Clark Cemetery
Port Lavaca, Calhoun County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This burial ground served members of the Clark family, many of whom lived in the no longer extant Chocolate Community. Named for the Chocolate Creek, which runs nearby, the settlement began when Sylvanus Hatch purchased property near the creek. In 1846, Sylvanus, his brother Joseph, and their families settled in the area. Residents raised cattle and horses, and farmed the land. Many of the settlers worshipped at St. Paul’s-on-the-Prairie, an Episcopal church; the community school was also housed in the congregation’s building for a time. Chocolate later declined and by 1936, the school and church closed. In the mid-1850s, John Clark and his extended family settled here. Clark donated property and built stock pens, which became known as Clark’s Station, along the Indianola Railroad to afford area residents the ability to ship their crops and stock to market. In 1899, he deeded this property for use as a burial ground. The earliest known burial here is of William Clark (d. 1875), a son of Daniel Clark, one of John’s brothers. Also among those interred is Thomas Clark, another of John’s brothers, who served the Confederacy during the Civil War. Cemetery features include curbing, masonic gravestones, vertical stones and obelisks; additional property was donated in 1941. Over the years, descendants of the interred have cared for the burial ground. Today, Clark Cemetery continues to serve as a record of a pioneering area family and is the last remaining vestige of the Chocolate Community.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This burial ground served the Clark family of the vanished Chocolate community, named for nearby Chocolate Creek where Sylvanus Hatch and his brother Joseph settled in 1846. Residents raised cattle and horses, farmed, and worshipped at St. Paul's-on-the-Prairie, whose building also housed the school. In the mid-1850s John Clark arrived and built stock pens known as Clark's Station along the Indianola Railroad, letting area farmers ship crops and cattle to market; he deeded this cemetery in 1899.
Why it matters
The cemetery is the last trace of a lost Gulf Coast farming community, preserving the memory of the railroad and cattle economy that briefly gave it life.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the mid-1840s, the Texas Gulf Coast was raw, open country — a grassland of shallow bays, salt prairies, and sluggish creeks that drew families willing to gamble on cheap land and good grazing. This stretch of what is now Calhoun County sat just inland from the busy port of Indianola, one of the great immigrant landing points of the era, and the settlers who fanned out from the coast were looking for pasture and farmland within reach of the water.
The little community that took root along Chocolate Creek belonged to that first pioneering wave. Its people raised cattle and horses and worked the land, the classic mixed economy of the coastal plain, where a family's wealth was measured in livestock and acreage rather than cash.
The decades that followed carried the whole country through upheaval — the Civil War, the long reshuffling of Reconstruction, and the railroad-building boom of the Gilded Age that reached even into remote farming districts like this one. A settlement's fortunes in this period often rose or fell on a single question: could its farmers get their crops and stock to a market that would pay for them?
People & events
The story begins in 1846, when Sylvanus Hatch bought property near Chocolate Creek and, with his brother Joseph and their families, settled the surrounding land. The creek gave the place its name, and the settlement became simply Chocolate. Its residents built a shared life around St. Paul's-on-the-Prairie, an Episcopal congregation whose building did double duty as the community's schoolhouse — the familiar frontier arrangement in which church and classroom shared one roof.
In the mid-1850s, John Clark arrived with his extended family and gave the community its economic anchor. Clark donated land and built stock pens that became known as Clark's Station, a shipping point on the Indianola Railroad. That was the crucial improvement: it let neighboring farmers and ranchers load their crops and cattle for market instead of driving them long miles overland.
In 1899, Clark deeded this ground for use as a burial place. The earliest known grave, though, predates that gift — William Clark, a son of John's brother Daniel, was laid here in 1875. Among the others resting on the site is Thomas Clark, another of John's brothers, who served the Confederacy during the Civil War. More land was added to the cemetery in 1941, and across the generations the descendants of those buried here have tended the graves themselves.
Its place in the American story
Chocolate is a small example of an enormous American pattern: the thousands of once-hopeful settlements that flickered to life in the nineteenth century and then quietly disappeared. The country is dotted with these vanished communities, and their fate almost always turned on transportation. When a railroad reached a town, it could thrive; when the rail traffic and the population shifted elsewhere, the town could dwindle to nothing.
Clark's Station embodies the promise that briefly sustained places like this. The spread of railroads into rural districts is one of the defining stories of Gilded Age America — it knitted isolated farms into national markets and decided which crossroads would grow into towns and which would fade back into pasture.
Here, the community faded. Its school and church closed by 1936, and the settlement itself is gone from the map. What survives is the cemetery, and that survival is its own kind of significance: a burial ground kept up by descendants becomes a durable public record of a family and a place that would otherwise leave no trace at all.
If you visit
Come expecting quiet. This is open coastal-prairie country, and the cemetery is the last standing remnant of a community that has otherwise vanished from the landscape — there is no town here to visit, only the ground its people cared enough to preserve.
Walk the rows and read the stonework itself as history. You'll find older forms of grave marking — curbing that outlines family plots, tall vertical stones and obelisks, and gravestones bearing Masonic emblems, small clues to the fraternal life of nineteenth-century settlers. The oldest markers reach back to the 1870s.
It makes a thoughtful stop on a Gulf Coast drive through Calhoun County, especially paired with the region's port and railroad history. Stand a moment and picture the stock pens and the rail line that once gave this spot its reason to exist. Please treat it as the working cemetery and family resting place it still is.
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
- · John Clark
- · Sylvanus Hatch
Themes & tags
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