Rosedale Cemetery
Gladewater, Gregg County, Texas
Marker Inscription
When John Kettle Armstrong and his wife Sarah bought 160 acres here in 1844, they were among the first settlers. Sarah died in 1856 and Armstrong set aside this tract for a cemetery. Tradition says the Armstrong slaves were interred outside the grounds. After Armstrong's death in 1860, his second wife Margaret Fisher married a Mr. Stewart. For years the Armstrongs and Stewarts allowed everyone to use the graveyard which was called "Stewart Cemetery." After the railroad started the town of Gladewater, a cemetery association organized in 1911 and changed the name of the graveyard to "Rosedale." An additional five acres were purchased from J. K. Armstrong and his wife. "Permits" for burial were sold instead of lots. When the East Texas oil boom began, this policy allowed all surface and mineral rights to remain with the association. In 1932 two oil wells were drilled on the burial ground. The association used the profits to build a caretaker's cottage, roads, a rock fence and to landscape the grounds. In 1973, after 41 years, the wells were plugged. Still in use, the burial ground has about 265 unmarked and 750 marked graves. Many of the older plots are covered with large red rocks.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When John Kettle Armstrong and his wife Sarah bought 160 acres of East Texas land in 1844, they were among the region's first settlers; after Sarah's death in 1856 the couple set aside this tract as a burial ground that neighbors came to call Stewart Cemetery. Renamed Rosedale by a cemetery association in 1911, the graveyard's clever practice of selling burial permits rather than lots kept its surface and mineral rights intact — so when the East Texas oil boom roared in, two wells drilled on the grounds in 1932 funded a caretaker's cottage, roads, and a rock fence. The tradition that the Armstrong slaves were buried outside the grounds is a quiet, telling detail of the antebellum South.
Why it matters
The cemetery compresses a full arc of Texas history — frontier settlement, slavery, and the oil wealth that transformed the state — into a single patch of ground still tended today.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · John Kettle Armstrong
- · Sarah Armstrong
- · Margaret Fisher
Related events
- · East Texas oil boom
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Foshee Family Homestead
Gladewater, TX
William Emmett and Mary Foshee bought this Upshur-country land in 1884 and raised their large family in a house built in 1890 from lumber sawn at John O'Byrne's mill, distinguished by a chimney of hand-hewn 'ironrock' from the creek that crossed the property. William wore many hats on the frontier — postmaster, farmer, lumber contractor, and justice of the peace. In the early 1930s one of the first wells of the great East Texas oil field came in on this ground, and the family's Ironrock Oil Company, named for that curious stone, was still operating when the marker was placed.
Gladewater
Gladewater, TX
Founded in 1827 as St. Clair a few miles east, the settlement moved to Glade Creek and the Texas & Pacific Railway in 1872 and took the name Gladewater. Its population exploded from 500 to 7,000 after oil was discovered in 1931, turning the farming and dairy town into a production and refining hub. The town became known for its East Texas Quarter Horse Show and a nationally known rodeo held in a converted salt-water disposal pit.
Dundee Angus Ranch Home, 1859
Longview, TX
Raised on the eve of the Civil War, this ranch home was the work of Dr. J. N. Allison, a pioneer physician who hauled building materials all the way from Virginia and had its bricks fired on site from local clay by enslaved laborers. The house stood on land that would later prove to sit atop the vast East Texas oil field, with the nearby Lathrop Discovery Well extending that famous strike. It marks the layering of Old South settlement and 20th-century petroleum wealth on a single patch of Gregg County ground.
Wartime Home Industry
Longview, TX
On this site from 1861 to 1865, settler Joseph M. Sparkman ran a shop making shoes for the Confederate Army, directing the work from his cot because arthritis had left him unable to stand. The actual shoemaking was supervised and taught by "Uncle Ben," an enslaved craftsman who had come with him from Georgia and who trained the boys and old men left behind by the war. Both men are buried in the family plot nearby.