Campground Cemetery
Jasper, Jasper County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Adam Byerly immigrated to Texas from South Carolina in 1834. The next year, he received a Mexican land grant located on Sandy Creek in Jasper County. This area was frequently used as a meeting place for the Methodist Episcopal Church and was known as “Methodist Campground” or “Byerly Campground.” In 1843, Byerly sold ten acres to the church. A building was soon erected and a cemetery established by 1858. To the south of this cemetery was a cemetery for African American residents, known as “Campground Cemetery.” The date of the first burial is unknown due to the loss of records and early headstones but was most likely in the late 1800s. For many years, the cemetery was unfenced which allowed livestock to roam freely, damaging headstones and burial sites. The earliest marked grave in the cemetery is that of Tom Limbrick (1827-1908). In 1960, family members of those buried here formed a cemetery association to care for the burial ground and a fence was erected. Many former slaves, community leaders and veterans are buried in the cemetery. The African American Community Church one mile north of the cemetery, Armstrong C.M.E. Church, has close ties with the cemetery association and allows them to hold committee meetings at the church. For this reason, the cemetery is sometimes referred to as “Armstrong Campground Cemetery.” This historic site and cemetery are important reminders of early African American development in the area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the perseverance they inspire.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Adam Byerly came to Texas from South Carolina in 1834 and received a Mexican land grant on Sandy Creek, where the site became a Methodist camp meeting ground known as Byerly Campground. Byerly sold ten acres to the church in 1843, and a cemetery for the area's African American residents took shape to the south. Its earliest marked grave is that of Tom Limbrick (1827–1908), and many former slaves, community leaders, and veterans rest here. Ties with nearby Armstrong C.M.E. Church give the site its alternate name, Armstrong Campground Cemetery.
Why it matters
This burial ground preserves the story of an African American community's growth from slavery through freedom in East Texas, and the churches and institutions its members built.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1830s, the pine forests of what would become Jasper County were a frontier at the edge of a young and shifting world. Texas was still Mexican territory, and newcomers arrived under land grants meant to draw settlers into the region's rich bottomlands and towering timber. This was the East Texas Piney Woods, a country of sandy creeks, camp meetings, and small farming communities carved out of the forest.
When Adam Byerly came from South Carolina in 1834 and received his grant on Sandy Creek the following year, he was part of that first wave of Anglo-American settlement. Places like his soon became gathering points, and the Methodist camp meeting — an open-air revival that could last for days — was one of the great social and spiritual institutions of the rural South.
But the community that grew here was never only the story of the landowners. Alongside them, and doing much of the labor that cleared and worked this land, were African American residents, first enslaved and later free. The ground just south of the church cemetery became theirs, and its history runs straight through the most transformative decades in Southern life: slavery, emancipation, and the long, hard work of building free communities afterward.
People & events
The site begins with Adam Byerly, the South Carolina immigrant whose 1835 grant on Sandy Creek anchored everything that followed. In 1843 he sold ten acres to the Methodist Episcopal Church, and within a generation a building stood and a cemetery had been established. To its south lay a separate burial ground for the area's African American residents — the place we now know as Campground Cemetery.
So much of that early story has been lost to time. Records vanished and the oldest headstones disappeared, so no one can name the first person laid to rest here; it was most likely sometime in the late 1800s. The earliest grave still marked belongs to Tom Limbrick, who lived from 1827 to 1908 — a lifespan that reaches back into the years of slavery and forward into a new century of freedom.
For a long time the cemetery stood unfenced, and livestock wandered through it, breaking headstones and disturbing graves. That neglect ended in 1960, when descendants of those buried here formed a cemetery association and put up a fence at last. Their work tied the ground closely to nearby Armstrong C.M.E. Church, a mile to the north, which hosts the association's meetings — and gave the place its second name, Armstrong Campground Cemetery.
Its place in the American story
The people resting here lived through the single greatest upheaval in American history: the end of slavery. Buried among them are former slaves, community leaders, and veterans — the founding generation of a free African American community and the ones who followed and sustained it.
After emancipation, one of the first things freedpeople across the South built for themselves was the church, and with it the cemetery, the school, and the mutual-aid society. The C.M.E. Church, formed in the years just after the Civil War, was part of that movement toward institutions African Americans owned and governed on their own terms. A church a mile up the road caring for a burial ground its neighbors could not always protect is that story in miniature.
That 1960 cemetery association matters, too. Fencing a graveyard sounds like a small thing, but it was an act of reclamation — descendants insisting that the people who cleared this land and built this community would not be forgotten or trampled. Multiply that determination across thousands of similar sites, and you have one of the quiet, essential threads of the American story.
If you visit
Come to this corner of Jasper County expecting quiet. This is Piney Woods country, and a place like this rewards slowing down and listening — to the wind in the tall trees, to the stillness of a well-tended country cemetery.
Look for Tom Limbrick's marker, the oldest one that survives, and let the dates on it do their work: a man born in 1827 who lived to 1908 carried the whole arc of a century inside a single life. Notice the fence, too. It is easy to walk past, but it stands for a family's decision, made in 1960, that this ground deserved protection and care.
The nearby Armstrong C.M.E. Church helps you feel how the pieces fit together — a living congregation and a historic burial ground, still bound to one another. If you're threading together a route through East Texas history, this is the kind of stop that grounds the big themes of the region in real names and real families. Treat it as the sacred place it is: read the stones, keep to the paths, and leave it exactly as you found 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
- · Adam Byerly
- · Tom Limbrick
Themes & tags
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