Mathews - Powell House

Linden, TX

Carved from Bowie County land in 1846, Cass County took its name from Lewis Cass, a soldier-statesman who had pushed hard for annexing Texas into the Union. The county's loyalties turned sharply in 1861: swept up in secession fervor, residents renamed it "Davis" for Confederate president Jefferson Davis, only to restore the original name in 1871 after the war. Its seat shifted too, from the busy river port of Jefferson to centrally located Linden once Marion County was split off in 1860.

Smithland, TX

This family burial ground served the people of the old Wilkinson Plantation and takes its name from Seaborn Jones Wilkinson and his wife, Elizabeth Ann. The earliest grave, from 1854, is an infant daughter of Confederate veteran Abner Pulaski Moseley. Also interred are the Confederate minister William Hilary Moseley and Samuel Fountain Moseley — a U.S.-Mexico War veteran, lawyer, and owner of the Jefferson Herald newspaper. A cemetery association formed in 1994 to maintain the site.

Jefferson, TX

Royal and Martha Lockett came to Texas from Georgia in the late 1850s with their eleven surviving children and the people they enslaved, and seven of their eight living sons went on to serve in the Confederate Army. The earliest marked grave is that of young Walter R. McGarity, a Lockett grandson who died in 1862. Family memory holds that a Union soldier who died on the Lockett Plantation was also buried here, and by 1999 the grounds held Confederate and World War II veterans among six generations of descendants.

Jefferson, TX

Built around 1851 by Daniel Nelson Alley, a founder of Jefferson, this Greek Revival house with its four-room central-hall plan stands among the earliest homes of Marion County. In 1884 it passed to Hector McKay, a Civil War veteran and one of the region's leading attorneys, whose family held it into the mid-20th century. The house survives as a rare antebellum landmark of a onetime riverport boomtown.