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.
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Related people
- · J.C. Berryman
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Oakhill Cemetery
Hemphill, TX
From the 1830s onward, pioneers spread across this Sabine County country in small farming settlements like Oakhill, where a Baptist church and its cemetery took root by the 1880s. Families scratched a living from subsistence farming supplemented by hauling timber to the Sabine River, until lumber companies stripped the forests by the 1930s and the communities faded. The graveyard was mistakenly folded into Sabine National Forest in 1935 — an error not corrected until 1966 — and later received reinterments displaced by the flooding for Toledo Bend Reservoir.
Hemphill
Hemphill, TX
Sabine County organized the town of Hemphill in 1858, naming it for Texas Supreme Court Justice John Hemphill and moving the county seat to the county's center on land surveyed from the Slaughter tract. A post office, courthouses, a bank, and Sabine Valley University followed, while the nearby Knox Sawmill drove steady growth into the twentieth century. When the mill burned in 1937 and postwar migration pulled people toward cities, Hemphill's population declined, though it remains the seat of Sabine County government.
Pineland
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Pineland was born from the logging boom that swept the East Texas pine forests in the early 1900s, beginning as a lumber camp along the new Gulf, Beaumont & Great Northern Railway in 1902. First called John Adams' Mill, it grew quickly once the railroad added a station, and after T.L.L. Temple bought the local sawmill it became part of the Temple Lumber Company empire. The town of mill workers grew to 1,500 by 1925 and incorporated in 1941, with timber still driving its economy.
Mt. Sinai Cemetery
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Mt. Sinai Cemetery has served the families of southeastern Sabine County since its first burial in 1894, on land the Lutcher & Moore Lumber Company deeded in 1955. Some graves here are older still, relocated from the Morris, Anthony, and Robertson cemeteries after the Toledo Bend Reservoir flooded their original ground by 1968. Maintained today by a local association, it remains a tangible record of the county's timber-country past.