Highland Cemetery
Edgewood, Van Zandt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Established by 1894, this burial ground serves the Highland community. In the 1880s, pioneering farmers settled the area after construction of a road which allowed easier access to markets. In 1889, John and Elizbaeth Valentine deeded property for a school building, which would also serve as a place of worship for Methodist and Church of Christ congregations. Community leaders instrumental in establishing a school community and in constructing the first building included J. J. Bateman, D. J. Newborn, Z. B. Daugherty, W. H. Palmer, U. L. Martin, John Hall and Joe Hamlet, along with John Valentine. The school moved in 1921, but the original site continued to be used as a burial ground. The oldest dated burial here, dating to 1894, is of Grover Dillard. Also buried here are veterans of conflicts dating to the Civil War and Highland pioneers, including members of the Bateman, Batts, Hall, Palmer, Martin and Thompson families. Many of the interred were farmers, reflecting the rural nature of the settlement. At first, cotton was the area's primary crop; by the late 1930s, tomatoes became the main crop. Farmers also produced sweet potatoes, watermelons, and other fruits and vegetables. By the late 1950s, hay and cattle became major industries in this area, as throughout Van Zandt County. Highland Cemetery features obelisks, vertical stones, a Woodmen of the World marker and curbing. In 1959, Highland Memorial Association organized to care for the cemetery. Today, this cemetery endures as one of the few remaining vestiges of the Highland community. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2006
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Highland Cemetery, established by 1894, served a Van Zandt County farming community that took shape once a new road opened easier access to markets. Settlers built a school in 1889 that doubled as a meeting house for Methodist and Church of Christ worshippers, and the surrounding families raised cotton, then tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and eventually cattle. Its obelisks, Woodmen of the World marker, and graves of Civil War veterans make it one of the last vestiges of the vanished Highland settlement.
Why it matters
The cemetery preserves the memory of the countless small agricultural communities whose rise and fall shaped rural America's landscape.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Highland Cemetery sits in the rolling farm country of Van Zandt County in East Texas, in the decades after the Civil War when the region was still filling in with settlers looking for cheap, workable land. The 1880s were a moment when a single practical improvement — in this case a new road — could summon a whole community into being. The inscription tells you that the Highland farmers put down roots only after that road opened easier access to markets, and that detail is the key to everything that followed.
This was the Reconstruction and Gilded Age era, when rural America was knit together not by cities but by countless small settlements built around a schoolhouse, a church meeting, and a burying ground. In much of the South and the trans-Mississippi West, land that had been open range or scattered homesteads was being organized into working farm communities, one family at a time.
Cotton was king across East Texas in those years, and Highland followed the pattern — a cash crop that tied even remote farmers into distant markets and the wider national economy. The story of the place is really the story of that connection: a road, a market, a crop, and the families who bet their futures on all three.
People & events
The community took real shape in 1889, when John and Elizabeth Valentine deeded property for a school building. In small settlements like this, the schoolhouse was rarely just a school — this one doubled as a house of worship for both Methodist and Church of Christ congregations, a single frame building carrying the weight of a community's education and its faith at once.
The inscription preserves the names of the men who built that first community: J. J. Bateman, D. J. Newborn, Z. B. Daugherty, W. H. Palmer, U. L. Martin, John Hall, and Joe Hamlet, alongside John Valentine himself. These were the organizers and builders, the people whose labor turned scattered farms into a place with a name. The oldest dated grave belongs to Grover Dillard, laid to rest in 1894 — the year the burial ground itself was established.
The school moved on in 1921, but the graves remained, and the land kept doing the quiet work of remembering. Buried here are veterans of conflicts reaching back to the Civil War, and the pioneer families whose surnames — Bateman, Batts, Hall, Palmer, Martin, Thompson — recur across the community's history. Most were farmers, and you can read the shifting fortunes of the land in their lifetimes: cotton at first, then tomatoes by the late 1930s, along with sweet potatoes, watermelons, and other produce, and finally hay and cattle by the late 1950s. In 1959 the Highland Memorial Association organized to care for the grounds, ensuring the community would not be forgotten even after it had faded.
Its place in the American story
Highland was one of thousands of small agricultural communities that rose across rural America in the late nineteenth century, thrived for a few generations, and then quietly dissolved as farming consolidated and young people left for towns and cities. Almost none of them made the history books. What survives, more often than not, is exactly what survives here: the cemetery.
The crop history etched into this marker is a compact lesson in the transformation of American farming. The move from cotton to truck crops like tomatoes and sweet potatoes, and finally to hay and cattle, mirrors changes that swept the whole rural South and Southwest across the twentieth century — soil exhaustion, shifting markets, mechanization, and the long decline of the small cash-crop farm.
That a community would organize an association in 1959 to tend the graves of people already gone speaks to something deeply American: the conviction that ordinary farming families deserve to be remembered, and that a place with no monuments but its headstones is still worth preserving. Highland Cemetery matters because it stands in for all the vanished settlements that shaped the countryside and left almost no other trace.
If you visit
Come to Highland Cemetery expecting quiet. This is not a grand monument but a working country burial ground, and its power is in its plainness — the kind of place where the wind in the grass is the loudest thing you'll hear.
Look closely at the stones themselves, because they tell the story. The obelisks and tall vertical markers reflect the Victorian tastes of the Gilded Age. Seek out the Woodmen of the World marker — that fraternal order once provided members with distinctive tree-stump and log-shaped monuments, and spotting one is like finding a signature of the era. The curbing that outlines family plots shows how carefully these farm families organized their dead, mirroring the ordered fields they worked in life.
Run your eye over the recurring surnames — Bateman, Palmer, Martin, Hall — and you'll see a whole community's kinship written in stone. It makes an ideal stop on a slow drive through Van Zandt County's back roads, a few reflective minutes among the pioneers who cleared this land. Read the names, do the arithmetic between birth and death dates, and let the vanished community of Highland come briefly back to life.
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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Themes & tags
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