Waller Cemetery
Richards, Grimes County, Texas
Marker Inscription
According to oral history, Alexander Waller was the first person to be buried at this site. He died shortly after helping his father choose the family burial ground on their land purchased in 1872. John Waller, a veteran of the 15th Texas Cavalry, and his wife Frances (Dyer), had eleven children, several of whom are buried in this cemetery. Other Confederate veterans are interred here: Thomas Cothran, Jesse Long, and Oliver Smoot. Many more Sulphur Branch community families rest here, including two African-American families originally buried outside the main cemetery. Waller Cemetery continues to serve descendants of the early residents of Sulphur Branch.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This family burying ground began on land the Wallers bought in 1872, when young Alexander Waller became its first grave shortly after helping choose the site. His father John, a veteran of the 15th Texas Cavalry, and other Confederate veterans of the Sulphur Branch community lie here, alongside two African American families and many neighbors. The cemetery still serves the descendants of those early residents.
Why it matters
Rural cemeteries like this preserve the intertwined Confederate and African American histories of the communities that settled post–Civil War Texas.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Alexander Waller
- · John Waller
- · Frances Dyer
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Primus Kelly
Navasota, TX
Primus Kelly was enslaved by the wealthy Grimes County planter John W. S. West, who in the Civil War sent Kelly to accompany his three sons into Terry's Texas Rangers. According to the inscription Kelly took up arms alongside them and twice carried a wounded son home to Texas and back to the front. After emancipation he bought a small farm nearby, raised a family, and prospered until his death in the 1890s. The marker itself, erected in the era of Confederate memory-making, frames his story through the 'faithful slave' language of its time.
Blackberry Community
Plantersville vicinity, TX
Settled by families from the Lower South along John's Creek, Blackberry had become a largely African American community by the late nineteenth century. Residents raised livestock, cotton, and corn, and at its height the settlement supported a cotton gin, grist mill, and stores. Macedonia Baptist Church, dating from 1870, anchored the community and doubled as the local African American school. Though population has thinned since the Great Depression, descendants still return each year for the church's homecoming.
Apolonia Cemetery
Anderson, TX
First known as Pine Grove for the Baptist church at its heart, this Grimes County burial ground was in use by the 1860s, with a headstone dated 1869 and likely older unmarked graves. Land donors formalized it in 1886, and it holds Confederate veterans as well as Brosig T. Wasson, the county's first fatality of World War I. When the church disbanded in 1929, the cemetery took the name of the area's vanished post office, Apolonia.
Jacob Shannon Evergreen Cemetery
Dobbin, TX
Jacob Montgomery Shannon came to Texas as a teenager in the 1820s, when the land was still under Mexican rule, and by 1831 held a league of land where he built a plantation known as Shannon's Prairie. The cemetery began about 1840 and, in 1863, Shannon deeded two acres for a public burial ground, school, and church. Buried here are members of his family, some of the people he enslaved and their descendants, and several war veterans.