Grand Bluff Cemetery

A history of Grand Bluff on the Panola County TXGenWeb site puts the cemetery about half a mile downriver from the settlement, on a knoll in a grove of cedars, with at least 100 unidentified graves. It says Robert Wyatt's wife and Frances Hoyle died after reaching Grand Bluff, and that a plot for the daughters of Dr. M. D. Sterrett is fenced with iron grillwork. The last gravestone death date is 1898. County records show the ferry license granted in January 1847 to Lucinda Vawter, and her $20 fee in 1852 was the highest of any county ferry.

What the plaque says

Grand Bluff Cemetery This cemetery originally served the pioneers who settled in the nearby community of Grand Bluff (.5 mi. W), an early ferry crossing on the Sabine River. The earliest known burials, dated 1838, are for Mary Frances Hoyle and Mrs. Robert Wyatt. Land for the cemetery was donated by David Vawter, an early ferry operator. The settlement of Grand Bluff began to decline in the 1880s, when railroads made the ferry crossing obsolete. The cemetery was last used in 1906 for the burial of Dr. David M. Vawter, son of the site's donor. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836 - 1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tex Ritter Museum and Texas Country Music Hall of Fame — 8.7 mi
  Carthage's country music museum, with Tex Ritter's boots, guitars and saddles in a room styled like a movie theater, and exhibits on other Texas stars, Jim Reeves among them.
• Starr Family Home State Historic Site — 18 mi
  Maplecroft, the 1871 Greek Revival house Frank Starr built in Marshall, with Ruth Starr Blake's glass and china, an 1880s kitchen restored in 2019 and a retirement home built for a formerly enslaved person.
• Harrison County Historical Museum — 18 mi
  Galleries in Marshall's 1901 courthouse that run from the Caddo to the present, with Wiley College, Lady Bird Johnson's inaugural gown and a military gallery across the square in Memorial City Hall.
• Texas and Pacific Railway Depot and Museum — 19 mi
  The only surviving building of the Texas and Pacific shops at Marshall, a 1912 Mission Revival depot saved from demolition in the 1990s, still an Amtrak stop, with a railway museum and a Mikado locomotive.

More markers nearby

• Rehobeth United Methodist Church — 4.8 mi
• Bell-Fountain Cemetery — 6.8 mi
• Jim Reeves — 8.0 mi
• Mount Zion C. M. E. Church — 8.5 mi