Oak Grove Cemetery

Oak Grove Cemetery, originally called American Cemetery, lies on the 1826 land grant of Empresario Haden Edwards, leader of the 1826 Fredonian Rebellion, who is buried there. The earliest marked burial on the site is Franklin J. Starr, who died in 1837, a native of New Hartford, Connecticut, and a local realtor. Many graves from Nacogdoches's early Spanish cemetery were moved here when the county courthouse was built on those grounds in 1912, and the earliest grave from that burial ground is marked Father Mendoza, 1718. The cemetery contains numerous figures important to Nacogdoches County and Texas, including Thomas Jefferson Rusk, judge, statesman, and Sam Houston's Secretary of War; Charles Standfield Taylor, John S. Roberts, and William Clark, Jr., who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence; Captain Haden Arnold and Elias E. Hamilton, veterans of the Battle of San Jacinto; Jacob Lewis; James Harper Starr; General Kelsey H. Douglass; George F. Ingraham; Nicholas Adolphus Sterne; Captain Frederick Voight; and Dr. Robert A. Irion, who was also Sam Houston's personal physician. Other notable burials include former slaves Mitchell Thorne, Lawrence Sleet, and Eliza Walker; Frost Thorn, among Texas's early millionaires; Diedrich Anton Wilhelm Rulfs, Nacogdoches's master architect, who designed Zion Hill Baptist Church on the north side of the cemetery; Richard William Haltom, founder and editor of Nacogdoches's The Daily Sentinel; and poet Karle Wilson Baker, the third person named a fellow of the Texas Institute of Letters.

Nacogdoches, Texas · United States