Antioch Cemetery

Luna took its name from Gertrudis Luna, who was granted a league of land here on July 25, 1835, by the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company, which had bought empresario David G. Burnet's contract. The Handbook of Texas says no one knows whether she ever lived in the community. A combined church and school went up in 1866 on what became the cemetery ground. The post office ran from 1880 to 1907, when mail went to Teague. After World War I ranchers consolidated the farmland, and by the late 1980s only a few houses and this cemetery remained.

What the plaque says

Antioch Cemetery Shortly after the Civil War, Edward Ezell, Sr. (d. 1903) and his wife, Frankie (Howard), gave about two acres for this cemetery. It was later enlarged under the direction of the Antioch Cemetery Association. In 1905, residents of the Luna community began holding an annual memorial service here. The community, with a population of 250, was once the site of a church, grist mill, school, blacksmith shop, and general store, but in 1906 the railroad bypassed Luna, and the settlement began to decline. The pioneer burial ground is all that remains. (1983)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Fort Parker — 20 mi
  A rebuilt 1830s family stockade near the Navasota River, where a May 1836 attack killed men of the Parker settlement and took five captives, among them nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker.
• Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site — 22 mi
  Where Limestone County Confederate veterans gathered each summer from 1888, later a water supplier in the Mexia oil boom, now a Texas Historical Commission site on the Navasota River.
• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 23 mi
  The Freestone County grave of the Texas blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded for Paramount in Chicago from 1926 and died there in December 1929.

More markers nearby

• Dew Cemetery — 4.6 mi
• Site of Worthy Store — 5.1 mi
• Old Division Point Office for the "Boll Weevil" Railway — 7.3 mi
• Town of Teague — 7.3 mi