DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna do my best to do it justice. Now, when folks talk about the founding families of Texas, the name Cumings doesn't always ring out the way some others do — but maybe it ought to. Because in 1821, Rebecca Cumings and her three brothers, James, John, and William, packed up their lives and migrated all the way from Virginia to Texas.
That is a long way to go on a hope and a handshake. But they weren't just drifting. They came in as members of Stephen F.
Austin's Old Three Hundred — that original colony, the first wave, the ones who got here before the legend fully formed. And for their trouble, for their commitment, for signin' on when Texas was still more promise than place, they were given twenty thousand acres. Twenty thousand.
But land alone wasn't the deal. In return, they took on the construction and operation of a mill on a nearby creek. That was the arrangement — you build something useful, you earn your ground.
And the Cumings family did exactly that. Now, the years rolled by the way years do in Texas — full and fast and sometimes hard. By 1885, William's son Samuel Cumings and his grandson Samuel Junior were both gone.
Two of them, same year. That kind of loss has a weight to it that doesn't lift easy. Two years after those deaths, the family decided those two men deserved more than the resting place they had.
So they built a vault — a proper family vault, constructed of stuccoed brick. The man who designed it was George, Samuel's son. Think about that for a moment.
George designing a monument for his father and his brother. The work of grief made into architecture. And what George drew up has stood the test of time, because today fifteen members of the Cumings family are buried there.
Fifteen. The family that came from Virginia, that helped build early Texas, that planted a mill on a creek and roots in the soil — they didn't just pass through. They stayed.
All of them.
What the marker says
Rebecca Cumings and her three brothers, James, John, and William, migrated to Texas from Virginia in 1821. As members of Stephen F. Austin's "Old 300" colony, they were given 20,000 acres here in return for the construction and operation of a mill on a nearby creek. Two years after the 1885 deaths of William's son and grandson, Samuel Cumings and Samuel, Jr., this family vault was built for their reinterment. Constructed of stuccoed brick, it was designed by Samuel's son George. Fifteen members of the Cumings family are buried here. (1981)