James Frederick Gomer Cemetery
Hemphill, Sabine County, Texas
Marker Inscription
JAMES FREDERICK GOMER (1797-1870), ANA M. BATEMAN GOMER (1804-1873) AND THEIR TWO CHILDREN, AUGUSTUS AND MARY ANN, CAME TO SABINE COUNTY FROM GILES COUNTY, TENNESSEE IN 1836. LATER, THEY ADDED TO THE FAMILY WITH AMANDA, LEONIDAS AND ANNA. IN 1838, GOMER RECEIVED ACREAGE AND BEGAN TO OPERATE A LARGE FARM. BY 1873, BOTH JAMES AND ANA HAD PASSED AND WERE BURIED ON THE FAMILY FARM ALONG WITH ANOTHER CHILD, CATHERINE, WHO DIED YOUNG. IT IS ALSO SAID THAT SINCE THE AREA WAS ALONG A POPULAR ROUTE, THERE ARE OTHER BURIALS OF INDIANS AND SLAVES OUTSIDE OF THE FAMILY CEMETERY. TODAY, THE CEMETERY IS CARED FOR BY THE JAMES FREDERICK GOMER CHAPTER OF THE DAUGHTERS OF THE REPUBLIC OF TEXAS.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
James Frederick Gomer and his wife Ana came to Sabine County from Giles County, Tennessee, in 1836, receiving acreage in 1838 and building up a large farm. By the early 1870s both had died and were buried on the family land alongside a child who died young. Because the farm sat along a well-traveled route, tradition holds that others — including Native people and enslaved individuals — were buried just outside the family plot.
Why it matters
The Gomer cemetery marks a Republic of Texas–era homestead and quietly acknowledges the Native and enslaved people whose graves lie at its edges, a reminder of who else shared this frontier ground.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1836, the year the Republic of Texas was born, the Gomer family made the long move from Giles County, Tennessee, to the eastern woods of Sabine County. They were part of a great southward and westward migration, as families from the older Southern states sought fresh land on a new frontier.
Two years later, in 1838, James Frederick Gomer received acreage and set about building a large farm. This was the fundamental work of frontier Texas — clearing ground, planting crops, and establishing a homestead that could support a growing family in a still-unsettled land.
The farm sat along a well-traveled route, which mattered more than it might seem. A place that people passed through became a place where events gathered — and, over time, where the dead of more than one community came to rest.
People & events
James Frederick Gomer, born in 1797, and his wife Ana M. Bateman Gomer, born in 1804, arrived in Sabine County with two children, Augustus and Mary Ann. In the years that followed, the family grew to include Amanda, Leonidas, and Anna — a household expanding alongside the farm they were carving out of the land.
Their lives ran their full course on that ground. By 1873 both James and Ana had died, and they were buried on the family farm, together with a daughter, Catherine, who had died young. What began as a family plot became the cemetery that still carries the Gomer name.
But the marker records something quieter and larger, too. Because the farm lay along a popular route, tradition holds that others were buried here as well — including Native people and enslaved individuals — laid to rest just outside the family cemetery. Their names were not preserved as the Gomers' were, but the ground remembers that they were here.
Its place in the American story
The Gomer cemetery marks a Republic of Texas–era homestead, one of the countless family farms whose founding, endurance, and losses are the real substance of American frontier settlement. In the graves of James, Ana, and their children you can read a whole immigrant-from-Tennessee family's rise and passing across a single generation.
What lifts this site beyond one family's story is what lies at its edges. The tradition of Native and enslaved burials just outside the family plot is a plain and important acknowledgment: the frontier was never settled by pioneer families alone. Others — some of them unfree, some displaced from the land itself — shared this ground and this history, even when the records kept fewer of their names.
That quiet honesty is the site's deepest significance. It asks visitors to remember not only the family honored by the cemetery's name, but the wider community of people whose lives and labor were bound up with this place.
If you visit
The James Frederick Gomer Cemetery is set in the rural landscape near Hemphill, in the wooded heart of Sabine County. It is a small family burial ground, cared for today by the James Frederick Gomer Chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas — a sign of how far back its roots reach into Texas's founding era.
As you visit, look for the graves of the family at the center of the story, and let the surrounding ground speak as well. The tradition that others were buried just beyond the family plot invites a moment of reflection for the Native and enslaved people whose resting places here went largely unmarked.
Come quietly and tread lightly; this is a historic, tended cemetery, not a developed attraction. For a traveler tracing the earliest chapters of Sabine County, it makes a thoughtful stop — a place where a single pioneer family's homestead opens onto the fuller, more complicated truth of who shared the American frontier.
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
- · James Frederick Gomer
- · Ana M. Bateman Gomer
Themes & tags
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