Forest Hill Cemetery
Livingston, Polk County, Texas
Marker Inscription
By 1905, all the lots in Livingston's Old City Cemetery had been filled, and community leaders began looking for a new cemetery site. Residents established Forest Hill Cemetery Association in 1906 and bought land from James and Arabella Henington on a hill south of the downtown area. In November 1906, Arthur B. Garner was the first to be buried in the new cemetery. Community women formed the Ladies Cemetery Association of Livingston in May 1908; their purpose was to improve, beautify and preserve the city's two cemeteries. In the 1930s, Marion Tew took charge of maintaining Forest Hill Cemetery, and under her leadership the grounds were beautified and Washington Avenue, which leads to the graveyard, was the first street in Livingston to be paved. Forest Hill Cemetery is a link to Livingston's history. Gravestones indicate the burials of thirty Confederate soldiers and one Union soldier, as well as veterans of subsequent American military actions. Noted individuals buried here include A.H. Bailey, of Mollie Bailey's Circus, George Ely, a traveling circus entertainer, and acclaimed theatre director Margaret "Margo" Jones.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
By 1905 Livingston's old city cemetery was full, so residents formed the Forest Hill Cemetery Association in 1906 and bought a hilltop south of downtown, where Arthur B. Garner became the first burial that November. Women organized the Ladies Cemetery Association in 1908 to beautify the grounds, and in the 1930s Marion Tew's stewardship even prompted the paving of Washington Avenue — Livingston's first paved street. Its stones mark thirty Confederate and one Union soldier alongside circus figures and acclaimed theatre director Margaret 'Margo' Jones.
Why it matters
Forest Hill shows how community women's associations quietly shaped Southern towns, and how a single graveyard can hold soldiers, showmen, and a pioneering woman of the American theater side by side.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Livingston sits in the Piney Woods of East Texas, in Polk County, and by the early twentieth century it was a settled county-seat town with the ordinary needs of a growing community — including, by 1905, the very practical problem that its old city cemetery had simply run out of room. That mundane crisis is where Forest Hill's story begins, in the Reconstruction-and-Gilded-Age world giving way to the Progressive Era.
This was a moment when American towns were organizing themselves in new ways. Civic associations, women's clubs, and community improvement groups were springing up everywhere, driven by a belief that ordinary citizens — and increasingly, ordinary women — could and should shape the look and life of their towns. A cemetery association buying land and platting a new burial ground fit squarely into that Progressive impulse toward civic order and beautification.
East Texas in this period was timber country and small-farm country, its towns bound together by rail and by the churches and fraternal orders that structured social life. Livingston was exactly the kind of place where a handful of determined residents could decide the community needed something better and then simply build it.
People & events
In 1906 the newly formed Forest Hill Cemetery Association bought a hilltop south of downtown from James and Arabella Henington, and that November Arthur B. Garner became the first person laid to rest there. But the marker's richest thread is what the women of Livingston did next.
In 1908 they organized the Ladies Cemetery Association to improve, beautify, and preserve the town's cemeteries — the kind of quiet, sustained civic labor that shaped countless Southern towns and rarely made the history books. Their most visible legacy came in the 1930s, when Marion Tew took charge of Forest Hill. Under her stewardship the grounds were beautified and Washington Avenue, the road leading to the cemetery, became the first paved street in Livingston. It is a wonderful detail: the town's first pavement led not downtown but out to honor its dead.
And the hill holds an unusually colorful company. Among its graves are A.H. Bailey, connected to the famous Mollie Bailey's Circus that toured the South, and another traveling circus entertainer, George Ely. Most remarkable of all is Margaret "Margo" Jones, the acclaimed theatre director — a hometown daughter who became one of the most important figures in twentieth-century American theater.
Its place in the American story
Forest Hill quietly connects a small East Texas town to several large American stories. The first is the story of women's civic power in an age before they could even vote nationally: the Ladies Cemetery Association and leaders like Marion Tew exercised real, lasting influence over their community's public spaces, a pattern repeated in thousands of towns and central to how the Progressive Era actually changed America.
The soldiers' graves — thirty Confederate and a single Union veteran, alongside veterans of later American wars — make the cemetery a compact record of the nation's military history, and that lone Union grave is a poignant reminder that even deep in the former Confederacy, the country's divisions and reconciliations rested side by side.
Then there is Margo Jones. A pioneer of the American regional and nonprofit theater movement, she helped break Broadway's monopoly on serious drama and championed new playwrights, leaving a mark on the national stage far larger than her hometown's size would suggest. That a figure of her importance rests on this hill links Livingston to the whole flowering of mid-century American theater.
If you visit
Approach by Washington Avenue and remember, as you do, that this was the first paved street in town — laid to reach the cemetery you're driving toward. It's a small thing to notice that changes how the whole place feels.
Once there, this is a cemetery to read like a community's biography. Look for the older section near the 1906 origins, and keep an eye out for the graves of its most storied residents — the circus figures who once traveled the South bringing spectacle to small towns, and the resting place of Margo Jones, worth seeking out if you care at all about the American theater.
The hilltop setting gives the grounds their character; the beautification the Ladies Cemetery Association began more than a century ago is part of what you're seeing today. Livingston makes an easy, rewarding stop on a Piney Woods road trip, and Forest Hill is the kind of place where twenty unhurried minutes reveals soldiers, showmen, and an artist of national stature all keeping company on one green rise.
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
- · Margaret 'Margo' Jones
- · Marion Tew
- · A.H. Bailey
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Margaret V. "Margo" Jones
Livingston, TX
Livingston native Margo Jones became one of the most influential figures in mid-twentieth-century American theatre, championing nonprofit regional theatre and the theatre-in-the-round staging she pioneered in Dallas. She guided the careers of Tennessee Williams and William Inge, directing Broadway productions including The Glass Menagerie and Inherit the Wind, and organized the Houston Community Players. Named one of the nation's outstanding little-theater directors, she died in Dallas in 1955, but her model of resident professional theatre endures.
Birthplace of Margo Jones
Livingston, TX
Livingston was the birthplace of Margo Jones (1911–1955), a visionary who reshaped American theater. After winning acclaim directing the Broadway premiere of "The Glass Menagerie," she founded in Dallas the nation's first professional resident theater-in-the-round and championed regional theater beyond New York. She premiered dozens of new plays and helped launch the careers of Tennessee Williams and William Inge.
Polk County, C. S. A.
Livingston, TX
During the Civil War, Polk County was a stretch of piney woods, farms, and thickets that included an Alabama-Coushatta reservation. Though it counted only 600 voters in 1860, it sent some 900 soldiers into the Confederate Army, furnishing four companies to Hood's famed Texas Brigade and organizing several other infantry units; twenty-one Alabama-Coushattas enlisted in an Indian cavalry company. On the home front, old men, women, children, and enslaved people raised food and cotton, while the county's ferries and river landings moved troops and supplies until Livingston became headquarters for the federal Army of Occupation in 1867-68.
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After the Civil War, families who had supported the Union — among them the Collins and Knight households — left Mississippi for the pineywoods of Polk County to escape hostile Reconstruction-era neighbors. Their settlements gave rise to the Bluewater community, whose cemetery was established in 1898, the same year a Missionary Baptist church organized nearby. More than 600 graves rest here, many marked by handmade concrete stones and shaded by old cedar trees.