Price-Sossaman-Slaughter Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, out near San Augustine, there's a spot where the land has gone quiet in a way that only old burial grounds can manage. Little physical evidence remains of the family graveyard near this site.

The trees don't give much away. The earth keeps its secrets. But one tombstone is still standing, and it belongs to James H.

C. Price, dated 1852. One stone, holding the line for all the rest.

You have to admire that kind of stubborn permanence. The cemetery holds the burials of members of several early San Augustine families, and to understand how all those families ended up together in one piece of ground, you have to go back to the beginning. Colonel Elijah Price, born in 1791, and his wife Temperance Thomas Price, born in 1805, came to San Augustine in the 1840s.

Elijah was a prosperous planter and merchant, a man of standing, and as was the custom, the family cemetery was located near the family home. That was how it was done. You kept your people close, even after.

Elijah Price, gone in 1852, and Temperance, gone in 1859, are both buried there in that quiet ground. Now the Colonel and his wife had children, and those children, as children will do, went and married into other families. Their son Albert married into the Slaughter family.

Their daughter Cornelia married into the Sossaman family. And just like that, what started as a Price family cemetery became something wider. Members of the Slaughter family, members of the Sossaman family, all came to rest in the same ground that Elijah and Temperance first consecrated with their own.

One graveyard, several families, and one lone tombstone from 1852 still standing there to remind you that this place remembers, even when the land itself seems to have forgotten.

What the marker says

Little physical evidence remains of the family graveyard near this site that contains the burials of members of several early San Augustine families. The remaining historic tombstone, that of James H. C. Price, dates to 1852. James Price was the son of Col. Elijah Price (1791-1852) and Temperance Thomas Price (1805-1859), who came to San Augustine in the 1840s. Elijah Price was a prosperous planter and merchant; he and his wife are both buried in the cemetery, which, as was the custom, was located near the family home. Their son Albert married into the Slaughter family, and their daughter Cornelia married into the Sossaman family; hence, members of those two families are also interred in the Price family cemetery. (2001)