Evergreen Cemetery
Paris, Lamar County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Evergreen Cemetery is the final resting place for many notable citizens of Paris and Lamar County. Due to the steady growth of the area, the old cemetery of Paris, located near the center of town, quickly became too small. In 1866, the Evergreen Cemetery Association was chartered by well-known community leaders to purchase land for cemetery purposes. After the initial purchase of sixteen acres from George Wright, additional tracts were acquired in 1893, 1907, 1956 and 1957. The first burial is attributed to Lucy Pope Maxey (1794-1866), the mother of Samuel Bell Maxey, a West Point graduate, Confederate General and United States Senator. His wife, Marilda C. Maxey (1833-1908) is also buried in Evergreen Cemetery. Most of the cemetery’s eleven incorporators are buried here, including Samuel Bell Maxey (1825-1895), Dr. Alfred Simpson Johnson (1814-1881), Albert J. Redding (1821-1900) and William Bramlette (1851-1908). Another incorporator buried here is Willet C. Babcock (1828-1881). His “Jesus in Cowboy Boots” monument attracts visitors from across the nation. Examples of the unique stonecutting art within the cemetery include a bevy of angelic figures and religious imagery, flowers, vines, cotton bales, broken trees, anchors and chains, sheep, a life-size buffalo and a replica of the front page of the Paris Morning News. This historic cemetery reflects the growth and rich history of Paris and Lamar County.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When the old graveyard near Paris's center grew crowded, community leaders chartered the Evergreen Cemetery Association in 1866 and bought sixteen acres from George Wright, expanding it over the following century. Among its earliest burials was Lucy Pope Maxey, mother of West Point graduate, Confederate general, and U.S. senator Samuel Bell Maxey, who rests here with many of the town's founders. Its celebrated stonework — including Willet Babcock's famous "Jesus in Cowboy Boots" monument — draws visitors from across the country.
Why it matters
A community's cemetery is its autobiography in stone, and Evergreen gathers the soldiers, senators, and stonecutters who made Paris and Lamar County.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Paris, Texas, grew quickly in the years surrounding the Civil War, a rising town at the center of Lamar County in the state's northeast corner. Growth of that kind brings a quiet problem that every prospering community eventually faces: the old burying ground near the center of town fills up, and the living must decide where to lay the dead.
In 1866 — with the war just ended and the long, unsettled years of Reconstruction beginning — community leaders answered that need by chartering the Evergreen Cemetery Association. It was a civic act as much as a solemn one, the founders looking past the disruptions of the moment to plan for the town's future generations.
The cemetery they created grew as the town did. From an initial sixteen acres, it expanded again and again across the following century, in 1893, 1907, 1956, and 1957 — the map of its acquisitions tracing, in its own way, the steady growth of Paris and Lamar County.
People & events
The association bought its first sixteen acres from George Wright, and the ground was soon receiving the people who had built the town. Fittingly, the first burial is attributed to Lucy Pope Maxey, who died in 1866, the very year the cemetery was chartered. Born in 1794, she had lived through the whole early arc of the American republic.
Her son gives the cemetery its most prominent figure: Samuel Bell Maxey, a West Point graduate who became a Confederate general and, later, a United States senator from Texas. He rests here, as does his wife, and their presence anchors Evergreen to the sweep of nineteenth-century American public life. Most of the cemetery's eleven incorporators lie here too, among them Dr. Alfred Simpson Johnson, Albert J. Redding, and William Bramlette — the founders keeping their community company in death as in life.
Another incorporator, Willet C. Babcock, left the cemetery its most famous landmark. His monument — a figure widely known as "Jesus in Cowboy Boots" — draws visitors from across the nation, an unmistakably Texan touch on a solemn Christian image, and proof that a gravestone can become a destination all its own.
Its place in the American story
A community's cemetery is one of the most honest historical documents it will ever produce. Evergreen gathers, in one place, the soldiers, senators, physicians, and ordinary founders whose choices made Paris and Lamar County — the local roster of an American town written in granite and marble.
It also belongs to a broader national story in stone. The nineteenth-century cemetery was a place of art as much as mourning, and Evergreen's monuments show the full vocabulary of that tradition: angelic figures and religious imagery, flowers and vines, anchors and chains, broken trees, sheep — each a small symbol with settled meaning to the Victorians who chose it. Alongside them stand distinctly local emblems: cotton bales, a life-size buffalo, even a replica of the front page of the Paris Morning News.
Samuel Bell Maxey's grave ties this quiet Texas ground to the largest currents of the era — the Civil War and the fraught rebuilding that followed. The presence of a general who became a senator reminds visitors how directly national history ran through even a county-seat town.
If you visit
Give yourself time to walk Evergreen slowly; a historic cemetery rewards patience the way a gallery does. The pleasure here is in the stonework, so read the monuments as art and as language.
Seek out Willet Babcock's celebrated "Jesus in Cowboy Boots" — it's the reason many travelers come, and it's every bit as memorable in person as its reputation promises. Then let your eye wander to the wider bestiary of carvings the marker describes: the angels and flowers, the anchors and broken trees, the sheep, the full-size buffalo, and the stone rendering of a newspaper's front page. Each was chosen deliberately, and together they form a catalog of what this community loved and mourned.
Pause, too, at the Maxey graves and at the resting places of the founders, and you'll feel the town's whole story gathered in one green enclosure. It makes a thoughtful, unhurried stop on any trip through northeast Texas — a place where the history of Paris is not described to you, but simply surrounds you.
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
- · Samuel Bell Maxey
- · Lucy Pope Maxey
- · Willet C. Babcock
- · George Wright
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Travis Clack Henderson
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Born in Alabama in 1836, Travis Clack Henderson moved to Paris, Texas, in 1856 to farm and joined the local militia in 1860. During the Civil War he served as a captain and staff officer with the 32nd Dismounted Texas Cavalry, was taken prisoner in 1864, and was released in 1865. Back in Lamar County he married, raised seven children, and went on to represent the area for twelve years in the Texas House and two in the State Senate.
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Sam Bell Maxey was a Kentucky-born West Point graduate brevetted for gallantry in the Mexican-American War before settling in Paris, Texas, as a district attorney. He rose to major general in the Confederate army, commanding in the Tennessee and Mississippi campaigns and then the Indian Territory from 1863 to 1865, where he organized three brigades of Native American troops for the Red River Campaign. After the war he served two terms in the United States Senate from 1875 to 1887.
Lightfoot-Coleman House
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Alabama-born Henry William Lightfoot, a Confederate veteran of Forrest's Cavalry, came to Paris, Texas, in 1872 as law partner to Sam Bell Maxey and married Maxey's adopted daughter Dora two years later. The young couple built this house across from the Maxey home, its double gallery trimmed in Eastlake-style millwork and its lumber hauled from Jefferson. Lightfoot went on to serve as a state senator and chief justice of the 5th Court of Civil Appeals before his death in 1901; the Coleman family later restored the home in the 1950s.
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