Harris Creek Cemetery
Winona, Smith County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Harris Creek Baptist Church organized in Oct. 1849, with 15 charter members and elder William H. Ray elected as pastor. Ray, who organized the First Baptist Church of Tyler the previous year, preached at Harris Creek for two years before resigning to form other Baptist churches in Smith County. The original location was along the creek at Lott’s Spring, near the Methodist Church camp ground east of this site. After severe flooding, members moved the church here, in the Mount Carmel community, in 1852. Anglo members and their African-American slaves worshiped together in one building while seated separately. The church building also served as a schoolhouse, and a cemetery began on adjacent land. The earliest documented burial in Harris Creek Cemetery is of South Carolina native John Brownlee Clinkscales, who signed his will the same day he died on Jan. 4, 1857. Mount Carmel declined after the Civil War, and an extension of the Tyler Tap Railroad established the nearby town of Winona in 1876. Harris Creek Memorial Association formed in Oct. 1909, with James T. Kay of Winona as chairman. The association continues to hold an annual meeting, which usually includes worship service and a picnic dinner. Winona Baptist Church (formerly Harris Creek Baptist Church) deeded the cemetery to Harris Creek Memorial Association in 1948. Tombstones made of marble, sandstone, concrete and metal chronicle several fraternal organizations and veterans of conflicts dating from the War of 1812 to Vietnam. The rural setting includes deciduous trees, some cedars, and native grass with some plantings. Many family plots are enclosed by concrete curbs, and some have iron fencing. Today, this burial ground of several hundred graves remains in use and recalls the contributions of citizens of Mount Carmel, Winona and other nearby communities.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Harris Creek Baptist Church took root in 1849 in the Mount Carmel community of East Texas, moving to this higher ground in 1852 after floods drove it from Lott's Spring. Its meetinghouse doubled as a schoolhouse, and Anglo settlers and the people they enslaved worshipped in the same building while seated apart. The adjoining cemetery, in use since at least 1857, holds several hundred graves and veterans of every war from 1812 to Vietnam.
Why it matters
The burial ground preserves the layered story of a frontier Texas farming community, including the uncomfortable record of segregated worship under slavery.
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Related people
- · William H. Ray
- · John Brownlee Clinkscales
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First Baptist Church of Winona
Winona, TX
Founded in 1849 as Harris Creek Baptist Church by Pastor William H. Ray and fifteen charter members, this East Texas congregation met in members' homes before raising a pine-log meetinghouse in 1850. Its cemetery, begun in 1858, held both white and—in a separate section—African American members, who belonged to the church until Emancipation. Surviving a cyclone, relocations, and repeated name changes, it became the First Baptist Church of Winona in 1947.
Hopewell Baptist Church
Tyler, TX
Hopewell Baptist Church grew out of open-air preaching in a post oak grove in the late 1850s, organizing formally in 1858 with the Rev. J. S. Bledsoe as its first pastor. Harvey Yarborough deeded land, and a meetinghouse rose in 1859 on the eve of the Civil War. Notably, during Reconstruction its members helped freed people establish churches of their own, and the congregation has worshiped continuously for well over a century.
Jarvis Christian College
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In the Jim Crow era, when Black Texans were shut out of most higher education, the Texas Negro Disciples of Christ and the Christian Women's Board of Missions joined forces in 1904 to build a school. On land donated by Ida and J.J. Jarvis, the institute opened in 1913 with a dozen elementary pupils and steadily grew—adding high school, junior college, and by 1937 a full four-year college that won accreditation in 1950.
Henry Miller Morgan
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