James Clark

Clarksville, TX

James Clark, founder of Clarksville, began this burial ground in the 1830s, and it holds his father Benjamin, a Revolutionary War veteran whose grave is the earliest here. Among the others laid to rest are Albert Hamilton Latimer, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, the pioneering newspaperman Col. Charles DeMorse, and the early preacher-educator Rev. John Anderson. Long known as the Baptist Cemetery, it gathers the founding generation of one of northeast Texas's oldest towns.

Clarksville, TX

This Presbyterian congregation traces its roots to Old Shiloh in 1833, when Anglo settlers were streaming into what was then Mexican Texas, and relocated to Clarksville in 1858. The present church building went up in 1905. It stands among the oldest congregations in Red River County, a corner of Texas settled early via the routes down from the north and east.

Clarksville, TX

Born in New Jersey in 1788, David Gouverneur Burnet became a leading figure in Texas's fight for nationhood. He served as a convention delegate and judge before becoming interim president of the Republic of Texas from March to October 1836, in the tumultuous months surrounding independence. He later served as vice president and secretary of state of the young republic.

Clarksville, TX

A Methodist circuit rider in the Missouri Conference, William Stevenson crossed into the Red River country in 1815 and preached to the Claiborne Wright family and their neighbors — sermons remembered as the first Protestant worship ever held in Texas, then part of Catholic New Spain. A friend of empresario Stephen F. Austin, Stevenson helped plant the seed of religious pluralism on the frontier decades before Texas independence.