Midway Cemetery
Livingston, Polk County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Andrew A. (1816-1898) and Mary Barnes (1817-1857) McKee came to Texas in 1845 and purchased land here in 1854. Mary, who died in childbirth, was the first person buried here. According to local tradition, just prior to her death Mary marked this site for family burials with her footprint on a gopher mound. By 1865 the cemetery served the Midway community and the surrounding area. Buried here are pioneer settlers and their descendants, former slaves, and veterans of conflicts from the Civil War to the Vietnam War. The cemetery is maintained by an association. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845-1995
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Andrew and Mary McKee came to Texas in 1845 and bought this land in 1854; when Mary died in childbirth in 1857 she became the first person laid to rest here, at a spot she is said to have marked herself. By the close of the Civil War the burial ground served the whole Midway community. Its graves hold pioneer settlers and their descendants, former slaves, and veterans of American wars from the Civil War to Vietnam.
Why it matters
A single country cemetery gathers the full sweep of a Texas community's history—frontier settlement, slavery and emancipation, and generations of military service—in one hallowed ground.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When Andrew and Mary McKee came to Texas in 1845, they arrived at a hinge moment in the region's history. That same year Texas left behind its decade as an independent republic and joined the United States, and settlers were pouring into its river valleys and pine woods to claim land that was cheap, plentiful, and freshly opened to American migration. The Piney Woods of what would become Polk County were still very much a frontier: thickly forested, sparsely settled, and a long, hard journey from any city.
This was the world the McKees bought into in 1854. A family did not simply move onto Texas land in those years; it carved a working home out of it, clearing timber, breaking ground, and establishing the roots that later generations would grow from. In a country with few churches, fewer doctors, and no towns to speak of, a family's own acreage became the center of its whole existence — the place where children were born, crops were raised, and, inevitably, the dead were laid to rest.
Death came early and often on the frontier, and childbirth was among its most common causes. Mary Barnes McKee's death in 1857, only a few years after the family settled here, was the kind of loss that shadowed nearly every pioneer household. The ground where she was buried would, over the decades that followed, absorb the full arc of the community that grew up around it.
People & events
The story the marker preserves begins with a single family and a single grave. Andrew A. McKee, born in 1816, and his wife Mary, born in 1817, made the move to Texas together in 1845 and put down roots on this land in 1854. Three years later Mary died in childbirth — a loss recorded plainly, but one that reshaped the land's purpose forever.
Woven through that fact is one of those tender local traditions that outlive the people who first told it. According to the story passed down here, Mary herself chose this spot for the family's burials shortly before she died, marking it with her own footprint pressed into a gopher mound. Whether history or cherished memory, the detail says something true about how pioneer families thought: a burial ground was not an afterthought but a deliberate act of rootedness, a declaration that this place was home for good.
Mary was the first to be laid here, but she was far from the last. What began as one family's private resting place grew outward. By 1865 — the close of the Civil War — the ground had become the cemetery of the whole Midway community and the country around it, no longer the McKees' alone but a shared inheritance tended, in time, by an association formed to care for it.
Its place in the American story
A small country cemetery like this one holds, in miniature, the entire American story of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The people buried here trace the arc that shaped the nation: pioneer settlers who came west when the land was raw, the generations of their descendants who stayed and built, the formerly enslaved men and women who lived through bondage and emancipation, and veterans of every American conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam.
That last detail is the most quietly powerful. To walk this ground is to move across more than a century of American military service in the space of a few dozen paces — the divisions of the Civil War, the world wars that pulled young men from rural Texas into global conflict, and the long Cold War struggles that followed. A single burial ground carries the weight of them all.
The presence of pioneers, former slaves, and their descendants side by side also tells the larger truth of how American communities were actually built: not by one kind of person, but by many, whose lives were bound together by the same land whether or not the wider society acknowledged it. Cemeteries are among the most honest historical documents a place can keep, because they record everyone who lived and died there.
If you visit
Come to Midway Cemetery expecting quiet. This is a working country burial ground in the Piney Woods of East Texas, not a grand monument, and its power lies precisely in that modesty. Give yourself time simply to walk the rows and read the stones.
As you go, notice the span of dates and the sheer range of lives gathered here. Look for the oldest markers — the pioneer generation — and then for the veterans' graves, which together carry you from the Civil War all the way to Vietnam. Reading them in sequence is like turning the pages of a community's biography, and it costs you nothing but attention.
The cemetery makes a natural, reflective stop on a drive through Polk County and the East Texas woods, a place to slow down between larger destinations. Treat it as you would any active cemetery — with quiet and respect — and remember that it is still cared for by the association that keeps its history alive. The best thing you can bring is curiosity about the ordinary people whose names are written here.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Andrew A. McKee
- · Mary Barnes McKee
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Nelson Henry Rice Cemetery
Leggett, TX
Nelson Henry Rice and Sarah Ann Stanley married in Alabama in 1841 and, having buried several children there, brought the rest of their family to Texas in 1854, finally settling this land in 1865 on about a thousand acres. Local memory holds that Rice drove a stake into this very spot and declared it his burial place; he also deeded land for nearby Wilson Chapel and gave plots to his children, seeding the Rice community. Civil War, World War I, and World War II veterans rest among the more than 140 graves.
Woodville Magnolia Cemetery
Woodville, TX
Established from land deeded in 1855 and expanded over the following years, this cemetery gathers the pioneer settlers and leaders of early Tyler County. Handmade bricks still outline unmarked graves, including those of George Van Vleck's family, and among those buried here are a Confederate captain, an early Methodist minister, and an ancestor of Governor Allan Shivers. Veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam lie here.
John Wheat
Woodville, TX
An Alabama native, John Wheat migrated to Texas in 1835 and claimed his headright and bounty lands here, naming many Tyler County creeks while hunting bear and other game. He served as a soldier in the Texas War for Independence, guarding a captured Mexican officer after the Battle of San Jacinto. Later a county commissioner, he donated the land for this cemetery and left descendants a wealth of frontier legends.
Valentine Burch
Chester, TX
This marker honors Valentine Burch, a Kentucky-born settler who stood among the men of the fledgling Texas army on April 21, 1836 — the day of the Battle of San Jacinto, where Sam Houston's forces won Texas its independence from Mexico. Detailed to guard the camp near Harrisburg rather than charge the field, Burch was part of the supporting cast whose vigilance made the decisive victory possible. He lived on into the 1890s, and the State of Texas set this stone during the 1936 Centennial to remember him.