Cade Cemetery

Cade lost its post office to a railroad town. The Handbook of Texas says the Trinity and Brazos Valley Railway established a station at Streetman in 1905 and settlement began the next year, and in 1907 the post office at Cade moved there. Streetman straddles the county line, with about a third of it in Navarro County. Its first school met in a blacksmith shop in 1907, and a Black school opened the same year, enrolling thirty-five students the next. The town was named for Sam Streetman, a Houston judge who surveyed it.

What the plaque says

Cade Cemetery This burial ground originally served the pioneer Cade community, which was established near this site in the 1870s. Named for Cade Hayes, an early area resident, the settlement included the surrounding farmland of southern Navarro County and northern Freestone County. The cemetery was first used in 1876 when a Mrs. Nelson, the widowed sister of Cade settler Andrew Smith, was buried here. Ansel Coleman (d. 1883) and his wife Alice (d. 1910), who are interred here, deeded the property to trustees of the local Missionary Baptist Church in 1883 for the establishment of the burial ground and for the construction of a church building and a Masonic Hall. The earliest marked grave is that of John Watson (b. 1882), who died in 1884. Cade began to decline in population in the early 1900s when construction of a Trinity and Brazos rail line bypassed the area. After the church closed in 1932 the burial ground was neglected until a group of local women formed a cemetery association in 1947. An early project of the organization was the addition of a frame chapel for the site. Reorganized in 1966, the association holds an annual luncheon and business meeting the first Sunday of each June. (1981)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery — 8.2 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 — 17 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 — 20 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 — 24 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 Community and Cemetery — 3.9 mi
• Birdston Valley — 4.1 mi
• Richland Cemetery — 5.6 mi
• Caney Baptist Church — 5.6 mi