Originally the site of a log church known as Mayhew Chapel, Thaxton Cemetery was established in the 1840s. Located on the Turnpike Road, which was built in the late 1830s by the U.S. government, its earliest known burial is ca. 1848. Land for a new church and cemetery expansion was donated by the town's founder, Dr. Montgomery C. Thaxton, in 1887. Among the nearly 1,000 persons buried here are more than eighty-five veterans of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.