Hart-Herrington Cemetery
Kountze, Hardin County, Texas
Marker Inscription
William Henry Hart was born in Georgia in March 1804. Hampton Jackson Herrington was born in the same state in 1817. Hart married Sarah Granberry Herrington, becoming "Hamp" Herrington's brother-in-law. Herrington married Rachel Overstreet in 1838; after Rachel's death he married her sister, Elizabeth Overstreet, in 1845. The Hart and Herrington families moved to the East Texas community of Providence in 1853. In that year Hart served as a delegate from Jefferson County to select a nominee for congressman for East Texas. Hart and Herrington purchased eighty acres of the W. M. Bumstead survey n 1854. A portion of that land was to be set aside for a cemetery. When Hardin County was created in 1858, William H. Hart was elected county treasurer and his brother-in-law, "Hamp" Herrington, became the first chief justice (county judge). William Hart died in 1861 and his body was interred near this site, formally establishing the cemetery. The next burial was that of Sarah Ann Teel of Saratoga, who died in 1872. Sarah Herrington Hart was buried beside her husband in 1896. Hampton Herrington served the people of Hardin County until his own death in 1899. Of the nine marked graves in Hart-Herrington Cemetery, eight are those of relatives of William and Sarah Hart or Hampton and Elizabeth Herrington. Believed to be the second graveyard established in Hardin County, the Hart-Herrington Cemetery remains as a chronicle of the pioneers of East Texas.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Georgia-born brothers-in-law William Henry Hart and Hampton Jackson 'Hamp' Herrington moved their families to the East Texas community of Providence in 1853 and set aside part of their land for a cemetery. When Hardin County was created in 1858, Hart became county treasurer and Herrington its first chief justice. Hart's 1861 burial formally established the graveyard, believed to be the second in the county, where eight of the nine marked graves belong to the two founding families.
Why it matters
It preserves the intertwined families who helped organize Hardin County, marking one of the earliest burial grounds in that corner of East Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The mid-1850s in East Texas were the years of turning raw frontier into governed country. Families arriving from the older Southern states brought the habits of civic life with them — courts, elections, treasurers — and set about building those institutions from scratch among the pines.
This land lay in what would soon become Hardin County, carved out in 1858 from the larger surrounding territory. The community of Providence, where these families put down roots in 1853, was the kind of small farming settlement that dotted the region long before railroads or oil arrived to reshape it.
It was also the eve of the Civil War. The men who first organized this county would watch the nation split apart only a few years after taking up their first local offices.
People & events
Two Georgia-born men anchor this story. William Henry Hart, born in 1804, and Hampton Jackson "Hamp" Herrington, born in 1817, became brothers-in-law when Hart married Hamp's sister, Sarah. Herrington's own life held both grief and continuity: after his first wife, Rachel, died, he married her sister, Elizabeth.
The families came to Providence together in 1853, and the next year the two men bought eighty acres, deliberately setting aside a portion for a burying ground. When Hardin County was formally created in 1858, they helped run it — Hart as county treasurer, Herrington as its first chief justice, the county's highest local office.
Hart died in 1861 and was laid here, formally establishing the cemetery. His wife Sarah joined him in 1896; Hamp Herrington served the county until his own death in 1899. Of the nine marked graves, eight belong to these two intertwined families — a kinship written into the ground itself.
Its place in the American story
This is a portrait of how the American frontier actually became America — not through generals and presidents, but through families who moved west, bought land, and then built the ordinary machinery of self-government: a treasury, a court, a county.
Believed to be only the second graveyard established in Hardin County, it marks a genuine founding place. The people here were not passing through. They drew the county's first boundaries and filled its first offices, and their graves sit at the very root of local government in this corner of Texas.
Their Georgia origins belong to a much larger current: the great migration of Southern families westward into Texas in the decades before the Civil War, carrying with them their kinship networks, their institutions, and their firm expectation of governing themselves.
If you visit
This is a small, intimate cemetery, and that intimacy is its charm. With just nine marked graves, nearly all from two families, you can take in the whole story in a single unhurried visit.
Read the names and dates in order and you'll watch the shape of a pioneer household emerge across the 19th century — founders, their spouses, the sisters who became second wives, and the children and kin gathered around them in one small ground.
It suits a slow drive through rural Hardin County, where the woods and the quiet make it easy to picture the isolated settlement of Providence and the handful of families who turned it into a working county.
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
- · William Henry Hart
- · Hampton Jackson Herrington
- · Sarah Herrington Hart
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Kountze Church of Christ
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This Church of Christ congregation gathered in 1886, a year before Kountze became the Hardin County seat, worshipping first in the Masonic Hall and the courthouse. In 1891 it raised a permanent building on land donated by Judge and Mrs. W. W. Cruse, calling worshippers with a church bell cast back in 1819. For well over a century the congregation has been woven into the fabric of Kountze's history.
Pine Lodge # 642, A. F. & A. M.
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Chartered in December 1886, Pine Lodge No. 642 gathered its first thirteen Masons from across Hardin County, with William B. Pedigo serving as founding master. Meeting first in the Washburn Building on Main Street, the lodge answered local calls for aid and helped launch new lodges in neighboring towns. It bought its longtime home in 1945, anchoring fraternal life in the East Texas pinewoods for generations.
Hardin County
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Hardin County was created on January 22, 1858, and organized that August, taking its name from the Hardin family of neighboring Liberty County. Five Hardin brothers—Benjamin Watson, Augustine Blackburn, William, Frank, and Milton—had come to Texas in 1825, among the early Anglo-American settlers of the region. The county seat sat at the town of Hardin until 1887, when it moved to Kountze.
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Since Hardin County was created in 1858, its seat of government has occupied a succession of buildings, beginning with a two-story log structure that burned around 1886 and took the county's early records with it. A frame courthouse followed in 1887—famously built around its safe—then a domed 1905 masonry building of West Texas stone and imported St. Louis brick, and finally a modern facility in 1958. Remarkably, the little 1887 building still stands near the square as law offices.