Site of Daniel McLean Claim

Weches, TX

Long before Europeans arrived, the Tejas Indians favored this spring-fed grove for its game and fresh water, and the site kept drawing travelers for centuries afterward. Sitting beside El Camino Real — the King's Highway that linked Spanish missions and presidios across the province — it hosted explorers, missionaries, traders, and later the wagon trains of 19th-century pioneers who circled up in the trees to rest. Hunting parties would camp here for weeks at a stretch well into the settlement era.

Grapeland, TX

John and Lucinda Sheridan left North Carolina in the mid-1820s to become two of Houston County's earliest permanent settlers, arriving while Texas was still Mexican territory. John, a former Texas Ranger, was killed by Indians in 1837 in what is now Anderson County, and Lucinda retrieved his body to bury it on their own land. She later donated part of that land for the cemetery where she herself was laid to rest.

Grapeland, TX

In continuous use since the 1850s, this cemetery rests on four acres donated by Lucinda Sheridan Murchison, widow of an early landowner, with its earliest documented grave dating to 1854. Among those buried here are pioneers, children—including an unidentified girl who died passing through with a wagon train—victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic, and veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars. A cemetery association formed in 1950 to care for the grounds.

Weches, TX

Frontiersman Daniel McLean and his brother-in-law John Sheridan settled here in 1821, soon joined by other pioneer families. The little community—first called Boston, then Augusta after a postmaster's daughter in 1857—weathered deadly frontier violence, including the Edens-Madden Massacre, and grew to some two dozen stores, a Masonic lodge, and a coeducational academy. As ranching and forestry supplanted cotton, the town faded away.