Fisher Cemetery
Longview, Gregg County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Several families from Alabama moved to Texas in the early 1830s, building homes in this area and creating the community known as Pine Tree. Sometime before 1860, A.T. Castleberry II designated 1.5 acres of his land for a cemetery. Family as well as early members of the Pine Tree Cumberland Presbyterian Church, which the family was instrumental in establishing, are buried here. The name Fisher Cemetery comes from A.T.’s granddaughter marrying a Fisher and that family’s continuing management. The cemetery now covers approximately 2.7 acres and contains 250 graves with the oldest dated 1860. Fisher cemetery serves as a remembrance of the pine tree community and holds historical and spiritual significance for many residents of Gregg County. HISTORIC TEXAS CEMETERY – 2016
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the early 1830s, families from Alabama settled this corner of East Texas and built the community they called Pine Tree, anchoring it with a Cumberland Presbyterian congregation. Before 1860, A.T. Castleberry II set aside an acre and a half of his land for a burial ground, and the graves of church founders and neighbors soon gathered there. Passed into the keeping of the Fisher family through marriage, the cemetery grew to some 2.7 acres and roughly 250 graves, the oldest dating to 1860.
Why it matters
Small settlement cemeteries like this one preserve the names and faith of the ordinary migrant families who filled in the antebellum Texas frontier, long after the community that made them has faded.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The families who settled this corner of East Texas arrived in the early 1830s, part of the wave of Anglo-American migration that flowed into Texas when it was still Mexican territory. They came largely from Alabama, carrying their households, their farming know-how, and — crucially — their faith westward into a country of tall pines and open ground. They built homes, cleared fields, and gave their new community a name drawn straight from the landscape: Pine Tree.
The decades that followed were among the most turbulent in Texas history. The settlement took root under Mexican rule, endured the upheaval of the Texas Revolution and the years of the independent Republic, and then saw Texas enter the United States in the 1840s. Through all of it, the ordinary work of frontier life went on — planting, worshiping, marrying, burying.
By the time A.T. Castleberry II set aside land for a cemetery sometime before 1860, Pine Tree was an established community with deep roots. The graves that gathered there record a settlement that had already weathered a generation of change.
People & events
At the heart of this place is a family and the church they helped bring into being. The Castleberrys were instrumental in establishing the Pine Tree Cumberland Presbyterian Church — and it was A.T. Castleberry II who designated an acre and a half of his own land as a burial ground for the community that gathered around it.
The people laid to rest here tell you what mattered in Pine Tree: family members alongside the early members of that Cumberland Presbyterian congregation. In a frontier settlement, the church and the cemetery were bound together, two halves of the same communal life. The founders of the faith were buried within reach of the pulpit they had raised.
The cemetery's name carries its own small human story. It became Fisher Cemetery when A.T.'s granddaughter married a Fisher, and that family took up its continuing care. The oldest grave dates to 1860, and over the years the grounds grew to roughly 2.7 acres holding some 250 graves — a settlement's worth of lives, watched over across generations and formally recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2016.
Its place in the American story
Fisher Cemetery is a window into how the antebellum American frontier was actually filled in — not by armies or great institutions, but by clusters of families migrating together, often from the same home state, and rebuilding their communities on new ground. The Alabama families who made Pine Tree were doing what countless others did across the expanding United States: carrying their kin, their crops, and their congregations into unsettled country.
The Cumberland Presbyterian connection points to a distinctly American religious story as well. Frontier faith was portable and community-driven; a congregation could be founded by determined settlers long before any city grew up around it, and the burial ground beside it became the community's most lasting record.
What gives a place like this its quiet significance is precisely its ordinariness. The Pine Tree community has faded, but the names endure in stone. These small settlement cemeteries preserve the migrant families who did the unremarkable, foundational work of populating the young nation — the people history rarely names individually, gathered here by the hundred.
If you visit
Fisher Cemetery is a place to read slowly. Begin with the Texas Historical Commission marker for the story of Pine Tree and the Castleberry family, and look for the Historic Texas Cemetery medallion, awarded in 2016, that recognizes the grounds' age and significance.
As you walk, watch for the oldest section, where stones reach back to 1860 and the early days of the Cumberland Presbyterian congregation. Older cemeteries often arrange their earliest graves in family clusters, and here you may sense the closeness of a community where church founders and neighbors rest side by side. The 250 or so graves span generations of Gregg County life.
Set among the pines that gave the vanished community its name, this is the kind of stop that turns a drive through East Texas into something more thoughtful. It fits naturally into a day of exploring the small towns and back roads around Longview — a reminder that the region's history lives not only in its cities but in these carefully kept acres. Treat it as the active, cherished burial ground it remains.
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
- · A.T. Castleberry II
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Cherokee Trace
Longview, TX
In 1821 Cherokee people blazed this trace from the Nacogdoches area to their reservation on Arkansas's White River, slashing trees, clearing a path, planting Cherokee roses, and marking springs as camps. The trail became a thoroughfare for Sam Houston, David Crockett, other soldiers of the Texas Revolution, and thousands of immigrants. After Texas forces drove the Cherokees from the state in 1839, the very people who made the road departed over it into exile.
Elmira Chapel Cumberland Presbyterian Church
Longview, TX
This East Texas congregation grew out of Sunday School classes that Pine Tree Cumberland Presbyterian Church began holding in the Spring Hill Schoolhouse in the late 1880s. Organized in the 1890s under its first resident pastor, the church took its name from Elmira Castleberry, matriarch of a prominent pioneer family whose sons served as founding elders and donated land and materials for a combined school and church building in 1897-98. The congregation remained active in community and missionary work for generations.
Martin Hays
Longview, TX
Martin Hays (1883–1958) built a long career in East Texas public life, beginning in 1910 as Longview's city marshal and district clerk before serving as Gregg County sheriff from 1924 to 1932. Married into a pioneer Gregg County family, he was known for enforcing the law in a soft-spoken manner and rarely carrying a gun. He was among the first Texas sheriffs to organize junior deputies, and remained active in his church and fraternal orders.
New Providence Cemetery
Longview, TX
This Gregg County cemetery grew up around the New Providence Missionary Baptist Church, founded in the 1880s, with its first recorded burial in 1896. Fire, windstorm, and lightning destroyed the church, and the congregation disbanded—reorganizing only briefly to tend the graves. Among the fifty-eight burials rest veterans of five American wars, a former county judge, and a former district judge.