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.
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Related people
- · Thomas Curry
- · Satsa Vann
- · Squire William Michael Lewis
Themes & tags
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