Link Family Cemetery
Palestine, Anderson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This cemetery was established when John and Mary Otelia Link buried their young daughters Annie and Allean at this site within a week of each other in July of 1887. Both children died of diphtheria. At that time no Catholic cemetery existed nearby and local tradition suggests the children were buried near their home because transportation of unpreserved bodies over a long distance in the heat was impractical. John Link died in 1888 and was buried next to his daughters. The Links practiced burial procedures commonly used in rural Texas in the 19th century. The deceased was washed and laid out on a cooling board with bags of saltpeter or silver coins placed over the eyes in an undertaking shared by friends and neighbors. Pallbearers lowered the locally manufactured casket with the use of three traditional cotton straps. After the burial, participants gathered at the home of the deceased to eat and express sympathy. John and Mary's eldest son Andrew B. Link formally set aside the cemetery in a deed transferring family land to his youngest brother John F. Link in 1919. Of the 32 burials currently in the cemetery, 11 are of children under the age of 6. The Link Family Cemetery is maintained by an association of family members. (1993)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This family burial ground began in July 1887 when John and Mary Otelia Link buried two young daughters, both dead of diphtheria within a week of each other; with no Catholic cemetery nearby and the summer heat making distant transport impractical, the children were laid to rest near home. John Link joined them in 1888. The graves preserve the burial customs of rural nineteenth-century Texas—cooling boards, saltpeter, locally made caskets, and neighbors gathering afterward to share food and sympathy.
Why it matters
The cemetery is a poignant record of frontier family life, where epidemic disease, high child mortality, and folk burial traditions shaped how rural Texans met death.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This quiet burial ground lies in the piney country of East Texas, near Palestine in Anderson County, and it opens a window onto rural family life in the years after the Civil War. This was the Reconstruction and Gilded Age era, a time when much of Texas was still stitched together by dirt roads, farmsteads, and the hard rhythms of a countryside where towns and services could be a long, hot journey away.
Medicine in that world had limits we can scarcely imagine today. Childhood diseases that are now largely preventable swept through farming communities with terrible regularity, and families measured their lives against the very real possibility of losing children young. Distance and summer heat shaped not only how people lived, but how they buried their dead.
Into that setting came the Link family, whose small plot of ground would grow, grave by grave, into a cemetery that still carries their name.
People & events
The cemetery was born of a heartbreak that would have been all too familiar to nineteenth-century parents. In July of 1887, John and Mary Otelia Link buried their young daughters Annie and Allean here within a single week of one another. Both girls had died of diphtheria — a suffocating throat infection that was among the great killers of children in that age.
With no Catholic cemetery within reach and the summer heat making a long journey with unpreserved bodies impractical, the Links did what grieving families across rural Texas did: they laid their children to rest close to home. The following year, in 1888, John Link was buried beside his daughters, and the small plot became a family resting place in fact if not yet in law.
The marker preserves the tender, communal customs of a country funeral in that era. The deceased was washed and laid out on a cooling board, with saltpeter or silver coins placed over the eyes; neighbors and friends shared the work of preparing the body. Pallbearers lowered a locally made casket on three cotton straps, and afterward everyone gathered at the family's home to eat and offer comfort. Years later, in 1919, the eldest son Andrew B. Link formally set the ground aside, deeding family land to his youngest brother John F. Link so the cemetery would endure.
Its place in the American story
A family cemetery may seem a small thing beside the great events of American history, but places like this hold a truth the textbooks often skip: for most Americans of the nineteenth century, history was lived and lost inside the family. Of the burials recorded here, roughly a third are children under the age of six — a stark, silent statistic that captures how heavily disease once fell on the very young.
That grief has a hopeful shadow. The diphtheria that took the Link daughters would, only a few years after their deaths, begin to yield to a lifesaving antitoxin, one of the first great triumphs of modern medicine. Standing here, you are standing at the edge of the era just before childhood death began its long retreat.
The folk customs the marker records — the cooling board, the neighbors, the home-built casket, the gathering afterward — belonged to communities all across rural America before funerals passed into professional hands. This ground preserves not just a family, but a whole vanished way of meeting death: local, handmade, and shared.
If you visit
This is a private family cemetery, cared for across the generations by an association of Link descendants, so come as a respectful guest rather than a sightseer. The proper way to visit a place like this is quietly — read the stones, take in the setting, and leave everything exactly as you found it.
What rewards the attentive visitor here is the small, sobering detail. Look for the little markers of the children, clustered among the older graves, and let the dates do their quiet work; they tell a story of epidemic and loss that no plaque can match. The two 1887 graves at the heart of the ground are where it all began.
Set among the trees of East Texas, the plot has the hushed, rooted feeling of a place that has been tended by the same family for well over a century. It makes a thoughtful stop for travelers drawn to the human scale of history — the reminder that the past was made of ordinary families meeting extraordinary sorrow, and choosing to remember.
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
- · John Link
- · Mary Otelia Link
Themes & tags
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