Colfax Cemetery

🏛️The era

In the 1880s, East Texas was still a land of small farms, piney woods, and young communities. Van Zandt County lies in this region, east of Dallas, where families cleared land, raised cotton and corn, and built their lives around a few shared places: a church, a school, and a burying ground.

Communities often took their names from a founder or a meeting place. A settlement might begin as somebody's chapel and grow into a town with a new name. That is just what happened here, where Tunnell's Chapel later became known as Colfax.

This was also the great age of the camp meeting and the revival in the rural South. Families traveled for miles, sometimes camping for days, to hear preaching, sing, and see friends. Those gatherings were spiritual events, but they were also among the biggest social occasions of the year.

👥People & events

In 1883, A. L. Kellam donated five acres of land that helped establish this cemetery. It was a generous and lasting gift: a place where the community could bury and remember its own.

The first burial came just a year later, in 1884, and it was a fitting one. Elisha Tunnell, who founded Tunnell's Chapel, was laid to rest here. The rural community that grew around his chapel would later take the name Colfax, so the man who started the settlement became the first to lie in its cemetery.

Over the years, the land around the graves served the living as well. Three school buildings and two local churches stood on this ground at different times. It was also a favorite spot for revivals and summer camp meetings, when the community gathered for preaching and fellowship.

Today the cemetery holds about 1,000 graves. Many belong to the area's pioneers and to the generations of their descendants who followed.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Colfax Cemetery is a classic example of how rural American communities organized themselves. A donated tract of land became the heart of a whole community, with the dead, the schoolchildren, and the faithful all gathered in one place. Across the country, many small towns grew up around exactly this kind of shared ground.

The revivals and camp meetings held here link Colfax to one of the strongest currents in American religious life. The camp meeting tradition shaped Protestant faith across the South and the frontier throughout the 1800s, and it lasted well into the next century in rural places like this one.

Cemeteries like this one are also archives. With about a thousand graves, Colfax Cemetery keeps the names and dates of the families who settled this part of East Texas, a record that is often more complete than anything on paper.

🧭If you visit

Colfax is a small community in Van Zandt County, in the gently rolling country of East Texas. A visit here is quiet and reflective, a chance to walk among the graves of the people who built this place.

Look for older headstones that may mark the earliest pioneer burials, and notice how family names repeat across the generations. Try to picture the grounds as they once were, with a schoolhouse nearby, a church or two, and in summer, crowds gathering for a camp meeting.

Please treat the cemetery with respect: stay on paths where they exist, do not disturb graves or markers, and keep in mind that families still visit loved ones here. Colfax makes a meaningful stop on a back-roads drive through East Texas, especially if you are tracing family roots in Van Zandt County.