Old Salem Cemetery
Center, Shelby County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The first settler on this land was Tennessee immigrant A.D. Fountain. The land in which the cemetery sits originated as a school for the rural community of Old Salem. Old Salem’s settlers began arriving from Alabama and Georgia looking for new opportunities in agriculture and logging. From the 1870s to the 1880s, settlers began to congregate under an old white oak tree and buried their families in the nearby Taylor Cemetery. By 1881, a log structure used as a school and church was built near this site and the Old Salem Cemetery at this location was in use. In 1890, J.R. and M.A. Hatton sold eight acres of land in the A.D. Fountain survey to the Salem School Community. By 1923, the Salem school merged with Tabernacle Common School District and soon the school district conveyed two acres to the public for use as a cemetery. The remaining six acres, sold to the Frost Lumber Company, was gifted in 1938 to the cemetery. The cemetery is surrounded by tall pine and hardwood trees with graves laid out in the traditional east-west pattern. Grave ornamentation includes urns of flowers, small statues and gravestone symbols, including masons and woodmen of the world. This burial ground is also one of the few remaining cemeteries filled with mounded dirt graves that are free of grass. Many unmarked graves fill the cemetery as a result of epidemics and infant mortality. One of the first known burials was an infant of Roe Battles and Emmer Fountain Battles. Many veterans from the Civil War to the present are buried here. Church and community members maintain this historic cemetery as a reminder of early settlers in East Texas and the Old Salem Community.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Settlers from Alabama and Georgia came to the Old Salem community seeking farmland and timber, and by the 1870s and 1880s they were burying their dead beneath an old white oak here. A log building served as school and church by 1881, and land changed hands over the decades—school district to public, lumber company to cemetery—to shape the burial ground that remains. Shaded by tall pines and hardwoods, it preserves the older East Texas custom of grass-free mounded-dirt graves alongside many unmarked burials from epidemics and infant deaths.
Why it matters
Old Salem Cemetery is a living archive of East Texas frontier settlement and folk burial tradition, its mounded graves a vanishing regional custom.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · A. D. Fountain
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Chinquapin Cemetery (Loggins Family Burial Ground)
San Augustine, TX
Martin and Susanna Loggins emigrated from Tennessee in 1839, and within months the deaths of two of their children began the Loggins Family Burial Ground. Around it the Chinquapin settlement grew, with a log church, a store, and a school that opened in 1854 and endured on the site beside the cemetery until 1957. Renamed Chinquapin Cemetery after the burial ground passed to a trustee board in 1977, it now holds more than 200 monuments, including a dozen Republic of Texas markers.
Elder William Brittain and Rosanna Wright Brittain
Patroon, TX
North Carolina preacher William Brittain and his wife Rosanna, drawn by the promise of frontier missions, migrated to the Republic of Texas in 1837 and raised a log cabin here. One room served as classroom and chapel for the settlers of the Sabine River steamboat port of East Hamilton. A pioneer Baptist leader, Brittain helped found several Shelby County congregations and served as moderator of the Sabine Association in 1847. When steamboat traffic ended the town faded, leaving only this cemetery on the site of the Brittains' home and chapel.
Tennessee Methodist Church
Timpson, TX
This East Texas congregation began in 1857 as a Union church serving Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian families, many of whom had migrated from Tennessee. First called Mount Carmel, its one-room frame building — with log seats — doubled as the community schoolhouse, and the name changed to Tennessee Church by 1871. The three denominations shared quarters, including a two-story building whose upper floor housed a Woodmen of the World lodge, until they finally divided in 1913.
First United Methodist Church of Nacogdoches
Nacogdoches, TX
Once the Republic of Texas guaranteed religious freedom, the missionary Littleton Fowler preached in Nacogdoches in October 1837 and soon gathered an eighteen-member "Methodist Society" — the first Protestant congregation organized in the town after Texas independence. Led by a succession of pastors, the Methodists became the town's most active Protestants by 1850 and built their first church in 1860. Later buildings burned and were rebuilt, and the congregation helped found a college bible chair and a sister church before completing its present home in 1969.