Corinth Cemetery
Grand Saline, Van Zandt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Land for this cemetery was first deeded in 1886 by James Richardson (1814-1887), on whose land grant the Corinth community had developed. Over the years, additional acreage for the graveyard has been given by members of the D. D. Richardson, Oliver, Carroll, and Davis families. The oldest legible tombstone in the Corinth Cemetery bears a death date of Jan. 14, 1874. Many of the headstones have weathered and deteriorated so that they are illegible, while others have disappeared over the years. Some of the early burial sites were marked only with fieldstones or by the planting of Cedar trees. Six known Civil War veterans are buried here. Early settlers in the Corinth community whose family names are common in the cemetery are Crestman, Yoes, Rawson, King, Cox, and Blair. Renowned aviator Wiley Post (1898-1935) grew up in the Corinth community and attended the Baptist Church. Several members of his family, including his mother, father, brother, and grandparents, are buried in the Corinth Cemetery. His grandfather, the Rev. Thomas M. Post (1843-1931), a well-known circuit preacher, founded many area churches and served as an early pastor of the Corinth Baptist fellowship. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Land for this cemetery was deeded in 1886 by James Richardson, on whose grant the Corinth community had grown, with the oldest legible stone dating to 1874. Among those buried here are six known Civil War veterans and members of the founding families whose fieldstones and cedar trees still mark the earliest graves. The renowned aviator Wiley Post grew up in the Corinth community, and his parents, grandparents, and other kin — including his circuit-preacher grandfather, Rev. Thomas M. Post — rest here.
Why it matters
A country graveyard tied to a record-setting aviator, it links the quiet world of Texas pioneers to the daring age of flight they helped raise.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Corinth Cemetery is a window into the world of the Texas frontier as it was being settled after the Civil War. Land for the graveyard was first deeded in 1886 by James Richardson, on whose land grant the Corinth community itself had grown up — the classic frontier sequence in which one family's grant becomes a neighborhood, and the neighborhood eventually needs a place to bury its dead.
The cemetery is older than its deed, though. Its oldest legible tombstone carries a death date of January 14, 1874, and the marker notes that many of the earliest graves were marked only with fieldstones or by the planting of cedar trees. That detail tells you almost everything about pioneer life here: monuments were a luxury, and grief often had to make do with a rough stone or a living tree.
This was Reconstruction-era rural Texas — a place of small farms, hard work, and tight-knit families whose names repeat across the headstones. Additional acreage came over the years from the Richardson, Oliver, Carroll, and Davis families, and early settler names like Crestman, Yoes, Rawson, King, Cox, and Blair recur in the ground, the quiet record of a community that lived and died together.
People & events
The founding gift belongs to James Richardson, who lived from 1814 to 1887 and whose grant gave Corinth its start; his deed of 1886 formalized the burial ground that his neighbors had already begun to use. Around him gathered the families whose descendants and kin filled the plots — a settlement's whole social history written in surnames.
Six known Civil War veterans rest here as well, a reminder of how thoroughly that conflict touched even remote rural communities; a graveyard this size holding half a dozen of them speaks to how many young men marched away from places just like Corinth.
But the name that draws the eye is Post. The renowned aviator Wiley Post, who lived from 1898 to 1935, grew up in the Corinth community and attended its Baptist church, and several members of his family — his mother, father, brother, and grandparents — are buried in this cemetery. Among them is his grandfather, the Reverend Thomas M. Post, a well-known circuit preacher who founded many area churches and served as an early pastor of the Corinth Baptist fellowship. Through that one family, a country graveyard reaches from the world of horseback preachers to the dawn of modern flight.
Its place in the American story
Wiley Post is the thread that ties this quiet Texas cemetery to one of the boldest chapters in American history. In 1933 he became the first person to fly solo around the world, and he was a pioneer of high-altitude flight, developing early pressure-suit ideas that pointed toward the way humans would one day travel at the edge of the atmosphere. His life ended in 1935 in a plane crash in Alaska that also took the life of the beloved humorist Will Rogers — a loss the whole nation mourned.
That a family with roots in this small farming community should produce a figure of that stature is the marker's quiet marvel. A circuit-riding grandfather who founded churches across the countryside, and a grandson who circled the globe by air within a single lifetime — the distance between those two lives measures how fast America changed.
So a modest rural graveyard becomes a hinge between two Americas: the pioneer world of fieldstones, cedar trees, and horseback preachers, and the daring twentieth-century age of aviation records and high-altitude dreams. The same soil that holds Civil War veterans and unnamed settlers also holds the kin of a man who helped teach the world to fly.
If you visit
Come to Corinth Cemetery for the atmosphere of a genuine country graveyard. Look for the oldest markers — the weathered stones, the plain fieldstones set as memorials, and the old cedar trees that were themselves planted as living grave markers. Many inscriptions have faded past reading, and that gentle erasure is part of what the place has to say about time and memory.
Let yourself read the repeated family names, and notice how a small settlement's whole history is gathered in one field. Somewhere among these plots lie six Civil War veterans and the family of a world-famous aviator, their ordinary graves giving no hint of the extraordinary story that runs through them.
The marker was dedicated for the Texas Sesquicentennial, the state's 150th-anniversary observance — a fitting frame for a spot that spans so much of Texas history. For a road-tripper, this is the kind of peaceful, out-of-the-way stop that rewards a slow walk and a little imagination: a place where the pioneer past and the age of flight rest, remarkably, in the same ground.
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
- · James Richardson
- · Wiley Post
- · Thomas M. Post
Themes & tags
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