Martin Cemetery
Tatum, Rusk County, Texas
Marker Inscription
MARTIN CEMETERY DANIEL MARTIN AND HIS FAMILY SETTLED AT THIS SITE CA. 1833, ADJACENT TO THE HISTORIC TRAMMEL’S TRACE. ALTHOUGH THE CEMETERY MAY HAVE BEEN IN USE MUCH EARLIER, THE OLDEST DOCUMENTED BURIAL IN MARTIN CEMETERY IS THE 1883 GRAVE OF JEWEL WILLIAMSON. THE SITE WAS NOT OFFICIALLY DEEDED FOR CEMETERY PURPOSES UNTIL 1972. IN 1986, GRAVES FROM THE NEARBY GRANT CEMETERY WERE RELOCATED TO THE MARTIN CEMETERY SITE SO THAT COAL MINING COULD BE CONDUCTED. WHEN MARTIN LAKE WAS CONSTRUCTED DURING THE LATE 1970s, THE CEMETERY WAS SURROUNDED ON THREE SIDES BY WATER AND NOW SITS ON A PENINSULA. MARTIN CEMETERY REMAINS ACTIVE, AND THE CEMETERY ASSOCIATION MEETS SEVERAL TIMES EACH YEAR. HISTORIC TEXAS CEMETERY – 2010
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Daniel Martin and his family settled here about 1833 alongside the historic Trammel's Trace, one of the earliest overland routes into Texas, though the cemetery's oldest documented grave dates to 1883. In the 1970s the building of Martin Lake left the burial ground on a peninsula surrounded on three sides by water, and in 1986 graves from nearby Grant Cemetery were relocated here to make way for coal mining. Still active, the cemetery is tended by an association that meets throughout the year.
Why it matters
Sitting on an old immigrant trace and reshaped by a modern lake and coal mine, this cemetery shows how the Texas landscape—and the resting places on it—were remade by each era's demands.
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Related people
- · Daniel Martin
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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Albert Tatum, a wealthy Alabama planter, settled in the 1840s where Trammel's Trace crossed the Grand Bluff Road, building a plantation home with enslaved labor that became a social center of the area. His family gave land for a railroad station in 1882, and his son Paul—"Uncle Fox"—laid out the townsite in 1892, after which farming and lumbering carried the community forward. A lake and power plant brought a fresh wave of growth in the 1970s.
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