Mattox Cemetery
New Diana, Upshur County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Several families from Alabama and Georgia settled in this area in the 1850s. According to oral history, slaves were interred around this site. The first recorded burial was that of Milla Ann Greer Oliver, who died in 1861. The graveyard became known as the "Old Family Cemetery." William and Martha Greer deeded land including this site for a church and cemetery in 1887. A cemetery association was formed in 1970. Members of the Covin, Jones, Loyd, Mattox, Oliver, Williams, and Willeford families are interred here. Of the more than four hundred burials, several are those of veterans of U. S. and international conflicts from the Civil War to the Vietnam War. The Mattox Cemetery remains a chronicle of the pioneers of Upshur County. (1999)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Families from Alabama and Georgia settled this area in the 1850s, and oral tradition holds that enslaved people were among the first buried here, with the earliest recorded grave that of Milla Ann Greer Oliver in 1861. Deeded for a church and cemetery by William and Martha Greer in 1887, the "Old Family Cemetery" holds more than four hundred burials, including veterans of every conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam. A cemetery association formed in 1970 to care for the grounds.
Why it matters
The cemetery chronicles both the pioneer settlement of Upshur County and the enslaved and free generations, and the many wars, that shaped it.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1850s, the piney woods and red-clay hills of what is now Upshur County were part of a great southward and westward migration. Families from Alabama and Georgia loaded wagons and pointed them toward the young state of Texas, which had joined the Union in 1845 and was advertising cheap, abundant land. They were chasing the same thing that pulled so many others west: room to farm, room to grow cotton, room to start over.
But this was the antebellum South transplanted, and the people who cleared these fields did not come alone. The oral history preserved at this site remembers that enslaved men and women were among the first laid to rest here — a reminder that the labor which built the early farms of East Texas was, in large part, forced and unpaid. That truth is woven into the ground itself.
By the time the earliest recorded burial was made in 1861, the nation was tearing itself apart over exactly that institution. The little settlement here sat far from any battlefield, yet the war that came would remake the lives of everyone buried in this soil, free and enslaved alike.
People & events
The first name the record keeps is Milla Ann Greer Oliver, who died in 1861 and whose grave anchors the story of this place. Around her, over the decades, gathered the families whose surnames still fill the cemetery rolls — Covin, Jones, Loyd, Mattox, Oliver, Williams, and Willeford — the interlocking clans of a rural community who married one another, farmed beside one another, and were finally buried beside one another.
The cemetery became official in 1887, when William and Martha Greer deeded the land for a church and a burying ground. That single act of generosity turned an informal "Old Family Cemetery" into something permanent, a place the community could hold in common. A church and a graveyard were often the twin hearts of a settlement like this one — the two institutions that outlasted the farms.
More than four hundred people now rest here, and among them lie veterans of every American conflict from the Civil War through Vietnam. Think of the span that represents: sons and grandsons and great-grandsons who left these same fields to serve, generation after generation, and came home to be buried in the family ground. In 1970 the descendants organized a cemetery association to tend it all, ensuring the names would not be lost to weather and time.
Its place in the American story
A country cemetery like this one holds a fuller version of American history than many a grand monument. In a single fenced acre it records the westward expansion that peopled Texas, the enslaved generations whose labor made that settlement possible, emancipation and the free families who came after, and the long line of citizen-soldiers a rural community sent to the nation's wars.
That combination is the point. The story of the American South and of westward migration is not two separate stories — one of pioneers, one of the enslaved — but a single tangled one, and here they share the same ground. To read the marker honestly is to hold both truths at once: the courage and hardship of settlement, and the human cost on which it was built.
And the veterans' graves stitch this remote spot to the largest events of the republic. From the Civil War to Vietnam, the people of this obscure corner answered national calls that were decided in distant capitals. The cemetery is small; the history it touches is not.
If you visit
Come expecting quiet. A place like Mattox Cemetery rewards slow walking more than sightseeing — read the family names as you go and notice how the same surnames repeat across the generations, the visual signature of a community that stayed put and intermarried for a century and more.
Look for the oldest markers and the veterans' stones especially. The span of service dates, if you take the time to find them, tells the story the inscription only summarizes: a single family ground touched by wars from the 1860s to the 1970s. Where the older graves are unmarked or worn, remember the oral history the marker preserves — that some of the very first people buried here were enslaved, and were never given a stone at all.
Set against the rolling farmland of Upshur County, this is a fitting stop on a back-roads loop through East Texas, the kind of detour that turns a drive into a reckoning with who actually built the place. Treat it as the working cemetery and sacred ground it still is, and leave it as you found it.
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
- · Milla Ann Greer Oliver
- · William Greer
- · Martha Greer
Themes & tags
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