Tehuacana Cemetery

This historic graveyard reflects the heritage of Tehuacana, an early Texas town founded in the 1840s by John Boyd (1796-1873). Elected from Sabine County to the First and Second Congresses of the Republic of Texas, Boyd moved to this part of the state and established the town's first post office in his mercantile store in 1847. His offer of land and money convinced the Cumberland Presbyterian Church to begin Trinity University here in 1869. Although no deed record exists for the cemetery, the earliest documented burial is that of Boyd's granddaughter, Roxana B. Campbell, who died in 1850 at the age of four months. Hers is one of many tombstones marking the burials of infants and children during the 19th century, bearing witness to the harshness of life on the developing Texas frontier. Others buried here include William E. Beeson (1822-1882), first president of Trinity University; James Lisbon Lawlis (1856-1902), founder and first president of Westminster College, which moved to Tehuacana after Trinity University relocated in 1902; Robert Marshall Love (1847-1903), who grew up in Tehuacana and was serving as Texas State Comptroller at the time of his death; Minnie Schuster Reck (1874-1950), who boarded college students in her home (those former students erected a memorial in her honor at the community center); and town founder John Boyd. The Tehuacana Cemetery Association maintains the burial ground, which, at the turn of the 21st century, contained more than 800 marked burials and a number of unmarked graves. (2001).