Mt. Hope Cemetery
Wells, Cherokee County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Joseph and Mary Bowman were married in Tennessee in the early 1800s. They moved their family to Missouri, then Mississippi and finally came to Texas with Stephen F. Austin's colony. Joseph, John J. (1807-1890) and James H. (1820-1886) Bowman fought in the Texas War for Independence from Mexico. James H. Bowman never married. In 1875 he offered one hundred acres of land to the Rev. W. D. Lewis (1819-1898) of the Barsola community to come to Mt. Hope community and establish a Methodist church at that location. Bowman gave adjacent land for a cemetery. The Rev. Mr. Lewis accepted his proposal. In November 1875, Mrs. Margaret (Ruby) Hicks, the wife of farmer Jasper Hicks and mother of Jess Hicks, died and was the first person to be interred on this site. The church was moved to nearby Wells after the railroad came through in 1886, the year that James H. Bowman was interred in Mt. Hope Cemetery. Among the early settlers buried here are members of the Bailey, Beasley, Bowman, Chapmon, Creekmore, Chandler, Cravens, Dubose, Doyle, Humphrey, Falvey, Hillencamp, Hicks, Lees, Lockhart, Luce, Lewis, Ruby, Spinks, Shamess, Stokes, Sneed, Sessions and Tyra families. Those interred here include area farmers and ranchers, teachers, doctors, business and civic leaders, and elected officials including former mayors, county commissioners and state legislators. Of the more than 1800 people interred on 13.2 acres at the dawn of the 21st century, more than two hundred were veterans of major wars and military conflicts, including eight Confederate veterans. The cemetery is a memorial to the pioneers of this area. (2000)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Joseph and Mary Bowman brought their family through Missouri and Mississippi to Texas as part of Stephen F. Austin's colony, and their sons Joseph, John, and James fought for Texas independence from Mexico. In 1875 James H. Bowman offered a hundred acres to draw the Rev. W. D. Lewis to establish a Methodist church at Mt. Hope, giving adjacent land for this cemetery. The first burial came that November; when the railroad passed through Wells in 1886, the church moved to town and Bowman himself was laid to rest here.
Why it matters
The Bowmans link Austin's colony and the Texas Revolution to the settlement of Cherokee County, and their cemetery gathers the farmers, officials, and veterans who followed.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The story of this cemetery reaches back to the very beginnings of Anglo settlement in Texas. In the 1820s, the empresario Stephen F. Austin brought the first colonists into Mexican Texas, and the families who came with that colony formed the seedbed of the American presence in the region. To have arrived with Austin's colony was to be present at the creation of Anglo Texas itself.
Those colonists soon found themselves at the center of a revolution. In the mid-1830s, tensions between the settlers and the Mexican government erupted into the Texas War for Independence — a short, decisive struggle that ended with the birth of the Republic of Texas. The men who fought it became the founding generation of a new nation, and later of a new American state.
By the 1870s, when this cemetery was established, that founding era was passing into memory, and the frontier community around it was maturing into a settled county of farms, churches, and, soon, railroads.
People & events
At the heart of this place is the Bowman family. Joseph and Mary Bowman married in Tennessee early in the nineteenth century and moved their family westward by stages — through Missouri and Mississippi — before finally settling in Texas with Austin's colony. Their sons Joseph, John, and James took up arms in the Texas War for Independence, tying this family directly to the fight that created the Republic.
It was James H. Bowman, who never married, who gave the community its spiritual and civic center. In 1875 he offered a hundred acres of land to draw the Reverend W. D. Lewis to come and establish a Methodist church at Mt. Hope, and he set aside adjacent land for this cemetery. Lewis accepted, and the community took root around church and graveyard together.
The first burial came that same November — Margaret Hicks, a farmer's wife and a mother, laid to rest as the cemetery's founding grave. Change came a decade later: when the railroad pushed through and gave rise to the nearby town of Wells in 1886, the church itself was moved to town. That same year, James H. Bowman — the man whose gift had begun it all — was buried in the ground he had provided.
Its place in the American story
Mt. Hope Cemetery connects a single Texas community to the largest chapters of the state's and the nation's story. Through the Bowmans, it links directly to Austin's colony and the Texas Revolution — the events by which a piece of the North American continent became first a republic and then part of the United States.
The cemetery also captures the transformation that reshaped rural America in the late nineteenth century: the coming of the railroad. When the rails arrived and pulled the church into the new town of Wells, they were doing to this community what they did to countless others — redrawing the map around the tracks and shifting the center of local life. The cemetery stayed put, a fixed point as the living community moved.
And in the more than eighteen hundred people eventually buried here — farmers and ranchers, teachers and doctors, mayors and legislators, and more than two hundred veterans, including men who wore Confederate gray — the ground gathers the full civic life of a county. It is a memorial not to a single hero but to the whole community that a founding family helped bring into being.
If you visit
This is a large cemetery — better than a dozen acres holding many hundreds of graves — so give yourself room to wander. Seek out the Bowman graves first; standing at the resting place of men who fought in the Texas Revolution, and of the founder whose gift created the church and cemetery both, connects you straight to the birth of the Republic.
As you walk, notice the range of people gathered here. The stones mark farmers and ranchers alongside teachers, doctors, and elected officials — a whole community's worth of lives and callings, laid out in one place. Look, too, for the graves of veterans, whose service stretches across generations of American conflicts.
Set against the nearby town of Wells, which the railroad called into being, the cemetery reads as the older, quieter half of the story — the place the community began before the tracks moved its center. If you're tracing Texas's founding era on a road trip, this is a rewarding, uncrowded stop: come with time to read the oldest stones and let the founding generation speak.
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
- · James H. Bowman
- · Rev. W. D. Lewis
- · Margaret Ruby Hicks
Related events
- · Texas War for Independence
Themes & tags
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