Iron Bluff Cemetery
Lone Star, Morris County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Livingston Skinner (1795-1874) came to this part of Texas from Georgia in the early 1840s with his wife, Hedidah "Jodie" (Hughes) (1806-1881), and their children. The Iron Bluff Cemetery began as a family cemetery at the northwest corner of their property. The first marked burial in the graveyard dates to 1853 and is that of the Skinners' daughter E.F. (Emily). They buried her sister N.E.A. (Amanda) here the following year. Other family members interred here include son William Moses Skinner (1832-1907), a Confederate veteran, and daughter Sarah Ann and her husband Joseph D. Lilly (1816-1860), who was a Texas Ranger as well as the first sheriff of Titus County. Residents of Lone Star began using the burial ground, which once was also the site of the Iron Bluff Schoolhouse. Among those buried here are numerous veterans of the Civil War, and landowner Livingston Skinner, a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Creek Indian Wars of 1813-14, as well as veterans of World War II, the Korean Conflict and Vietnam. Iron Bluff Cemetery serves as an important link to these veterans and to generations of other area residents who played important roles in the area's history. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2005
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Livingston Skinner brought his family from Georgia to this corner of Texas in the early 1840s, and the burial ground began at the edge of their land with a daughter's grave in 1853. Over generations it filled with the Skinners and their neighbors from nearby Lone Star, and once shared its ground with the Iron Bluff Schoolhouse. Those buried here served in nearly every American conflict — Skinner himself a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Creek Wars, alongside later Confederate, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam veterans.
Why it matters
Spanning more than a century of American wars in a single frontier graveyard, Iron Bluff Cemetery is a living ledger of the settlers who claimed and defended the Texas interior.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When Livingston Skinner brought his family to this corner of Texas in the early 1840s, they were arriving at the edge of a very young republic. Texas had won its independence from Mexico in 1836 and would not join the United States until 1845; the land here in what became Morris County was still frontier, thickly wooded and thinly settled, drawing families out of the older cotton states of the Deep South.
Those settlers came mostly from places like Georgia, carrying their households, their farming know-how, and their dead. In a country with no established towns, no county seats, and few churches, a family simply chose a quiet rise of ground and began to bury its own. The northwest corner of a homestead, out of the way of the plow, was a natural place for it.
Within a generation this stretch of East Texas would be swept into the Civil War, and later still into the timber and iron economy that gave the nearby town of Lone Star its name. The graveyard that began on Skinner land would outlast the farm itself, becoming a shared inheritance of the whole community.
People & events
The story starts with Livingston Skinner and his wife Hedidah — "Jodie" — who came west with their children and put down roots. The cemetery opens, as so many family plots do, with a heartbreak: their daughter Emily was buried here in 1853, the first marked grave, and the following year they laid her sister Amanda beside her. A place meant to hold a family's future had instead begun holding its losses.
Other Skinners followed into the same ground over the decades — among them son William Moses Skinner, who lived into the twentieth century after serving as a Confederate soldier. Another thread runs through daughter Sarah Ann and her husband, Joseph D. Lilly, a man who wore two of frontier Texas's most demanding hats: he rode as a Texas Ranger and served as the first sheriff of Titus County, keeping a fragile order in a raw and often violent country.
At the center of it all lies Livingston Skinner himself, whose own life reached back astonishingly far — a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Creek War of 1813–14, conflicts fought when the United States was barely a generation old. That one man could carry that history into a Texas grave, alongside descendants and neighbors who served in the Civil War and, later, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, is the quiet marvel of this place.
Its place in the American story
Iron Bluff Cemetery is a small patch of ground that somehow touches nearly the whole sweep of American military history. In a single fenced acre lie men who answered the call in the War of 1812 and the Creek War, in the Civil War on the Confederate side, and in the great conflicts of the twentieth century — a continuity of service running from the early republic to the living memory of families in Lone Star today.
It also tells the larger story of how the American interior was settled. Families like the Skinners moved steadily westward out of the older South, and where they stopped, they built the institutions of community from scratch — not just farms, but schoolhouses and burial grounds. That the Iron Bluff Schoolhouse once stood on this same site captures something true about frontier life: learning, worship, and remembrance often shared the same humble ground.
When the Texas Historical Commission recognized it as a Historic Texas Cemetery, it was honoring exactly this — the way an ordinary rural graveyard preserves an extraordinary record of the people who claimed, worked, and defended this land.
If you visit
Come to Iron Bluff Cemetery expecting quiet. This is a rural burial ground near Lone Star, not a monument, and its power is in its stillness and its span. Walk the rows slowly and read the dates: you can trace, stone by stone, the arc from a War of 1812 veteran to men who served in Vietnam, all resting in the same soil.
Look for the oldest markers first — the 1850s graves of the Skinner daughters that started it all — and then let your eye travel forward through the generations. The military markers, in particular, turn a walk here into a kind of timeline you can touch. Somewhere among these graves is the family that gave the cemetery its start and the neighbors who made it their own.
It fits naturally into a slow drive through the piney woods and old iron country of Northeast Texas, where small towns and older cemeteries dot the back roads. Give yourself a few unhurried minutes, and remember that every name here belonged to someone who helped make this corner of the country what it is.
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
- · Livingston Skinner
- · Hedidah Hughes Skinner
- · Joseph D. Lilly
Related events
- · War of 1812
- · Creek War
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Harris Chapel Cemetery
Hughes Springs, TX
Settlers reached this corner of Cass County in the 1850s, and the community took its name after John T. Harris arrived in 1853 on land that already held a Methodist log church and burial ground. The church doubled as a schoolhouse, was rebuilt larger in 1859, and the cemetery grew alongside it, its oldest legible stone dating to 1859. Rebuilt again after a 1949 tornado, the church endures beside graves that include veterans from the Mexican War through Korea.
Mattox Cemetery
New Diana, TX
Families from Alabama and Georgia settled this area in the 1850s, and oral tradition holds that enslaved people were among the first buried here, with the earliest recorded grave that of Milla Ann Greer Oliver in 1861. Deeded for a church and cemetery by William and Martha Greer in 1887, the "Old Family Cemetery" holds more than four hundred burials, including veterans of every conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam. A cemetery association formed in 1970 to care for the grounds.
Center Grove Cemetery
Cookville, TX
First known as the Yancey Cemetery, this burial ground began in the mid-1860s on land donated by David Yancey, Sr., whose party had traveled from Tennessee to Texas—an orphaned infant from that group being the first laid to rest here. Many of the earliest graves are marked only with rough fieldstones. Renamed Center Grove in 1900 for the nearby Church of Christ, it holds veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars.
Smyrna Cemetery
Harleton, TX
Pioneer physician John Chadd received an 1845 land grant here and the following year donated ground for a church, school, and cemetery, choosing the biblical name Smyrna for the community. The burial ground dates to 1850, with its earliest surviving headstone from 1859, and grew alongside the Methodist congregation Chadd later helped endow. Among its 675-plus graves rest early settlers and veterans of every American conflict from the Civil War through Vietnam.