Joaquin Cemetery
Joaquin, Shelby County, Texas
Marker Inscription
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN MORRIS PROVIDED LAND FOR RAILROAD RIGHT-OF-WAY AND A 100-ACRE TOWNSHIP SITE FOR JOAQUIN IN THE 1880s. IN 1890, MORRIS DONATED ONE ACRE AT THIS SITE TO ESTABLISH JOAQUIN MISSIONARY BAPTIST CHURCH. ON OCTOBER 24, 1894, WHEN ALLIE M. WHIDDON DIED AT AGE EIGHTEEN, VIOLA “OLA” WHIDDON RUSHING DONATED LAND ADJOINING THE CHURCH IN MEMORY OF HER YOUNG SISTER TO ESTABLISH JOAQUIN CEMETERY. ADDITIONAL EARLY BURIALS INCLUDE B. F. MORRIS’ GRANDSON AND TOWN NAMESAKE, JOAQUIN MORRIS (1898), JAMES W. TAYLOR (1897), WESLEY A. SMITH (1897), IMA SOJOURNER (1898), WILLIAM TAYLOR (1898), BERTIE TRUITT (1899), AND ALMER WOOD (1899). A SURVEY RECORDED MORE THAN 800 GRAVES AND IDENTIFIED TWELVE CIVIL WAR VETERANS. JESSIE AVERY FERGUSON (1859-1943), FIRST MAYOR OF JOAQUIN AND ONE OF THE FIRST SCHOOLTEACHERS, IS BURIED HERE, AS ARE TWO VICTIMS OF THE NEW LONDON SCHOOL EXPLOSION (1937). OTHER NOTABLE GRAVES INCLUDE PHYSICIANS DR. WILLIAM ALLEN RAMSEY (1880-1962) AND DR. EDGAR RUSHING (1877-1943) AND PHARMACIST EDWARD LEWIS RAMSEY (1875-1947). MANY EARLY SETTLERS, POSTMASTERS, BUSINESS AND CIVIC LEADERS ARE BURIED HERE. THE LAND WAS FORMALLY DEEDED IN 1954 BY VIOLA RUSHING’S SON, DR. E. O. RUSHING, TO THE CHURCH. A CEMETERY ASSOCIATION FORMED IN THE 1960s, AND CONTINUES TO HOLD AN ANNUAL HOMECOMING ON THE SECOND SUNDAY IN JUNE. THE GRAVES OF B. F. MORRIS (1827-1900) AND HIS WIFE, JANE (1829-1883), WERE MOVED HERE FROM MORRIS CEMETERY ON GRAVEYARD HILL IN 1994 BECAUSE OF LACK OF PERPETUAL CARE AND DIFFICULTY OF ACCESS. PROMINENT FEATURES OF THE CEMETERY INCLUDE EAST-FACING GRAVES, FAMILY PLOTS, A LARGE CONCRETE CRYPT, STATELY MARBLE WOODMEN OF THE WORLD MARKERS, AND GRAVESTONES OF COMMUNITY MEMBERS WHO WERE CITIZENS OF THE REPUBLIC OF TEXAS. THIS HISTORIC SITE CONTINUES TO SERVE THE BURIAL NEEDS OF THE COMMUNITY.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Benjamin Franklin Morris gave land for a railroad right-of-way and a township in the 1880s, and the depot town of Joaquin grew up around it. A one-acre gift in 1890 established the Baptist church, and in 1894 Viola Rushing donated adjoining ground for a cemetery in memory of her young sister. Among its more than 800 graves lie a dozen Civil War veterans, the town's first mayor, and two children killed in the 1937 New London School explosion.
Why it matters
The cemetery maps the rise of a railroad town and holds, side by side, the Republic-era settlers, Civil War veterans, and disaster victims who make up its community memory.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The story of Joaquin is the story of the railroad, told in miniature. In the decades after the Civil War, rail lines pushed across Texas, and wherever the tracks went, towns followed. A depot could conjure a community out of open country, and a well-placed gift of land could decide where that community grew. This corner of Shelby County, in the deep pine woods of East Texas, was settled and shaped in exactly that way.
In the 1880s a landowner named Benjamin Franklin Morris gave the ground that made the town possible — a right-of-way for the railroad and a 100-acre site for the township itself. Around that depot, Joaquin took root, part of the great wave of railroad towns that defined the Gilded Age and the decades that followed.
A new town needs more than a depot, though. It needs a church and it needs a burying ground — the two institutions that turn a cluster of settlers into a community with roots. Within a few years of the town's founding, Joaquin had both, and the second grew directly out of grief.
People & events
In 1890 Morris donated an acre for the Joaquin Missionary Baptist Church. Four years later, tragedy gave the town its cemetery. On October 24, 1894, eighteen-year-old Allie M. Whiddon died, and her sister, Viola "Ola" Whiddon Rushing, gave land beside the church in the girl's memory. From one family's loss came a resting place that would serve the whole community for generations.
The early graves read like a roll call of a town finding its feet — among them Morris's own grandson and the town's namesake, young Joaquin Morris, buried in 1898, alongside Taylors, Smiths, Truitts, and others laid to rest in the 1890s. A later survey counted more than 800 graves and identified twelve Civil War veterans among them, old soldiers who had lived on into the railroad age and were buried in the town it built.
The cemetery holds the people who made the place work: Jessie Avery Ferguson, the town's first mayor and one of its first schoolteachers; physicians and a pharmacist; postmasters, merchants, and civic leaders. It holds sorrow, too, in the graves of two young victims of the 1937 New London School explosion, a disaster that struck the schoolchildren of this region. And it holds the town's founders themselves — B. F. Morris and his wife, Jane, whose graves were moved here in 1994 from an older, hard-to-reach family plot so that they might rest in a place with lasting care.
Its place in the American story
A cemetery like this one is a document, and it tells a national story in local handwriting. Read across its stones and you can trace the whole arc of how much of America was settled: the frontier generation, the coming of the railroad, the rise and steady work of a small town, and the shared griefs that bound its people together.
The details are the kind that connect a single Texas town to the country's larger memory. Here lie citizens of the Republic of Texas, people whose lives reached back to the days before Texas joined the Union. Here are a dozen Civil War veterans, the war's survivors carried into the twentieth century. And here are children lost in the New London School explosion of 1937 — a catastrophe that shook a region and helped spur reforms in how communities protect their schools.
The cemetery's living traditions matter as much as its graves. A cemetery association formed in the 1960s and still holds an annual homecoming each June — the kind of gathering, common across small-town America, where descendants return to tend the ground and keep the names alive. It is proof that community memory is not a thing that simply survives; it is something people choose, year after year, to keep.
If you visit
Walk slowly here, because a cemetery this old is meant to be read. Look for the east-facing graves, arranged in an old Christian tradition, and for the family plots that keep kin together across the generations. You will find a large concrete crypt and stately marble Woodmen of the World markers — the distinctive tree-stump and log monuments that a fraternal order once provided for its members, and that turn up in burying grounds all across this part of the country.
Seek out the oldest stones and the most telling ones: the markers of people who were citizens of the Republic of Texas, the graves of the town's founding family, the resting places of its first mayor and its early doctors. Each is a small biography in stone, and together they map how a railroad depot became a town.
This is a working cemetery still serving its community, so visit with the quiet respect the place asks for. If your travels bring you through the pine country of East Texas, it makes a moving stop — and if you happen through on the second Sunday in June, you may find the community gathered for its homecoming, keeping faith with the names carved here.
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
- · Benjamin Franklin Morris
- · Viola "Ola" Whiddon Rushing
- · Jessie Avery Ferguson
Related events
- · New London School explosion (1937)
Themes & tags
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