Mill Creek Cemetery
Burkeville, Newton County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Settlers to this area crossed from Louisiana into Texas near Toledo Bend on the Sabine River. Along Mill Creek, they established a community and this cemetery. Dating to the early 1840s, the first marked grave is that of Tandy Key Martin. The cemetery's more than 50 unmarked burials indicate the harsh conditions and poverty faced by area families. During the 20th century, many left Mill Creek for other jobs. Descendants of those buried here joined in an association in the 1980s to preserve this link to their heritage. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2004
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Settlers crossing from Louisiana into Texas near Toledo Bend on the Sabine River founded a community and this cemetery along Mill Creek in the early 1840s, with Tandy Key Martin's the first marked grave. Its more than fifty unmarked burials speak to the hardship and poverty of those pioneer families. As work drew people away in the twentieth century, the community faded, but descendants formed an association in the 1980s to preserve the site.
Why it matters
The many unmarked graves at Mill Creek testify to the poverty and struggle of the ordinary families who first pushed across the Sabine into Texas.
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Related people
- · Tandy Key Martin
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Fairmount Cemetery
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Families settled along South Prong Creek in deep East Texas as early as the 1850s, sustained by a post office that ran from 1854 into the twentieth century and a school that lasted until 1953. Burials likely began by the mid-1850s, though the oldest marked grave—that of Eli Elijah Smith, son of a Baptist pastor—dates to 1874. Fairmount Cemetery remains a quiet link to the pioneers and the churches, like Friendship Missionary Baptist, that shaped the community.
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Oakhill Cemetery
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From the 1830s onward, pioneers spread across this Sabine County country in small farming settlements like Oakhill, where a Baptist church and its cemetery took root by the 1880s. Families scratched a living from subsistence farming supplemented by hauling timber to the Sabine River, until lumber companies stripped the forests by the 1930s and the communities faded. The graveyard was mistakenly folded into Sabine National Forest in 1935 — an error not corrected until 1966 — and later received reinterments displaced by the flooding for Toledo Bend Reservoir.
Rev. Henry Stephenson
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