Bonner Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about Bonner Cemetery, out in Newton County. Now, every family has a place where the story starts to feel permanent. For the Bonners, that place was a piece of ground on the banks of the Sabine River, and it has been holding their history a long, long time.

Thomas Bonner was born in 1833, and he made his way out of Mississippi and into Texas in the early 1850s. Texas had a way of pulling people like that, west and south toward river country. In 1855, Thomas married Eliza Jane Rutledge, and the two of them put down roots right there along the Sabine.

Together, Thomas and Eliza Jane became the parents of thirteen children. Thirteen. That is not a small family.

That is a legacy with legs. But with a family that size, joy and grief travel close together. The first recorded burial in this family cemetery came in 1861, and it was the hardest kind.

An infant, Lenora J. Bonner, was laid to rest there. The ground that would become the Bonner family cemetery received her first.

Thomas himself passed in 1891. Eliza Jane lived on until 1910. The site today contains eight graves, eight markers of a family's time on this earth.

In 1926, the Temple Inland Company purchased land that included this graveyard. Ownership of the surrounding acres changed hands, but the cemetery itself has never really passed out of the family's keeping. Descendants of the Bonner family still maintain the site to this day.

Some ground, it turns out, you don't sell. You just tend it.

What the marker says

Thomas Bonner (1833-1891) moved from Mississippi to Texas in the early 1850s. He married Eliza Jane Rutledge (d.1910) in 1855 and settled on the banks of the Sabine River. They became the parents of 13 children. The first recorded burial in this family cemetery is that of infant Lenora J. Bonner in 1861. The site contains eight graves. The Temple Inland Company purchased land including this graveyard in 1926. The cemetery is maintained by descendants of the Bonner family. (1997)