Miles Cemetery
Concord, Rusk County, Texas
Marker Inscription
THE COMMUNITY OF LAWSONVILLE, LOCATED IN PRESENT DAY CONCORD, WAS NAMED AFTER HENRY M. LAWSON WHO INHERITED THE LAND FROM HIS FATHER, IRVIN LAWSON, IN THE 1840s. MANY OF THE EARLY SETTLERS OF THE COMMUNITY WERE FORMER SLAVES OF NEARBY PLANTATIONS WHO CAME TO LAWSONVILLE TO ESTABLISH HOMES AND FIND WORK. THE COMMUNITY WAS RAPIDLY GROWING BY THE 1860s AND MOST OF THE LAWSONVILLE FAMILIES WORKED AS FARMERS, RANCHERS, SHARECROPPERS, OR WOODCUTTERS. IN 1877, THE LAWSONVILLE POST OFFICE WAS ESTABLISHED WITH AMANDA LAWSON, WIFE OF HENRY M. LAWSON, AS THE POSTMASTER. IN THE 1880s, THE COMMUNITY HAD THREE SAWMILLS, THREE COTTON GINS, A GENERAL STORE, THREE CHURCHES, AND A SCHOOL. THE MILES CEMETERY IS THE ONLY REMAINING VESTIGE OF THE LAWSONVILLE COMMUNITY. ALTHOUGH THE CEMETERY BEGAN AS A FAMILY PLOT, IT INCLUDED THE BURIALS OF THE MILES FAMILY’S SLAVES AND AFRICAN-AMERICANS CITIZENS OF THE COMMUNITY. THE EARLIEST MARKED GRAVE FOR BENJAMIN FRANKLIN MILES IS DATED 1864. HOWEVER, THE PRESENCE OF A NUMBER OF UNMARKED GRAVES SUGGESTS THE POSSIBILITY OF EARLIER INTERMENTS. MEMBERS OF THE MILES FAMILY ARE BURIED WITHIN A WROUGHT IRON FENCE ENCLOSURE, INCLUDING THAT OF ALBERT B. MILES, A PROFESSOR OF SURGERY AT TULANE UNIVERSITY. OUTSIDE OF THIS ENCLOSURE ARE A NUMBER OF GRAVES MARKED BY ROCKS, CEDAR WOOD, AND PLANTED FLOWERS. AN ASSOCIATION ESTABLISHED IN 2009 HAS OVERSEEN THE AFFAIRS AND UPKEEP OF THIS SITE THAT CHRONICLES THE HERITAGE OF THE COMMUNITY.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The community of Lawsonville, in present-day Concord, took its name from Henry M. Lawson and drew many former slaves from nearby plantations who came to build homes and find work as farmers, sharecroppers, and woodcutters. By the 1880s it boasted three sawmills, three cotton gins, a store, three churches, and a school, and its post office was run by Amanda Lawson. Today the Miles Cemetery—holding the Miles family, the people they had enslaved, and other African American residents, from a fenced family plot to graves marked only by rocks and cedar—is all that remains of Lawsonville.
Why it matters
The cemetery is the last trace of a vanished freedmen's community, preserving both the industry that once sustained it and the intertwined lives of the enslaved and their enslavers.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the piney woods and rolling farmland of East Texas, small communities grew up around whatever a family owned and whatever the land could give. In the years before the Civil War, this corner of what is now Rusk County was a landscape of plantations and the labor that made them run, and the people who worked that land were, in large numbers, enslaved.
The community that took shape here was named for Henry M. Lawson, who had inherited land from his father in the 1840s. What makes the place remarkable is who came to live on it. In the years around emancipation, formerly enslaved people from nearby plantations gathered here to do something they had never before been allowed to do freely: build their own homes and choose their own work.
They farmed and ranched, cut timber, and worked the cotton — the ordinary trades of a Southern countryside remaking itself after slavery. It was a fragile kind of freedom, hedged by poverty and the hard terms of sharecropping, but it was theirs, and out of it a real town grew.
People & events
By the 1880s, Lawsonville was a going concern. It had three sawmills and three cotton gins turning the region's raw timber and cotton into something to sell, a general store, three churches, and a school — the full anatomy of a settled community that intended to last.
One detail stands out. When the local post office was established in 1877, its postmaster was Amanda Lawson, wife of Henry M. Lawson. In an era when few women held such a public office, a woman's name went on the ledger that connected this small East Texas place to the wider country.
The cemetery that survives tells the community's fuller story in stone and iron. It began as a family plot, and its earliest marked grave dates to 1864. But it did not stay a family plot. Buried here are the people the Miles family had enslaved, and other African American residents of the community, alongside the family itself — a graveyard that holds, in one ground, both sides of slavery's ledger. Within a wrought-iron enclosure lie members of the Miles family, among them Albert B. Miles, a professor of surgery at Tulane University.
Its place in the American story
The story of Lawsonville is the story of Reconstruction and its long aftermath, told at the scale of one community. Across the South after the Civil War, freedpeople built settlements exactly like this — gathering near the places they had been held, pooling labor, raising churches and schools, and trying to convert emancipation into something durable. Most of these communities never appear in the national histories, yet together they were one of the great acts of nation-building in American life.
The cemetery also preserves a truth the country often prefers to smooth over: that the enslaved and those who enslaved them lived intertwined lives, and in this ground lie together. The unmarked graves hint at burials older than the earliest dated stone — lives lived, and lost, without a record the wider world kept.
That a community with sawmills, gins, a store, churches, and a school could vanish so completely, leaving only its dead, is its own American lesson. Towns rose and fell with the economy of timber and cotton and the coming and going of the railroads, and the people who built them are too easily forgotten. An association formed in 2009 to tend this site is, in effect, refusing that forgetting.
If you visit
This is a quiet country cemetery, and quiet is the right word for how it feels. Come expecting stillness, tall trees, and the particular hush of a place that outlived the town around it.
Look first at the wrought-iron enclosure. Inside it lie members of the Miles family, their graves marked in the formal way of people with means. Then look just beyond the fence, and you will see the community's other half: graves marked by rocks, by pieces of cedar wood, and by flowers someone once planted and someone, perhaps, still tends. That contrast — iron on one side, fieldstone and cedar on the other — is the whole history of Lawsonville laid out in a few square yards.
Walk slowly and notice the ground itself, where unmarked graves suggest more lives than the stones record. If you are building a road trip through East Texas, this makes a fitting, contemplative stop — a place where you stand in a town that is otherwise entirely gone, kept by the people who decided it should be remembered.
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
- · Henry M. Lawson
- · Amanda Lawson
- · Albert B. Miles
Themes & tags
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