Bluewater Cemetery
Polk County, Polk County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The woods of Polk County provided refuge and a new home for many families from Mississippi following the Civil War. They supported the Union during the war but sought to avoid the post-Reconstruction attitudes of their neighbors. The Collins and the Knight families were among these new residents. Soon, both the Knight community and the Bluewater community would develop as families moved in during the close of the 19th century. Many of these founders of the community and war veterans would be buried in Bluewater cemetery, established in 1898. That same year, the Missionary Baptist Church of Bluewater was first organized, with local landowner E. P. Dowden as one of the first members. He went on to donate a parcel of land to the county for the construction of a school in 1907. The first known burial here was of Thomas Jefferson Collins, among the first Mississippians to settle here. Much of his family and descendants would be buried here. There are more than 600 burials, with dozens of veteran headstones. More than 200 are engraved double headstones. Some have homemade concrete borders, others are handmade in full concrete. Prominent cedar trees mark some of the older graves. The front gate is black cast iron, and the fences are chain link. A small wood frame building sits on the corner of the property. Some say that it is the old church building but records cannot fully support the claim. The cemetery still stands as a reminder of the many hardships and sacrifices of our ancestors and their proud descendants who continue to maintain the cemetery.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
After the Civil War, families who had supported the Union — among them the Collins and Knight households — left Mississippi for the pineywoods of Polk County to escape hostile Reconstruction-era neighbors. Their settlements gave rise to the Bluewater community, whose cemetery was established in 1898, the same year a Missionary Baptist church organized nearby. More than 600 graves rest here, many marked by handmade concrete stones and shaded by old cedar trees.
Why it matters
Bluewater preserves the little-told story of Southern Unionists who migrated to escape post-war reprisals, showing how the Civil War reshaped where and how Americans chose to build new communities.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The pineywoods of Polk County, in deep East Texas, were exactly the kind of country where people could disappear into the trees and start over. In the years after the Civil War, that quality mattered enormously, because the war did not end cleanly for everyone.
Reconstruction reshaped the South not only through law and politics but through the everyday tensions between neighbors. Families who had taken unpopular positions during the war often found the postwar years hostile, and some chose to leave the places they had known for somewhere they could live in peace.
That is the current that carried new families into these woods at the close of the nineteenth century. The forest offered refuge and a new home, and out of that migration grew small communities like Bluewater, whose cemetery, established in 1898, still stands as a record of who came and why.
People & events
According to the marker, many of these families came from Mississippi after the Civil War. They had supported the Union during the war and sought to avoid the post-Reconstruction attitudes of their neighbors, and so they moved west into Polk County. The Collins and the Knight families were among these new residents, and their arrival seeded both the Knight community and the Bluewater community as more families settled in.
The first known burial here was that of Thomas Jefferson Collins, one of the first Mississippians to settle in the area, and much of his family and many of his descendants would be laid to rest in the same ground. The year 1898 was a founding moment in more ways than one: the same year the cemetery was established, the Missionary Baptist Church of Bluewater was first organized, with local landowner E. P. Dowden among its first members. Dowden later donated a parcel of land to the county for a school, built in 1907.
The cemetery grew into a community of memory. It holds more than 600 burials, with dozens of veteran headstones and more than 200 engraved double headstones. Some graves have homemade concrete borders, others are handmade in full concrete, and prominent cedar trees mark some of the older ones. A small wood-frame building stands on the corner of the property, and while some say it is the old church building, the marker is careful to note that records cannot fully support that claim.
Its place in the American story
The story told here complicates the neat picture many Americans carry of the Civil War, in which the South was uniformly Confederate. It was not. There were Southerners who supported the Union, and in the war's aftermath some of them found their home communities unwelcoming enough that they chose to move away. Bluewater preserves that less-told chapter.
That makes this a quietly important site. It shows how the war reshaped not only the map of politics but the map of settlement, sending families across state lines to build new lives where their wartime loyalties would not follow them. The migration from Mississippi into the Texas pineywoods is a small, human-scale example of a national reshuffling.
The cemetery itself, with its handmade concrete markers and its dozens of veteran headstones, is a democratic kind of monument. It records ordinary people who endured hardship and sacrifice, and it survives because their descendants keep maintaining it, a form of memory-keeping that plays out in thousands of rural cemeteries across the country.
If you visit
Bluewater rewards the visitor who slows down. This is a working community cemetery deep in the woods, not a polished landmark, and its character lives in the details of the stones themselves.
Look closely at the markers. More than 200 engraved double headstones stand here, along with graves ringed by homemade concrete borders and others shaped entirely by hand in concrete. The old cedar trees mark some of the earliest graves, and the veteran headstones testify to the community's founders and their service. Notice the front gate of black cast iron and the small wood-frame building on the corner, but remember the marker's own honesty: it may be the old church, or it may not, and the records simply cannot say.
If your road trip takes you through the Polk County pineywoods, this is a moving place to pause and reflect on the people who came here seeking peace. Walk quietly, respect the graves, and appreciate that the cemetery still stands because generations of proud descendants have chosen to care for it.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Thomas Jefferson Collins
- · E.P. Dowden
Themes & tags
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