Oakwood Cemetery

Oakwood's plaque says the cemetery holds Honey Grove's pre-Civil War slave community and freed Black citizens, which places it inside a larger county story. The Handbook of Texas says Fannin County had 9,217 residents in 1860 and about 19 percent were Black. Honey Grove, with a post office branch since 1846, reached a population of 300 a decade later. The graves of enslaved people here belong to the town's founding generation, and the marker does not name them.

What the plaque says

Oakwood Cemetery Established in 1846, this cemetery was originally known as the Walcott Graveyard. The earliest documented burial in the cemetery is that of James G. Gilmer (1814-1846). A native of Kentucky, Gilmer came to Texas in the late 1830s and settled in this area. He was buried on his family land, and his widow, Elizabeth Parrish Gilmer, later married Benjamin Stuart Walcott. Mr. and Mrs. Walcott gave the land containing Gilmer's grave to the community as a public graveyard. It later became known as Oakwood Cemetery because of the area's large oak trees. Members of Honey Grove's early pioneer families are interred in the graveyard, as are many of their descendants. Over 275 veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II are represented here, some with gravestones and some, whose bodies were not returned, with memorials. Also buried here are members of Honey Grove's pre-Civil War slave community and freed black citizens. Land acquisitions over the years have increased the size of the cemetery. An entrance gate was erected in 1910, and a fence was built around the graveyard about 1913. the Oakwood Cemetery Association, formed in 1923, maintains the historic cemetery. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 18 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 21 mi
  The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 21 mi
  Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
• Cooper Lake State Park — 22 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.

More markers nearby

• Samuel Augustus Erwin — steps away
• James G. Gilmer — steps away
• Erwin Evans Smith — steps away
• James Thomas Holt — steps away