Winchester Cemetery
Winchester, Fayette County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In use as burial ground since site gift in 1971 by Col. Nathan Thomas (1909-81), former Republic of Texas congressman, member of the legislature, civic leader. Many Ingram Prairie pioneer families are interred her. Cemetery association was organized in 1881, with 44 members.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This Fayette County burial ground serves the pioneer families of Ingram Prairie, with a cemetery association organized in 1881 by 44 charter members. It is tied to Nathan Thomas, remembered locally as a Republic of Texas legislator and civic leader who gave the land. The graves gather generations of the settlers who first broke this prairie for farms.
Why it matters
Rural cemeteries like this one preserve the names and kinship of the ordinary families who settled Texas, when little else survives to record them.
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Related people
- · Nathan Thomas
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Stephen Williams
Winchester, TX
A veteran of the War of 1812, Stephen Williams left North Carolina and followed the great southern migration through Georgia and Alabama before reaching Texas in 1832. In 1843 he took a land grant in Washington County, where he became a prominent landowner and devoted Baptist. He is best remembered as a founding member of the Texas Baptist Education Society, and his farmstead stayed in the family for over 115 years.
Old Plum Grove Cemetery
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This ground began as a family plot when Texas pioneer John Y. Criswell—part of Stephen F. Austin's Third Colony—buried his wife Eleanor here, with the oldest grave dating to 1835. In 1839 the Plum Grove Baptist Church, one of the earliest Baptist congregations in Texas, took shape nearby, and in 1851 John Click deeded land for church and cemetery alike. As the town of West Point grew, the burial ground served the wider community, with separate sections that reflected the segregation of the era.
Woods Prairie Cemetery
West Point, TX
Zadock Woods, a War of 1812 veteran and one of Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred colonists, settled here in 1828, built a fortified home, and started this cemetery for family and neighbors. Woods himself died in the 1842 Dawson Massacre and lies elsewhere, but a fellow captive who survived imprisonment in Mexico, Joseph C. Robinson, rests here beneath a 1936 Texas Centennial marker. Pioneers bought and preserved the graveyard in 1875 to protect the resting place of the area's earliest families.
Site of Wood's Fort
West Point, TX
From 1828 to 1842 the fortified residence of Zadock Woods served the colonists of this vicinity as a refuge against Indian attacks during the turbulent years of Mexican Texas and the Republic. Woods, a veteran of the War of 1812 and one of Stephen F. Austin's original "Old Three Hundred" colonists, was by then an old man. He was killed at the Dawson Massacre on September 18, 1842, remembered as the oldest man to fall in that fight against invading Mexican forces.