Historical Marker
Wallisville Cemetery
Wallisville, Chambers County · Texas
Erected 1991
The cemetery lies a mile from a town that built boats. Wallisville was a steamboat landing on the Trinity through 1877, and from the 1850s until the 1915 hurricane its main industries were lumber and shipbuilding. McLelland and Dunman were launching steamboats and sailboats by 1855, and the Cummings brothers moved their consolidated sawmill here around 1899. The last yard to work was Dunman Marine, which in the early 1940s built the first steel boat on the lower Trinity. In 1836 the captured Santa Anna was held at the Wallis family home.
What the plaque says
Wallisville Cemetery Early settler Albert Gallatin Van Pradelles (1808-1884) set aside land at this site for the burial of his grandson, William M. "Willie" Chambers, who died on his third birthday on December 10, 1878. the land surrounding the grave was established as a legal cemetery in county deed records the following month. Field notes by county surveyor Daniel B. Wallis along with other deed work set up a total of sixteen family lots in January 1879. Several locally prominent families were among those who purchased the original sixteen plots, including the van Pradelles, Chambers, Gordon, Wooten, Sisson, Mayes, and LaFour families. In 1884 a. G. van Pradelles became the fourth known burial in the cemetery he established. Among the stately monuments and shade trees can be found the tombstones of numerous elected county officials and pioneer settlers. The Wallisville Cemetery has been expanded several times since Van Pradelles laid out the site in 1879. The cemetery land remained in the van Pradelles family for over 100 years until 1986, when a descendant entrusted it to the Wallisville Cemetery Association for care and administration. (1991)
Where it stands
29.83228, -94.72619 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- San Jacinto Battleground State Historic Site — 22 miThe 1,200 acres of coastal prairie and marsh where the Texas Revolution ended in eighteen minutes, and the 567-foot shaft of fossil-studded limestone that has stood over them since 1939.
- Space Center Houston — 30 miThe visitor center of NASA's Johnson Space Center at Clear Lake, with flown capsules, a shuttle replica riding a 747, and tram tours to Mission Control and a Saturn V.