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.
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
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.
Concord Cemetery
Quitman, TX
Settlers founded the Concord community in the 1870s, and early resident Hubbard Moseley gave land for a burial ground, a school, and a Baptist chapel. Velinda Wood, laid to rest in July 1875, has the oldest marked grave, though unmarked earlier burials lie among the roughly one thousand people from Concord, Hainesville, and nearby settlements interred here. Generations of caretakers and a cemetery association have tended the grounds ever since.
Millville Cemetery
Henderson, TX
In the 1840s Jesse Walling, a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto, set aside four acres for a church, school, Masonic lodge, and cemetery to serve the Liberty Hill community, later renamed Millville. Of the nearly 400 graves—many unmarked—Ann Rushing's, dated 1851, is the earliest marked, and several are covered with distinctive carved fieldstone slabs that give the ground a singular look. Descendants still gather for the annual Millville picnic, a tradition reaching back to at least 1885.
Nelta Cemetery
Sulphur Bluff, TX
In December 1842 a wagon train from Warrick County, Indiana, led by two Hargrave brothers, reached the Sulphur River country, and settlement soon followed. The earliest burial came in 1843, and over decades several nearby graveyards—McFall, Hargrave, and the church plot at Pleasant Hill—merged into what became Nelta Cemetery when the community took the name of its 1882 post office. Trustees expanded the grounds through land purchases into the 1920s.