Hawthorne Cemetery
Noonday, Smith County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Mississippi natives William and Emily Hawthorne moved to this area with their family in 1867. In the 1870 census, they were recorded as having ten children. This cemetery takes its name from the Hawthornes, although their name does not appear on any of the gravestones. Several, however, are only marked with initials. The first documented burial at the site is that of J.W. Adams (1879-1882), son of T.T. and M.J. Adams. Others from the area were interred here, with family names including Cone, Gandy, Glaze, Lewis, Jones, McCoy, Oldham, Templeton, Thedford, Turman and Williams. William Turman bought the property surrounding the burial ground in 1914, and the Turman family cared for the cemetery for many years, holding an annual cleaning and dinner; that was discontinued in 1957 as the Turman family began holding annual reunions. The family deeded the site in 1982 to the Noonday Cemetery Association, which continues to maintain the grounds and oversee the cemetery's operations. Known also as Turman Cemetery, the burial ground is a link to the area's pioneers and their families. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2004
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Mississippi natives William and Emily Hawthorne brought their large family to Smith County in 1867, and though the cemetery bears their name, no Hawthorne headstone survives among its graves—some marked only with initials. The first documented burial, in 1882, was the infant son of the Adams family, followed by neighbors bearing names like Cone, Gandy, and Turman. The Turman family long cared for the grounds with annual cleanings and dinners before deeding the site to a cemetery association in 1982.
Why it matters
Hawthorne Cemetery shows how a rural burial ground keeps a community's memory alive even when its namesake founders leave no marked grave of their own.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When the Hawthorne family arrived here in 1867, East Texas was in the raw early years of Reconstruction. The Civil War had ended only two years before, the old plantation economy lay in ruins, and families across the defeated South were pulling up stakes to start over somewhere new. Mississippi, where William and Emily came from, sent many such families west toward the cheaper land and second chances of the Texas frontier.
Smith County in that era was thickly wooded, thinly settled country of small farms and scattered homesteads. There were no paved roads, no county services as we would know them, and often no church or school for miles. People relied on their neighbors for nearly everything — raising a barn, bringing in a harvest, sitting up with the sick, and burying the dead.
It is against that backdrop that a place like this one takes shape. A rural burying ground was rarely planned. It grew, grave by grave, out of the simple need to lay loved ones to rest close to home, on ground a family was willing to set aside.
People & events
The story begins with William and Emily Hawthorne and a household the 1870 census recorded as holding ten children — a large family even for a time of large families, and a sign of just how much labor and hope a frontier farm demanded. Their name settled permanently on this ground, and yet, in one of the quiet mysteries that old cemeteries so often keep, no stone here bears it. Some graves are marked only with initials, their full stories worn away or never carved at all.
The first burial anyone can document is the saddest kind: J.W. Adams, a small child who lived only from 1879 to 1882, son of T.T. and M.J. Adams. Around that little grave gathered others from the surrounding farms — families named Cone, Gandy, Glaze, Lewis, Jones, McCoy, Oldham, Templeton, Thedford, Turman, and Williams. Read together, those surnames are practically a census of the neighborhood.
In 1914 William Turman bought the land around the graves, and for decades the Turman family took the cemetery into its care. They held an annual cleaning followed by a dinner — a workday and a homecoming rolled into one — until 1957, when the gatherings shifted to family reunions. In 1982 the family deeded the ground to the Noonday Cemetery Association, which keeps it still.
Its place in the American story
Across rural America, thousands of small cemeteries like this one tell a history that never made the textbooks. They are the record of ordinary families — farmers, mothers, children — who cleared land, built communities, and left almost nothing else behind with their names on it. Where a courthouse fire or a lost county record erases the paper trail, the graveyard often remains the only surviving register of who lived and died in a place.
This site also captures something distinctly American about how such places endure. No government founded it and no institution funded it. It survived because one family, generation after generation, chose to tend it, and then handed that trust on to a community association rather than let it be forgotten. That chain of voluntary care — the annual cleaning, the shared dinner, the eventual deed — is how countless historic cemeteries have been saved.
The puzzle of the missing Hawthorne headstones speaks to a national truth as well. Memory outlasts marble. A community can remember whom it honors long after the physical markers have crumbled or were never there to begin with.
If you visit
Come expecting a quiet, humble place rather than a grand monument — that quiet is the point. This is a working rural cemetery, still cared for, tucked into the East Texas countryside near Noonday.
Walk the rows slowly and look closely at the older stones. You will find graves marked only with initials, and you will not find the Hawthorne name the cemetery carries — a small, moving reminder of how much history a modest headstone can hold and how much it can leave unsaid. Notice how many surnames repeat; each cluster is a family that farmed this land and stayed.
If you are threading together a road trip through Smith County's back roads, a stop here pairs naturally with the region's other pioneer sites. Give yourself a few unhurried minutes. Places like this reward patience, and they ask only that you remember the people resting here were once as alive to their world as you are to yours.
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 Hawthorne
- · Emily Hawthorne
- · William Turman
Themes & tags
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