Sterling Rex Barnes

Barnes tolled a river whose valley is now a lake. The East Fork of the Trinity, which runs about eighty-five miles south from Grayson County, was dammed to supply Dallas, and Lake Ray Hubbard, finished around 1970, now covers more than an eighth of Rockwall County. The Handbook says swollen water sometimes kept travelers from crossing, and some families simply settled on the east bank. Barnes arrived in 1846 and settled at Black Hill, now Heath, where he is buried near the town that took John O. Heath's name.

What the plaque says

Sterling Rex Barnes (Gravesite in Heath Cemetery) Virginia native Sterling Rex Barnes (1799-1866) migrated to this area from Mississippi with his wife Martha Ann (Mitchell) (b. 1809) and family in 1846. A pioneer settler in the community of Black Hill, now Heath, he was a charter member of East Trinity Masonic Lodge No. 157 in Rockwalll, organized in 1854. Barnes was the local justice of the peace in 1852 and operated a toll bridge at a site on the east fork of the Trinity River, now under the waters of Lake Ray Hubbard. Five sons and one son-in-law served with the Confederacy during the Civil War. (1981)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 6.5 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 15 mi
  A free museum at Terrell's airport where about 2,200 RAF cadets learned to fly between 1941 and 1945, with logbooks, uniforms, letters and original training aircraft.
• Fair Park — 17 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 17 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.

More markers nearby

• Heath Methodist Church — 0.2 mi
• Central National Road of the Republic of Texas — 5.4 mi
• Chisholm Cemetery — 5.9 mi
• Hillcrest Cemetery — 6.0 mi