Buck Foster Cemetery
Bedias, Walker County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Buck Foster Cemetery, also known as Foster or Loma Cemetery, is located about twelve miles west of Huntsville in the eastern part of the Loma Community. The cemetery was officially created when William Harrison “Buck” Foster (1835-1908) sold 100 acres of land in 1882 to W.L. Sandel reserving one acre for a cemetery. However, prior to the sale, this land was used as a burial ground for people in the surrounding community as evidenced by the eroded sandstone markers in the northwest section of the cemetery. With hundreds of burials, the Buck Foster Cemetery served nearby rural communities of Loma, Gladstone and New Hope. One of the earliest marked graves is that of Nancy (Gibson) McCulloch Heath (1817-1875), one-half Choctaw and one-half German. Nancy came to Texas from Illinois in 1845 with her husband, Samuel David McCulloch, and two children. According to county history, David died in 1848 and was buried here, but the exact location is lost to time. Nancy married her neighbor, William Heath (1821-1882) and they had seven sons. The oldest marked tombstone in Buck Foster Cemetery marks the grave of William McCulloch (1846-1870), Nancy and David’s son. Many of Nancy’s descendants are buried here. Gravestone materials include sandstone, concrete, granite, marble and steel, and are adorned with a variety of symbols such as masonic and eastern star symbols, religious symbols, and images of ranching, farming, sports and music. Many military veterans dating from the Civil War are buried here. This historic cemetery is a testament to the pioneering men and women in southwestern Walker County.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Buck Foster Cemetery took its name from William Harrison "Buck" Foster, who reserved an acre for burials when he sold his land in 1882 — though eroded sandstone markers show the ground served the Loma community even earlier. Among its hundreds of graves lies Nancy McCulloch Heath, of Choctaw and German descent, who came to Texas in 1845, alongside Civil War veterans and generations of her descendants. Its weathered stones, carved with Masonic, religious, and ranching symbols, form a folk record of southwestern Walker County.
Why it matters
The cemetery preserves the intertwined Native, immigrant, and pioneer roots of rural Texas settlement across the 19th century.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Southwestern Walker County, in the rolling country west of Huntsville, was settled in the middle decades of the 19th century by farming and ranching families drawn to East Texas. The rural neighborhoods that grew up here — Loma, Gladstone, New Hope — were the kind of small, tight-knit communities that anchored frontier Texas: a church, a school, scattered farmsteads, and a burial ground shared by all.
The marker's two named eras — the Early Republic and the later Reconstruction and Gilded Age — bracket a long stretch of change. Families arrived when Texas was young and land was cheap, weathered the Civil War, and carried on into the decades of railroads and expanding towns that followed. A community cemetery in continuous use across that whole span becomes, in effect, a written record of everyone who passed through.
Ground like this often served the dead before anyone thought to formalize it. The eroded sandstone markers in the cemetery's northwest section are evidence that people were being buried here well before any deed set an acre aside — a common frontier pattern, where a convenient rise of ground became a resting place by custom long before it became one by law.
People & events
The cemetery takes its name from William Harrison "Buck" Foster (1835–1908), who in 1882 sold 100 acres to W.L. Sandel but reserved one acre for a cemetery — the moment the old burial ground became an official one. But the weathered stones predate that transaction, so Buck Foster is less the founder than the man who gave lasting form to something the community had already been doing.
Among the earliest marked graves is that of Nancy (Gibson) McCulloch Heath (1817–1875), described as one-half Choctaw and one-half German — a single life that gathers together several of the peoples who made rural Texas. She came from Illinois in 1845 with her first husband, Samuel David McCulloch, and two children. According to county history, David died in 1848 and was buried here, though the exact spot is now lost. Nancy later married a neighbor, William Heath, and raised seven sons.
The oldest legible tombstone belongs to William McCulloch (1846–1870), Nancy and David's son — a marker that has outlasted its own generation's memory. Many of Nancy's descendants lie nearby, so the cemetery is in part the long family record of one Choctaw-German woman's line. Around them rest Civil War veterans and the farming and ranching families of the surrounding communities, their stones carved with Masonic and Eastern Star emblems, religious symbols, and images of ranching, farming, sports, and music.
Its place in the American story
A country cemetery like this is a folk archive of how America actually filled in. The textbook story of westward settlement can flatten into a single kind of pioneer; a burial ground corrects that. Here, in one acre, are Native and immigrant and Anglo roots braided together — a woman of Choctaw and German descent, families from the older states, veterans of the nation's most divisive war — the real, mixed population of the 19th-century frontier.
Nancy McCulloch Heath's presence is especially telling. The Choctaw were among the peoples forced west in the era of Indian Removal, and Native heritage runs quietly through countless American communities in ways the official record rarely captures. That the earliest marked graves here include hers is a reminder that the "pioneers" and the continent's first peoples were never separate stories but often, as in her own family, the very same one.
The symbols carved on the stones — Masonic squares, Eastern Star emblems, and scenes of farm and ranch life — speak to the fraternal lodges and working lives that knit rural America together. Read across hundreds of graves, they form a portrait of a whole community's values, memberships, and daily labor, the kind of grassroots history that no single document preserves.
If you visit
Walk first to the northwest section, where the oldest sandstone markers are worn nearly smooth. These are the earliest burials, the ones that predate the 1882 deed, and they set the tone: this is a place where the earliest chapters have to be read in texture and shadow as much as in words.
Then look closely at the carvings elsewhere in the grounds. Cemeteries are open-air galleries of folk art, and here the range is unusually rich — Masonic and Eastern Star symbols, religious motifs, and personal images of ranching, farming, sports, and music that tell you what mattered to the people beneath them. The variety of materials, from sandstone and concrete to granite, marble, and steel, tracks the passage of decades all by itself.
Set about twelve miles west of Huntsville in the old Loma community, this is a quiet rural stop rather than a marquee attraction — which is exactly its appeal. Give it the unhurried attention a place of hundreds of burials deserves, and it becomes a moving reminder of just how many different lives went into settling one corner of Texas.
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
- · William Harrison "Buck" Foster
- · Nancy Gibson McCulloch Heath
- · William McCulloch
Themes & tags
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