Beeson-Box Cemetery
Houston County, Houston County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Harston Wilson Beeson, one of Houston County's first settlers (1840), bought land in this area from his neighbor, John Box, in 1852. The Cemetery was established on Beeson land about 3/4 of a mile east of this site with the burial of Box's son, William R. (b. 1827) in 1852. The 2-acre graveyard was officially set aside in wills executed by Beeson in 1878 and his son, George W., in 1915. Three Box Brothers (all veterans of the Battle of San Jacinto) and Civil War veterans Harston Beeson and his son, Argyle, are interred here. Beeson descendants maintain their family burial ground.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the years after Texas won its independence, families like the Beesons and Boxes carved farms out of the East Texas woods, and their private burial grounds became the enduring record of that first generation. Established in 1852 with the burial of William R. Box, this family graveyard gathers together settlers who arrived in the early 1840s, three brothers who fought at the Battle of San Jacinto, and Confederate soldiers of the next generation. The Beeson descendants who still tend the plot keep an unbroken line of memory stretching back to Houston County's founding families.
Why it matters
Family cemeteries like this one are the ground-level archive of the American frontier, preserving the names of the ordinary settlers and soldiers who built a new state one homestead at a time.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Harston Wilson Beeson
- · John Box
- · William R. Box
- · Argyle Beeson
Related events
- · Battle of San Jacinto
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
John T. Smith
Crockett, TX
New York-born John Titus Smith came to Texas from Georgia in 1849 and settled on a cotton plantation at McKenzie's Bend on the Trinity River, where he operated the steamboat Ida Reese. He served as chief justice of Houston County in the 1850s and later in the state legislature, and fought in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. He and his wife Elizabeth raised a large family before his death in 1874.
Rockland Cemetery, Church and School
Lovelady vicinity, TX
Benjamin Thomas Ellis, born in Alabama in 1825, came to Texas as a boy and by mid-century was farming the land around this site, where his family began burying its dead. Two of the men laid here—John Milliken and Ellis himself—served in the Texas militia during the Confederacy. In 1890 the family deeded the ground to a new Rockland Church, and by 1892 a combined church and school stood before the cemetery, serving as a community center until the school consolidated with Lovelady in the 1940s.
Old Shady Grove Cemetery
Kennard, TX
John Hallmark, a signer of the 1837 petition that called Houston County into being, died just three years after reaching Texas and was buried by his wife on land the family occupied but did not own. His son George, also a signer, lies here too, along with six Confederate veterans and Shadrack 'Shade' Carlton, killed in action in France in August 1918. Long lost to the public in its remote woods, the cemetery is now recorded and cared for by descendants and volunteers.
Homesite of Samuel Cartmill Hiroms
Austinio, TX
Samuel Cartmill Hiroms was born in 1836 to parents among Stephen F. Austin's 'Old Three Hundred,' the first Anglo-American colonists of Mexican Texas. A schoolteacher and county surveyor, he served in the Confederate Army before moving his family to Houston County and settling the Creek community — later Austinio — in 1878, where he received land for his teaching and helped lead the local Methodist church.