Port Sullivan Cemetery
Cameron, Milam County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1851, Reuben Anderson encouraged development of a townsite on Augustus Sullivan's land; two of Anderson's sons bought the first lots sold in Port Sullivan. The town benefitted from river navigation and grew to include stores, a sawmill, a college, and a population of over one thousand. In 1867, St. Paul's Masonic Lodge No. 177 bought five acres for a community cemetery. One notable burial is that of Thomas J.H. Anderson (d. 1871), Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Texas. The town declined when bypassed by railroads, and today the cemetery is the only landmark left of this once-thriving settlement. Since 2004, the San Andres Masonic Lodge No. 170 of Cameron has cared for the burial ground. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2006
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the 1850s, boosters laid out Port Sullivan on the Brazos River, and thanks to steamboat traffic it briefly bloomed into a town of more than a thousand souls, complete with stores, a sawmill, and even a college. In 1867 the local Masonic lodge set aside five acres for a community burying ground, where a Grand Master of Texas Masons was later laid to rest. When the railroads pushed through elsewhere, they left Port Sullivan stranded, and the town withered until only its cemetery remained.
Why it matters
Port Sullivan is a classic Texas ghost town whose fate was sealed by the railroad — a reminder that the transportation lines chosen by the Gilded Age decided which frontier settlements lived and which vanished.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the middle of the nineteenth century, before railroads redrew the map of Texas, the state's rivers were its highways. A town's fortunes rose or fell on whether boats could reach it, and along the Brazos a string of ambitious little ports sprang up wherever the water ran deep enough to float a cargo of cotton downstream and goods back up.
This was the era of the town-builder and the booster — men who looked at a stretch of riverbank and saw not mud and cane but stores, streets, and a courthouse square waiting to happen. Land was cheap, optimism was cheaper, and a well-placed settlement could grow from nothing to a thousand souls in a single generation.
But the ground under all that optimism was shifting. Even as river towns flourished, a new technology was coming that cared nothing for water depth. The decades spanning the Early Republic and the Gilded Age were, for many Texas settlements, a single long gamble on which the whole future turned: would the tracks come your way, or pass you by?
People & events
Port Sullivan began, as so many towns did, with a landowner and a believer. In 1851 Reuben Anderson urged the development of a townsite on Augustus Sullivan's land, and Anderson's faith was more than talk — two of his own sons bought the very first lots that sold. That is how a town is truly founded: not by a plat on paper, but by someone willing to stake his family on it.
And for a time the gamble paid off handsomely. River navigation carried Port Sullivan upward until it boasted stores, a sawmill, a college, and a population of more than a thousand — a real town, with the ambition to educate its young and mill its own lumber.
In 1867 the community did what growing towns do: it set aside ground for its dead. St. Paul's Masonic Lodge No. 177 bought five acres for a cemetery, and among those later laid to rest there was Thomas J.H. Anderson, who died in 1871 having risen to Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Texas — a figure of statewide standing resting in a small-town plot. Today that burial ground is the last landmark of the settlement, tended since 2004 by the San Andres Masonic Lodge No. 170 of nearby Cameron.
Its place in the American story
Port Sullivan's rise and fall is one of the most American stories there is — the ghost town created not by disaster but by a change in the routes of commerce. Across the country, the coming of the railroad was a kind of quiet verdict, and settlements that had thrived on river or wagon traffic could wither simply because the tracks chose another line.
The detail that a Grand Master of Texas Masons lies here says something about how these towns saw themselves. A place with a college and a lodge of that standing was not a backwater in its own mind; it expected to endure. The gap between that expectation and the empty fields today is the whole lesson.
That a cemetery is what remains is fitting and moving at once. When the stores close and the sawmill falls silent and the people move on, it is the burying ground — and the fraternal order that keeps it — that holds the memory. Port Sullivan is a monument to how thoroughly a thriving place can vanish, and to the quiet duty of those who refuse to let it vanish completely.
If you visit
Come here expecting quiet. What you'll find is a cemetery standing more or less alone where a town of a thousand once bustled, and that contrast is exactly the point — let the surrounding emptiness do its work on your imagination.
Walk the grounds and read the stones. Somewhere among them is the resting place of a Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Texas, a reminder that this was once a place of real consequence and not merely a wide spot on the river. Look, too, for the care of the site itself: the fact that a lodge from Cameron still tends these five acres is part of the living story.
For a road-tripper, Port Sullivan Cemetery is a stop that reframes everything around it. As you drive the modern roads and rail lines of the region, you'll start to see the map differently — as a record of which towns the tracks blessed and which they quietly left behind. Bring your curiosity and a little reverence; this is a place best appreciated slowly.
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
- · Reuben Anderson
- · Augustus Sullivan
- · Thomas J.H. Anderson
Themes & tags
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