Chaffin Cemetery

Grapeland, TX

Established around 1862, this Houston County burial ground took root in the heart of the Civil War, when East Texas was a Confederate homefront far from the fighting but bound up in its losses. Set among the farms and pine woods of Grapeland, it reflects the settlement of the region by families who had pushed into East Texas in the antebellum decades. Its Historic Texas Cemetery designation preserves that link to the war years.

Elkhart, TX

Founded in April 1886 when J.W. Cromwell and six others organized a Baptist congregation in a community that had none, this Elkhart church traces its roots to an 1876 building on the Quarles plantation that served as both school and meeting house. Fire twice destroyed its homes — in 1943, taking all the early records, and again in 1963 — before a new sanctuary was dedicated in 1964. One of the oldest churches in the city, it has anchored Elkhart's spiritual and social life for well over a century.

Elkhart, TX

Shaded by oak, pine, and crepe myrtle, this Elkhart burial ground took its first grave in 1887 but was not formally established until the Fuller family donated two acres in 1906. Among those resting here is E.V. Douthit — Civil War veteran, town postmaster, and co-owner of Elkhart's first store — alongside veterans of every American conflict from the Civil War to Desert Storm. A cemetery association organized in 1962 has cared for the grounds ever since.

Elkhart, TX

Myrtle Springs Cemetery is the last visible trace of an early Anderson County farming community that grew up around a church, a school, and the myrtle-fringed springs that gave it its name. The land traces to John A. Box, an original settler of David G. Burnet's colony who received his grant from the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas in 1835. Deeded to a cemetery association in 1927, its graves — the oldest dated 1903 — hold generations of the county's settlers, veterans, and community leaders.