Oates Cemetery
Joaquin, Shelby County, Texas
Marker Inscription
OATES CEMETERY ESTABLISHED 1863 HISTORIC TEXAS CEMETERY – 2012
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This Shelby County burial ground was established in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, in the piney woods of deep East Texas. It was recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2012.
Why it matters
A cemetery begun during the Civil War marks how East Texas communities carried on the rhythms of settlement and loss even through the nation's greatest crisis.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Fellowship Baptist Church
Joaquin, TX
Founded by settlers who crossed the Sabine River by ferry as early as 1818, Fellowship Baptist Church is among the oldest Baptist congregations in Texas, ministering through the Republic of Texas era. Worshippers rode miles by farm wagon to gather in a log building heated by an eight-foot fireplace, with split-log benches and shutter-covered, glassless windows that doubled as a schoolhouse in season. Its first pastor, Rev. Wyatt S. Childress, was kin to George C. Childress, an author of the Texas Declaration of Independence.
Truitt Cemetery
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James Truitt and his wife Sarah left North Carolina in 1838 and settled near this site in 1840, when Texas was still an independent republic. Truitt served in the Republic's congress and, after statehood, in the Texas legislature as both representative and senator. The family sent sons into the Regulator-Moderator War, the Mexican War, and the Civil War, and several generations of Truitts rest in this cemetery founded at Sarah's death in 1848.
John May Cemetery
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John May came to Shelby County in 1836, among the pioneers settling near the Tenaha Bayou in the earliest days of the Republic of Texas, and this graveyard holds the May and Hooper families from the 1850s onward. Richard Hooper, who arrived the same year, served in the Republic's army, sat in its first congress, and worked as county surveyor. Vandalized and neglected after the land was sold in 1970, the cemetery was rescued by a preservation association in 2004 and renamed for its original owner.
B. F. Morris and the Town of Joaquin
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Alabama-born Benjamin Franklin Morris came to Texas in 1838 and settled the pioneer village of Sarat, becoming a prosperous farmer and rancher. In 1884 he gave the Houston, East & West Texas Railroad a right of way through 500 acres and provided a 100-acre townsite—named for his grandson Joaquin—on the condition that a depot be built and passenger trains stop daily. A Confederate veteran, Morris also donated land for the town's First Baptist Church.