Brushy Cemetery
Leon County, Leon County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The family of George Washington and Elizabeth Yarborough, originally from South Carolina, came to Texas from Alabama in the 1850s and settled in eastern Leon County. Their five sons served the Confederate cause during the Civil War. Two of them, Wade Hamption (1834-1905) and William Burns (1840-1913) Yarborough, moved to the Brushy area and purchased 186 acres here in 1883. William worked the land to pay it off while Wade was forced to move away for a time due to illness. Wade did set aside three acres for a church and cemetery and returned to minister to the Primitive Baptist Congregation in a one-room sanctuary that also served as a school. The church building was lost to a fire in the 1920s.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Yarborough family left South Carolina by way of Alabama and settled in eastern Leon County in the 1850s, and their five sons all served the Confederacy during the Civil War. Two brothers, Wade Hampton and William Burns Yarborough, bought 186 acres in the Brushy area in 1883, where Wade set aside three acres for a Primitive Baptist church and cemetery that doubled as a one-room school. Fire claimed the sanctuary in the 1920s, but the burial ground endured.
Why it matters
The marker traces a Southern family's migration west and their absorption into the Confederate cause, a pattern repeated across countless Texas frontier communities.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The land that became Brushy Cemetery sits in eastern Leon County, in the pineywoods-and-prairie country of East Texas where the Old South met the frontier. When the Yarborough family arrived in the 1850s, Texas was barely a decade into statehood and still filling up with settlers moving west out of the older Southern states. Families like theirs — South Carolinians who had already paused a generation in Alabama — were part of a broad tide of cotton-country migration that carried Southern ways, Southern crops, and Southern loyalties into the new state.
That first decade in Leon County was one of clearing, planting, and putting down roots. Then came the war. When the fighting ended in 1865, this corner of Texas entered the long, unsettled years of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age that followed — a time of rebuilding shattered fortunes, working out debts, and knitting scattered rural families back into communities.
It was into that postwar landscape that the Yarborough brothers made their real mark here, decades after they first came to Texas. The purchase of land, the setting aside of ground for a church, the gathering of a small congregation — these were the quiet acts of recovery and community-building that defined rural Texas in the generation after the Confederacy's collapse.
People & events
The story begins with George Washington and Elizabeth Yarborough, who brought their family from Alabama — and originally from South Carolina — to eastern Leon County in the 1850s. They had five sons, and when the Civil War came, all five served the Confederate cause. That single fact tells you a great deal about how completely a Southern family of that era could be swept into the conflict: not one son held back, but the whole rising generation went to war.
Two of those sons carry the rest of the story. Wade Hampton Yarborough (1834–1905) and William Burns Yarborough (1840–1913) settled in the Brushy area and in 1883 bought 186 acres of land here. The brothers divided the labor of ownership between them in a way that speaks to hard circumstance: William stayed and worked the land to pay off the purchase, while Wade, struck by illness, was forced to move away for a time.
But Wade returned, and it is his generosity that the ground remembers. He set aside three acres for a church and cemetery and came back to minister to a Primitive Baptist congregation, preaching in a one-room sanctuary that doubled as a schoolhouse — a single humble building serving a rural community's need for both worship and learning. That sanctuary was lost to fire in the 1920s, but the burial ground the brothers established endured.
Its place in the American story
Brushy Cemetery is a small window onto one of the largest population movements in nineteenth-century America: the steady westward migration of Southern families out of the Atlantic seaboard states, through the Deep South, and on into Texas. The Yarboroughs' path — South Carolina to Alabama to Texas across the span of a generation — was walked by hundreds of thousands, and it reshaped the map of the American South.
The marker also records how thoroughly the Civil War reached into ordinary families far from the famous battlefields. Five brothers from one household serving the Confederacy is a reminder that the war was not fought only by armies in Virginia and Tennessee; it drew its soldiers from remote farming settlements across the whole Confederacy, Texas included.
And in the one-room building that served as both church and school, you can see the pattern by which rural America built its institutions from the ground up. Across the postwar South and West, small communities pooled a few acres and a single structure to meet their deepest needs at once — faith, education, and finally a place to lay their dead. Brushy is one modest, particular example of that near-universal American story.
If you visit
Come to Brushy Cemetery expecting quiet. This is a rural burial ground in eastern Leon County, well off the beaten path, and the reward is exactly that sense of stillness and of standing in a place shaped by one family's long labor.
The sanctuary itself is gone — lost to fire in the 1920s — so let your imagination rebuild it. Picture a single plain room on these three acres, filled on Sunday with a Primitive Baptist congregation and on weekdays with children at their lessons. Walk the grounds and read the names on the stones; this is where the Yarboroughs and their neighbors are gathered.
If you're threading together a day of small historic sites across Leon County's back roads, Brushy makes a fitting stop — the kind of place that rewards travelers willing to slow down. Treat it with the respect any active cemetery deserves: tread lightly, leave the markers as you find them, and let the land tell its story.
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
- · Wade Hampton Yarborough
- · William Burns Yarborough
- · George Washington Yarborough
Related events
- · Civil War
Themes & tags
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