Site of the Town of Jonesville

Lufkin vicinity, TX

In 1854 W.W. Manning opened a drugstore and sawmill here and named the settlement Homer for his old Louisiana home. Chosen as Angelina County seat in 1856 under a state mandate to center each county's government, Homer was platted in 1857 around a courthouse square, and its cemetery took its first recorded burial—Margaret Patterson McMullen—in 1861. The town thrived with schools, churches, and a newspaper until it lost the county seat in 1892; its cemetery, holding veterans from the Civil War to Vietnam and many county officials, still serves the community today.

Huntington, TX

This burial ground dates to 1873, when Cyrus Ivy buried a grandson on his family farm and set aside land for a cemetery. A Georgia native who reached Texas in 1852, Ivy became a community leader as the settlement around him grew to include a gristmill, cotton gin, post office, and two stores by the 1890s. Neighboring families soon shared the graveyard, whose interments include veterans reaching back to the Civil War.

Lufkin, TX

Once known as Angelina, the town of Homer served as the third seat of Angelina County from 1858 to 1890 before losing that role and fading from the map. Like many nineteenth-century county seats, its fortunes rose and fell with courthouse politics and the routes of new roads and railroads. Today only a marker southeast of Lufkin recalls the vanished town.

Huntington, TX

Brown Cemetery was established around 1879, in the years when settlers were putting down roots across the pinewoods of Angelina County, East Texas. Recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2012, it preserves the resting place of a pioneer-era rural community. Such burial grounds are often the most lasting record of the families who first farmed these lands.