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.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Old Salem Cemetery grew out of the Reconstruction-era and Gilded Age settlement of East Texas, when families from Alabama and Georgia pressed into Shelby County looking for new opportunities in farming and logging. The pine and hardwood forests that shade the graves today were also the region's fortune—timber and agriculture were the twin engines that drew people to clear land and build communities here in the decades after the Civil War.
The first settler on this land was A. D. Fountain, a Tennessee immigrant, and the ground the cemetery sits on began not as a burial place but as a school for the rural community of Old Salem. That detail says a great deal about the era's priorities: even in a raw farming settlement, people wanted their children taught, and the same modest structures often served for learning and worship alike.
By the 1870s and 1880s, settlers had begun gathering under an old white oak here, burying their families nearby. Out of that informal beginning—a shade tree, a school, a scattering of graves—an enduring community institution slowly took shape.
People & events
The land carries A. D. Fountain's name as its first settler, and the survey he established became the reference point for everything that followed. By 1881 a log structure served the community as both school and church, and the Old Salem Cemetery at this location was in use—the sacred and the everyday sharing one humble building, as they so often did on the frontier.
The cemetery's history is really a history of land changing hands for the community's benefit. In 1890, J. R. and M. A. Hatton sold eight acres in the A. D. Fountain survey to the Salem School Community. When the Salem school merged with the Tabernacle Common School District by 1923, the district conveyed two acres to the public for use as a cemetery. The remaining six acres passed to the Frost Lumber Company—a fitting owner in timber country—and were gifted back to the cemetery in 1938.
Among the earliest known burials was an infant of Roe Battles and Emmer Fountain Battles, a poignant reminder of how many of these early graves belonged to children. Many burials here are unmarked, the silent toll of epidemics and infant mortality, alongside veterans of conflicts from the Civil War to the present.
Its place in the American story
Old Salem Cemetery is a living archive of how American rural communities actually organized themselves. The migration of Alabama and Georgia families into the timber and farmland of East Texas mirrors the broader post-war resettlement of the South, when people chased fresh opportunity across state lines. That a school came first, and the cemetery grew up around it, captures how tightly education, faith, and community were bound together in these small settlements.
The cemetery also preserves a vanishing regional folk tradition. It is one of the few remaining burial grounds filled with mounded-dirt graves kept free of grass—a distinctive Southern custom of tending the dead that has almost entirely disappeared, along with the graves laid out in the traditional east-west orientation.
And the many unmarked graves tell a hard national truth of the age. Before modern medicine, epidemics and infant mortality filled cemeteries with the young and the poor whose families could not afford a carved stone. To walk here is to confront a demographic reality that shaped every nineteenth-century American community, whether or not it left a name behind.
If you visit
Old Salem Cemetery is a place to walk slowly and read the landscape as much as the stones. Ringed by tall pines and hardwoods near Center, it keeps the old East Texas custom of mounded-dirt graves swept free of grass—an increasingly rare sight, and the single most striking thing you'll notice. Take it in for what it is: a folk tradition still visible on the ground.
Look for the graves laid out east to west, and for the ornamentation that families chose—urns of flowers, small statues, and carved symbols including the square and compass of the Masons and the emblems of the Woodmen of the World. Then let your eye rest on the spaces between the marked graves, the many unmarked burials that speak of epidemics and of children lost too young. They are as much a part of the story as any inscription.
If you're traveling the back roads of Shelby County, this is a contemplative stop that rewards quiet attention rather than a quick photograph. It's cared for by church and community members who understand it as a reminder of the settlers who built the Old Salem community—so tread respectfully, and give the place the unhurried time its history asks for.
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
- · A. D. Fountain
Themes & tags
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