Whitehouse Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about Whitehouse Cemetery in Angelina County. Now, every good cemetery has a story, and this one starts with a house. According to local tradition, this cemetery may take its name from a Cole family home, a 19th-century structure whose whitewashed exterior stood out from the majority of other log houses and frame buildings in the area.

Picture that. You're traveling through the piney woods of East Texas, everything around you is rough-hewn timber and weathered planks, and then there it is, bright and white, like somebody was making a point. The cemetery that grew up nearby carried that image forward.

The land it sits on was once part of a thoroughfare, a road running between Homer, the former Angelina County seat, and Crockett, the county seat of neighboring Houston County. People passed this way with purpose. The oldest marked grave belongs to Catherine Wheat Wideman, dated 1893, but the marker is careful to note there are earlier burial sites on the property.

The marked stones are not the whole story. The family names carved into those tombstones reflect people who were influential in shaping and organizing Lufkin and Angelina County government and businesses. Early settlers, residents of the central part of the county, people who put down roots and stayed.

Among the most significant were the Ganns, who for many years owned the very land on which the cemetery is located. Think about that for a moment. The family that owned the land became part of the land.

In 1934, the Whitehouse Cemetery Association was organized to care for the property, and in 1941 it purchased additional land from the Gann family. Until the 1960s, all the graves were kept clear of vegetation in the traditional scraped-earth manner, bare soil tended by hand, the way generations before had always done it. That practice, that care, says something about the people who kept coming back to this place.

The Whitehouse Cemetery, the marker tells us, remains a significant part of the area's heritage, a reminder of the people who settled permanently in this part of Angelina County. They passed through on that old road to Homer and Crockett, and some of them, they decided to stay for good.

What the marker says

Whitehouse Cemetery According to local tradition, this cemetery may take its name from the 19th-century Cole family home, a structure whose whitewashed exterior stood out from the majority of other log houses and frame buildings in the area. It lies on what was once a thoroughfare from the former Angelina County Seat of Homer to Crockett, the county seat of neighboring Houston County. Although the oldest marked grave-that of Catherine Wheat Wideman-is from 1893, there are earlier burial sites on the property. Whitehouse Cemetery contains the burials of people who lived and worked in the central part of the county, including early settlers and residents of the area. Family names on the tombstones reflect many who were influential in shaping and organizing Lufkin and Angelina County government and businesses. Among the most significant were the Ganns, who for many years owned the land on which the cemetery is located. In 1934, the Whitehouse Cemetery Association was organized to care for the property. It purchased additional land from the Gann family in 1941. Until the 1960s, all graves were kept clear of vegetation in the traditional "scraped-earth" manner. As a reminder of the people who settled permanently in this part of Angelina County, the Witehouse Cemetery remains a significant part of the area's heritage. (2002)