Piney Cemetery
Harleton, Harrison County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Located five miles north of Harleton, Piney Cemetery is a rural cemetery in Harrison County. The site has several large oak and cedar trees, some over 100 years old. The entrance to Piney Cemetery is lined with a large iron arched sign and a chain fence. The burial site originated in the 1800s with its oldest grave dated to 1861. Carolin Oney Ragon was the first burial known today in the cemetery complete with a rock tombstone hewed from natural stone. Piney Cemetery became an organization in 1967. Its founding members were President E.L. Craver and Secretary and Treasurer Laurel Hicks. At the end of the 19th century there was a school and a church on top of the hill where the cemetery pavilion is now located. In 1889, Piney School and Piney Church moved to the bottom of the hill to be nearer to the natural water spring. In 1890, a church named Harmony was built on top of the cemetery hill but was closed in 1905. Designated Historic Texas Cemetery in 2014. Piney Cemetery has been associated with several names: Bear Bottom, Harmony, Lancaster, Pineridge, and Equality. Piney Cemetery holds 250 marked graves and around 20 unmarked graves. The unmarked graves date back to 1905 when a wagon train was struck by a case of small pox that killed many of the travelers. Their doctor, J.F. Mattox, is buried at Piney Cemetery. In the 1930s and 1940s the community of Harleton would meet at the cemetery with bag lunches to clean the grounds. This tradition, called the Piney Cemetery annual meeting, is an opportunity for the community to honor their ancestors. Designated as Historic Texas Cemetery in 2014.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Set among century-old oak and cedar north of Harleton, Piney Cemetery holds its oldest known grave from 1861 and has gone by many names — Bear Bottom, Harmony, Lancaster, Equality. A school and church once stood on the hill above, moving downslope in 1889 to be near a spring. Among the roughly 20 unmarked graves are travelers from a 1905 wagon train struck by smallpox, buried alongside the doctor who tended them.
Why it matters
It preserves the layered history of a rural Harrison County community, including a poignant reminder of the epidemics that struck travelers in early-1900s Texas.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Carolin Oney Ragon
- · J. F. Mattox
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Harleton
Harleton, TX
Settlers trickled into the country between Big and Little Cypress creeks in the 1830s, but Harleton truly took off when a railroad arrived in 1891 as part of a scheme by the Harle brothers and their backers to harvest the area's virgin forests. Their Hope Lumber Company built a depot, commissary, and band sawmill, and their well-stocked store so outclassed the nearby village of Grady that its post office moved over and took the Harle name. Timber wealth spurred farming and a cluster of thriving merchants, though the company closed its mill by the late 1890s once the nearby forests were cut over.
Harleton Methodist Church
Harleton, TX
Methodist worship in this corner of Harrison County began in settlers' cabins in the 1840s, when East Texas was still raw frontier. By 1901 the congregation had land and a sanctuary of its own, and in 1914 they raised a brick church here under trustee R. W. Taylor. Long a shared civic space for other local groups, it became Harleton United Methodist Church in 1970.
Smyrna Cemetery
Harleton, TX
Pioneer physician John Chadd received an 1845 land grant here and the following year donated ground for a church, school, and cemetery, choosing the biblical name Smyrna for the community. The burial ground dates to 1850, with its earliest surviving headstone from 1859, and grew alongside the Methodist congregation Chadd later helped endow. Among its 675-plus graves rest early settlers and veterans of every American conflict from the Civil War through Vietnam.
Smyrna United Methodist Church
Harleton, TX
In 1846, Dr. John Chadd led a party of settlers from Indiana into the piney woods of Harrison County, and the Methodist congregation he helped found first met in his own home, served every three weeks by the circuit riders who stitched frontier Texas together. For decades the little Smyrna church shared a log building with a Masonic lodge and the community school, rebuilding after fire, a second fire, and a 1905 cyclone. Its fifth sanctuary still anchors the Smyrna community today.