Oaklawn Cemetery
Cooper, Delta County, Texas
Marker Inscription
THE FIRST BURIALS IN THE CITY OF COOPER WERE MADE ON A HILL WEST OF DR. J.A. BLACKWELL’S OLD HOME. THE FIRST BURIAL WAS BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN THE YOUNG DAUGHTER OF DR. R.C. ANDREWS. THE SITE SOON BECAME UNDESIRABLE AND LAND WAS SOUGHT ELSEWHERE. IN 1891, MR. ASA WHITE DONATED FIVE ACRES FOR A CEMETERY. MOST OF THE PEOPLE BURIED IN THE OLD COOPER CEMETERY WERE MOVED TO THIS LOCATION. THE OLDEST EXISTING MONUMENT IS THAT OF MARY CUMMING (1791-1881). THE INDEPENDENT ORDER OF ODDFELLOWS ORGANIZATION CARED FOR THE CEMETERY AND PURCHASED ADDITIONAL LAND UNTIL THE OAKLAWN CEMETERY, INC. WAS CHARTERED ON NOV. 17, 1959. THEY CONTINUE TO CARE FOR THIS HISTORIC COMMUNITY BURIAL GROUND. HISTORIC TEXAS CEMETERY – 2009
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The first burials in Cooper were made on a hill near Dr. J. A. Blackwell's home — reputedly beginning with the young daughter of Dr. R. C. Andrews — but the site soon proved unsuitable. In 1891 Asa White donated five acres for a new cemetery, and most of the old graves were moved here, including the community's oldest surviving monument to Mary Cumming, born in 1791. The Independent Order of Odd Fellows tended the grounds and added land until Oaklawn Cemetery was chartered in 1959.
Why it matters
The cemetery's relocation and long stewardship trace the settling and maturing of a small East Texas town, where fraternal orders often shouldered the community's civic duties.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This ground tells the story of a small East Texas town learning how to bury and remember its dead. Cooper took shape in the decades after the Civil War, in the long stretch historians call Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, when settlers were still filling in the map of Texas and turning scattered farms into organized communities.
In a young town, a cemetery is one of the first shared institutions people build. Before there are paved streets or grand public buildings, there is the need to lay loved ones to rest with some dignity and permanence — and the first attempts are not always the lasting ones.
That is the arc written into this hillside. A frontier community that began with rough, improvised burials gradually matured into one that chose a proper site, moved its dead there with care, and organized itself to tend the graves for generations. The cemetery's own history is, in miniature, the history of the town settling down.
People & events
The first burials in Cooper were made on a hill west of Dr. J. A. Blackwell's old home. Local memory holds that the very first was the young daughter of Dr. R. C. Andrews — a child's grave marking the true beginning of the community's remembrance, as such beginnings so often are.
That first site soon proved undesirable, and the town looked elsewhere. In 1891 Mr. Asa White donated five acres for a new cemetery, and most of those buried in the old Cooper cemetery were moved to this location. Among the graves that traveled with them was the one that still bears the oldest existing monument here: that of Mary Cumming, whose long life spanned from 1791 to 1881.
Stewardship then passed to a fraternal brotherhood. The Independent Order of Odd Fellows cared for the cemetery and bought additional land over the years, until the ground was formally chartered as Oaklawn Cemetery, Inc. on November 17, 1959. That organization continues to care for this historic community burial ground, which was recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2009.
Its place in the American story
The relocation of an entire cemetery is not a dramatic national event, and that is rather the point. Across America, thousands of towns went through this same unglamorous passage — a first burying ground abandoned, a better one established, the dead gathered up and moved so the community could put down roots that would hold.
The long involvement of the Odd Fellows connects this hillside to a broad chapter of American life. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fraternal orders were the connective tissue of small towns everywhere, quietly shouldering civic duties — caring for cemeteries, aiding widows and orphans, tending to the sick — long before governments took such work on. A single lodge looking after a town's graves is a window onto how American communities once organized their mutual care.
And a grave like Mary Cumming's, belonging to someone born in the eighteenth century and buried in a Texas town, quietly measures the enormous westward migration that peopled the interior of the country. Ordinary cemeteries like this one hold the real, granular record of how America moved and settled.
If you visit
This is a working community cemetery, so visit as you would any place of rest — quietly, and with an eye for detail rather than spectacle. Part of the pleasure is simply reading the ground like a document.
Seek out the oldest surviving monument, marking a life that began in 1791, and let the arithmetic sink in — a span of years that reaches back nearly to the founding of the nation, resting in the East Texas soil. From there, wander among the stones and watch the styles and dates shift, each one a small entry in the town's ledger of names.
It makes a thoughtful, unhurried stop on a back-roads drive through Delta County. There are no gates to a grand attraction here, only a well-tended hillside that a fraternal order and its successors have looked after for well over a century — a reminder that some of the most honest history a traveler can find is written on the humble markers of an ordinary 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.
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Related people
- · Asa White
- · Mary Cumming
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Turbeville, Sam B.
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Born in Mississippi in 1856, Sam B. Turbeville came with his wife Saluda to Texas in 1879 and settled in Delta County as a farmer. Elected county sheriff in a contested special election in 1897, he served several terms, counseling young people and enforcing Prohibition. His career culminated in appointment as U.S. Marshal for the Eastern District of Texas.
Delta County
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Carved from parts of Lamar and Hopkins counties, Delta County was created on July 29, 1870, and organized that October during the Reconstruction era. Its name reflects its triangular shape, wedged between the forks of the Sulphur River, with the town of Cooper chosen as county seat.
Yates and Methodist Protestant Cemeteries
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George and Mary Polly Wallace Yates brought their family to Texas in 1846 and settled newly formed Hopkins County land that would later become part of Delta County, raising livestock on nearly a thousand acres. When their fifteen-year-old daughter Mary died in 1855, she was buried on a hill near the family's log house, beginning the graveyard that still bears the family name. A later gift of land added the adjoining Methodist Protestant cemetery, and both burial grounds remain in the care of descendants.
Hiram Rattan
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Hiram Rattan, born in 1805, came to Texas in 1835 and settled on his brother Larkin's land grant—ground that would later become the city of Paris—before both families moved to Delta County in 1839. Hiram earned two land grants raising grain and livestock, while Larkin chased the California Gold Rush before returning to Illinois. The family knew frontier hardship firsthand: four relatives were killed in Indian raids, and the Civil War split their loyalties without shaking their devotion to Texas.