Starr Funeral Home
Hemphill, Sabine County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1946, W. O. Stringer, County Judge and owner of Stringer Funeral Home in Jasper, opened a second facility in Hemphill, on the corner of worth street and FM 2971 (Beckcom Road). Stringer hired Tennessee native John Byron Starr, Sr. (1909-1978) to operate the business. John’s parents, Hillard A. and Sarah E. Starr, lived in several states, including Georgia and Tennessee, and appeared in the 1880 U.S. census in Navarro County, Texas. John, Sr. Grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and later moved to Texas. He was living in Houston in 1930 and Kerrville in 1940 and served in the merchant marines during World War II. In the early 1940s, John married Margaret Virginia (Prather) Lisle in Beaumont. She had been married previously and had two sons. The Starrs had a son and a daughter together to add to their growing family. In 1949, W. O. Stringer chose to close the Hemphill location of his funeral home business. John Byron Starr, Sr. decided to purchase the business and keep it in operation. He received financial assistance from his brother Lewis E. Starr from Chattanooga. In a side room in the funeral home, Margaret started a flower shop, operating as a separate business. The funeral home moved in 1958 to a new facility, the first in east Texas specifically designed for that purpose, at 510 Starr Street. The flower shop also moved in 1958, to a new facility at 201 Starr Street and is still in operation today, in the second generation of the Starr family. The Starr Funeral Home is in its third generation and is the only such business in Hemphill, providing a vital community service over a widespread area of east Texas and Louisiana.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1946 a Jasper county judge opened a funeral home in Hemphill and hired Tennessee-born John Byron Starr to run it. When the owner closed the branch three years later, Starr bought it outright with help from his brother, and his wife Margaret opened a flower shop in a side room. From those modest beginnings grew a family enterprise that built the first purpose-designed funeral facility in East Texas and still serves the region across three generations.
Why it matters
The story captures how small family businesses became lasting institutions in rural American towns, providing continuity and service across generations in communities far from any city.
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Related people
- · John Byron Starr, Sr.
- · Margaret Virginia Starr
- · W. O. Stringer
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Hemphill
Hemphill, TX
Sabine County organized the town of Hemphill in 1858, naming it for Texas Supreme Court Justice John Hemphill and moving the county seat to the county's center on land surveyed from the Slaughter tract. A post office, courthouses, a bank, and Sabine Valley University followed, while the nearby Knox Sawmill drove steady growth into the twentieth century. When the mill burned in 1937 and postwar migration pulled people toward cities, Hemphill's population declined, though it remains the seat of Sabine County government.
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One of the original 23 counties of the Republic of Texas, Sabine County takes its name from the river that marks the Louisiana border. Long home to the Ais people of the Caddo, the area saw Spanish explorers pass through and later became a gateway for American settlers—Stephen F. Austin among them—entering Mexican Texas. Formed in 1837, the county built its economy on timber floated down the Sabine to sawmills, weathered the Great Depression and years without a bank, and revived when the vast Toledo Bend Reservoir rose in the 1960s.
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East Mayfield sprang up here in 1912 around a large sawmill built by Hiram Knox of the Knox Lumber Company, and was named for Texas Railroad Commissioner Earle B. Mayfield. Incorporated in 1914, the company town swelled to roughly 1,200 people with homes, businesses, churches, a school, a movie theater, and a hospital. But once the surrounding timber was cut out and the mill burned in 1937, there was nothing to rebuild for, and the town emptied out.
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