Stone's Chapel Cemetery
Clarksville, Red River County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Stone's Chapel Cemetery The first known burial at Stone's Chapel Cemetery is that of Parson Amos M. Stone (1813-1862). A New York native, Stone was a Cumberland Presbyterian minister in Tennessee who moved to Texas in 1857 with his wife, Margaret Rodgers, their five children and his four children from his first marriage to Jane McConnell. In Texas, Stone became the minister of churches in the Clarksville area, preaching for a time in San Antonio before returning in 1861 to this area, where he also served in a Confederate home guard unit. At least three of his sons also served the Confederacy. After coming to Texas, Stone led area residents in establishing Stone's Chapel Presbyterian Church on grounds near this cemetery, for which he donated land sometime prior to his death in 1862. The church continued until merging with Pine Grove Church in the 1950s. The Cherry School, named for early settler G.P. Cherry, was also located near the cemetery. There, Stone's granddaughter, Mable Gaines, served as a teacher. Little evidence exists of the Cherry Community or the Stone's Chapel Church, but the cemetery remains a testament to the lives of area settlers. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2002
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Parson Amos M. Stone, a New York–born Cumberland Presbyterian minister, moved his large family from Tennessee to the Clarksville area in 1857 and soon founded a church on ground near this cemetery. During the Civil War he served in a Confederate home guard while at least three of his sons joined the Confederate cause, and his 1862 death made his the first known grave here. His church later merged away and the nearby Cherry School faded, but the cemetery endures as a record of the settlers he served.
Why it matters
The graves of frontier preachers and their neighbors preserve the intertwined religious and wartime history of Civil War–era Texas settlement.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1850s and 1860s, the Clarksville area of Red River County sat on the northeastern edge of settled Texas, close to the older frontier of Tennessee and Arkansas from which many of its families came. This was farming and preaching country, where the arrival of a minister could anchor a whole neighborhood — the church and the burying ground often being the first shared institutions a scattered settlement built.
Then came the Civil War, and it reached even these remote settlements. Far from the great battlefields, communities like this one raised home guard units for local defense and sent their sons east and south to the Confederate armies. The war touched families directly, and it touched this ground, because the man who founded the church here also served in that home guard and died in the middle of the conflict.
Stone's Chapel Cemetery preserves the memory of that era — a frontier settlement bound together by faith and then swept into the national catastrophe of the war.
People & events
The story here belongs to Parson Amos M. Stone. Born in New York in 1813, he became a Cumberland Presbyterian minister in Tennessee before moving to Texas in 1857. He came with a large blended family: his wife, Margaret Rodgers, their five children, and four more children from his first marriage to Jane McConnell. Uprooting a household that size and carrying it across the country to the Texas frontier was no small act of faith.
In Texas, Stone became a minister to churches around Clarksville, preaching for a time as far away as San Antonio before returning to this area in 1861. He led local residents in founding Stone's Chapel Presbyterian Church on ground near the cemetery, donating the land himself sometime before his death. When the war came, he served in a Confederate home guard unit, and at least three of his sons also joined the Confederate cause — a family drawn wholly into the conflict.
Stone died in 1862, and his was the first known burial here — the founder becoming the cemetery's first resident. The institutions he helped build had their own long afterlives: his church continued until it merged with Pine Grove Church in the 1950s, and the nearby Cherry School, named for early settler G.P. Cherry, employed Stone's own granddaughter, Mable Gaines, as a teacher. Today little trace remains of the Cherry Community or the chapel, but the cemetery endures as a testament to the settlers Stone served.
Its place in the American story
Amos Stone's life traces one of the great migratory currents of nineteenth-century America: a New York man who became a Tennessee preacher and then a Texas frontier minister. That westward and southward movement of ministers and their congregations helped carry organized religion across the expanding nation, and the Cumberland Presbyterian church he represented was itself an American-born denomination shaped by frontier revivalism.
The cemetery also shows how total the Civil War's reach was. Here, in a rural settlement far from any famous battlefield, a founding minister served in a home guard and his sons went to war — a pattern repeated in thousands of communities where the conflict was not an abstraction but a matter of who stayed to defend home and who marched away.
And the fading of the Cherry Community and Stone's Chapel Church, with only the graves remaining, is a distinctly American story too. Countless small settlements rose around a church and a school and then dissolved as populations shifted, leaving the cemetery as the last durable record of the people who once lived, worshiped, and taught there.
If you visit
Stone's Chapel Cemetery asks you to imagine what is no longer there. The chapel that Amos Stone founded and the Cherry School where his granddaughter taught have largely vanished from the landscape, so the graves themselves carry the whole memory of the community. Come prepared to read a place by what remains rather than what stands.
Seek out the oldest burial — that of Parson Stone himself, who died in 1862 and lies here as the first known interment. Standing there, you're at the literal and figurative origin point of the settlement's shared history, the grave of the man who gave the land. The surrounding stones mark the neighbors and family he served.
Set in the rural country near Clarksville in Red River County, this is a quiet, out-of-the-way stop for a traveler interested in frontier faith and the Civil War's reach into ordinary places. It rewards reflection more than sightseeing — a small ground where a founding family and a whole vanished community are remembered.
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
- · Amos M. Stone
- · Margaret Rodgers Stone
Themes & tags
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