Bolton Cemetery

A Waymarking page that reads the 1860 slave schedule counts thirty-five people enslaved by Ebenezer Bolton on his Camp County plantation and names his wife as Louisa, where the plaque says Martha. It says that after his death in 1877 she gave land to the people formerly enslaved there, and that the Bolton community grew on that land. The people who wrote the page visited in 2019 and estimated about 150 burials, many unmarked or marked with local ore rock. They described a freestanding arch at the entrance and put the cemetery on FM 993.

What the plaque says

Bolton Cemetery Ebenezer (Ebb) and Martha Bolton settled in this area in the 1850s. They established an extensive plantation and owned a number of slaves before the Civil War. Following Ebb Bolton's death in 1877, his widow made arrangements to provide land to their former slaves. This cemetery, which began in 1861 upon the death of Martha Bolton's mother, Rebecca Durley, became a part of the Bolton community, a Freedmen's town which built up in the area. Both Ebb and Martha Bolton are interred here, as are many of the former slaves and their descendants. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Bob Sandlin State Park — 12 mi
  A 1987 state park on a 9,000-acre reservoir, where a Republic of Texas stockade called Fort Sherman stood in 1838 and the Caddo lived from A.D. 800 to 1860, now with fishing piers, trails and cabins.
• Daingerfield State Park — 15 mi
  A pine-and-hardwood park built in 1935-39 by a white and a Black Civilian Conservation Corps company, with a dammed lake, Bass Lodge and a 2.4-mile loop trail around the water.

More markers nearby

• The Ezekiel Airship — 3.4 mi
• Site of First Carnegie Library in Texas — 3.5 mi
• Pittsburg — 3.5 mi
• Pitts Family Cemetery — 3.6 mi