Corinth Cemetery
Stephenville, Erath County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1880, North Carolina native Dr. William Wallace McNeill and his wife, Elizabeth Ann (Bell), deeded land to the Methodist Episcopal Church, south, for a church, school and cemetery. The burial ground is the last remaining historic trace of the Corinth community. There are an unknown number of unmarked graves representing the cemetery’s earliest burials in the late 1800s. The oldest grave is of Confederate Soldier F.J. Simpson, who died in 1899. Artist Ethel Lewallen, who was twice appointed Texas State Artist of the Year, died in 1988 and is buried here. The Corinth Cemetery Association formed in 2003 to preserve and care for this sacred place.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1880, North Carolina native Dr. William Wallace McNeill and his wife Elizabeth Ann deeded land to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for a church, school, and cemetery. The burial ground is the last surviving trace of the vanished Corinth community, with an unknown number of unmarked graves from the late 1800s. Its oldest marked grave is that of Confederate soldier F. J. Simpson, who died in 1899, and later burials include twice-honored Texas State Artist Ethel Lewallen.
Why it matters
The cemetery is the sole remaining evidence of a lost rural community and preserves the memory of the settlers, veterans, and artists who lived there.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1880, the country around Stephenville was still a young, thinly settled corner of Texas, filling in during the decades after the Civil War. This was the Reconstruction and Gilded Age era, when the South was rebuilding and the West was drawing settlers from the older states — men and women looking to start again on new ground.
Dr. William Wallace McNeill was one of them, a native of North Carolina who had made his way to this Texas frontier. Like many of the era's community founders, he understood that a settlement needed more than farms: it needed the institutions that anchor a people to a place. A church, a school, and a burial ground together announced that a community meant to stay.
The Methodist Episcopal Church, South — a distinctly post-Civil-War Southern institution — was the natural home for such a congregation here. Around these three gifts of land, the small community of Corinth took shape, one of many rural settlements that briefly flourished across late nineteenth-century Texas.
People & events
The marker's story begins with a single generous act. In 1880, Dr. William Wallace McNeill and his wife, Elizabeth Ann (Bell) McNeill, deeded land to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for a church, a school, and a cemetery. That gift created the civic heart of the Corinth community, and the cemetery is now the last visible trace of it.
The ground holds an unknown number of unmarked graves from the settlement's earliest days in the late 1800s — the anonymous founders whose names time has worn away. The oldest identifiable grave belongs to F. J. Simpson, a Confederate soldier who died in 1899, a reminder of how recent that war still was to the people who settled here.
The cemetery also holds a more unexpected resident: the artist Ethel Lewallen, who was twice named Texas State Artist of the Year and who died in 1988. And in 2003, the Corinth Cemetery Association formed to preserve and care for the site — a modern chapter in which the descendants and neighbors of a vanished community chose to protect its memory.
Its place in the American story
Corinth Cemetery tells the story of the "lost town" — a settlement that once had a church, a school, and families, and now survives only as a graveyard. This pattern repeated itself thousands of times across rural America as populations shifted, economies changed, and small communities were absorbed or abandoned. The cemetery is often the single most durable thing a vanished town leaves behind.
The range of people resting here captures the breadth of the American experience in one small plot: unnamed pioneers, a Confederate veteran whose life spanned the nation's most divisive war, and a celebrated twentieth-century artist. It is a reminder that even the most obscure rural places produce lives worth remembering.
The formation of the cemetery association in 2003 speaks to something enduringly American as well — the grassroots impulse to preserve local heritage, to refuse to let a community be entirely forgotten simply because it no longer appears on the map.
If you visit
Come with a sense of quiet attention. This is the last remaining trace of the Corinth community, and much of its earliest history lies in graves that were never marked — so part of what you're seeing is what is no longer there. Let the empty spaces speak as much as the stones.
Seek out the oldest marked grave, that of the Confederate soldier F. J. Simpson, and look for the resting place of artist Ethel Lewallen, whose two-time honor as Texas State Artist of the Year connects this modest country cemetery to the wider world of Texas culture. Between them lies more than a century of one community's life.
Set a short distance from Stephenville, the cemetery makes a reflective stop on a tour of rural Erath County. Thanks to the association that has cared for it since 2003, it remains a tended and dignified place — the kind of spot where you can stand for a few minutes and feel the presence of a whole town that once was.
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
- · William Wallace McNeill
- · Elizabeth Ann Bell McNeill
- · Ethel Lewallen
- · F. J. Simpson
Themes & tags
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