Early Chapel Cemetery
Lexington, Lee County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Site bought by Methodist Episcopal Church South in 1850, although some burials had occurred here previously. Buried here are San Jacinto heroes Capt. Jas. Shaw (founder of Lexington) and Wm. Hawkins; Civil War veterans; Mrs. R. Y. King, wife of first Lee County judge. Contains special section for slaves. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1967
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Methodist Episcopal Church South bought this cemetery site in 1850, though some burials predate it. Among those resting here are San Jacinto veterans — including Lexington's founder, Capt. James Shaw, and William Hawkins — Civil War soldiers, an early county judge's wife, and, in a set-apart section, enslaved people.
Why it matters
It gathers Texas's revolutionary heroes, Civil War dead, and the enslaved in a single ground, laying bare the era's hierarchies.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The ground at Early Chapel Cemetery tells the history of Texas in layers. By 1850, when the Methodist Episcopal Church, South bought the site, Texas had already been an independent republic and was a new state of the Union. Some burials here were already older than the purchase, so people had been laid to rest on this land before any church formally owned it.
The church's name carries history of its own. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South came out of the split in American Methodism in the mid-1840s, when Northern and Southern Methodists divided largely over slavery. That division foreshadowed the national break that would come with the Civil War.
This was cotton and plantation country in central Texas, and slavery was part of its economy and society. Lee County itself was not created until 1874, after the war, from parts of neighboring counties. Its first county judge was among the officials who governed the new county, and his wife is buried here.
People & events
The marker names two veterans of the Battle of San Jacinto, the decisive clash of April 1836 in which the Texian army defeated Mexican forces and secured Texas independence. One of them, Captain James Shaw, is remembered as the founder of Lexington. The other is William Hawkins. The marker says little more about them, and it is best not to invent details. Their burial here connects this quiet ground to the founding moment of the Republic of Texas.
The cemetery also holds Civil War veterans, men from this community who served in the conflict that tore the nation apart a generation after San Jacinto. Mrs. R. Y. King, wife of Lee County's first judge, rests here as well, a reminder of the families who shaped local government in the years after the war.
And there is a special section for enslaved people. This may be the most important line in the inscription. Many of those buried in that section probably went into the ground without names recorded in any public document, but their presence here is a fact of history. They lived and worked in this community, and even in death they were kept apart from the people who enslaved them.
Its place in the American story
Few places put so much of the nineteenth-century American story in one setting. Here you find the Texas Revolution, which helped lead to Texas annexation and in turn the U.S.-Mexican War. You find the Southern branch of a church that divided over slavery. You find veterans of the Civil War that slavery caused. And you find the enslaved people themselves, buried in a separate section.
Segregated burial grounds were common across the South and in other parts of the country, and they reveal how deeply racial hierarchy shaped everyday life, even in death. A cemetery that honors revolutionary heroes alongside a set-apart section for enslaved people makes the contradictions of the era impossible to miss. Freedom was won for some and denied to others.
Preserving places like this matters because the records of enslaved people are often thin or missing. Physical sites such as a cemetery section may be among the few surviving traces of their lives. Remembering them alongside better-known figures makes the history more honest and more complete.
If you visit
Early Chapel Cemetery rewards slow, quiet attention. As you walk, think of it as a timeline: graves older than the 1850 church purchase, the resting places of San Jacinto veterans, Civil War soldiers, and the families who built Lee County after the war.
Take time with the section set aside for enslaved people. Graves there may be unmarked or simply marked, and their quietness is part of their meaning. Standing there is a chance to remember people whose names history largely failed to record. As in any cemetery, please be respectful and careful where you walk.
Lexington is a small town in the rolling country of central Texas, and the cemetery fits well into a back-roads drive among the area's historic communities. Pair it with other San Jacinto and Republic-era sites in Texas for a fuller sense of how the revolution's veterans settled the land, and of the complicated society they helped build.
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
- · Capt. James Shaw
- · William Hawkins
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Mt. Homer Baptist Church Cemetery
Milano, TX
Originally the Watson family burial ground, this site passed to the trustees of Mt. Homer Baptist Church in 1866, its church building doubling as a schoolhouse. Its earliest marked grave, dated 1863, belongs to Zachary Williams, mortally wounded at the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia, and family diaries record that local African American residents were buried in the southeastern section. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2004, it preserves the intertwined histories of white and Black Milam County families.
Lee County
Giddings, TX
Straddling the Old San Antonio Road on land first surveyed for Moses and Stephen F. Austin's colony, Lee County became in 1854 the heart of Wendish settlement in America, when Pastor Johann Kilian led his Sorbian-speaking congregation from Central Europe to a new home here. Their school was the only one in the United States to teach in Wendish, a Slavic language that survives in the modern world chiefly here and in Australia. The county was organized in 1874 and named for Confederate general Robert E. Lee, with Giddings as its seat.
Burleson County
Caldwell, TX
The land here was farmed as early as 1744 by Native people under Spanish missionaries, and in 1830 Fort Tenoxtitlan guarded the Brazos crossing on the old San Antonio Road, drawing Anglo-Texans who lived off wild game. The county was organized in 1846 and named for Gen. Edward Burleson — a hero of San Jacinto, Indian fighter, and Republic of Texas vice-president — with its seat at Caldwell. During the Civil War it sent troops, cotton, and food to the Confederacy.
Moss Ragsdale Cemetery
Rockdale, TX
This family burial ground dates to the 1850s, on land formally set aside in 1902 "to be used exclusively as a burying ground." It is named for Matthew Moss—a Virginia-born War of 1812 veteran and Red River steamboat man who brought his family to Milam County around 1845—and his son-in-law James Ragsdale, a veteran of the Texas Revolution and the first person buried here. Several Confederate veterans and members of the extended Moss family lie nearby, close to the vanished townsite of San Andres.