Texas, Taylor County, Abilene
![]()
Established as a U.S. Army training camp in 1940, Camp Barkeley (whose main entrance was about seven miles south of this site) became one of the nation’s largest World War II military training bases. The 12th Armored Division, activated at Camp Campbell, Kentucky, in September 1942, was assigned to Camp Barkeley in November 1943.
By April 1944 the manpower of the division was at peak strength with combat commands, three battalions each of tanks, armored infantry, and armored field artillery, and numerous support units. Intensive day and night training at the camp culminated in tests that qualified the division for combat. Camp Barkeley’s population was more than twice that of the city of Abilene. Soldiers’ families became a part of the community and many returned here to live.
The last combat division stationed at Camp Barkeley, the 12th Armored shipped out to Europe in September 1944. The division, nicknamed “Hellcats” and dubbed “The Mystery Division” in Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.’s historic drive to the Rhine River, served with distinction, receiving more than 800 battle decorations. A dominating presence in Abilene during the war, Camp Barkeley was deactivated on April 1, 1945.
(Forts, Castles • War, World II) Includes location, directions, 4 photos, GPS coordinates, map.
Established as a U.S. Army training camp in 1940, Camp Barkeley (whose main entrance was about seven miles south of this site) became one of the nation’s largest World War II military training bases. The 12th Armored Division, activated at Camp Campbell, Kentucky, in September 1942, was assigned to Camp Barkeley in November 1943.By April 1944 the manpower of the division was at peak strength with combat commands, three battalions each of tanks, armored infantry, and armored field artillery, and numerous support units. Intensive day and night training at the camp culminated in tests that qualified the division for combat. Camp Barkeley’s population was more than twice that of the city of Abilene. Soldiers’ families became a part of the community and many returned here to live.
The last combat division stationed at Camp Barkeley, the 12th Armored shipped out to Europe in September 1944. The division, nicknamed “Hellcats” and dubbed “The Mystery Division” in Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.’s historic drive to the Rhine River, served with distinction, receiving more than 800 battle decorations. A dominating presence in Abilene during the war, Camp Barkeley was deactivated on April 1, 1945.
(Forts, Castles • War, World II) Includes location, directions, 4 photos, GPS coordinates, map.
Dedicated to the memory of all men of the 12th Armored Division in World War II. Camp Barkeley, 1943-44.
This place, five miles northeast, has been owned by the Harrison family for two centuries. John Martin patented the land in 1617; Nathaniel Harrison bought it in 1720. The present house was built about 1770. The British General Phillips landed at Brandon, May 7, 1781. A mile farther is Upper Brandon.
On 23 November 1811 William Carsley sold an acre of land here to trustees of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The first Methodist church built in Surry County was constructed here soon thereafter. During the 19th century it was replaced by a second plain structure, which like the first faced the "rolling road" to the south. In 1897 the present sanctuary was built. Ramey's Store, constructed across the road soon after the Civil War, was moved to its present location in 1990 to function as the fellowship hall. Carsley United Methodist Church serves the oldest continuously active congregation in Surry County.
Jerusalem Baptist Church was organized as Mt. Joy Baptist Church in 1867 at the nearby home of Mondoza Bailey, community leader and carpenter. Amelia “Mother” Howard assisted in the organization of this and six other churches. Sent by the United States Freedmen's Bureau, Howard, a teacher from Pennsylvania, helped to establish African American schools and churches in the region. Bailey led church members in the construction of a wooden building. Nancy Ellis James, born a free African American woman, and her family provided the land here for the church. The current brick structure was built in 1993.
On 12 Oct. 1892, Dr. John Jefferson Smallwood, born enslaved in 1863 in Rich Square, North Carolina, founded the Temperance Industrial & Collegiate Institute nearby with fewer than ten students. Sprawled over sixty-five acres on the James River in Claremont, his school provided a high level of education for African American boys and girls from Virginia and other states. After Smallwood’s untimely death on 29 Sept. 1912, his school underwent several mergers and name changes. By the time the school closed in 1928, more than two thousand students had attended.
Opened in 1906 as part of the Memphis Park and Parkway System, Confederate Park commemorates the Battle of Memphis. When Confederate forces retreated to Mississippi after the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, unfortified Memphis became vulnerable to attack. From these bluffs and those at what is now Chickasaw Park, on June 6, 1892, thousands of civilians watched the naval battle on the Mississippi River below. Within 90 minutes, the Union fleet defeated the Confederates, Medical Cadet Charles R. Ellet and as small party entered the city and raised the U.S. flag over the post office. The Federals held Memphis for the rest of the war.
Atop these bluffs in the early morning hours of June 6, 1862, the citizens of Memphis gathered in exited anticipation as the Confederate River Defense Fleet steamed out into the Mississippi to meet the descending Union Gunboat Fleet. The “cotton-clad” Confederate fleet, under the command of Captain James E. Montgomery, was comprised of 8 converted wooden paddlewheel steamboats (Little Rebel, Colonel Lovell, Sumter, General Price, General Beauregard, General M. Jeff Thompson, General Bragg, and General Van Dorn), and was armed with a total of 18 cannon and protected by ‘armor’ of cotton bales and oak planking. The Union fleet (Carondelet, Benton, Cairo, Cincinnati, Louisville, Mound City, Pittsburg, and St. Louis), commanded by Commodore Charles Henry Davis, carried 79 cannon and was clad with iron plating. These ships were followed by nine new unarmed “Ellet” rams.
Oldest public cemetery in Taylor County; used by residents of Buffalo Gap even before the earliest known headstones were erected about 1877.
When George Edgar Merrick (1886-1942) designed his idealistic City of Coral Gables in the early 1920s, he created a special area for scouts and built a rustic log cabin for his Troop 7 boy scouts on this site. Today, only the chimney remains. After the hurricane of 1926, Merrick's Coral Gables Construction Company built this Troop 7 scout cabin largely from pine trees and telephone poles. Merrick deeded these two acres of land, now in the middle of the Granada Golf Course, to the scouts in perpetuity. Their first scoutmaster was Albert H. Bartle. As scoutmaster for the first three years, then a committee member, Mr. Bartle served Troop 7 for 16 years until 1938, setting the standard for excellence and longevity for others to follow. The old Troop 7 log cabin burned down on March 30, 1971, leaving only the chimney. The new building , finished in 1976, was dedicated to Scoutmaster Rex Hawkins, who kept the troop alive during the difficult WWII years when many adult leaders were away. The George Merrick Foundation continues to maintain the property with help from the City of Coral Gables, the Kiwanis Club of Coral Gables and concerned citizens who appreciate the legacy of George Merrick's scouting program.
In 2007, archaeologists completed investigations discovering a pre-Contact village occupied sometime between A.D. 1400-1600. Evidence of longhouses, and cooking and food processing, provide clues about the villagers' lives. Thousands of artifacts, including fragments of decorated pottery jars and smoking pipes, testify to their artistic skills. The remains of maize (corn) and bone from fish, frog, turtle, birds and mammals, ranging in size from squirrel to black bear, recovered from hearths and storage pits reveal the wide variety in the villagers' diet.
(Continued on other side)
Based on the decorative styles on the clay jars and pipes, and the village's layout, this site appears to have been inhabited by Native Americans with close ties to St. Lawrence Iroquoians, people whose main area of settlement was along the St. Lawrence River. The archaeological studies were conducted by the University of Vermont Consulting Archaeology Program with funding from the VT Agency of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration.
This is the once and future site of the cathedral church of the Diocese of Madison. Saint Raphael, the first Catholic parish in Madison, laid the cornerstone for its second church here in 1854. It was built of native stone and faced Main Street. That church was raised to the dignity of a cathedral when the Diocese of Madison was created in 1946, and destroyed by arson in 2005.
General, Congressman and later Sec. of War, lived here until his home was destroyed by the British at the burning of Buffalo 1813.
Randolph was settled in the early 1800's and became a large river port. Rev. Samuel R. Davidson was appointed the first pastor by the Tennessee Conference in 1834. A congregation formed and built a church. During the Civil War the town was burned. The second church was built in 1883 on this bluff. The present building was erected in 1953 and remodeled in 1975. Bishop William C. Martin who served as President of the Methodist Council of Bishops, grew up in this church. Seventy-eight pastors have led this congregation. Together they have built on Eph. 2:20, "Jesus Christ himself being the cornerstone."
During the fall of 1863, when a Federal signal station functioned at Signal Point, the draft stock troops in this area was kept in two corrals about four miles northeast. This road crosses the site of one corral, the other was northwest of it, in the Flipper Bend area of North Chickamauga Creek.
Land Fever 
Kentucky Primeval 
In 1865-66 Edison was military telegraph operator with the Federal occupation army, working in a building formerly at the east corner of North Court and November 6 Streets, and boarding next door. Trying to invent an auto-repeat key, he managed to connect New Orleans with New York directly for the first time after the war. As a result, he was discharged by a jealous superior, and he left Memphis.
Originally named Coates for early settler Kem Coates, Cedar Gap community formed in the late 19th century. Coates, on whose land the post office was later located, arrived in the 1870s, and by the early 1880s, a number of families from Robertson County settled here. Residents soon organized Cedar Gap Baptist Church, which remained in existence until the 1970s. The Rev. G.C. Scott served as the first pastor.
