Oak Shade Cemetery
Cleveland, Liberty County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Established 1845. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2018
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Founded in 1845, the year Texas was annexed to the United States, Oak Shade Cemetery served the pioneer families settling the piney woods of Liberty County. Such burial grounds were often among the first permanent community institutions on the Texas frontier. It holds a Historic Texas Cemetery designation.
Why it matters
A cemetery dating to the very moment of Texas statehood documents the earliest wave of permanent Anglo settlement in the region.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Oak Shade Baptist Church
Cleveland, TX
Out of an 1857 meeting in a log schoolhouse, two Union Baptist Association missionaries helped organize the Oak Shade congregation on July 4 of that year, with Virginia-born Rev. Austin Ellis as first pastor. The church weathered decline, reorganization, and several buildings before a brick sanctuary was completed in 1951. Its cemetery holds Texas Revolution veteran Andrew Jackson Isaacks and victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic.
Andrew Jackson Isaacks
Cleveland, TX
Born in Mississippi in 1817, Andrew Jackson Isaacks came to Texas and fought in the Texas Revolution in 1835 before settling into the civic life of a young frontier region. He served as sheriff of Jasper County, raised a large family, farmed and ranched, and became the first postmaster at Tarkington Prairie in the 1850s. Buried where he died in 1864, his remains were reinterred at this site in 1970.
McGinnis Cemetery
Tarkington, TX
Established in 1861, McGinnis Cemetery began at the very outset of the Civil War, when the farming families of rural Liberty County were being drawn into the conflict that would reshape Texas. Frontier cemeteries of this era often gathered pioneer settlers and the war generation side by side. It carries a Historic Texas Cemetery designation.
Burton B. Tarkington
Cleveland, TX
Burton B. Tarkington and his wife Sarah left Indiana in the mid-1820s for the Mexican state of Coahuila, settling west of the Trinity River and building a ranch and farm on land that came to bear their name. Family tradition holds they fled in 1836 as Santa Anna's army advanced toward San Jacinto. After independence, the new Republic granted Tarkington more than 4,600 acres, and he later served in the Texas Militia and as a county commissioner.