John Thomas Stark

The mail route is how the Stark story turns. The Orange Leader says John T. Stark held an 80-mile route between Burkeville and Orange, and that his son William Henry Stark rode it. The captain's war ended in winter 1864, when illness left him disabled and discharged after fighting that included Mansfield and Pleasant Hill. In Orange he taught Sunday school at the Old First Orange Baptist Church. When he died on September 24, 1893, Camp Walter P. Lane of the United Confederate Veterans escorted him to Evergreen, and he was buried with his company's battle flag.

What the plaque says

John Thomas Stark Patriarch of the Orange County Stark family, John T. Stark was born in Pebble County, Ohio, in 1821 and moved to East Texas in 1840. He settled in Newton County in the 1850s where he read law and ran a mercantile store. In 1861 Stark joined the Confederate forces as a private in the Texas infantry and was later elected captain. In 1874 he moved to Orange where he practiced law, served one year as Orange County judge, and was active in the old Orange First Baptist Church. Stark's three marriages produced eighteen children. He died in 1893 and is buried in this cemetery. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stark Museum of Art — 0.6 mi
  A white-marble museum in Orange built by the Stark Foundation and opened in 1978, holding Western art, American Indian art, Audubon's Birds of America and Steuben glass, free to enter.
• Shangri La Botanical Gardens and Nature Center — 1.3 mi
  More than 250 acres on Adams Bayou, begun by H. J. Lutcher Stark in 1937, with garden rooms, a cypress-tupelo swamp, a heronry blind and free pontoon tours in season.
• Museum of the Gulf Coast — 19 mi
  Port Arthur's regional museum in a former bank building: fossils, Native Americans, the petroleum story, a 125-foot history mural and Halls of Fame for musicians, athletes and artists.
• Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum — 21 mi
  A re-created oil boomtown on the Lamar University campus, with a derrick, period shops, a 1941 granite monument and an optional re-enactment of the January 1901 Lucas gusher.

More markers nearby

• Dr. Samuel M. Brown — steps away
• Samuel Wallace Sholars, M.D. — steps away
• Evergreen Cemetery — steps away
• Captain George M. Levingston — steps away