Tubb Cemetery
Centerville vicinity, Leon County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Tubb Cemetery was named for early area landowners Elisha Floyd Tubb (1805-1862) and G. W. Tubb (1818-1896), who are both interred here. The first documented burial is that of Joel D. Leathers (1795-1849); his wife, Mary Leathers (1800-1865), is also buried here. According to oral tradition, they were sent here by General Sam Houston because Joel could speak several Indian dialects. Gravestones in the cemetery reflect the military service of Civil War, World War I and World War II veterans. The burial ground has served the nearby communities of Malvern, Nineveh and Oakwood and is maintained by the Tubb Cemetery Association. (2001)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This East Texas burial ground grew up around the graves of early landowners the Tubb family and the pioneer Leathers family, whose first interment dates to 1849. Oral tradition holds that Joel Leathers, who could speak several Indian dialects, was sent to the area by General Sam Houston — a hint of the frontier's uneasy meeting of settlers and Native peoples. Later headstones mark veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars, so the cemetery reads like a layered record of the communities of Malvern, Nineveh, and Oakwood.
Why it matters
A rural cemetery like this is a community's memory made visible, tracing settlement, service, and generations of ordinary lives across more than a century.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1830s and 1840s, the piney, rolling country of what is now Leon County sat on the edge of settled Texas. The Republic of Texas had won its independence in 1836, and families from the older Southern states were pushing west and north into land that Native peoples had long hunted, farmed, and traveled. It was an uneasy meeting ground, where trade, negotiation, and violence could all happen in the same season.
Sam Houston, the Republic's most famous leader, had a background few frontier politicians shared. He had lived among the Cherokee as a young man and again in his middle years, and as president he generally favored treaties and trade over war with Native nations. People who could talk across the language divide were valuable in that world, as interpreters, go-betweens, and early warning for misunderstandings that could turn deadly.
By the time Joel D. Leathers was laid to rest here in 1849, Texas had joined the United States, and the frontier was moving steadily west. East Texas was filling in with farms, small crossroads communities, churches, and family graveyards like this one. Many rural Texas cemeteries began exactly this way: a first grave on a family's land, then neighbors, then generations.
People & events
The cemetery takes its name from two men of the Tubb family, Elisha Floyd Tubb and G. W. Tubb. They were early landowners in the area, and both are buried here. Elisha was born in 1805 and died in 1862, in the middle of the Civil War. G. W. lived until 1896, long enough to see the frontier he arrived on become settled farm country.
The oldest documented grave, though, belongs to someone else: Joel D. Leathers, who died in 1849. His wife Mary outlived him by sixteen years and lies nearby. A local story has come down about the couple. According to oral tradition, General Sam Houston sent them to this part of Texas because Joel could speak several Native languages. No document confirms it, and the marker is careful to call it tradition rather than fact. But it fits the times. A man who could talk with Native neighbors would have been a real asset on the edge of settlement.
The cemetery kept growing as the generations went on. Later headstones mark men who served in the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, so the family names of this corner of Leon County show up again and again through a century of American conflicts. The grounds served the nearby communities of Malvern, Nineveh, and Oakwood, and the Tubb Cemetery Association still looks after them today.
Its place in the American story
Small cemeteries like this one hold a version of American history that rarely reaches the textbooks. The country's westward growth was not only treaties and battles. It was also thousands of families claiming land, burying their dead close to home, and gradually building communities around those graves.
The Leathers tradition also points to something larger: on the Texas frontier, the ability to communicate with Native nations could matter as much as land or livestock. Houston's own life, moving between Anglo-American and Cherokee worlds, is one of the best-known examples of that in-between role. A family story linking a local settler to Houston shows how much frontier communities valued, and remembered, those connections.
The veterans' stones bring the story into modern times. They show how a single rural place sent its sons into the nation's great wars, from the Civil War to the world wars of the twentieth century. Read together, the graves here trace the whole arc from frontier to modern America, one community at a time.
If you visit
Tubb Cemetery is a quiet country burial ground in the Centerville area. Expect the feel of rural East Texas: tall trees, a hush broken by birdsong, and stones ranging from weathered nineteenth-century markers to tidy modern headstones. Walk slowly. The oldest graves usually reward a close look at their carving and lettering.
Look for the Tubb and Leathers names, and keep an eye out for veterans' markers. Many of them carry service details that say where a soldier came from and which unit he served in. As with any active cemetery, be respectful: stay on paths where you can, don't make rubbings without permission, and leave everything as you found it.
This is a good stop for travelers exploring Leon County's back roads and small communities. Pair it with nearby towns and other rural cemeteries for a day of reading the countryside's history in its own words, carved in stone.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Sam Houston
- · Elisha Floyd Tubb
- · Joel D. Leathers
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Fort Boggy
Centerville, TX
Around 1840, pioneer families settling this corner of Leon County lived uneasily beside Kichai and Kickapoo camps. After Christopher C. Staley was killed while hunting in early 1840, the settlers built Fort Boggy—two blockhouses and eleven dwellings—under a company authorized by Texas President Mirabeau B. Lamar and led by Captain Thomas Greer. Some seventy-seven people crowded inside, plagued more by illness than by raids, until the danger eased after Greer himself was killed in an 1841 attack.
Fort Houston Cemetery
Palestine, TX
When Joseph Jordan and William S. McDonald donated some 500 acres in 1835 for the town of Houston—later Fort Houston—the plan set aside a "public burying ground" that survives as the community's last physical trace. Its oldest marked grave dates to 1840, and among those laid to rest are victims of disease and frontier hardship, two San Jacinto veterans in unmarked graves, and, in a soldiers' plot marked by a boulder, veterans of the Republic of Texas and a War of 1812 soldier, General Nathaniel Smith. Though the town was abandoned after Palestine became county seat in 1846, the cemetery remains in use today.
Dalys/Dailey Community Cemetery
Houston County, TX
The Daily family and their neighbors founded the Dalys Community in the 1850s, and when Ethalinda Meriwether died in 1876 the Dailey and Hill families donated ground for a burial place. The cemetery served both this settlement and nearby Reynard, gathering generations of East Texas farm families into one hillside. Among its graves lie veterans of the Civil War and both World Wars, and in 1981 the name was formally fixed as Dailey Community Cemetery.
Mt. Pisgah Church and Cemetery
Oakwood, TX
Though records don't fix its beginning, the Mt. Pisgah Cemetery's earliest marked grave belongs to a child who died in 1854, and local tradition holds that older unmarked burials lie among the pioneers here. Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church was organized in 1855 beside it in a hewn-log building called the Board Shanty, and the graveyard holds veterans of the Texas Revolution, the Civil War, and both World Wars, along with victims of an early influenza epidemic.