Thomas Boucher Wood Family Cemetery
Athens, Henderson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
According to family history, Thomas Boucher Wood (1820-1897) was born in Columbus, Mississippi. He attended the University of Louisville in Kentucky in 1843 and again in 1849, at which time he received his doctoral degree in medicine with a thesis on pneumonia. Soon thereafter, Dr. Wood came to this area to farm and practice medicine. He and Susan Amanda Pinson (1833-1873) were married in July 1850. Susan's family were among the earlier pioneers of nearby Mound Prairie in Anderson County. The Wood Family Cemetery is a testament to the harsh conditions of pioneer life. It was established in 1851 when Thomas and Susan's first child, a daughter, was stillborn. Family records indicate that she was buried on the homestead. Thomas and Susan Wood had ten children. Their daughter Mary Josephine (1858-1863) was the next family member to be interred here. The following year the Woods' son, John Felix (1862-1864), died and Susan Amanda Wood miscarried a daughter on the same day. Another unnamed infant girl was stillborn in 1866. Two-year-old Amanda Joe Wood died in 1870. Susan Amanda Wood was buried here in 1873. T. B. Wood and their son, Albert (1853-1879), both succumbed to pneumonia on Albert's twenty-sixth birthday. Another daughter, Tommie Elizabeth Wood Pelham (1856-1884), was buried here next to her four infants. Some of the Wood family slaves are believed to have been buried just outside the family plot. In the late 1990s, Wood descendants returned to the site and restored the cemetery. It serves as a memorial to the Wood family pioneers of Henderson County. (2000)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Dr. Thomas Boucher Wood earned his medical degree at Louisville in 1849, writing his thesis on pneumonia, and soon came to Henderson County to farm and practice medicine, marrying Susan Amanda Pinson in 1850. Their family cemetery began in 1851 with a stillborn daughter and filled steadily with children lost to the harsh conditions of pioneer life—and, cruelly, both the doctor and a grown son died of the very pneumonia he had studied. Enslaved people held by the family are believed buried just outside the plot; descendants restored the site in the late 1990s.
Why it matters
The small family graveyard lays bare the staggering child mortality of frontier settlement and the enslaved laborers whose presence shadowed even a country doctor's homestead.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Thomas Boucher Wood
- · Susan Amanda Pinson Wood
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
William Richardson
Athens, TX
Born in South Carolina in 1805, William Richardson moved to Alabama, married Mary "Polly" Kilpatrick, and in 1855 brought his large family, his brothers' families, and the people he enslaved to Texas by wagon train, arriving at this location. He became a successful planter, registered his "Three Circles" cattle brand, and helped lay out an early road between Athens and Kaufman that Highway 175 still roughly follows. The enslaved people he brought all took the Richardson name; many stayed on after emancipation and, with their descendants, founded the nearby Sand Flat community.
Davis Reynolds
New York, TX
In 1856, Davis Reynolds hauled his family — and several enslaved people — by wagon and on foot from Gordon County, Georgia, to Henderson County, Texas. Optimistic about its future, he named his settlement New York and donated land for the community's first cemetery, where his daughter's 1863 burial was the first marked grave. His hopes for a great city faded when the railroad bypassed New York in 1901, but the church, cemetery, and family store still endure.
Cox Cemetery
Canton, TX
Robert K. Gibbs and his family settled this Van Zandt County land in the early 1850s, and the earliest documented grave — an infant Gibbs daughter — dates to 1853. When Robert Daniel Cox acquired the property in 1880, he opened the small family plot as a community cemetery, which grew through later land additions. Some of the unmarked graves are believed to hold enslaved people, and five generations of the Cox family rest here.
Primrose-Sexton Community
Van, TX
Land granted to Thomas Horsley in 1847 drew settlers through the 1850s, among them Johnson Watts and the planter B. H. Denson, who arrived in 1859 with his family and thirty enslaved people and bought nearly 1,900 acres. The community coalesced around the "Shilo Meeting House," reserved by deed in 1866, and grew with cotton gins, the New Harmony and Sexton schools, and Methodist congregations. A post office opened in 1902 under the name Primrose, so the place answered to both names until schools consolidated with Van in 1938.