DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Stephen G. and Keziah Albright Box packed up their children and came to Texas from Alabama in 1826 — and I want you to sit with that for a second. Eighteen twenty-six.
Texas was a different world, a different country practically, and this family put down roots anyway. The Stephen Box land grant was deeded in April of 1835, and somewhere around this very site, the family looked at the land and said: this piece, right here, we're setting aside. For those who don't make it to wherever we're all headed next.
That's how a burial ground gets its beginning. The earliest known burial is that of Dicy Box Hallmark, daughter of Stephen and Keziah, born in 1807 and gone by 1837. She was the wife of San Jacinto veteran William Calvert Hallmark — and that detail, San Jacinto veteran, carries weight out here in Texas.
You know it does. Then comes James Bynum, the widower of Margaret Box — known to folks as Polly — and in 1852 he purchased the site. From that point on, people started calling it Bynum Cemetery, and the name stuck the way names do when a place earns them.
Bynum conveyed the land to his grandsons in 1885, and here's the part that quietly takes your breath away — it remained in the family at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Generation after generation, holding on. The graves here tell a long story of service too: veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War, all resting in ground the Box family first set aside nearly two centuries ago.
Some places hold more history than they have any right to. This is one of them.
What the marker says
Stephen G. and Keziah Albright Box came to Texas from Alabama with their children in 1826. The Stephen Box land grant was deeded in April 1835, and the family set aside the acreage around this site for a burial ground. The earliest known burial is that of Dicy Box Hallmark (1807-1837), daughter of Stephen and Keziah Box and the wife of San Jacinto veteran William Calvert Hallmark. James Bynum, the widower of Margaret (Polly) Box, purchased the site in 1852, and it became known as Bynum Cemetery. Bynum conveyed the land to his grandsons in 1885, and it remained in the family at the dawn of the 21st century. The cemetery includes graves of veterans of the Civil War, Spanish- American War, World War I, World War II and the Korean War. (2000)