Sterling Rex Barnes

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker says about Sterling Rex Barnes, resting in Heath Cemetery in Rockwall County. Now let me take you back to 1846. A man named Sterling Rex Barnes, born in Virginia in 1799, packed up his wife Martha Ann, née Mitchell, born in 1809, and their family, and they made the long pull from Mississippi all the way out to a stretch of Texas called Black Hill.

That's the place folks now call Heath. Sterling wasn't the kind of man who arrived somewhere and sat down quiet. By 1852 he was serving as the local justice of the peace: the law, the order, the word of the community, all rolled into one.

And if that wasn't enough to keep a man busy, he also operated a toll bridge spanning the east fork of the Trinity River. You want to cross? You deal with Sterling Barnes.

That bridge and that crossing are gone now, swallowed up beneath the waters of Lake Ray Hubbard, which tells you something about how time rearranges the landscape around the lives people built. In 1854, Barnes was among the founding members (a charter member) of East Trinity Masonic Lodge Number 157 over in Rockwall. He helped organize it from nothing.

Then came the Civil War, and the Barnes household sent five sons into Confederate service. A son-in-law went too. Six men from one family riding off into that conflict.

Sterling Rex Barnes died in 1866, just on the other side of that war, with a toll bridge beneath a future lake, a community grown up around him, and six empty chairs that had once held his family. Some legacies you build. Some you simply outlive.

What the marker says

(Gravesite in Heath Cemetery) Virginia native Sterling Rex Barnes (1799-1866) migrated to this area from Mississippi with his wife Martha Ann (Mitchell) (b. 1809) and family in 1846. A pioneer settler in the community of Black Hill, now Heath, he was a charter member of East Trinity Masonic Lodge No. 157 in Rockwalll, organized in 1854. Barnes was the local justice of the peace in 1852 and operated a toll bridge at a site on the east fork of the Trinity River, now under the waters of Lake Ray Hubbard. Five sons and one son-in-law served with the Confederacy during the Civil War. (1981)