Historical Marker
Greathouse Cemetery
Temple vicinity, Bell County · Texas
Erected 1986
Early Greathouse's road to Texas ran through slavery. A Georgia Baptist minister, he owned five enslaved people in 1840, later farmed a thousand acres in Tallapoosa County, Alabama, and served in the legislature and a postwar constitutional convention. A family historian calls the household staunchly proslavery and says sons fought for the Confederacy. The family reached Bell County in 1870. The plaque says former slaves who came with the Greathouses are buried here, though it does not name them.
What the plaque says
Greathouse Cemetery The Rev. Early Greathouse (1810-1885) was ordained to the ministry in Georgia in 1846. He moved to Alabama in 1852, where he served in the state legislature and the Constitutional Conventions of 1865 and 1867. In 1870 Greathouse and his family arrived in Texas and bought land south of the present site of Temple. He built the first cotton gin in the area, and soon organized both the Knob Creek and Mt. Vernon Baptist Churches. He also set aside a tract of land to be used for a cemetery, probably in 1871. Though originally used as a family burial ground, other people of the community were later interred here. The oldest marked grave is that of Mattie Lee Clopton (1863-1875), granddaughter of Early Greathouse. Also buried here are several former slaves who came to Texas with the Greathouse family, and veterans of the Civil War and both world wars, as well as one survivor of the Battle of San Jacinto. The Rev. Early Greathouse and his wife, the former Susan Talley, were the parents of ten children. In 1884 the Rev. and Mrs. Greathouse deeded a large tract of land to a daughter, who in turn sold one acre to the trustees of the Greathouse Cemetery Association of Bell County in 1908. (1986)
Where it stands
31.03007, -97.33906 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 4.5 miThe Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
- Mother Neff State Park — 22 miA Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.
- Milam County Courthouse and Jail — 25 miCameron's 1892 Renaissance Revival courthouse and the 1895 St. Louis-built jail beside it, now the county museum, are listed together on the National Register.