Olds Cemetery
Jasper, Jasper County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Established as a family cemetery, Olds Cemetery is located on part of the original homestead property of David and Sally Dunn. David Dunn and Sally Rayburn were married in 1830 in Mississippi and had ten children before settling in Tyler county by 1860. Eventually, the family settled permanently in jasper county on Spring Hill Road by 1870. The first marked burial in the cemetery dates to 1874, when one of their children, Morgan Dunn, passed away at an early age of 20. The next to be buried there were David Dunn in 1889 and Sally in 1897. Their son John Dunn and his wife, Martha, buried five of their infant children prior to 1902, actual dates unknown. Their graves are marked by a single marker. David and Sally Dunn’s daughters, Melinda, Nancy, Martha, and Rhoda, were also buried here in 1908, 1914, 1918 and 1919, respectively. Melinda and her husband James Perry Olds’ only child, David Amy Olds, was buried here in 1936. In the years following the death of David Amy Olds, the children of David and Lucy Jane (Morse) Olds took over the homestead and the cemetery, with the cemetery being commonly referred to as Olds Cemetery. As of 2017, there are over 60 interments at Olds Cemetery. Its graves are oriented to face east. The oldest graves, those of the Dunn family, can be found in the first row, except for the infant children of John and Martha Dunn, and are marked with wooden crosses and name plates have been added. David Amy Olds’ grave is the first to be marked with a headstone. The cemetery continues to be maintained and operated by descendants of the Dunn-Olds family. HISTORIC TEXAS CEMETERY – 2015
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
David and Sally Dunn married in Mississippi in 1830 and made their way west with a growing family, settling permanently in Jasper County by 1870 on land along Spring Hill Road. When their son Morgan died young in 1874, they opened a family burying ground that would hold David, Sally, and generations of their descendants. Marked at first by wooden crosses, the graves face east in the old custom, and the family's Olds descendants still tend the ground today.
Why it matters
Family cemeteries like this trace the westward migration of Southern families into the Texas piney woods and the tight kinship networks that settled the land.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The middle decades of the nineteenth century were a time of restless movement for the families of the American South, and the piney woods of East Texas were one of the places they were moving to. In the years after the Civil War — through Reconstruction and into the Gilded Age — the region drew Southern families looking for land and a fresh start, settling along country roads and clearing homesteads in the timber.
This is dense, wooded, water-laced country, and settlement here meant working a family homestead: a patch of cleared land, a house, fields, and — almost inevitably — a family burying ground somewhere on the property. Death was a near neighbor on the frontier, and families kept their dead close, on their own land, rather than at a distant churchyard.
The story here belongs to one such family and one such homestead, gradually taking root in Jasper County. It is not the tale of famous events but of ordinary endurance: a long marriage, ten children, a move westward, and a plot of ground set aside to hold the generations as they passed.
People & events
David Dunn and Sally Rayburn married in Mississippi in 1830 and began the slow migration west that shaped so many Southern families. By 1860 they had ten children and had reached Tyler County; by 1870 they had settled for good in Jasper County, on Spring Hill Road. The cemetery grew out of grief: the first marked burial came in 1874, when their son Morgan died at just twenty years old.
From there the ground filled with the family's own. David Dunn was laid to rest in 1889 and Sally in 1897, the founders following the son who had gone before them. Their son John and his wife Martha knew heavier sorrow still, burying five infant children before 1902 — their short lives gathered now under a single shared marker, the dates of most of them lost to time. The Dunn daughters — Melinda, Nancy, Martha, and Rhoda — came to rest here across the years, from 1908 into 1919.
The cemetery's very name records how one family's plot became a family legacy handed down. Melinda Dunn had married James Perry Olds, and their only child, David Amy Olds, was buried here in 1936 — the first grave to be marked with a proper headstone rather than a wooden cross. In the years that followed, the children of the next Olds generation took over the homestead and the cemetery, and the ground came to be known as Olds Cemetery. Today it holds more than sixty burials, and it is still tended by the descendants of the Dunn–Olds family.
Its place in the American story
The great migrations of American history are usually told in big numbers, but they were made of exactly this: one couple marrying in Mississippi and inching west across a lifetime until they put down roots in the Texas woods. A family cemetery like this one is a map of that movement, tracing the path of Southern families into the piney woods and the kinship networks that actually settled the land.
The ground is also a record of nineteenth-century American life at its most intimate and unsentimental. Five infants under one marker, a son dead at twenty, wooden crosses standing in for headstones no one could yet afford — these are the ordinary facts of frontier mortality, preserved here more honestly than any statistic could manage.
And there is meaning in the fact that the family still keeps the ground. Across the country, countless small family cemeteries have been lost to neglect, plowed under or swallowed by brush once the descendants moved on. One that is still maintained by the same bloodline, generations later, is a living instance of the continuity that holds American local history together.
If you visit
This is a small, working family cemetery in the East Texas countryside, and its character is quiet, rural, and personal. Expect a modest plot rather than a grand monument-filled ground — the reward here is in the details, and in the sense of a family's whole story gathered in one place.
Look first at the oldest row, where the Dunn graves lie. Several of the earliest are marked with wooden crosses to which name plates have been added — a moving, homemade kind of memorial that tells you these were people of limited means who honored their dead as best they could. Notice that the graves face east, following an old custom, and see if you can find the single marker that holds five of John and Martha's infant children. The 1936 headstone is worth finding too, as the first true stone in a ground that began with crosses.
Because this cemetery is still cared for by the family's descendants, visit as a respectful guest: stay on the ground's edges where you can, disturb nothing, and leave it exactly as you found it. It suits a slow, reflective detour on a drive through rural Jasper County — a few minutes among the trees to feel how a single family's westward journey came to rest in the Texas soil.
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
- · David Dunn
- · Sally Rayburn Dunn
Themes & tags
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