Birdston Community and Cemetery

By 1885 Birdston had outgrown its first store. The Handbook of Texas counts two steam gristmill and cotton gin combinations, a sawmill, five churches and a public school, and estimates the population at 250 in 1892. After 1900 families drifted to Streetman, which sat on the railroad, and the post office closed in 1909. By the mid-1930s highway maps no longer listed the community. A Navarro County history site says the old townsite was marked in 1990 only by a cemetery and a few scattered houses.

What the plaque says

Birdston Community and Cemetery When V. I. Bird opened a general mercantile store about 2 miles to the northwest in the 1860s, Birdston community was founded. As local economy then depended on cotton, a gin was soon built near the store. In a few years, store and gin were relocated a mile east of this cemetery, at halfway point on main road from Fairfield to Corsicana. The Birdston post office opened Dec. 11, 1866. By 1867 the community also had a school; by 1872 a church building, used by all faiths. The cemetery was opened on land donated by Edd and Juliett Burleson for church and school purposes. The first grave, located near the church, was that of a child, Mary Rayburn, whose family had been traveling from Fairfield to Corsicana, stopping at Sherrard's Boarding House in Birdston, where the child fell ill and died. A second grave was dug near the church when T. J. Gilbert died on Dec. 5, 1872. By 1888 additional cemetery land was sold to trustees by Mrs. Burleson. When Birdston was bypassed in 1909 by Burlington Rock Island Railroad, it lost its post office and businesses; the school closed in 1920. The cemetery has continued in use through ensuing years, and in the 1950s had a new section annexed by purchase of acreage from the Charley Gregory Estate. (1972)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 12 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.
• Petroleum Industry Park — 15 mi
  The pipes and drilling tower mark where a city water well struck oil on June 9, 1894, the start of the first Texas field to produce oil and gas in important quantities.
• Confederate Reunion Grounds State Historic Site — 24 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.
• Old Fort Parker — 28 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.

More markers nearby

• Birdston Valley — 1.2 mi
• Cade Cemetery — 3.9 mi
• Winkler — 5.6 mi
• Hopewell Cemetery — 6.0 mi