The Archive
Browse Every Story
Every tribute page on MyHistoryStone, whether it remembers a person, a place, or a thing. 106 in all, and growing.
People & Pets
Lives remembered, and the companions who shared them.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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...
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
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 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
Tyler Manor
July 1889
Stay Gold Ponyboy
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
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 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...
The Story of
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 ...
The Story of
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...
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