Naples Cemetery
Naples, Morris County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The earliest recorded burial on this site was that of Elizabeth A. Baker, who died on April 26, 1883. Pattie D. Baker, who died in October of that year, is one of several people reported to have been reinterred here from the local school grounds. In 1892, J. H. Mathews sold about an acre including this site to trustees of the Belden Public School for $12.50 for use as a cemetery. In 1895 when the town of Belden was renamed Naples, the Belden Cemetery was renamed accordingly. Among those interred here are a Texas state representative, as well as Amanda Sheppard, the mother and grandmother of two U. S. congressmen. Members of the Watts family were reinterred here from the Wheatville graveyard northeast of Naples. Now encompassing two acres, Naples Cemetery is a chronicle of Morris County. (2000) Incise on base: Glenda Brown Scarborough
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The earliest recorded burial here is Elizabeth A. Baker, who died in April 1883, followed by others reinterred from the local school grounds. In 1892 J. H. Mathews sold about an acre to the trustees of Belden Public School for $12.50 to use as a cemetery, and when the town of Belden was renamed Naples in 1895 the graveyard's name changed with it. Among the interred are a Texas state representative and Amanda Sheppard, mother and grandmother of two U.S. congressmen.
Why it matters
A small-town cemetery holding a state legislator and the matriarch of a congressional family shows how ordinary rural communities quietly produced the nation's political leaders.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The oldest graves here take us back to the early 1880s, a time when the small towns of Northeast Texas were still finding their footing in the decades after the Civil War. This was the Reconstruction and Gilded Age frontier of settlement — a period when railroads, farms, and new towns were knitting rural Texas into a broader national economy, and when a growing community's most pressing civic needs included a proper place to bury its dead.
What makes this cemetery's origins revealing is how tightly it was bound to the local school. Some of the earliest people laid to rest here were reinterred from the grounds of the community's school, and in 1892 the land itself was purchased by the trustees of the Belden Public School to serve as a cemetery. In a small town, the same handful of institutions and the same handful of leaders tended to overlap — school board, church, and cemetery all drawing on the same civic energy.
The town around the cemetery was itself still settling into its identity. Within a few years its name would change entirely, and the burying ground would change with it — a small sign of how young and fluid these communities still were as the nineteenth century drew toward its close.
People & events
The earliest recorded burial belongs to Elizabeth A. Baker, who died in April 1883, and the record notes another Baker — Pattie D. Baker, who died that same October — among those reported to have been moved here from the local school grounds. Those first names set the tone: this was a community consolidating its scattered graves into one dignified, permanent place.
The institutional turning point came in 1892, when J. H. Mathews sold about an acre of ground to the trustees of the Belden Public School for the modest sum of twelve dollars and fifty cents, to be used as a cemetery. Three years later, in 1895, the town of Belden was renamed Naples, and the cemetery's name followed suit — an ordinary bureaucratic act that nonetheless folded the graveyard into the new identity of the town.
The people who came to rest here reflect how rural communities could quietly produce figures of real consequence. Among the interred is a Texas state representative, and Amanda Sheppard, who was the mother and grandmother of two United States congressmen. Members of the Watts family were also brought here, reinterred from the Wheatville graveyard northeast of town. Over time the single purchased acre grew to two, and the cemetery became, in the truest sense, a chronicle of Morris County.
Its place in the American story
It is easy to imagine that the nation's political leaders sprang from great cities and famous families, but a cemetery like this one tells a humbler and more accurate story. Here, in a small Texas town that even changed its name partway through its early history, lie a state legislator and the matriarch of a family that sent two men to the United States Congress.
That detail — a grandmother resting in a two-acre country cemetery whose descendants helped govern the country — captures a deep truth about American democracy. Its leadership has always been replenished from ordinary places, from families rooted in farming towns far from the centers of power. The distance between this quiet plot and the halls of Congress was, in human terms, a single generation or two.
The cemetery's very founding — bought by a school board, its earliest residents moved from a schoolyard — also reflects how thoroughly education and civic life were braided together in the building of American communities. The people who valued a schoolhouse were the same people who set aside sacred ground, and both were investments in a town's future.
If you visit
Approach this as a place where a whole community's memory is gathered in two quiet acres. Naples Cemetery is a chronicle you can walk through, its stones spanning from the 1880s onward, and the pleasure of it lies in reading names and dates and letting the town's history assemble itself around you.
Look for the oldest markers from the 1880s, and keep in mind that some of the earliest people here were reinterred from other grounds — so the dates on the stones sometimes reach back further than the cemetery itself. Somewhere among these graves rest a Texas state representative and the mother and grandmother of two congressmen, a reminder that this modest ground holds outsized stories.
A visit here pairs naturally with the small towns of Morris County, where the pleasures of the road are found not in monuments but in the accumulated texture of ordinary places. Give yourself time to wander, to notice a family name repeated across the generations, and to feel how a single burying ground can hold the entire arc of a small American town.
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
- · Elizabeth A. Baker
- · Amanda Sheppard
Related events
- · Renaming of Belden to Naples
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Omaha School
Omaha, TX
Omaha bought land for a public school in 1892, and a wooden building by the railroad tracks soon held three teachers and 165 students. The community incorporated its own school district in 1905, replaced the frame building with brick, and—like countless Depression-era towns—gained a sturdy WPA rock gymnasium between 1938 and 1940. A 1950 tornado hastened consolidation with neighboring Naples, backed by a local oilman, and the old gym found new commercial life.
Concord Meeting House
Omaha, TX
Built around 1860 to replace an earlier log church, the Concord Meeting House did the multiple duty typical of a rural East Texas building—serving at once as a place of worship, a schoolhouse, and a polling place. It carries on today as a Baptist church, a thread of continuity running from the eve of the Civil War to the present.
County Line Baptist Church and Cemetery
Daingerfield, TX
County Line Baptist Church traces its records to 1859 and likely stood even earlier, its cemetery already in use by 1863 when three-year-old John C. Leftwich became the first marked burial. For a decade around the turn of the century the log church doubled as the County Line Community School before a new building rose in 1901. When age and storm damage forced the congregation to relocate in 1943, the once scraped-earth cemetery was left to grow over in grass, and a cemetery association formed to tend it in 1976.
Site of Valley View School, Site of
Daingerfield vicinity, TX
When Morris County drew up its school districts in 1893, this corner fell within the Valley View District, and the Fomby family donated 3.5 acres for a schoolhouse moved here from nearby Snow Hill. It grew from one room to two as enrollment rose, teaching local children through the eighth grade before they went on to Daingerfield High School. The school closed in 1935 and its district was folded into Daingerfield in 1952.