Holly Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll pass it right along to you. Sitting right on the Houston-Trinity county line, there's a place called Holly Cemetery, and it carries the kind of quiet weight that only old ground can carry. According to oral tradition, it was William and Harriet Brent Brannen who set aside part of their own land, making room for a Primitive Baptist church and, beside it, a graveyard.

Church and cemetery, side by side, the way folks out here used to do things. Now the church is gone from the record, but the graveyard remains, and it has been keeping its secrets for a long time. There are unmarked burials in that ground, including five members of the Speer family, and some of those may date as early as 1863.

Think on that. Eighteen sixty-three. The land was still raw, the country was in the grip of the Civil War, and families were laying their own into the earth with nothing but memory to mark the spot.

The earliest marked grave belongs to the infant daughter of H. L. and N. J.

Brannen, and that stone dates to 1880. A child. The very first name anyone thought to carve in stone out there.

From that point on, the markers begin to tell a broader story. You'll find the family names: Brent, Driskell, Baker, Dishough, Clancy, Goodwin, Lane, Cupp, Hammond, Morrow, Sanders. Names that meant something to somebody, names that built communities and raised children and worked that East Texas soil.

And among all of them, veterans of various military conflicts rest in Holly Cemetery too, men who came home, or didn't fully come home, and ended up here on this county line. One cemetery, straddling two counties, holding generation after generation. The ground doesn't ask much.

It just keeps them.

What the marker says

Located on the Houston-Trinity county line, this cemetery once was associated with a Primitive Baptist church at the same site. According to oral tradition, William and Harriet Brent Brannen set aside part of their land for the church and the graveyard. There are a number of unmarked burials in the cemetery, including five members of the Speer family, which may date as early as 1863. The earliest marked grave, that of the infant daughter of H. L. and N. J. Brannen, dates to 1880. Markers bear such family names as Brent, Driskell, Baker, Dishough, Clancy, Goodwin, Lane, Cupp, Hammond, Morrow and Sanders. Veterans of various military conflicts also rest in the Holly Cemetery. (2001)