Gilmer

Gilmer, TX

Burials on this steep rise called "Little Mound" may reach back to the late 1860s, before residents of the pioneer village of Calloway organized Little Mount Baptist Church in 1878 in a former Union church and schoolhouse. Over the decades the congregation rebuilt three times, thriftily reusing the same lumber from one meetinghouse to the next. Among those buried here is Emma Sansom Johnson, remembered as a Confederate heroine who as a sixteen-year-old guided General Nathan Bedford Forrest's troops across a river in her native Alabama before later settling in Texas.

Harleton, TX

In the years around the Civil War, settlers drawn from North Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia gathered near the Harrison–Upshur county line to form the Crossroads community, founding a Baptist church and this cemetery on land given by Dr. T.B. Burford. The earliest marked grave belongs to Eli Henderson McCoy, who came from North Carolina in 1859, served in the Confederate Army, and died in 1863. Tombstones bearing military and fraternal emblems—and two rare stone cairns—record the lives of the families who built the settlement.

Pittsburg, TX

This burying ground was begun by William Harrison Pitts, the founder of Pittsburg, with the 1862 grave of his wife Sarah. The Pitts family had left their Georgia plantations to reestablish themselves on the Texas frontier in the mid-nineteenth century, and the plot soon held a Confederate corporal, Pitts's mother, and several of his siblings. Their arrival helped shape the young community of Camp County.

Gilmer, TX

Early in the nineteenth century a band of Cherokees established a village on this East Texas ground, part of the tribes that had migrated westward ahead of American expansion. They lived here until 1839, when the Cherokee and their allied peoples were forcibly driven from the young Republic of Texas.