Lewis Family Cemetery
Buckholts, Milam County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This family burial ground has roots in Sterling C. Robertston's colonies of the 1830s. Thomas Curry, born in 1771 in South Carolina, married Satsay (Satsa) Vann, a member of the Cherokee Indian tribe and daughter of a tribal leader. They had nine children, and following Satsa's death, Thomas and several family members, including son David and his wife Jane (Phillips), joined a group of colonists settling in Texas in 1834. Thomas was accepted as a settler in the Nashville Colony, and his one league grant of land stretched from south of Little River to Elm Creek, including the land on which the Lewis Family Cemetery is sited. After Thomas died in 1841, David and Jane Curry moved from Robertson County, where their four children were born, to Milam County. In 1847, the Currys moved to the Thomas Curry land grant. Daughter Anne Elizabeth married Squire William Michael Lewis, and they were prominent in the development of the communities of Corinth, Buckholts and Cameron. Squire was the first Justice of the Peace in Corinth and a charter member of the Masonic Lodge in Cameron, and helped build the Milam County Courthouse. He also served in the Confederacy's Fourth Texas Mounted Volunteers during the Civil War, participating in campaigns in Louisiana and New Mexico. Squire Lewis died in 1867 and was buried beneath a large oak tree on the family ranch, establishing the Lewis Family Cemetery. More than two dozen people, including seventeen family members, are buried here. In 1877, a typhoid epidemic caused the deaths of Elizabeth and Tapley Dewberry and Elizabeth Hutchins; they and other neighbors were also buried here. The majority of the graves in this historic graveyard are from before 1900. Historic Texas Cemetery-2007
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This burial ground reaches back to the 1830s colonies of Sterling C. Robertson, when Thomas Curry—whose late wife Satsa Vann was a Cherokee leader's daughter—brought his family to a league of land along Little River. His descendants married into the Lewis family, prominent in building the communities of Corinth, Buckholts and Cameron; Squire William Michael Lewis, a justice of the peace and Confederate cavalryman, was buried beneath a ranch oak in 1867, founding the cemetery. A typhoid epidemic a decade later added more graves to a plot whose burials mostly predate 1900.
Why it matters
The cemetery threads together Cherokee heritage, Anglo colonization, and Civil War service in one Texas family, mirroring the tangled human history of early Central Texas settlement.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This burial ground reaches back to the 1830s, when Texas was still a frontier being opened to Anglo-American settlement under the empresario system. Sterling C. Robertson's colonies drew families from the Upper South into the country along the Little River and its tributaries in what is now Central Texas—land that was fertile, promising, and far from any settled authority.
The Early Republic era in Texas was a time of extraordinary mixing and movement. Native peoples, some of them themselves displaced from the eastern United States, lived alongside and intermarried with the incoming settlers, and land grants measured in leagues could turn a family into landed gentry almost overnight. It was a world of both opportunity and hardship, where distance from doctors and towns made life fragile.
By the time of the Civil War, the families who had come in the 1830s had put down deep roots. The graves gathered here—most of them predating 1900—span that whole arc, from frontier colonization through the war and into the settled communities that followed.
People & events
The story begins with Thomas Curry, born in South Carolina in 1771, and his wife Satsay—Satsa—Vann, a member of the Cherokee tribe and the daughter of a tribal leader. Together they had nine children. After Satsa's death, Thomas and several family members, including his son David and David's wife Jane Phillips, joined colonists bound for Texas in 1834.
Thomas was accepted as a settler in the Nashville Colony, and his league of land stretched from south of Little River to Elm Creek—including the ground where this cemetery now lies. After he died in 1841, David and Jane, whose four children had been born in Robertson County, moved to Milam County, and in 1847 the family settled on the Thomas Curry grant itself.
The Lewis name enters through David and Jane's daughter, Anne Elizabeth, who married Squire William Michael Lewis. The couple became prominent in building the communities of Corinth, Buckholts, and Cameron. Squire served as the first Justice of the Peace in Corinth, was a charter member of the Masonic Lodge in Cameron, and helped build the Milam County Courthouse. During the Civil War he served in the Confederacy's Fourth Texas Mounted Volunteers, taking part in campaigns in Louisiana and New Mexico. When he died in 1867, he was buried beneath a large oak on the family ranch—the grave that established the Lewis Family Cemetery. More than two dozen people rest here, including seventeen family members; among them are Elizabeth and Tapley Dewberry and Elizabeth Hutchins, neighbors who died in an 1877 typhoid epidemic.
Its place in the American story
In a single family plot, this cemetery holds together several of the largest threads in the American story. The marriage of Thomas Curry and Satsa Vann reflects the deep and often overlooked intertwining of Cherokee and Anglo-American families in the early nineteenth century—kinship ties that crossed the very lines the frontier was supposedly drawing.
The Currys' move to Texas in 1834 places them at the leading edge of Anglo colonization, the great westward push that would soon carry the United States to the Pacific. Their league grant, their frontier communities, and the courthouse Squire Lewis helped build are the small, concrete acts out of which the settlement of the West was actually made.
And Squire Lewis's Confederate service ties this quiet Milam County graveyard to the national trauma of the Civil War. The typhoid epidemic that claimed neighbors in 1877 speaks to another universal frontier reality—the constant nearness of disease and death in communities beyond the reach of modern medicine. Woven together, these lives mirror the tangled human history of early Central Texas, where Native heritage, Anglo expansion, and civil war met within a single family.
If you visit
This is a small, deeply personal place, and it asks for a quiet and respectful visit. The majority of the graves date from before 1900, so you are walking among the very first generations of settlers in this part of Milam County—people whose lives touched the Republic, the frontier, and the Civil War.
Look for the setting as much as the stones. The cemetery began beneath a large oak on the family ranch, the spot chosen for Squire Lewis's burial in 1867, and that landscape of open Central Texas ranchland is part of what makes the place feel true to its origins. As you read the markers, you can trace a single family's branches—the Currys, the Lewises, and the neighbors drawn into the plot by the hardships they shared.
Come thinking about the layers of history gathered in one small ground: a Cherokee woman whose descendants are buried here, an 1830s colonist's land grant, a Confederate cavalryman, and the ordinary neighbors lost to an epidemic. A stop here pairs well with a wider drive through the old communities of Corinth, Buckholts, and Cameron, where the family the cemetery remembers helped lay the foundations of the county itself.
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
- · Thomas Curry
- · Satsa Vann
- · Squire William Michael Lewis
Themes & tags
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