Hartman Cemetery
Old River-Winfree, Chambers County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Robert Wiseman immigrated to Texas in 1825 and received a land grant in 1831 on the banks of Old River in what is now Chambers County. Wiseman sold his land in 1853 to Dr. Edward G. Hartman. Dr. Hartman's wife, Mary Francis Hartman, died about 1853 after giving birth and was probably the first person buried in the family cemetery. Dr. Hartman later remarried and moved to Galveston, where he lived until his death in 1867, but the Hartman children remained at their home on Old River. The small, largely unmarked graveyard was used by the families who owned the land and is an example of rural Texas burial customs. Shallow depressions, along with two brick-covered crypts and two small modern tombstones, are the only physical evidence of the graveyard. Soft handmade bricks over the graves probably were manufactured at the 1870s Pierre Almeras Brickyard about three-fourths of a mile downstream on Old River. There are ten known burials in the Hartman Cemetery. Although there is no visible evidence, a separate slave cemetery is thought to exist on land adjacent to the family graveyard. (1991)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This small graveyard on the banks of Old River began with a tract granted to Texas immigrant Robert Wiseman in 1831 and sold in 1853 to Dr. Edward Hartman, whose first wife was likely its earliest burial. Now marked mostly by shallow depressions, handmade brick crypts, and a few stones, the cemetery preserves rural Texas burial customs—including bricks probably fired at a nearby 1870s brickyard. A separate slave cemetery is believed to lie on adjacent land.
Why it matters
Modest family graveyards like this one document how ordinary settlers lived, died, and were remembered—and the suspected adjoining slave cemetery is a quiet reminder of the enslaved people whose graves went unmarked.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The story of this small graveyard begins in Mexican Texas. When Robert Wiseman arrived in 1825, Texas was part of the newly independent Republic of Mexico, which was inviting settlers to its thinly populated northern frontier. Land grants drew families from the United States to the rich coastal lowlands.
The country around Old River, near the upper reaches of Galveston Bay, was low, wet and fertile. Waterways were highways in those days, and a riverside grant gave a family both good soil and a route to market. Not far away, at Anahuac, friction between American settlers and Mexican officials flared in the early 1830s, one of the tensions that led to the Texas Revolution.
By the 1850s, when Dr. Edward G. Hartman bought the land, Texas had become a U.S. state. Galveston had grown into its leading port. Coastal plantations and farms in the region relied in part on the labor of enslaved people, a fact this cemetery's story quietly acknowledges.
People & events
Robert Wiseman came to Texas in 1825 and received his land on the banks of Old River in 1831. He held it for more than twenty years before selling it in 1853 to Dr. Edward G. Hartman.
The cemetery was born in grief. Around the time of the sale, Hartman's wife, Mary Francis Hartman, died after giving birth. She was probably the first person buried in the family graveyard. It is a painfully common story from that era, when childbirth was one of the gravest dangers a woman faced.
Dr. Hartman later remarried and moved to Galveston, where he lived until he died in 1867. His children stayed on at the family home on Old River, and the families who owned the land kept burying their dead there. Ten burials are known. The soft handmade bricks covering some graves were probably made at the Pierre Almeras Brickyard, which operated in the 1870s about three-quarters of a mile downstream. The marker also notes that a separate cemetery for enslaved people is thought to lie on adjacent land, though nothing visible remains. Their names have not come down to us.
Its place in the American story
Small family cemeteries like this one were once found all over rural America. Before towns had public cemeteries, families buried their loved ones on their own land. These graveyards are often the only physical record of lives that never made it into history books.
The suspected slave cemetery next door carries a heavier meaning. Across the South, enslaved people were buried in separate, often unmarked ground, and many of those burial places have been lost to plowing, building or simple neglect. Recognizing that such a cemetery may exist here is a small act of remembrance for people whose names and lives were deliberately left unrecorded.
The Hartman family's Galveston connection also links this quiet riverbank to a larger story. It was in Galveston, in June 1865, that Union authorities announced the end of slavery in Texas, the event now celebrated nationwide as Juneteenth.
If you visit
Don't expect rows of headstones. The marker describes a graveyard you read in the ground itself: shallow depressions where graves have settled, two crypts covered with soft handmade brick and just two small modern tombstones. Take your time and look closely, because the evidence is subtle.
Keep in mind the graves you cannot see, both the unmarked family burials and the enslaved people thought to rest on nearby land. Walk softly, stay on any paths and treat the whole area as sacred ground. Before you go, confirm that the site is open to visitors, since small rural cemeteries sometimes sit on or beside private property.
This stop fits naturally into a trip around the upper Galveston Bay region. You can combine it with Anahuac and the Chambers County countryside, then continue to Galveston, where Dr. Hartman spent his final years and where Juneteenth began.
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
- · Robert Wiseman
- · Edward G. Hartman
- · Mary Francis Hartman
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Linney Cemetery
Dayton, TX
Founded in the 1850s to serve the people of West Liberty—now Dayton—this thirteen-acre burial ground grew informally, its sections known by family names like Smith and Alford, with a separately reserved area for Black residents now called Acie Cemetery. Many graves are unmarked; the earliest documented is that of six-day-old Joseph Monroe Linney in 1880. Those laid to rest here include pioneer settlers, elected officials, and veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam.
Enoch Brinson & Pecan Grove Plantation
La Porte, TX
Enoch and Eliza Brinson came to Texas in 1824 among Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists, settling a league of land overlooking San Jacinto Bay. Enoch opened a blacksmith shop and, unable to serve as a soldier because of a disability, supplied labor and goods to the Texian cause during the Revolution. His plantation grew to hundreds of cattle and improved acreage worked in part by an enslaved person, and after his death in 1861 his widow Delilah ran the estate before dividing the land among their children.
Old River
Old River-Winfree, TX
Old River, a looping channel of the Trinity, drew some of the earliest pioneers to this corner of southeast Texas in the 1820s and 1830s, among them Robert and Eleanor Wiseman on land grants taken up in 1827. Fertile soil and open grassland made it a farming and ranching center whose hides, timber, and charcoal were shipped down to market in Galveston. That trade fostered shipbuilding firms, brick kilns, and ferry operations, seeding a pattern of settlement whose descendants still live in the area.
Henry and Amelia Griffith
Mont Belvieu, TX
Pennsylvania native Henry Griffith and his Louisiana-born wife Amelia "Milly" Barrow settled this area in 1826, when it was still under Mexican rule, receiving a land grant in the Atascosito District where they farmed and raised cattle. In 1835 Griffith sold land including the "big hill" that his deed dubbed "Mont Bellview"—the origin of the name Mont Belvieu. Living under the flags of Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederacy, and the United States, Griffith even served as a Reconstruction-era sheriff before his death in 1869.