David Greene Templeton
Jacksonville, Cherokee County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(Aug. 5, 1815 - June 29, 1871) Cherokee County pioneer David Greene Templeton arrived in the county shortly after the legislature organized it in 1846. Settling in the Gum Creek Community (later Old Jacksonville), the North Carolina native became a prominent landowner and civic leader. In 1850, Templeton was appointed one of nine original trustees to the Presbyterian College at Larissa (later Larissa College). Active in his local Masonic lodge, he was part of the Confederate home guard during the Civil War. His descendants served prominently in the early development of Jacksonville. Recorded - 2001
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
David Greene Templeton, a North Carolina native, reached newly organized Cherokee County soon after 1846 and settled in the Gum Creek community that became Old Jacksonville. He grew into a prominent landowner and civic leader, was named in 1850 one of the original trustees of the Presbyterian college at Larissa, and served in the Confederate home guard during the Civil War. His descendants went on to play a prominent role in the early growth of Jacksonville.
Why it matters
Templeton's life traces the pioneer settlement of East Texas and the local leadership—civic, educational, and Confederate—that shaped a county in its founding generation.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When David Greene Templeton reached East Texas, the region was still raw and new. Cherokee County had only just been organized by the state legislature in 1846 — the very year Texas itself passed from an independent republic into the United States. The pine-and-hardwood country here, drained by creeks and dotted with small farming settlements, was being surveyed, claimed, and turned into farmland almost as fast as families could arrive.
Templeton was part of that first wave. Born in North Carolina in 1815, he came south and west into a county that barely existed on paper, settling in the Gum Creek community that would later grow into Old Jacksonville. For a man of his generation, the frontier was not a metaphor; it was a place where church, school, courthouse, and militia all had to be built from nothing by the people who showed up first.
That founding generation carried its Southern origins with it. The plantation-and-slaveholding culture of the older states shaped the institutions these settlers created, and within a decade and a half the sectional crisis that split the nation would reach even this quiet corner of the piney woods.
People & events
Templeton did not simply farm and disappear into the record. He became a prominent landowner and one of the men a young community leans on — the sort who is asked to serve when something needs organizing.
In 1850 he was named one of nine original trustees of the Presbyterian college at Larissa, later Larissa College. That detail says a great deal about him and about his neighbors: barely four years into the county's existence, settlers were already trying to plant higher education in the wilderness. To be trusted with founding a college is to be counted among a community's builders, not merely its residents. He was active, too, in his local Masonic lodge, another of the fraternal and civic threads that stitched frontier towns together.
When the Civil War came, Templeton served in the Confederate home guard — the older and settled men who stayed behind to keep order and defense while younger men marched off. He lived until 1871, long enough to see the county through war and into its aftermath, and his descendants went on to play a prominent part in the early growth of Jacksonville itself.
Its place in the American story
A single life like Templeton's is a window onto how the American frontier was actually settled — not by lone adventurers, but by families and neighbors who arrived and immediately began building the institutions of a settled society. The rush to organize a county, found a college, and charter a lodge, all within a few years of the first surveys, was repeated across the expanding United States in the mid-19th century.
His story also captures the tangled loyalties of that era. The same men who founded schools and served their communities were, when the sectional crisis broke, drawn into the Confederacy. The home guard he joined existed in countless Southern counties, a reminder that the Civil War was not only fought on famous battlefields but managed and endured in thousands of ordinary places far from the front.
And the arc that follows — descendants shaping the town their forebear helped begin — is one of the quiet engines of American local history: the founding family whose name and influence carry across generations.
If you visit
This is a memorial marker rather than a grand site, so come in the right frame of mind: you are visiting a name and a life, not a monument. Stand at the spot and let the modern town fall away for a moment, and picture the Gum Creek community that preceded it — scattered farms, a new church, the raw beginnings of a college nearby.
Read the marker slowly and notice how much it packs into one life: pioneer, landowner, college trustee, lodge member, home-guardsman. Each of those roles is a thread you can pull. If Jacksonville and Cherokee County history interest you, this makes a natural first stop before seeking out the county's other early landmarks and cemeteries, where the founding generation is remembered.
It fits beautifully into a slow East Texas road trip through the piney woods — the kind of drive where the pleasure is in the small markers that tell you who was here first, and why the town around you exists at all.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · David Greene Templeton
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Jackson Smith
Jacksonville, TX
A Kentucky blacksmith, Jackson Smith came to Texas in the 1830s and fought in its War for Independence before scouting for the Republic of Texas. Settling near Gum Creek in the 1840s, he platted the townsite he named Jacksonville; he later served as a Confederate officer, and in 1872 the town was relocated to meet the new railroad.
Grimes Cemetery
Jacksonville, TX
Benjamin Franklin Grimes came to Cherokee County in 1852 with his parents, married Mary Jane Wallace in 1859, and raised ten children while running freight wagons and serving in the Confederate army. In 1883 he buried his daughter Cassandra Gabriella on the family's land, beginning what became the Grimes Cemetery. Still in use, it holds more than 80 graves, including those of a dozen veterans.
Myrtle Springs Cemetery
New Summerfield, TX
Begun in the 1860s on land deeded by pioneer Thomas Garrison, this burial ground served the vanished town of Lone Star and scattered East Texas homesteads, its earliest marked grave that of young Martha Wallace in 1866. At least fifteen Civil War veterans rest here, some beneath hand-cut sandstone markers now worn to bare initials. Though Lone Star became a ghost town, the cemetery endured, tended by a community association chartered for perpetual care in the 1960s.
Walker's Chapel Cemetery
Reklaw, TX
This cemetery grew from Walker's Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, South, founded by John Walker, who reached this Cherokee County vicinity by 1839. Harvey N. Cooper deeded the church its site in 1879, and the congregation became the heart of a rural community that took the chapel's name. The oldest legible grave dates to 1879, and among the burials are veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War. A memorial service still gathers here each July.