Center Hill Cemetery
Lovelady, Houston County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Ellis family came from Mississippi to Texas in 1839. Charles McHenry Ellis and Elizabeth (Lovelady) Ellis had 15 children. After her death in 1865, he wed Aramenta Hartfield, with whom he had 7 children. His oldest son, Byanthy Woodville Ellis, deeded land including the family cemetery in 1876 for use as a church and burial ground. One of the first marked burials is that of Elizabeth Lovelady Ellis. There area also unmarked graves believed to be those of slaves. Today, the cemetery, which includes military veteran burials, is a link to the area's rich history and early settlers. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2003
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Ellis family came from Mississippi to Texas in 1839, part of the wave of southern settlers pushing into the region in the years before statehood. Charles McHenry Ellis raised a large family here, and in 1876 his son deeded land, including the family burial ground, for use as a church and cemetery. Among its early graves is that of Elizabeth Lovelady Ellis, alongside unmarked graves believed to be those of enslaved people and, later, military veterans.
Why it matters
Frontier family cemeteries like Center Hill preserve the layered story of early Texas settlement, including the enslaved people whose unmarked graves testify to lives the written record often left out.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1839, when the Ellis family made the long move from Mississippi to Texas, they were joining one of the great population surges of the era. Texas had won its independence from Mexico only three years earlier and was then its own republic — a raw, ambitious young nation actively recruiting settlers from the American South with the promise of cheap, abundant land. Families packed wagons, drove livestock, and crossed into a country that was still being mapped and claimed.
Houston County, in the timbered lands of East Texas, was frontier in the fullest sense. Settlers cleared fields, planted crops, and built farms far from established towns, and their households were often large — extra hands meant survival. This was also, unmistakably, part of the cotton South transplanted westward, which meant that the labor and lives of enslaved people were woven into the settlement from the start.
By the time the marker's story stretches into the Civil War years, the Republic had become a state and then a member of the Confederacy, and the frontier world the Ellis family entered was already being reshaped by war and its aftermath.
People & events
At the center of the story are Charles McHenry Ellis and his wife, Elizabeth Lovelady Ellis, who came west from Mississippi and put down deep roots. Theirs was a large frontier family — fifteen children — and the scale of it says much about both the era and their standing in this new country. When Elizabeth died in 1865, Charles married again, to Aramenta Hartfield, and had seven more children, so that the family tree spreading from this ground was broad indeed.
The cemetery itself came into being through an act of the next generation. In 1876, Charles's oldest son, Byanthy Woodville Ellis, deeded land that included the family burial ground for use as a church and cemetery — turning a private plot into a shared community resource. Among the first marked graves is Elizabeth's own, a fitting anchor for a place that carries her family's name and, through her maiden name of Lovelady, is tied to the surrounding community.
But the marker is careful to record more than the family that owned the land. It notes unmarked graves believed to be those of enslaved people, and it notes the veterans who rest here too. Those quiet lines hold entire lives — people whose names the records did not preserve, buried in the same earth as the family whose story was written down.
Its place in the American story
A family cemetery like Center Hill is a kind of document, and it tells the American frontier story with unusual honesty. The marked graves record the settlers who are remembered by name; the unmarked graves, believed to hold enslaved people, record those whom the written record so often left out. Together they capture a truth about the antebellum South that a tidier monument might hide: that the same farms and families being celebrated for their pioneering also rested on the forced labor of people denied even a headstone.
Across the country, historians and descendants have increasingly turned to old burial grounds precisely because they preserve what other records do not. A cemetery does not edit. The presence of veterans' graves adds still another layer, folding the community's later generations and their service into the same ground.
Center Hill's designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery reflects a broader national effort to protect these fragile places and read them fully — not just as monuments to founding families, but as testimony to everyone who lived, labored, and died in the making of a place.
If you visit
A historic cemetery asks for a slower kind of attention than a museum does. Here, near Lovelady in Houston County, you're walking ground that has served as both church site and burial place since 1876, and the oldest marked stones carry you back to the very first generation of settlers.
Look for Elizabeth Lovelady Ellis's grave among the earliest marked burials, and let the family names around it sketch out how a single household expanded across an entire community. Then look, too, at the spaces between the marked stones — the areas thought to hold unmarked graves. Standing where names were never carved is a powerful and sobering part of the experience, and it's the part the marker most wants you to notice.
The setting is rural East Texas, quiet and shaded, the kind of place where the pace of the surrounding country hasn't changed much in generations. If you're tracing early Texas settlement on a road trip, a stop like this rewards you in a way a highway pullout never could — it puts you in the actual company of the people who settled this land. Treat it as the resting place it still is, and read the marker before you wander, so the ground tells you its full 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
- · Charles McHenry Ellis
- · Elizabeth Lovelady Ellis
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Antioch Cemetery
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Rockland Cemetery, Church and School
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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.