Myers Cemetery
Alvarado, Johnson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Samuel Houston Myers (1810-1874) and his wife Martha "Patsy" Wallace Myers came to Texas with their six children in 1851. Patsy Myers died in 1853; Sam Houston married Cynthia Ann Bales in 1854; she bore 5 children and died in 1865. Sam married Mary Hunter in 1866. The first recorded burial in this cemetery on the family farm occurred in 1873 with the death of a granddaughter, Mary Myers. Other early graves include those of Sam Houston Myers, a traveler named John A. Mullen who drowned in Quil Miller Creek in 1875, and an ex-slave known as "Aunt Rachel," twenty-one-year-old Sam Houston Myers, Jr. was hanged in 1880 for the murder of his stepmother Mary. His brother-in-law, James Bowden, later confessed to the crime. (1999)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Samuel Houston Myers brought his wife Patsy and six children to Texas in 1851, establishing a family farm; over the following years he outlived three wives and buried several kin on the land. The cemetery's first recorded burial came in 1873 with his granddaughter Mary, and early graves include Myers himself, a traveler who drowned in Quil Miller Creek, and a formerly enslaved woman remembered as "Aunt Rachel." A darker chapter unfolded in 1880, when young Sam Houston Myers, Jr. was hanged for a murder his brother-in-law later confessed to.
Why it matters
The Myers graves hold both the pioneers who settled Johnson County and the freed people who lived among them, along with a wrongful hanging that speaks to frontier justice.
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Related people
- · Samuel Houston Myers
- · "Aunt Rachel"
Themes & tags
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