Old Salem Cemetery
Historical marker location:The first settler on this land was Tennessee immigrant A.D. Fountain. The land in which the cemetery sits originated as a school for the rural community of Old Salem. Old Salem’s settlers began arriving from Alabama and Georgia looking for new opportunities in agriculture and logging. From the 1870s to the 1880s, settlers began to congregate under an old white oak tree and buried their families in the nearby Taylor Cemetery. By 1881, a log structure used as a school and church was built near this site and the Old Salem Cemetery at this location was in use. In 1890, J.R. and M.A. Hatton sold eight acres of land in the A.D. Fountain survey to the Salem School Community. By 1923, the Salem school merged with Tabernacle Common School District and soon the school district conveyed two acres to the public for use as a cemetery. The remaining six acres, sold to the Frost Lumber Company, was gifted in 1938 to the cemetery.
The cemetery is surrounded by tall pine and hardwood trees with graves laid out in the traditional east-west pattern. Grave ornamentation includes urns of flowers, small statues and gravestone symbols, including masons and woodmen of the world. This burial ground is also one of the few remaining cemeteries filled with mounded dirt graves that are free of grass. Many unmarked graves fill the cemetery as a result of epidemics and infant mortality. One of the first known burials was an infant of Roe Battles and Emmer Fountain Battles. Many veterans from the Civil War to the present are buried here. Church and community members maintain this historic cemetery as a reminder of early settlers in East Texas and the Old Salem Community.