Jobe Cemetery
Hawkins, Wood County, Texas
Marker Inscription
African American families settled the Jobe Community on the Lemuel G. Powers survey. Brothers Phelix and Sampson Jobe bought several tracts of land from 1881 to 1892, setting aside land for the Jobe Cemetery. The local economy included cattle, cotton, crops, timber cutting, and sugar cane for ribbon cane syrup. Jobe Brothers Lumber Co. Provided building materials for area projects such as the clubhouse for Little Sandy Hunting and Fishing Club. Land farmed on Little Sandy Creek was impounded as Lake Hawkins in 1962. The oldest burial in Jobe Cemetery is a child of the Shamburger family, but most graves are Jobe family members and relatives. The cemetery is a testimony to a rural community and a way of life.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
African American families settled the Jobe community on the Lemuel G. Powers survey, where brothers Phelix and Sampson Jobe bought tracts of land from 1881 to 1892 and set aside ground for a cemetery. The local economy turned on cattle, cotton, timber, and sugar cane pressed into ribbon-cane syrup, and the family's own lumber company supplied building materials for area projects. The oldest grave belongs to a Shamburger child, but most who rest here are Jobe kin.
Why it matters
The cemetery testifies to the self-reliant Black landowning communities that took shape in East Texas after emancipation and to a rural way of life now largely vanished.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
After emancipation, one of the deepest hopes among newly freed African Americans was to own land — to work ground that was truly their own, beyond any master's reach. In the piney woods and creek bottoms of East Texas, some families made that hope real, and the Jobe community, settled on the Lemuel G. Powers survey, is one such place.
This was Reconstruction and Gilded Age Texas at the level of a single rural neighborhood. The economy ran on what the land and the forest could yield: cattle, cotton, garden crops, timber cut from the surrounding woods, and sugar cane pressed and boiled down into ribbon-cane syrup — a sweet, dark East Texas staple that families made themselves each fall.
A Black landowning community in the post-emancipation South was never a small thing. Every acre held in a family's own name was both a livelihood and a quiet assertion of freedom's promise, made in a time and place where that promise was far from guaranteed.
People & events
The community's foundation was laid by two brothers, Phelix and Sampson Jobe, who between 1881 and 1892 bought several tracts of land — building, purchase by purchase, a landholding substantial enough to anchor a whole community. Out of that land they set aside ground for the Jobe Cemetery, an act that turned a settlement into a place with roots and a future.
The Jobes did not only farm. Jobe Brothers Lumber Company drew on the timber all around them and supplied building materials for area projects — including the clubhouse for the Little Sandy Hunting and Fishing Club. A Black-owned lumber business furnishing materials in this era is a striking detail: it speaks to enterprise, skill, and a place in the local economy earned through work.
The land itself carries the community's later history too. Ground once farmed along Little Sandy Creek was impounded in 1962 to create Lake Hawkins, reshaping the landscape the Jobes had worked. In the cemetery, the oldest burial is a child of the Shamburger family, but most who rest there are Jobe kin — the family whose name the whole community bears.
Its place in the American story
The Jobe Cemetery testifies to one of the most important and least-told chapters of American history: the rise of independent Black landowning communities in the generation after slavery. Across the South, freedpeople who managed to acquire land built self-reliant enclaves — with their own farms, churches, schools, and businesses — and in doing so claimed a fuller measure of the freedom the war had promised.
The Jobe brothers' story compresses that achievement into a single family: land bought steadily over a decade, a cemetery set aside, a lumber company that put their name on the region's buildings. This is Black enterprise and Black ownership made concrete, in a time and region where both were hard-won.
The damming of Little Sandy Creek into Lake Hawkins in 1962 adds a familiar American coda. Across the country, reservoir and infrastructure projects reshaped rural land and displaced the ways of life tied to it. What remains most durably of the Jobe community is its cemetery — which is exactly why the marker calls it a testimony to a rural community and a way of life that has largely passed.
If you visit
Jobe Cemetery, near Hawkins in Wood County, is a quiet resting place that carries a large history in a small space. Come to it as you would to any cemetery — softly, and ready to read names rather than rush past them.
The recurrence of the Jobe name across the stones is the thing to notice: this is the burial ground of the family that founded and gave its name to the whole community, so the graves trace a single family's long presence on the land. Look, too, for the oldest burial, a Shamburger child — a reminder that a community's story does not always begin with the family that names it.
As you stand there, consider what surrounds the place: land the Jobes farmed and logged, and nearby, the waters of Lake Hawkins that in 1962 covered ground they once worked along Little Sandy Creek. If you are traveling this corner of East Texas, let this be a stop that asks you to slow down and honor a self-made community — freedpeople who bought land, built a business, and set aside a place to rest among their own.
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
- · Phelix Jobe
- · Sampson Jobe
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Lillian Richard
Hawkins, TX
Born in the Fouke community in 1891, Lillian Richard left rural Wood County for Dallas and in 1925 took a job with Quaker Oats, becoming one of several African American women who toured the country portraying "Aunt Jemima" to promote pancake mix. The character drew on a demeaning minstrel-show stereotype even as the work gave Richard a 23-year career, until a stroke sent her home to Fouke, where she died in 1956. Her hometown was later named the "Pancake Capital of Texas."
Rosenwald Schools in Wood County
Hawkins, TX
In the 1920s, Black children across the rural South studied in dilapidated schoolhouses until Sears president Julius Rosenwald, working with educator Booker T. Washington, seeded a fund to build better ones. Communities matched the grants with their own money and labor; by the time the program ended in 1932, more than 5,300 Rosenwald schools stood in fifteen states, including eight in Wood County. Local families gave money and sweat to raise schools like Hawkins, Muddy Creek, and Fouke.
Jarvis Christian College
Hawkins, TX
In the Jim Crow era, when Black Texans were shut out of most higher education, the Texas Negro Disciples of Christ and the Christian Women's Board of Missions joined forces in 1904 to build a school. On land donated by Ida and J.J. Jarvis, the institute opened in 1913 with a dozen elementary pupils and steadily grew—adding high school, junior college, and by 1937 a full four-year college that won accreditation in 1950.
First Baptist Church of Winona
Winona, TX
Founded in 1849 as Harris Creek Baptist Church by Pastor William H. Ray and fifteen charter members, this East Texas congregation met in members' homes before raising a pine-log meetinghouse in 1850. Its cemetery, begun in 1858, held both white and—in a separate section—African American members, who belonged to the church until Emancipation. Surviving a cyclone, relocations, and repeated name changes, it became the First Baptist Church of Winona in 1947.