Charles Howard Roan

The destroyer named for him had a long career of its own. Built at Bethlehem Steel's Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, she was launched on March 15, 1946, with his mother as sponsor, and commissioned that September. A 1950 collision with USS Brownson killed five of her crew. In 1959 she sailed with the first naval force to pass through the Saint Lawrence Seaway into the Great Lakes, and in 1967 she helped escort the damaged USS Liberty to Malta. Transferred to Turkey in 1973 as TCG Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak, she was scrapped in 1994.

What the plaque says

Charles Howard Roan (August 16, 1923 - September 18, 1944) Claude native Charles H. Roan volunteered for World War II service in the U.S. Marine Corps in December 1942. On active duty in the Pacific, he was killed in battle on Peleliu Island when he threw himself on a Japanese grenade, thereby saving the lives of four fellow Marines. For his heroic action he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The medal was presented to his mother, Armstrong County Treasurer Lillabel Roan, in ceremonies here at the courthouse in July 1945. A U.S. Navy destroyer built in 1946 was christened the USS Charles H. Roan DD-853. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Gem Theatre — steps away
  Claude's small-town movie house of 1915, restored by the Armstrong County Museum and remembered for the scene in Hud where Homer and Lonnie Bannon sing along to Clementine.
• Charles and Mary Ann Goodnight Ranch State Historic Site — 11 mi
  The two-story house the Goodnights moved into on December 27, 1887, after leaving the JA, with a porch that looks over bison descended from the calves Mary Ann saved.
• Carson County Square House Museum — 16 mi
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.
• Lighthouse Trail — 21 mi
  The park's most walked trail, 2.8 miles each way across the canyon floor to the Lighthouse, a hoodoo of Triassic sandstone balanced on a pedestal of softer red shale.

More markers nearby

• Great Panhandle Indian Scare of 1891 — steps away
• Boy Scout Troop No. 17 — steps away
• Town of Claude — steps away
• Route of Coronado Expedition — steps away