McNeir Cemetery
Smith Point, Chambers County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Also known as McNeir Family Cemetery, this burial ground is the final resting place for Sarah Ridge Paschal Pix and her descendants. Her father, known as Major Ridge, was a Cherokee chief in Georgia. He and others were assassinated in 1839 over a controversial treaty. Sarah came to Texas in 1848 with her husband George Washington Paschal and settled in Galveston. There, in 1850, she treated yellow fever victims using a Cherokee remedy. She also divorced Paschal the same year. In 1856, she wed Charles Sisson Pix and moved to Smith Point, where their son, Charles Forest Pix, was born in 1857. Tradition holds that at the age of seven, Charles Forest planted an acorn near the Pix home, and the resulting live oak tree later shaded the site of his grave. Although he died in 1874, his father, who had abandoned his family, delayed permission for the burial on the land until the next year. The site later passed to Emily Agnes Paschal McNeir, Sarah's daughter. Emily's husband, William, was the second buried here in what became known as McNeir Cemetery. Family members continue to maintain the small burial ground as a link to their rich history. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2004
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This small burial ground holds Sarah Ridge Paschal Pix, daughter of the Cherokee chief Major Ridge, who was assassinated in Georgia in 1839 in the bitter aftermath of the treaty that led to Cherokee removal. Sarah came to Texas in 1848, treated Galveston's yellow-fever victims in 1850 with a Cherokee remedy, and later settled at Smith Point with her second husband. Family tradition holds that her grandson's grave rests beneath a live oak he grew from an acorn as a boy, and descendants still tend the McNeir Cemetery.
Why it matters
The graves link a nationally significant chapter of Cherokee history—Major Ridge, the treaty crisis, and removal—to the Texas Gulf Coast, carried west by one remarkable woman and her family.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The mid-nineteenth-century Gulf Coast of Texas was a place of arrivals — people washing in from older parts of the South and the eastern states, drawn by cheap land and second chances. Galveston was the great port of entry, a booming, cosmopolitan, and dangerous city where fortunes were made and where epidemics could empty a neighborhood in a single terrible summer.
But the people who came here carried older histories with them, and some of those histories were national tragedies. The forced removal of the Cherokee and other southeastern nations in the 1830s scattered families and reshaped the map of the American South. A woman arriving in Texas in the 1840s might carry, in her own life story, the memory of one of the most bitter episodes in the country's history.
Smith Point, out on the marshy edge of Chambers County, was a far quieter world than Galveston — a small coastal settlement where a family could build something lasting and private. It is the kind of out-of-the-way place where a remarkable life could come to rest without fanfare.
People & events
At the heart of this burial ground lies Sarah Ridge Paschal Pix. Her father was known as Major Ridge, a Cherokee chief in Georgia, and he was among those assassinated in 1839 in the violent aftermath of a controversial treaty that had divided the Cherokee people. Sarah carried that inheritance west.
She came to Texas in 1848 with her husband, George Washington Paschal, and settled in Galveston. There, in 1850, she treated victims of yellow fever using a Cherokee remedy — a striking image of traditional knowledge put to use in a frightened port city. That same year, she divorced Paschal. In 1856 she married Charles Sisson Pix and moved to Smith Point, where their son, Charles Forest Pix, was born in 1857.
A tender family tradition holds that at the age of seven, Charles Forest planted an acorn near the family home, and the live oak that grew from it later shaded the very spot where he would be buried. He died young, in 1874, and his father — who had abandoned the family — delayed permission for the burial on the land until the following year. The site later passed to Sarah's daughter, Emily Agnes Paschal McNeir; Emily's husband, William, became the second person laid to rest here, giving the cemetery its lasting name. Family members still care for the small burial ground today.
Its place in the American story
Few places connect a national story to a local one as directly as this. The killing of Major Ridge belongs to one of the most painful chapters in American history — the removal of the Cherokee from their southeastern homelands and the deep, lasting divisions it created within the Cherokee Nation itself. That this history has a resting place on the Texas Gulf Coast, carried here in the person of his daughter, is a powerful reminder that the consequences of national events ripple outward through individual lives for generations.
Sarah's own life bridges worlds. She was the daughter of a Cherokee leader, a woman who ended a marriage on her own terms in 1850, and a healer who drew on Cherokee medical knowledge during a deadly epidemic. Her story sits at the crossroads of Native American history and women's history, two threads too often left out of the standard American narrative.
The cemetery, then, is more than a family plot. It is a physical link between a chapter usually told in Georgia and the Carolinas and a small settlement on the Texas coast — proof that the American story is rarely contained by the places where it is said to have happened.
If you visit
This is a small, private-feeling place, still lovingly maintained by descendants, so approach it with the care you would bring to any family's sacred ground. Its power is not in scale but in the depth of the story held in so few graves.
If a grand old live oak stands over the site, let it hold your attention — family tradition ties such a tree to a boy who planted an acorn nearly two centuries ago, and it is hard to look at a spreading coastal oak the same way afterward. The setting itself, out toward the water's edge in Chambers County, has the hushed, big-sky feeling of the Gulf marshes.
Come knowing the story before you arrive, because the stones themselves are modest and will not tell it to you. Fitted into a coastal Texas drive, this is a place to stand quietly and think about how one woman carried a nationally significant history across half a continent — and how her family has kept that memory rooted here ever since.
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
- · Sarah Ridge Paschal Pix
- · Major Ridge
- · Charles Forest Pix
Related events
- · Cherokee removal
Themes & tags
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Sarah Ridge Paschal Pix
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Sarah Ridge (1814–1891) was born into a prominent Cherokee family in Georgia, the daughter of Major Ridge, whose support for the treaty ceding Cherokee lands led to his assassination and to the forced removal remembered as the Trail of Tears. Sarah made her way to Texas, nursed the sick during Galveston's 1850 yellow fever epidemic, and after her marriage traded her city home for this land at Smith Point. While her husband served in the Confederate Army she built a sprawling cattle ranch, running it herself and holding onto the land long after emancipation reshaped the operation.
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