Emporia Cemetery

Duane's take

The way I tell it, I'm following the official marker on this one, so let's talk about what the ground itself remembers. Out here in Angelina County, there's a piece of earth that was old before the sawmill towns ever showed up. This is Emporia Cemetery, and it was a family burial ground first, long before anybody thought to build a town around it.

The story starts in 1882, with a grief no parent should have to carry. W.E. and Emily Waltman laid their infant son William in the ground here, and that first burial is what set this place apart as a cemetery. Not a church cemetery, not a town cemetery.

A family cemetery, quiet and private, out in the rural timber country of what would become Angelina County. Then the Emporia sawmill arrived. It operated just a few hundred yards to the west, running from 1893 to 1906.

The mill brought workers, and workers brought families, and some of those families never left, at least not entirely. When sawmill men and their kin were buried here, most of them went into the ground without a stone to mark their names. Unmarked graves, now mostly forgotten by name, though not by the soil that holds them.

Relatives of Jeremiah and Hester Anthony are buried here too, and for a stretch of time it was the Anthony family who tended the place. Because of that care, people came to call it Anthony Cemetery, or sometimes Pleasant Hill Cemetery. Three names for one piece of ground, which tells you something about how a place earns its meaning over time.

Now here's what makes this cemetery worth slowing down for, even if you're just passin' through. The people who marked these graves didn't always have marble or granite to work with. They used what the land gave them.

Landscape petrified wood. Homemade concrete gravestones, shaped by hand. It's not conventional, but there's a kind of stubbornness to it, a refusal to let the dead go unremembered just because a fancy headstone was out of reach.

The sawmill is long gone. The timber towns came and went. And what was once a rural cemetery sitting out in the piney woods is now inside the city limits of Diboll.

The town grew up around the dead, and the dead have been here the whole time, waiting for someone to notice. First burial, 1882. A Waltman infant named William.

That's where this ground began, and it's still here.

What the marker says

This pioneer burial ground predates later timber towns of the area. The land was originally set aside as a family cemetery, with the first burial for W.E. and Emily Waltman's infant son William in 1882. The Emporia sawmill operated a few hundred yards west from 1893-1906; some sawmill workers and their families are also buried here, mostly in unmarked graves. Relatives of Jeremiah and Hester Anthony are also buried here, and while that family took care of the graveyard it was also known as Anthony Cemetery or Pleasant Hill Cemetery. Noteworthy features here include the use of landscape petrified wood and homemade concrete gravestones. Once a rural cemetery, the site is now within the city limits of Diboll. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2006