DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about Old Powder Mill Cemetery out in Harrison County. Now, before there was a cemetery, there was a factory. A Confederate gunpowder factory, sitting on a patch of East Texas ground that would one day hold the memory of an entire community.
The story begins in the soil itself — because long before any official records were kept, enslaved people were being laid to rest on that Powder Mill acreage. That was their ground too, whether the world acknowledged it or not. Then came 1865.
The Confederacy collapsed, and when it did, that factory was destroyed right along with it. The acreage passed into private hands, and the cemetery kept receiving the dead. A mortician named M.
M. Rains eventually became one of the landowners, and in 1880 he began doing something that mattered enormously — he started recording the burials. Writing them down.
Giving them permanence on paper. But here's the thing about the past: it doesn't always wait for paperwork. The earliest known marked grave in that cemetery belongs to a woman named Millie Abner, and her stone is dated 1878.
Two years before anyone started keeping the official count. Millie's husband, David Abner, is buried there beside her. And David Abner was no ordinary man.
He had served as Harrison County Treasurer and stood as a member of the 14th Texas Legislature. A former slave, buried on land that had once been a Confederate powder works. You let that sit with you for a moment.
Old Powder Mill Cemetery became the resting place of some of the most consequential figures in Marshall's Black community — leaders in religion, business, social life, and politics. Among those interred there are educators H. B.
Pemberton, J. R. E.
Lee, and Frederick William Gross. War veterans. Businessmen and women.
Professionals who built something lasting in a world that made building anything difficult. And tucked into that ground as well are many former members and founders of the Colored Baptist Church — known today as Bethesda Baptist Church. One of those founders was William Massey, a Confederate soldier who went on to serve as the church's first pastor.
History has a way of holding contradictions without flinching, and that cemetery holds plenty of them. A gunpowder factory. Collapsed.
A community rising. And generation after generation laid gently into the same East Texas earth, their stories still there for anyone willing to stop and read the stones.
What the marker says
Located on part of a site once occupied by a Confederate gun powder factory, this cemetery originated with the burial of slaves on the Powder Mill acreage. After the factory was destroyed in 1865 with the collapse of the Confederacy, the acreage fell into private ownership. One of the landowners, mortician M. M. Rains, began recording the burials here in 1880; however, the earliest known marked grave, that of Millie Abner, is dated 1878. Her husband, David Abner, a former Harrison County Treasurer and member of the 14th Texas Legislature, is also buried here. Old Powder Mill Cemetery is important to the history of Harrison County as the burial ground of many of the leaders of Marshall's Black community who played important roles in local religious, social, business, and political affairs. among those interred here are educators H.B. Pemberton, J.R.E. Lee, and Frederick William Gross; war veterans; businessmen and women; and professionals. Also located in Old Powder Mill Cemetery are the graves of many former members and founders of the Colored (now Bethesda) Baptist Church, including William Massey, a Confederate soldier who served as first pastor. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986