McAdams Homeplace
Walker County, Walker County, Texas
Marker Inscription
John McAdams, III (1815-92), a veteran of the Texas Revolution and the Republic of Texas Army, moved to present Walker County from the Sabine District. He and his first wife Hester White (1818-49) built this home in the 1840s. He later wed Mary Frances Bankhead (1834-1905). A land speculator, planter, and rancher, he also ran a cotton gin and sawmill. The area around his land became known as McAdams community. A post office was located there from 1888 to 1917. The family cemetery is now a public burial ground. In 1968 the house was moved here from the original site (1 mi. E).
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
John McAdams III, a veteran of the Texas Revolution and the Republic of Texas Army, moved from the Sabine District to present Walker County and, with his first wife Hester White, built this home in the 1840s. A land speculator, planter, and rancher, he also ran a cotton gin and sawmill, and the surrounding area became the McAdams community, with a post office from 1888 to 1917. The house was moved here in 1968 from its original site a mile east.
Why it matters
The homeplace preserves the story of a Republic-era settler family whose land became a small East Texas community.
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Related people
- · John McAdams III
- · Hester White
- · Mary Frances Bankhead
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
McAdams Cemetery
Walker County, TX
John McAdams, a veteran of the Texas Revolution, brought his family to what became Walker County around 1840 and built a life as a rancher, planter, and mill owner; the community that grew around his land took his name. The cemetery began in 1849 with the burial of his first wife, Hester, and grew over generations to hold family, neighbors, and a separate section McAdams set aside for the people he enslaved. Maintained since 1937 by a cemetery association, it now spans nearly thirteen acres.
Harmony Cemetery
Huntsville, TX
Harmony Cemetery is a quiet ledger of frontier Walker County, its earliest known grave dug for pioneer Vincent Herlock in 1851. Known in turn as Herlock and Goolsby cemetery, the ground later anchored the Harmony Missionary Baptist Church after it relocated here in 1906. Church and graveyard tell the familiar rural rhythm of settlement, worship, decline, and revival by a caretaking association.
Near Gravesite of Veteran of American Revolution Mark Manning
Crabbs Prairie, TX
Mark Manning was born in 1750 and served in the American Revolution from the Halifax District of his native North Carolina. Living to a remarkable old age, he came to Texas at the age of 97 to join sons who held large land grants and helped settle Walker County—sons who had themselves fought in the Texas Revolution. Manning was one of some twenty or thirty Revolutionary War veterans who followed the nation's westward movement all the way to Texas, and he is buried in a nearby family cemetery.
Buck Foster Cemetery
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Buck Foster Cemetery took its name from William Harrison "Buck" Foster, who reserved an acre for burials when he sold his land in 1882 — though eroded sandstone markers show the ground served the Loma community even earlier. Among its hundreds of graves lies Nancy McCulloch Heath, of Choctaw and German descent, who came to Texas in 1845, alongside Civil War veterans and generations of her descendants. Its weathered stones, carved with Masonic, religious, and ranching symbols, form a folk record of southwestern Walker County.