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.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the years right after the Civil War, the Black communities of central Texas were building new lives out of the wreckage of slavery. Falls County, in the rich farming country along the Brazos, filled with freedpeople and migrants — many drawn from the older plantation states of the Deep South and the Atlantic seaboard — looking for land, work, and above all a measure of self-determination.
Reconstruction promised much and delivered unevenly. Freedom was real, but so were poverty, insecure land tenure, and the hardening lines of the Jim Crow decades to come. In this climate, a rural Black settlement's survival depended on the institutions it could build for itself: a church, a school, and — just as essential — a burial ground of its own.
Long Branch was one such community. Set among the surrounding farmland, it took shape as freedpeople gathered, worshiped, taught their children, and buried their dead on ground they controlled. The cemetery that remains is the last physical trace of that world.
People & events
The earliest families were on the ground by June 1870 — names like Thornton Craig, Jim Furry, Jessie Smith, Edmond Taylor, and Nelson Weatherspoon — most having come from Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The record is honest about what it cannot say: whether these men and their families first arrived enslaved or came after emancipation is simply not known.
What they did once here is clearer, and remarkable. They organized around the Methodist Episcopal Church of Long Branch, built a two-room schoolhouse, and chose teachers from among their own. They made their living by tenant farming, day labor in nearby towns, and taking in boarders — and, step by step, several of them became landowners. In 1883, community trustees bought land from William M. Stephens to secure both a place of worship and a permanent resting ground.
Their sons served the country in every conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam. Among them was Anthony Shaw of Company G, 104th U.S. Colored Infantry, who is buried here. So too is Silvia King, one of twenty-five formerly enslaved people interred at Long Branch, who late in her long life gave a detailed account of her experiences before her death in the 1930s. The school closed in 1950 and the church in 1971, later lost to fire — but the cemetery endures.
Its place in the American story
Long Branch tells, in miniature, one of the central stories of American history: what free Black Americans did with their freedom. Across the postwar South, freedpeople poured their energy into founding churches, schools, and mutual institutions — the building blocks of citizenship that the wider society was often unwilling to extend to them. This small Texas settlement did exactly that, and its cemetery is the receipt.
The presence of a soldier from a United States Colored Infantry regiment connects the community to the roughly 180,000 Black men who served in the Union armies, helping to turn a war for the Union into a war that ended slavery. That thread of military service, running from the Civil War all the way to Vietnam, is a quiet rebuttal to a country that too often withheld full citizenship from the very people defending it.
And the survival of Silvia King's testimony ties this rural graveyard to the larger national effort, during the Great Depression, to record the memories of the last generation born in slavery. A place this modest turns out to hold pieces of the biggest American subjects there are: emancipation, self-reliance, service, and memory.
If you visit
Long Branch is a working cemetery, still active, set on more than three acres ringed by farm fields — so visit as you would any resting place, quietly and respectfully. The setting itself is part of the story: the openness of the surrounding land, and the sense that this ground has been carefully kept for well over a century while nearly everything else around the old community has vanished.
Walk the rows and read the stones as a kind of archive. Interments here exceed two hundred, some of the earliest unrecorded, and the range of dates traces a community across generations — from people born under slavery to veterans of twentieth-century wars. Look for the military markers in particular; a headstone naming a U.S. Colored Infantry regiment is a direct link to the Civil War.
Because the church and school are gone, this burial ground is the last place where Long Branch can be encountered at all. Treat it as the memorial it is: not a roadside curiosity but the enduring civic monument of a freedpeople's community that built its own institutions and buried its own with dignity. It's a stop that asks for stillness, and gives back a real sense of continuity with the people who made this place.
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
- · Silvia King
- · Anthony Shaw
Themes & tags
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Silvia King
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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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