McWilliams Cemetery
Shelbyville, Shelby County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This burial ground, originally known as Wayfare and later as McWilliams Graveyard, has served the Todd Springs community since early in the settlement's history. The community, named for landowner John D. Todd and area springs, was largely populated by African Americans. Before the Civil War, there were plantations in the area, including one owned by Irishman Robert McWilliams, who came here with wife Mary and his family from South Carolina in 1843. McWilliams died in 1864 and although this burial ground is named for him, he is buried in nearby Rather Cemetery. After the Civil War, many freedmen worked in the area as farmers; others labored in Center, Shelbyville and San Augustine. During the early 1900s, Todd Springs was a thriving community, with several businesses, an African American school and a lodge. However, the population declined during the 1930s and 1940s, as many residents moved to urban areas.This burial ground was officially established when N.K. and E.L. Boozer deeded property to trustees, although the land was used as a cemetery before that time. The oldest marked grave in McWilliams Cemetery, of Fennie McClelland, dates to 1903; however, it is believed there are a number of earlier, unmarked burials here. Others interred include farmers, preachers, community leaders and veterans of conflicts dating to World War I. There are also a number of teachers buried here, including Johnny W. Lee, who also served as a school administrator. The cemetery features obelisks, grave slabs and Masonic lodge markers. Today, the McWilliams Cemetery Association maintains this burial ground, whose graves provide a record of African American pioneer families that settled Todd Springs.Historic Texas Cemetery-2007
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Long known as Wayfare and later McWilliams Graveyard, this cemetery served Todd Springs, a community named for a local landowner and springs that was largely populated by African Americans. Before the Civil War the area held plantations; afterward, freedmen farmed the land and built up a thriving community with businesses, a school, and a lodge before the population thinned in the 1930s and 1940s. Its graves—marked by obelisks, slabs, and Masonic markers—hold farmers, preachers, teachers, and community leaders, and it is maintained today by a cemetery association.
Why it matters
McWilliams Cemetery chronicles an African American pioneer community's journey from slavery through freedom and self-sufficiency, preserving the names of the families who built Todd Springs.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
To stand at McWilliams Cemetery is to stand in the pine-and-springs country of deep East Texas, where the land itself shaped who settled and how they lived. Before the Civil War this was plantation country, worked under slavery, and the community that grew up around Todd Springs took its name from a local landowner and the water that made the place livable. Springs meant permanence in a landscape where reliable water was everything.
The cemetery's story straddles one of the great dividing lines in American history: the end of slavery. The people buried here lived through the before and the after. Some were enslaved on area plantations; after emancipation, they and their children remade themselves as free farmers, laborers, and townsfolk. The burial ground had been in use even before it was formally deeded to trustees, which tells you how deep its roots run into the settlement's earliest days.
By the early twentieth century, Todd Springs was a genuine community in full — not just scattered homesteads but businesses, a lodge, and a school for its African American children. That flourishing was real, and so was its fading: through the 1930s and 1940s, residents left for the cities, part of the vast movement of Black southerners toward urban work and opportunity that reshaped the whole country.
People & events
The names attached to this ground carry its history. The place bears the McWilliams name for Robert McWilliams, an Irishman who came from South Carolina with his wife Mary and their family in 1843 and held a plantation in the area. Yet here is one of those quiet facts that keeps a cemetery honest: although the burial ground is named for him, McWilliams himself is not buried here. He died in 1864 and lies in nearby Rather Cemetery. The name marks the land's early ownership, not his grave.
The community that gave the cemetery its life was named for John D. Todd, the landowner, and the springs nearby. After the war, the freedmen and their descendants were the ones who filled these grounds — farmers who worked the surrounding fields, others who found labor in Center, Shelbyville, and San Augustine, and the preachers and lodge members who held the community together.
Among the teachers laid to rest here is Johnny W. Lee, who served not only in the classroom but as a school administrator — a reminder of how much a small community invested in educating its children. The oldest marked grave belongs to Fennie McClelland and dates to 1903, though it is believed that earlier, unmarked burials lie here too, the resting places of people whose names time did not preserve but whose lives built the place all the same.
Its place in the American story
McWilliams Cemetery is a local ground that tells a national story. Across the American South after the Civil War, freedpeople faced an enormous question: what does freedom look like when you own nothing but yourself? The answer, again and again, was community — churches, schools, fraternal lodges, and land held in common for the dead. Todd Springs built exactly these institutions, and this cemetery is where they are recorded in stone.
The grave markers themselves — obelisks, slabs, and Masonic lodge markers — speak to that self-organized dignity. A Masonic marker on a rural African American grave is a small monument to a whole world of mutual aid and fellowship that Black southerners created for themselves in an era that offered them little from the wider society.
The cemetery's arc — thriving community, then decline as people moved to the cities — is the local face of the Great Migration, one of the largest internal movements of people in American history. When a place empties out, its cemetery often becomes the last durable record that the community was ever there at all. That is precisely the role this ground now plays.
If you visit
Come to McWilliams Cemetery expecting quiet. This is rural Shelby County, deep in the East Texas pines, and the cemetery is the kind of place you notice the wind and the birds before anything else. It is a working record of a community more than a tourist site, so walk it with the care you would bring to any resting place.
Read the stones. The variety itself tells the story — tall obelisks for those who could afford them, simple slabs for those who could not, and the distinctive Masonic markers that flag members of the lodge. Look for the older dates and remember that the earliest burials here likely have no markers at all; the ground holds more names than it shows.
The cemetery is maintained today by a local association, which is why it endures when the community around it has thinned. If you are tracing the history of African American settlement in East Texas, this is a place where that history is not abstract — it is written, family by family, in the ground beneath you. Give yourself time to let the names settle in before you drive on.
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
- · John D. Todd
- · Robert McWilliams
- · Johnny W. Lee
Themes & tags
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