Stevens Cemetery
Hochheim, DeWitt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Joseph (1810-1861) and Sarah Ann Steen (1820-1860) Stevens, with Stevens, Steen, and Stephens relatives and a number of slaves, arrived in this area from Rankin County, Mississippi in 1846. They bought land from members of Green DeWitt's Colony and began to farm and raise cattle near this site. The 1851 grave of their infant son, Joseph Enoch Stevens, has the oldest marker in this family burial ground; the infant's grandfather, Elisha Stevens (1776-1851), was laid to rest nearby a few months later. Honored here are pioneer family members, veterans and descendants, the heritage of this area of DeWitt County. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2002
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1846 Joseph and Sarah Ann Stevens arrived from Rankin County, Mississippi, with relatives and a number of enslaved people, buying land from members of Green DeWitt's Colony to farm and raise cattle. The family burial ground holds its oldest marker over the 1851 grave of their infant son, and the child's grandfather Elisha Stevens was laid to rest nearby months later. Pioneer family members, veterans, and descendants are honored here.
Why it matters
The cemetery preserves the story of an early settler family in DeWitt County — including the enslaved labor bound up in that settlement — during the founding years of the Texas frontier.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When Joseph and Sarah Ann Stevens rolled into this stretch of DeWitt County in 1846, Texas itself was brand new to the Union — statehood had come only months earlier, at the tail end of that year's momentous change. The land they settled had until recently been the frontier edge of Green DeWitt's colony, one of the empresario grants that Mexico had used to lure Anglo-American families into Texas a generation before. Buying acreage from members of that colony placed the Stevens family squarely inside the first wave of permanent settlement here.
This was still very much frontier country. The blackland and post-oak prairies of south-central Texas were being turned to the plow and to pasture for the first time by newcomers, and cattle-raising was as much a part of survival as farming. Families arrived not as lone pioneers but in clusters — the Stevens, Steen, and Stephens kin traveled together, the older generation, the younger, and the enslaved people whose forced labor the family carried with them from Mississippi.
That migration route — from the older cotton districts of the Deep South westward into Texas — was one of the great population movements of the age. Rankin County, Mississippi, lay in a region built on plantation agriculture, and the people who moved from there to Texas brought that world's economy and its cruelties with them.
People & events
At the heart of this ground lies a family, and the earliest grave tells the hardest part of their story. In 1851, the Stevenses buried an infant son, Joseph Enoch, and his small stone became the oldest marker in this burial ground. A child's grave at the head of a family cemetery is a quiet reminder of how narrow the margin of frontier life could be, and how often the first person laid to rest in a new place was its youngest.
The grief did not come alone. Only a few months later, the child's grandfather, Elisha Stevens — born in 1776, in the very year of American independence — was laid to rest nearby. In the span of a single year, the family marked both the loss of its newest generation and the passing of its oldest, the man whose long life had bridged the founding of the nation and the settling of this Texas prairie.
Joseph and Sarah Ann themselves would not live to see the country's coming upheaval. Sarah Ann died in 1860 and Joseph the following year, their lives closing just as the land they had cleared entered a period of national crisis. The marker is careful to name what their household included: the enslaved people who arrived with them and whose labor made the farming and cattle-raising possible. Their presence is part of this place's history, even where the record leaves them unnamed.
Its place in the American story
The Stevens family cemetery is a small window onto one of the defining patterns of nineteenth-century America: the westward spread of Southern agriculture, carried across the map by families and, inseparably, by the enslaved people they held. The story of how Texas filled with settlers cannot be told honestly without both halves of that sentence, and this quiet burial ground holds both.
Ground like this also shows how the country was actually built — not by solitary heroes but by extended kin networks moving together, pooling labor and risk, and putting down roots one farm and one grave at a time. The empresario colonies that drew them, the cattle they raised, the crops they planted: all of it became the foundation of a region that would grow into one of America's agricultural heartlands.
By being designated a Historic Texas Cemetery, the site takes its place among the thousands of small family graveyards that dot the American landscape. Each one preserves not a famous name but a fuller, more truthful account of how ordinary settlement happened — including the human cost carried in the phrase 'a number of slaves.'
If you visit
A family cemetery like this one asks for a slower kind of attention than a battlefield or a grand monument. The pleasure here is in reading the stones themselves — the weathered dates, the way an infant's small marker from 1851 sits near the grave of a man born in 1776. Standing between them, you're standing inside a single family's arc across seventy-five years.
Look for the oldest markers first; they anchor everything else. Around them you'll find the pioneer relations, the veterans, and the later descendants the site honors, the layers of a family that kept returning to the same patch of earth. The land around you — gently rolling, once cleared for farming and grazing — still carries the shape of the frontier landscape the Stevenses knew.
This is a fine stop on a back-roads loop through DeWitt County, where the history is written in cemeteries, old colony lands, and small crossroads rather than big attractions. Come in a reflective frame of mind, walk the rows, and remember that the marker deliberately honors everyone bound up in this place's founding — and that the words 'a number of slaves' point to lives that shaped this ground even without headstones of their own.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Joseph Stevens
- · Sarah Ann Steen Stevens
- · Elisha Stevens
Themes & tags
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