Yellowpine Cemetery
Hemphill, Sabine County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Yellowpine was one of many logging communities founded in the East Texas pine forests during the early 20th century. After the death of J.C. Berryman on October 2, 1932, local residents received permission from the Temple Lumber Company to inter Berryman on the top of a hill, close to a fire watchtower. The cemetery was known as Tower Hill Cemetery until the tower’s removal. The cemetery was officially recorded in 1935 when the lumber company conveyed almost 78,000 acres (excluding the cemetery site) to the U.S. Government for the establishment of Sabine National Forest. The site is managed by an association that meets yearly on the last Sunday in September, during an annual homecoming celebration.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Yellowpine was one of many company logging towns that sprang up in the East Texas pine forests in the early 1900s. When J.C. Berryman died in 1932, the Temple Lumber Company allowed his burial atop a hill beside a fire watchtower, giving the ground its first name, Tower Hill Cemetery. In 1935 the company conveyed nearly 78,000 acres — pointedly excluding the cemetery — to the federal government to create Sabine National Forest, and the burial ground is still tended by an association that gathers each September.
Why it matters
The cemetery is a surviving trace of the sawmill towns that boomed and vanished across the Piney Woods, and of the transfer of cut-over timberland into the national forest system.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the great pine forests of East Texas were treated as a resource to be harvested at speed. Timber companies laid narrow-gauge rail deep into the woods, threw up mills, and built entire towns around them almost overnight. These "company towns" came with company houses, company stores, and a company payroll — and when the marketable timber ran out, they emptied just as fast as they had filled.
Yellowpine was one of these places, a sawmill community that lived and breathed by the rhythm of the log train and the mill whistle. Sabine County sat squarely in the heart of the Piney Woods, close to the Louisiana line, where longleaf and shortleaf pine grew tall and straight and the whole regional economy leaned on the cut.
By the 1930s the logic of the boom was reversing. Decades of intensive cutting had left much of East Texas as "cut-over" land — stripped hillsides and stump fields that no longer paid to hold. That exhausted landscape set the stage for a very different chapter: the arrival of the federal government and the birth of a national forest on ground the lumber companies were ready to let go.
People & events
The human story here begins with a single grave. When J.C. Berryman died on October 2, 1932, the community had no long-established burial ground of its own, and so local residents asked the Temple Lumber Company — the town's owner and employer — for permission to lay him to rest on the crown of a nearby hill.
That hilltop already had a working purpose: it stood beside a fire watchtower, one of the lookout posts that scanned the pinelands for the smoke that could wipe out a season's timber in an afternoon. For years afterward the burial ground carried the tower's name, Tower Hill Cemetery, and only lost it when the tower itself was finally taken down.
The next turning point came in 1935, when the cemetery was officially recorded — a small but telling act, because it happened exactly as the lumber company conveyed nearly 78,000 acres to the United States government. The graves were deliberately left out of that transfer. The living community that had gathered around Berryman's hilltop chose to keep this one small parcel for themselves, and they have honored that choice ever since through a cemetery association that meets every year on the last Sunday in September.
Its place in the American story
Yellowpine's quiet hilltop connects to two large movements in the American story. The first is the rise and fall of the company town, a pattern repeated across the coal fields, textile mills, and timber camps of the nation. Whole communities existed at the pleasure of a single employer, and when the resource was gone, most of them simply disappeared, leaving little behind but foundations, a few names, and the cemetery — often the most durable thing a vanished town ever built.
The second is the creation of the national forest system. Across the country in the early twentieth century, the federal government began acquiring worn-out, cut-over land, much of it from the very companies that had logged it, and slowly nursing the forests back. The conveyance that created Sabine National Forest was one small piece of that nationwide effort to reclaim and steward land that private industry had used up.
What makes this site especially eloquent is the exclusion written into that 1935 transfer. Almost everything passed to the government — but not the graves. In that carve-out you can read a community insisting that its dead, and its memory, were not for sale.
If you visit
Come to Yellowpine expecting stillness rather than a monument. You are standing on high ground in the middle of a working national forest, and the setting itself is the story: tall second-growth pine where a busy sawmill town once stood, and a hilltop chosen long ago because it commanded a wide view for spotting fire.
Let yourself notice what is no longer here — the tower that gave the cemetery its first name, the mill, the company houses. The graves are the survivors. Walking among them is the closest you can come to meeting the people who made a living, and ended their lives, in these woods.
If you can time a visit for late September, the annual homecoming on the last Sunday of the month is when the place comes back to life, as descendants and neighbors gather to tend the ground and keep the memory. On any other day, it makes a reflective stop on a Piney Woods drive — a reminder that a forest can grow back over a town, but a community can still refuse to let it grow over the names.
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
- · J.C. Berryman
Themes & tags
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