom for being married to each other. It took nine years and the Supreme Court to undo it, and all they h...
In Memory of
Sequoyah
1770 - 1843 - Sallisaw, Oklahoma, United States
He could not read. Not English, not anything. There was nothing to read in his own language, because his own language had never been written...
In Memory of
Sergeant Alvin C. York
1887 - 1964 - Pall Mall, Tennessee, United States
He tried not to go. Alvin Cullum York was from Pall Mall, Tennessee, in the Cumberland foothills — a place with more hollows than roads. He...
In Memory of
Standing Bear
1829 - 1908 - Niobrara, Nebraska, United States
In 1879 a federal court in Omaha was asked to decide whether a Native American was a person. It had never been settled. Standing Bear was a...
In Memory of
Stubby
1917 - March 16, 1926 - New Haven, Connecticut, United States
A stray wandered onto the Yale Bowl field in the summer of 1917 while the 102nd Infantry was drilling there, and went to France in a soldier...
In Memory of
The Delany Family of Raleigh
1858 - Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
A man born into slavery in 1858 raised ten children on a college campus, and two of his daughters lived long enough to tell the whole story ...
In Memory of
The Hubbell Family of Ganado
1878 - 1967 - Ganado, Arizona, United States
One family stood behind the same counter for eighty-nine years, and it is still a working trading post. John Lorenzo Hubbell was born at Pa...
In Memory of
The Sager Children
1844 - Walla Walla, Washington, United States
Seven children crossed the plains in 1844. In twenty-six days they lost both parents, and the wagon train raised them the rest of the way. ...
In Memory of
Thomas Blind Tom Wiggins
1849 - 1908 - Columbus, Georgia, United States
He was born blind and enslaved in Harris County, Georgia, and by the time he was eight years old other people were making money out of him. ...
In Memory of
Wendell Scott
August 29, 1921 - December 23, 1990 - Danville, Virginia, United States
He won the race, and the man who finished second was flagged the winner, and it took fifty-eight years for the trophy to reach his family. ...
Places
Homes, buildings and ground that holds a story.
The Story of
Bodie, California
1876 - 1942 - Mono County, California, United States
Sixty-five saloons along a mile of main street, and now nobody at all. Gold was found at Bodie in 1876 and the camp turned into a boomtown ...
The Story of
Cadentown Rosenwald School
1922 - Lexington (Fayette County), Kentucky, United States
A two-room frame schoolhouse outside Lexington, Kentucky, built in 1922 and 1923 by a Black farming community that had to buy its own school...
The Story of
Cahokia
1050 - 1350 - Collinsville, Illinois, United States
We do not know what the people who built this city called it. That is the first thing to say about the largest pre-Columbian settlement nor...
The Story of
Centralia, Pennsylvania
1841 - Centralia, Pennsylvania, United States
There is a town in the anthracite country of Pennsylvania with five people living in it, a revoked postal code, and a coal seam burning unde...
The Story of
Dyess Colony
1934 - 1951 - Mississippi County, Arkansas, United States
Five hundred families were given twenty acres, a mule and a debt. One of them raised Johnny Cash. In May 1934, in the worst year of the Dep...
The Story of
Elbowoods, North Dakota
1889 - 1954 - Fort Berthold Reservation, North Dakota, United States
There is a photograph from 1948 of a man holding his glasses aside so he can wipe his eyes while the Secretary of the Interior signs a piece...
The Story of
Kalaupapa, Molokai
January 6, 1866 - Kalaupapa, Hawaii, United States
Nearly eight thousand people were taken from their families and put on this peninsula. About a thousand of their graves can still be identif...
The Story of
Malaga Island
1860 - 1912 - Phippsburg, Maine, United States
In 1912 the State of Maine evicted an entire community from an island, committed eight of its people to an institution for the feeble-minded...
The Story of
Nicodemus, Kansas
1877 - Graham County, Kansas, United States
The federal troops left the South in 1877. That same year, six Black men and one white man organized a town company out on the Solomon River...
The Story of
The Angel Island Immigration Station
1910 - 1940 - San Francisco Bay, California, United States
The poems are cut into the walls. A park ranger found them in 1970, with the building already scheduled for demolition. The immigration sta...
The Story of
The Cherokee National Female Seminary
1851 - 1909 - Tahlequah, Oklahoma, United States
The Cherokee Nation built it, paid for it, and staffed it, in Indian Territory, twenty years before Oklahoma existed. Then the state bought ...
The Story of
The Heart Mountain Relocation Center
1942 - 1945 - Park County, Wyoming, United States
At its fullest it was the third largest city in Wyoming, and nobody in it was allowed to leave. The Heart Mountain Relocation Center opened...
The Story of
The Lovering Farmhouse
c. 1755 - Kensington, New Hampshire, United States
A house built around 1755 in Kensington, New Hampshire, and measured two centuries later by draftsmen who came with rulers instead of camera...
The Story of
The Raising of Galveston
September 8, 1900 - 1911 - Galveston, Texas, United States
Around eight thousand people died at Galveston in a single night. Then the survivors picked the city up off the ground. The hurricane came ...
The Story of
Tyler Manor
July 1889
Stay Gold Ponyboy
The Story of
Vanport, Oregon
1942 - 1948 - Portland, Oregon, United States
Oregon's second-largest city lasted five and a half years and is now a golf course. Vanport was built in 1942 to house the people who built...
Things & Shared History
Businesses, teams, working lives, and everything else worth keeping.
A Tribute to
Chautauqua
1874 - Chautauqua, New York, United States
For about thirty years a brown tent went up on a well drained field outside town, and for a week the whole county came to hear a former pres...
A Tribute to
Dockery Farms
1895 - 1982 - Sunflower County, Mississippi, United States
The sign on the seed house says Dockery Farms, Est. 1895. The Mississippi Blues Trail marker in front of it asks a question: Birthplace of t...
A Tribute to
Farragut Naval Training Station
1942 - 1946 - Bayview, Idaho, United States
Nearly 300,000 sailors learned to be sailors on a lake in northern Idaho, three hundred miles from the nearest ocean. In March 1942 the Nav...
A Tribute to
Hamilton's Store at West Thumb
West Thumb, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, United States
A general store and gas pump on the shore of Yellowstone Lake, at the place called West Thumb, where the road came down out of the trees and...
A Tribute to
Hamtramck Stadium
1930 - Hamtramck, Michigan, United States
There is a federal record for this ballpark. It contains no photographs. That is not a note about a filing error. It is the story. Hamtram...
A Tribute to
Iowa Girls Six-on-Six Basketball
1920 - 1993 - Des Moines, Iowa, United States
In 1925 the men who ran Iowa high school sports decided to drop girls basketball. Twenty-five superintendents from small towns walked out an...
A Tribute to
Kennecott, Alaska
1909 - November 10, 1938 - Kennecott, Alaska, United States
The last train left Kennecott on the tenth of November 1938, and everyone still there got on it. For twenty-nine years this camp in the Ala...
A Tribute to
Pioneer Day and the Days of '47
July 24, 1849 - Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
The same community has marked the same day for a hundred and seventy-seven years, and the sentence everyone quotes was written down thirty y...
A Tribute to
Rickwood Field
August 18, 1910 - Birmingham, Alabama, United States
The oldest professional ballpark still standing in the United States. It opened on August 18, 1910 — two years before Fenway Park, four year...
A Tribute to
Roosevelt Stadium
1937 - 1985 - Jersey City, New Jersey, United States
The color line in organized baseball did not break in Brooklyn. It broke here, in Jersey City, on April 18, 1946, and almost nobody remember...
A Tribute to
The 1925 Serum Run to Nome
January 27, 1925 - Nome, Alaska, United States
In January 1925 the only doctor in Nome, Alaska sent a telegram out of a town that was frozen in for the winter. The wording survives: "An e...
A Tribute to
The 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps
1896 - 1897 - Missoula, Montana, United States
Twenty Black soldiers rode bicycles from Montana to Missouri in 1897 to find out whether the Army should use bicycles. The Army decided it a...
A Tribute to
The 65th Infantry Regiment
March 2, 1899 - 1956 - San Juan, Puerto Rico
They were decorated, and then they were court-martialled, and the Army admitted almost fifty years later that the two things were connected....
A Tribute to
The Bonus Army
1932 - Washington, District of Columbia, United States
In the summer of 1932 men who had been shot at in France built a town out of scrap lumber and packing crates on the mud flats across the Ana...
A Tribute to
The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
1925 - 1978 - Chicago, Illinois, United States
Passengers called every porter George. In 1926 the company finally put name cards in the cars, and of the twelve thousand porters and waiter...
A Tribute to
The Cherry Mine Disaster
1909 - Cherry, Illinois, United States
Twelve men rode the cage down seven times. Six times they came back with somebody. The seventh time the engineer waited fifteen minutes for ...
A Tribute to
The Children's Blizzard of 1888
January 12, 1888 - Ord, Nebraska, United States
The morning was warm enough that some of them went to school without their coats. The cold air that became the storm formed around 8 Januar...
A Tribute to
The Chinese Workers of the Central Pacific
1864 - 1869 - Promontory Summit, Utah, United States
The Central Pacific kept no record of the deaths of any of its workers. That is not a gap in the archive. That is the archive. Between 1864...
A Tribute to
The Choctaw Gift to Ireland
1847 - Scullyville, Oklahoma, United States
In 1847 a group of Choctaw people in Indian Territory took up a collection for the starving poor of Ireland, a country none of them had seen...
A Tribute to
The Deaf Community of Martha's Vineyard
1694 - 1952 - Chilmark, Massachusetts, United States
On this island, for something like two hundred and fifty years, deaf people were not a category. Hearing people signed too, including when t...
A Tribute to
The Donora Smog of 1948
October 27, 1948 - Donora, Pennsylvania, United States
For five days at the end of October 1948, the air in a mill town in the Monongahela Valley killed twenty people, and the football game went ...
A Tribute to
The Duryea Motor Wagon Company
1895 - 1917 - Springfield, Massachusetts, United States
The first American company to build gasoline automobiles broke up over a proposal to move to Detroit. Charles and Frank Duryea started in S...
A Tribute to
The Elaine Massacre
1919 - Elaine, Arkansas, United States
On the night of 30 September 1919 about a hundred Black farmers met in a church at Hoop Spur, three miles north of Elaine, Arkansas, to talk...
A Tribute to
The Erie Canal
1817 - 1825 - Lockport, New York, United States
It is three hundred and sixty-three miles long, it was dug by hand, and the men who surveyed it were a judge, a mathematics teacher and a tw...
A Tribute to
The Fisk Jubilee Singers
October 6, 1871 - Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Nine students went on the road in 1871 to keep their school from closing. They came back having built it a building. Fisk opened on the nin...
A Tribute to
The Franklin Automobile Company
1902 - April 1934 - Syracuse, New York, United States
For thirty-two years, a factory on Syracuse's west side built cars with no radiator. Franklin's engines were air-cooled — no water, no pump...
A Tribute to
The Ghost Army
1944 - 1945 - Pine Camp, New York, United States
The Army recruited them out of art schools and advertising agencies, gave them inflatable tanks and a set of gramophone records, and sent th...
A Tribute to
The Great Hinckley Fire
September 1, 1894 - Hinckley, Minnesota, United States
The loggers took the trunks and left the branches where they fell. Four years of drought later, the ground itself was kindling. Less than t...
A Tribute to
The Great Molasses Flood
January 15, 1919 - Boston, Massachusetts, United States
The company said anarchists had blown up the tank. The auditor spent years on it and found the tank had simply been built badly. Just after...
A Tribute to
The Great Reunion of 1913
June 29, 1913 - July 4, 1913 - Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, United States
Fifty years after the battle, both armies came back and camped on the same field. The encampment ran from the twenty-ninth of June to the f...
A Tribute to
The Harvey Girls
1883 - Florence, Kansas, United States
Something like a hundred thousand young women worked as Harvey Girls. We went looking for their names. After two full passes through the Kan...
A Tribute to
The Hawks Nest Tunnel
1930 - 1935 - Fayette County, West Virginia, United States
They were told they were digging a tunnel. They were also mining, and nobody told them that. In 1930 Union Carbide, through a subsidiary ca...
A Tribute to
The Hello Girls
1918 - 1979 - United States
They took the Army oath, wore the Army uniform and the Army identity disc, and could be court-martialled under the Army code. When the war e...
A Tribute to
The Homestake Mine
1876 - 2002 - Lead, South Dakota, United States
They dug a mile and a half down for gold. Then somebody filled a tank at the bottom with dry-cleaning fluid and started catching neutrinos f...
A Tribute to
The Homestead Grays
1912 - May 1951 - Homestead, Pennsylvania, United States
Between 1937 and 1948 the Homestead Grays finished first in ten seasons out of twelve. Most people have never heard of them. The team start...
A Tribute to
The Honeymoon Express to Elkton
1913 - 1938 - Elkton, Maryland, United States
For twenty-five years, a town of three thousand people married the whole Northeast. Around 1913 the northern states began requiring couples...
A Tribute to
The Johnstown Flood
May 31, 1889 - Johnstown, Pennsylvania, United States
The club lowered the top of the dam by a couple of feet so that two carriages could pass each other on the road across it. The South Fork D...
A Tribute to
The Little Church of the West
1942 - Las Vegas, Nevada, United States
The oldest building on the Las Vegas Strip is a wedding chapel, and it has been picked up and moved three times to get out of the way of eve...
A Tribute to
The Lowell Mill Girls
1823 - Lowell, Massachusetts, United States
They were farm girls, most of them between fifteen and thirty-five, and they went to Lowell because it was the only place in America where a...
A Tribute to
The Ludlow Tent Colony
1913 - April 20, 1914 - Las Animas County, Colorado, United States
They were living in tents because they had gone on strike, and the houses belonged to the company. The southern Colorado coal strike began ...
A Tribute to
The Marmon Motor Car Company
1902 - 1933 - Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
The first Indianapolis 500 was won by a company engineer driving a car with a mirror bolted to it. Ray Harroun worked for Marmon. In 1911 h...
A Tribute to
The Mercury 13
1960 - 1962 - United States
Thirteen women passed the same medical screening as the Mercury astronauts. It was never a NASA programme, and that turns out to be the whol...
A Tribute to
The Miller Brothers 101 Ranch
1893 - 1932 - Kay County, Oklahoma, United States
The 101 Ranch more or less invented the rodeo by accident, and the best hand on the place had to be billed as an Indian in order to compete....
A Tribute to
The Navajo Code Talkers
May 4, 1942 - 1945 - Fort Wingate, New Mexico, United States
The government had spent forty years punishing Navajo children for speaking Navajo. Then it asked them to win a war with it. Philip Johnsto...
A Tribute to
The Negro Motorist Green Book
1936 - 1966 - New York, New York, United States
The man who published the guide wrote that he was waiting for the day it would not have to exist. Victor Hugo Green was born in Manhattan o...
A Tribute to
The Orphan Trains
1854 - 1929 - New York, New York, United States
Fewer than half of them were orphans. Nobody agrees how many children there were, either. Charles Loring Brace was a Connecticut minister w...
A Tribute to
The Osage Reign of Terror
1918 - 1931 - Pawhuska, Oklahoma, United States
In 1923 the Osage took in more than thirty million dollars from the oil under their own land, and most of them could not spend a dollar of i...
A Tribute to
The Overseas Railroad
1905 - September 2, 1935 - Islamorada, Florida, United States
It took seven years and more than fifty million dollars to build a railroad across the open ocean, and one afternoon to end it. Henry Flagl...
A Tribute to
The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky
1935 - 1943 - Hindman, Kentucky, United States
They were paid twenty-eight dollars a month, and they had to bring their own horse. There had been an attempt before. In 1913 a pack horse ...
A Tribute to
The Pony Express
April 3, 1860 - October 26, 1861 - St. Joseph, Missouri, United States
The Pony Express ran for eighteen months, lost money on every letter it carried, and is remembered better than almost anything else in the A...
A Tribute to
The Radium Girls
1917 - 1938 - Orange, New Jersey, United States
They were told the paint was harmless. Some of them were told to put the brush in their mouths. The United States Radium Corporation ran a ...
A Tribute to
The Sultana
1863 - April 27, 1865 - Memphis, Tennessee, United States
More people died on the Sultana than on the Titanic. Almost nobody has heard of her. Her legal capacity was three hundred and seventy-six p...
A Tribute to
The Thomas B. Jeffery Company
December 6, 1900 - 1916 - Kenosha, Wisconsin, United States
A bicycle man bought a dead bicycle factory in Kenosha, and cars were built on that ground for the next eighty-six years. Thomas B. Jeffery...
A Tribute to
The Thomas Flyer
1900 - 1919 - Buffalo, New York, United States
In February 1908 six cars left Times Square to drive around the world. Three of them finished, and the one that won was built in Buffalo. T...
A Tribute to
The Tuskegee Study
1932 - 1972 - Tuskegee, Alabama, United States
Almost everything most people believe about this study is wrong in one specific way, and the correction belongs at the top rather than burie...
A Tribute to
The United States Camel Corps
1855 - 1866 - Quartzsite, Arizona, United States
In 1855 the United States Congress appropriated thirty thousand dollars to buy camels, and for about ten years the United States Army had a ...
A Tribute to
The United States Life-Saving Service
August 14, 1848 - January 28, 1915 - United States
The regulations told them to launch. They did not say anything about getting back. The United States Life-Saving Service ran more than two ...
A Tribute to
The Whiskey Rebellion
1791 - 1794 - Washington County, Pennsylvania, United States
The first tax the United States ever laid on a domestic product was a tax on whiskey, and within three years it had seven thousand armed men...
A Tribute to
The Winecoff Hotel Fire
December 7, 1946 - Atlanta, Georgia, United States
The hotel stationery said absolutely fireproof. It meant the building would survive. Nobody had promised anything about the people inside it...
A Tribute to
The Winton Motor Carriage Company
March 15, 1897 - February 11, 1924 - Cleveland, Ohio, United States
In 1903 a doctor bought a used car on a fifty-dollar bet and drove it from San Francisco to New York, because nobody had done it yet. Horat...
A Tribute to
USS Mason (DE-529)
March 20, 1944 - October 12, 1945 - Boston, Massachusetts, United States
A destroyer escort, commissioned at the Boston Navy Yard on March 20, 1944, with a crew of about two hundred and four men — roughly a hundre...
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