HistoricSiteMarkers
Reconstruction & Gilded Age

Seal McDougle Cemetery

Spring, Harris County, Texas

Marker Inscription

Seal McDougle Cemetery Established 1883 Historic Texas Cemetery - 2005

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

Seal McDougle Cemetery was established in 1883 in the Spring area of Harris County, a burial ground serving the farming families who settled north of Houston in the late nineteenth century. It was recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2005. Like many such grounds, it endures as a quiet record of a rural community as the surrounding countryside gave way to suburban growth.

Why it matters

Small nineteenth-century cemeteries preserve the names and lineages of early settlers whose communities have otherwise been absorbed by the expanding modern city.

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Themes & tags

Westward ExpansionFrontier HistoryLandmark

Nearby & related markers

Bonin Family Cemetery

Houston, TX

In 1852 Paul Norval Bonin, born in Louisiana in 1814, led his family and some fifty other French families from the bayou country to North Harris County, buying more than 1,200 acres at the heart of what became the area's French settlement. Neighbors bore names like Leleux, Melancon, and Pevateaux, and the earliest grave here marks a Bonin child who died in 1865. After the deaths of Norval and his wife Coralie, the land passed to their surviving sons, and in 1987 descendants formed an association that still gathers each April to honor their ancestors.

McDougle Cemetery

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In 1838 George McDougle brought his family to 100 acres carved from the John House survey, building a home and raising cattle on land his descendants would hold for a full century. This small burying ground reflects the 19th-century Texas custom of interring kin near the homestead; among its graves lie a Texas Ranger, a Civil War veteran who served as a Harris County commissioner, and several generations of the family.

Oklahoma School

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Pioneer farm families settled the Oklahoma community in the mid-to-late 1800s, shipping their crops and livestock from the nearby Hufsmith rail station. Valuing education, they built the first one-room school by 1880 with a small donation and family-donated land, using it as both schoolhouse and church. Successive buildings followed, and after students transferred to Tomball and then Magnolia in the 1930s and 1940s, the schoolhouse lived on as a community center and polling place.

Oklahoma Cemetery

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Local tradition holds that the settlement earned the name 'Oklahoma' when a man who announced he was moving to Oklahoma instead settled near here. George W. Snook and his wife Bonnie set aside the first acre for a burial ground after their young daughter Jessie died in 1894, choosing a spot near a storm-uprooted tree she had last visited. Her uncle John Henry Goodson donated another acre in 1903, and the cemetery has since doubled in size while chronicling the families of this corner of Montgomery County.