Columbus Odd Fellows Rest Cemetery
Columbus, Colorado County, Texas
Marker Inscription
John Toliver deeded a tract of land to Columbus Lodge No. 51, Independent Order of Odd Fellows, in July 1871 for use as a cemetery. Among the first to be interred here were victims of the 1873 yellow fever epidemic, including George W. Smith, district judge and Texas Supreme Court justice. Within a few years, a bluff on the south side began to erode, exposing some graves. In 1888 a committee was appointed to take preventative measures. The grave of Henry Middleton (d. 1888) was washed out before their efforts were successful. The Odd Fellows sold the cemetery to the newly formed Columbus Cemetery Association in 1890. The association added land in 1901. Many stones, such as those of the Dick family, were relocated from the Old City Cemetery to higher ground in the Odd Fellows Rest Cemetery after a devastating flood in 1913. Among the many burials of note in the Odd Fellows Rest Cemetery was that of J. W. E. Wallace, a Columbus founder, whose grave was moved to the State Cemetery in Austin. Robert and John Stafford, prominent Columbus businessmen, died as a result of a feud which also involved deputy sheriff Larkin S. Hope and his uncle, Sheriff J. "Light" Townsend. Hope is interred here. Wells Thompson was a Texas state senator and lieutenant governor. Others include local poets and historians, as well as veterans of the Civil War, the U. S. War with Mexico, Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, and other international wars and conflicts. More land was added to the cemetery in 1977. It continues to serve the city of Columbus at the dawn of the 21st century. The Columbus Odd Fellows Rest Cemetery is a chronicle of the history and pride of Colorado County. (2000) Incising on base: Researched by Mary Lynn skinner
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
John Toliver deeded this Columbus tract to the local Odd Fellows lodge for a cemetery in 1871, and among its first burials were victims of the 1873 yellow fever epidemic. Erosion along a bluff repeatedly threatened graves, and after a devastating 1913 flood many stones were relocated here from the old city cemetery to higher ground. Its burials include judges, legislators, and figures from a notorious local feud, making the grounds a chronicle of Colorado County.
Why it matters
The cemetery's shifting graves and epidemic victims record how disease, flooding, and violence shaped daily survival in a nineteenth-century Texas river town.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Columbus sits on a bend of the Colorado River in the cotton country of southeast Texas, and by the early 1870s it was a working river town finding its feet again after the Civil War. This was the Reconstruction era, when Texas communities were rebuilding local institutions from the ground up — courts, congregations, schools, and the burial grounds that anchored them. A cemetery in a town like this was never just a field of stones; it was the community's ledger, the place where every family eventually met.
The men who founded this particular ground belonged to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, one of the great fraternal societies of nineteenth-century America. Lodges like Columbus No. 51 built their identity on mutual aid — visiting the sick, relieving the distressed, and, above all, seeing that the dead were buried with dignity. Setting aside land for a cemetery was one of the most characteristic things such a lodge could do.
And this was an age that lived close to death. Before modern medicine, a Gulf Coast river town faced epidemics with almost no defense, and the seasons turned on rumors of fever moving upriver. To understand these grounds, you have to picture a place where survival itself was a communal effort — and where the cemetery grew, quite literally, out of the town's hardest years.
People & events
The story begins with a gift. In July 1871, John Toliver deeded a tract of land to Columbus Lodge No. 51 for use as a cemetery, and within just two years the ground received some of its most sorrowful early burials. The yellow fever epidemic of 1873 swept through, and among those laid to rest here was George W. Smith, remembered on the marker as a district judge and a justice of the Texas Supreme Court — a man of real standing brought down like so many others by a disease no one yet knew how to stop.
The land itself proved restless. A bluff on the south side began to erode, exposing graves, and in 1888 a committee was appointed to hold back the damage. They were not quite fast enough: the grave of Henry Middleton washed out before their work took hold. Water shaped these grounds again in 1913, when a devastating flood forced the relocation of many stones — including those of the Dick family — from the old city cemetery up to this higher, safer ground.
The roll of names reads like the town's own biography. There was J. W. E. Wallace, a founder of Columbus, whose grave was later moved to the State Cemetery in Austin. There was a Texas state senator who also served as lieutenant governor. And there is the darker thread of a local feud: the prominent businessmen Robert and John Stafford died as a result of it, a conflict that also drew in deputy sheriff Larkin S. Hope and his uncle, Sheriff J. "Light" Townsend. Hope is buried here — one more chapter in a ground that keeps the town's quarrels as faithfully as its honors.
Its place in the American story
A cemetery like this one is a kind of archive that no courthouse fire can erase. Across America, community burial grounds preserve the texture of ordinary life — who mattered, what people died of, which families endured — more honestly than almost any official record. Read row by row, these stones tell the national story in miniature.
The fraternal order that founded it belonged to a movement that shaped civic life all over the nineteenth-century United States. In an age before insurance and social welfare, lodges like the Odd Fellows were the safety net, promising members and their families care in sickness and a decent burial in death. Grounds established by such societies exist in countless American towns, quiet monuments to a whole culture of mutual aid.
The fever that filled its earliest graves connects Columbus to one of the great American medical dramas. Yellow fever terrorized Southern ports and river towns for generations, and its true cause — transmission by mosquitoes — was not proven until around the turn of the twentieth century. Every epidemic burial here is a reminder of how recently humanity was helpless against a threat it could not even see, and of the veterans of the nation's wars, from the U.S. war with Mexico through the world wars, who also rest in this ground.
If you visit
Come to this cemetery the way you would come to read a long, patient book. The names on the older stones — judges, legislators, poets, soldiers, and the ordinary families who outlived them all — turn a quiet afternoon into an unhurried tour through Colorado County's whole history. Walk slowly; the pleasure here is in the accumulation.
Pay attention to the lay of the land. The higher ground is not an accident but a decision, made after floods and erosion threatened the graves below, and some of the stones you pass were carried up here from elsewhere to keep them safe. Knowing that, the gentle rise of the ground becomes part of the story rather than just its setting.
Columbus sits along the corridor between Houston and San Antonio, which makes these grounds an easy and rewarding stop on a longer Texas road trip. Give yourself time to let the place breathe, read the dates against one another, and notice how a single cemetery can hold epidemics, feuds, floods, and the everyday pride of a river town all at once.
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
- · George W. Smith
- · J. Light Townsend
Related events
- · 1873 yellow fever epidemic
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Colonel Joseph Worthington Elliott Wallace
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A Philadelphia native, Wallace served as United States Consul to the Texas colonies from 1829 to 1832 before joining Austin's Colony and the campaigns for Texas independence. In 1837 he helped plat the town of Columbus with W. B. DeWees, and he later fought at the 1840 Battle of Plum Creek against the Comanche and under General Edward Burleson in the 1842 defense against Mexican invasion.
Columbus' Old City Cemetery
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Columbus's old cemetery holds the founders of one of Texas's oldest towns, with its earliest headstone dating to 1853 and the city taking title to the seven acres in 1870. Among the buried are Benjamin Beason and town founder W.B. DeWees, both of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" colonists, early historian Dilue Rose, a War of 1812 and Texas Revolution veteran, and numerous Confederate soldiers and victims of the 1873 yellow fever epidemic.
William Demetris Lacey
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Born in Virginia and raised in Kentucky, William Demetris Lacey settled in what is now Columbus around 1831, opening a tanyard and saddle shop and marrying Sarah Ann Bright. Elected to office while Texas was still part of Mexico, he was chosen as a delegate to the Convention of 1836 at Washington-on-the-Brazos, where he signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. After service in the Texas army he returned to find his home in ruins, resettling on land granted for his service before dying in Kentucky in 1848.
George Glenn
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Born into slavery in 1850 and raised on a Colorado County ranch, George Glenn trained as a cowhand and trail cook and stayed on the Johnson Ranch as a free man after Emancipation. On an 1870 cattle drive to Abilene his employer, Bob Johnson, died; after the herd was sold, Glenn disinterred the body and drove it nearly 800 miles home by wagon over six weeks for reburial. Honored decades later at Old Trail Drivers reunions and interviewed by folklorist J. Frank Dobie, he became one of the few Black members remembered by name from the great cattle-drive era.