Oakwood Cemetery

🏛️The era

Tyler was founded in the mid-1840s as the seat of newly created Smith County, and it was named for President John Tyler. Texas had just joined the Union. East Texas, with its pine forests and good farmland, was filling quickly with settlers from the older Southern states, and new towns needed places to bury their dead almost as soon as they needed courthouses.

On land John Lollar bought in 1846, one such burial ground began. It grew with the town through the rest of the nineteenth century: the Civil War, which cost East Texas many young men, and the hard years of Reconstruction that followed.

In the twentieth century the cemetery's story reflected the nation's. Towns turned to planning and mapping to bring order to old grounds. Then, during the Great Depression, federal programs like the Works Progress Administration put jobless Americans to work improving parks, roads and public spaces, including cemeteries like this one.

👥People & events

The story starts with John Lollar, who bought this land in 1846. When he sold it to John Madison Patterson in 1849, he set aside five acres for burials. People had already been buried here since the 1840s, but many of the earliest stones are gone. The oldest marked grave belongs to a four-year-old, P. M. Scott, who died in 1852, a quiet reminder of how often frontier families lost children.

The Civil War left its mark here too. The graves of many Confederate soldiers who died during the war lie in a raised section east of Central Drive. Nearby, in its own separate portion, is the Jewish Beth-el Cemetery. Its oldest grave is that of Rachel Wolinsky, just 19 when she died in 1884, evidence of a Jewish community in Tyler by the late 1800s.

In 1903 the city added land and gave the cemetery its present name, Oakwood. Officials hired William A. Woldert to map the grounds, locate old graves and lay out new walkways. In the 1930s, WPA workers improved and enlarged it again. By the 1970s it covered 19.5 acres with more than 2,000 marked graves.

Many of Tyler's leading citizens rest here. Among them is Judge Stockton P. Donley, a justice of the Texas Supreme Court, and Richard B. Hubbard, a governor of Texas who later represented the United States in Japan, a remarkable journey from an East Texas town to the Pacific.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Oakwood Cemetery is a small-town record of the whole American nineteenth century. Its oldest graves come from the years right after Texas joined the Union. Its raised Confederate section recalls a war that split the nation. Its Jewish burial ground shows how immigrant and religious communities put down roots across the South.

The career of Richard B. Hubbard ties this burial ground to the wider world. At a time when the United States was just beginning its diplomatic relationship with Japan, a man from Tyler served as the nation's representative there. It is a reminder that people from quiet county seats helped shape America's place in the world.

The cemetery's later history is national too. The WPA work of the 1930s was part of a huge New Deal effort that left its mark on public places in nearly every American community, often in ways people walk past today without knowing.

🧭If you visit

Oakwood is a place for slow walking. Watch how the grounds change as you go: older areas with weathered stones, the raised Confederate section east of Central Drive, and the separate Beth-el Cemetery with its Hebrew lettering and traditions of its own. Some visitors leave a small stone on a Jewish grave as a sign of remembrance.

Look for the graves of Tyler's prominent citizens, including Governor Richard B. Hubbard and Judge Stockton P. Donley. Take time for the smaller stones too. A child's grave from 1852 can say as much about frontier life as any monument.

This is an active burial ground, so visit quietly and respectfully. It fits well into a day in Tyler, a city known for its roses and its brick streets, and it offers a peaceful counterpoint to the town's busier sights.