Fields Store Cemetery
Hempstead vicinity, Waller County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Established during Reconstruction period on land given by D. H. Fields, local merchant for whom community and cemetery were named, and by J. W. Day, Confederate veteran. Burial place of early settlers of area and their descendants, including veterans of 5 wars. Under management of Fields Store Cemetery Association.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Fields Store Cemetery was established during Reconstruction on land given by merchant D. H. Fields — for whom the community and cemetery are named — and by Confederate veteran J. W. Day. It became the resting place of the area's early settlers and their descendants, including veterans of five wars, and is maintained by a cemetery association.
Why it matters
Burial grounds founded in the Reconstruction years preserve the names and service of a rural community's pioneer families across generations.
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Related people
- · D. H. Fields
- · J. W. Day
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Field's Store Community
Hempstead vicinity, TX
Settlers reached this part of Waller County before the Civil War, and in the early 1870s Druey Holland Field and his wife Caroline opened a general store that gave the growing settlement its name. Around it clustered a school, post office, brick kiln, blacksmith shop, and cotton gin, making it a hub for the surrounding farms. Also known as New Hope, the community still keeps a sense of its pioneer identity.
Reid's Prairie Baptist Church
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Seventeen worshippers organized Reid's Prairie Baptist Church in August 1890, and by 1895 they had raised a sanctuary along the old Navasota Stage Road. Rural congregations like this one were the social spine of frontier Texas, doubling as gathering places in scattered farming country.
Shiloh Cemetery
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In 1881 Thomas Armer deeded land in the Shiloh community for a Baptist church and, two years later, an adjoining acre for this cemetery. As the community grew, more land was added for a larger sanctuary, a school, and the Armer family burial ground, whose earliest marked grave dates to 1882. A 1957 tornado destroyed the sanctuary and damaged the cemetery, but the congregation rebuilt.
Shiloh Baptist Church
Waller County, TX
In September 1871, thirteen worshippers carrying letters of transfer from other congregations gathered at the nearby Kirby Chapel Methodist Church and organized themselves as Shiloh Baptist Church, aided by the Rev. Jesse Tubb and Deacon John M. McGinty. A decade later the young congregation raised its own building beside the Pond Creek School, and by the early 1900s counted about a hundred members. Successive sanctuaries followed — a 1908 building lost to a 1957 storm, then a third raised in 1958 — marking a rural Texas community's enduring faith through Reconstruction and beyond.