Martin Varner

Mineola, TX

Martin Varner reached Texas before 1820 and became one of the "Old Three Hundred" families who settled Stephen F. Austin's first colony, building a plantation near Columbia. He took up arms in the pivotal clashes of the Texas independence struggle, fighting at Velasco in 1832 and at San Jacinto in 1836. Varner moved to Wood County late in life and died in 1844 of wounds from a quarrel over a debt.

Quitman, TX

Settlers founded the Concord community in the 1870s, and early resident Hubbard Moseley gave land for a burial ground, a school, and a Baptist chapel. Velinda Wood, laid to rest in July 1875, has the oldest marked grave, though unmarked earlier burials lie among the roughly one thousand people from Concord, Hainesville, and nearby settlements interred here. Generations of caretakers and a cemetery association have tended the grounds ever since.

Quitman, TX

Henry Stout arrived in Texas from Tennessee in 1818 and lived through nearly every chapter of its early history. He served in the Republic of Texas Army in 1836, captained a Texas Ranger company from 1839 to 1845, and later helped organize Wood County, becoming its first sheriff and a state legislator before serving as a Confederate officer. He is buried in a family cemetery beside this site.

Mineola, TX

This fellowship began in 1864 as a Baptist Church of Christ and reorganized in 1890 as Stephen's Chapel Missionary Baptist Church, honoring an elder who had died the year before. A sanctuary rose in 1902 on Black Branch, a stream used for baptisms near New Hope Cemetery, and the congregation took the New Hope Baptist name in 1916 before moving to its present home the next year. Its shifting names and locations trace the movement of a Wood County farm community over half a century.