McCune Cemetery
Laneville, Rusk County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Located in the Chinquapin Community, McCune Cemetery dates to 1852. Pioneer James L. McCune (1788-c.1838) came to Texas as a member of David G. Burnet’s colony and received a land grant in 1835. McCune’s son, James, married Delila storm, a local Cherokee, in 1836. The first known burial occurred in 1852 for Susan Elizabeth McCune, James and Delila’s third child. The cemetery was handed down through the family until the 1954 McCune Cemetery association was founded. There are more than 200 graves in the cemetery, mostly marked with headstones of granite surrounded by large hickories, oaks and chinquapins. Since 1835, the cemetery land has been owned by McCune heirs and is still active.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
McCune Cemetery grew out of the Chinquapin community in the pine country of Rusk County, its roots reaching back to pioneer James L. McCune, who came to Texas in David G. Burnet's colony and took a land grant in 1835. His son married a local Cherokee woman, Delila Storm, in 1836, and their third child's 1852 burial opened the family graveyard. More than 200 graves now rest beneath hickories, oaks, and chinquapins on land still held by McCune heirs.
Why it matters
A single East Texas family plot preserves the intertwined story of Anglo colonists arriving under the empresario grants and the Cherokee families they married into, a reminder of how blurred the frontier's cultural lines could be.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
To stand in the piney woods of Rusk County in the early 1850s was to stand at the far eastern edge of a very young Texas. Statehood had come only in 1845, and before that the whole region had been the Republic of Texas — a raw, self-governing frontier stitched together out of empresario colonies, land grants, and the ambitions of settlers pushing west out of the older Southern states.
The land here is the ‘Chinquapin Community,’ named for the scrubby native chestnut whose sweet little nuts once fed both people and hogs across the Southern uplands. This is deep East Texas: sandy hills, tall hardwoods, and a climate closer to Louisiana than to the cattle country most people picture when they imagine the state.
It was also, in these very decades, Cherokee country. In the 1820s and 1830s a substantial community of Cherokee and allied peoples had settled the forests of East Texas. Their presence, and the treaties and conflicts that surrounded it, form the backdrop against which a family like the McCunes built their lives — and married across the line that too many histories draw as though it were solid.
People & events
The story begins with James L. McCune, born in 1788, who came to Texas as a member of David G. Burnet's colony and secured a land grant in 1835 — the classic path of the empresario era, when settlers were drawn in with the promise of land in exchange for helping populate the frontier. He appears to have died only a few years later, around 1838, but the land and the family remained.
It is his son, also named James, whose marriage gives this cemetery its quiet significance. In 1836 the younger James married Delila Storm, a local Cherokee woman. In a period when Anglo settlement and Native communities in East Texas were often cast as opposing forces, here was a union that simply braided them together into one family line.
The cemetery itself opens with grief. The first known burial, in 1852, was for Susan Elizabeth McCune, the third child of James and Delila. From that single grave grew a family burying ground that the McCunes kept and tended, handing it down generation by generation until a formal cemetery association was organized in 1954 to carry the responsibility forward.
Its place in the American story
The land grants of David G. Burnet's colony are a small window onto one of the largest forces in American history: the great nineteenth-century movement of people westward, drawn by the promise of cheap or free land. The empresario system that brought the elder McCune to Texas was a distinctly frontier arrangement, but the hunger it served was national.
What makes this particular plot matter is the marriage at its root. American frontier history is full of hard, painful borders between newcomers and Native nations, and East Texas had its share. But those borders were also crossed, constantly, in the most human way — through marriage, family, and shared graves. Delila Storm's descendants rest here alongside the colonists who arrived under a land grant, in the same ground, under the same trees.
A family cemetery is one of the most democratic records America keeps. No archive, no courthouse — just names in stone, passed down and protected by the people who remember them.
If you visit
You will find more than two hundred graves gathered on family land that has stayed in McCune hands since 1835 — and it is still an active cemetery, not a relic behind a fence. The setting is the quiet, green heart of East Texas: headstones mostly of granite, shaded by big hickories, oaks, and the chinquapins that gave the old community its name.
Walk it slowly and read the dates. This is a place to feel continuity rather than spectacle — the same surnames appearing across the decades, the grass and the hardwoods doing the work of a monument. Look for the oldest stones and think of 1852, when the first grave was dug for a child of an Anglo settler and a Cherokee mother.
It pairs well with a broader ramble through the Rusk County pines, where the roads run under a canopy that feels a world away from the open plains. Come with respect — it remains a working family burial ground — and let the trees and the names tell you how tangled, and how ordinary, the frontier's human story really was.
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
- · James L. McCune
- · Delila Storm McCune
Themes & tags
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