Virginia began marking its highways in 1927, the first statewide program of its kind in the country, and the program continues today under the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Every mapped marker in the program's database now has a permanent page at TreeAlive, placing its current text on georeferenced maps from the period it commemorates. The Department updates and replaces markers every year; each page shows the year its text was approved, from the signature line cast on the sign.
2,687Marker pages
82,000+Historical map sheets
Virginia Department of Historic ResourcesCredited on every page
Every dot is a live page. Click one to preview it or add it to a road trip; many dots hold several markers each; click a busy spot to zoom in. Prefer a list? Browse all 2,687 markers by county.
TreeAlive maps family trees. When a visitor's ancestors lived in Virginia, the markers standing near those places surface automatically alongside their family's journey:
Shadwell, Birthplace of Thomas Jefferson · near where a family lived in Albemarle County in the 1700s · Peter Jefferson began acquiring land in this frontier region in the mid-1730s, and Thomas Jefferson was born near this site in 1743
When a marker stands near a place in your own tree, you have a personal reason to go see it. Open the live demo tree, choose the Crossings tab, and turn on Historical Markers to see the experience working (the demo family’s markers are in Pennsylvania; a Virginia family sees Virginia’s).
Browsing all 2,687 markers by county.
Scan: Patrick Henry's Birthplace marker