Long Branch Cemetery
Reagan, Falls County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This graveyard, one of the oldest in Falls County, was used for the interment of African-Americans for more than a century. Founded by former slaves in connection with the Methodist Episcopal Church of Long Branch (later Long Branch United Methodist Church), it covers more than three acres surrounded by farm land. The cemetery is the last surviving vestige of the Long Branch community. The earliest names associated with the settlement, including Thornton Craig, Jim Furry, Jessie Smith, Edmond Taylor and Nelson Weatherspoon, were all here by June 1870. Records do not indicate whether these men and their families were in the community as slaves or arrived after emancipation. Most came from Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Long Branch citizens built a two-room school house and chose educators from their ranks. Many made their living by tenant farming, working manual labor in nearby towns and taking in boarders, and several became landowners. They also served their country in military conflicts from the Civil War to Vietnam, including Anthony Shaw, Co. G, 104th U. S. Colored Infantry, who is buried here. On September 20, 1883, community trustees bought land from William M. Stephens to establish a hall of worship and an eternal resting place for those calling Long Branch home. While cemetery interments exceed 200, some early burials went unrecorded. Among the decedents are the remains of 25 freed slaves. One of these, Silvia King, recorded valuable personal and cultural history in the 1930s before she died at age 133. The school at Long Branch closed in 1950, and the church closed in 1971 and later burned. This important community burial ground remains an active cemetery. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2010
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Founded by former slaves in connection with a Methodist Episcopal church, this three-acre burial ground served the Black community of Long Branch for more than a century. Families who had come from Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia by 1870 built a two-room school, chose teachers from their own ranks, farmed as tenants, and gradually became landowners. Their sons served in every American conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam—including Anthony Shaw of the 104th U.S. Colored Infantry—and among those buried here is Silvia King, who recorded her remarkable life story before her death in the 1930s.
Why it matters
As the last surviving trace of the Long Branch settlement, the cemetery preserves the story of a self-reliant freedpeople's community that built its own church, school, and civic life in the decades after emancipation.
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Related people
- · Silvia King
- · Anthony Shaw
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Cotton Gin Cemetery
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The Wills family settled here in 1845, and Dr. James S. Wills is credited with founding the Cotton Gin community in 1848, donating land for a public cemetery divided — as the era demanded — into Anglo and African American sections. The oldest legible stone dates to 1854, but the ground holds a deeper record of frontier Texas: a veteran of the War of 1812, at least 67 Civil War soldiers, and veterans of later conflicts lie here among the settlers and the enslaved people who worked the land.
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Silvia King was already a married mother in Morocco when slave traders kidnapped her, carried her to France, and forced her through the Middle Passage to New Orleans. Sold at auction and marched hundreds of miles to a Texas cotton plantation near La Grange, she was placed in a forced marriage and made to cook and weave for her enslaver. In 1937 the WPA's Federal Writers' Project recorded her extensive oral history in Marlin, capturing rare firsthand testimony of slavery and acts of resistance such as the ring shout—she died that same year, reportedly at the astonishing age of 133.
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