Long Branch Methodist Episcopal
History of the Methodist Episcopal Church of Long Branch & CemeteryLong Branch, Texas
By Pearl Taylor Vanderbilt
Located on County Road 265 off FM 2413, the land for the original Methodist Episcopal Church and Cemetery was purchased by community trustees (Messrs. Jim Furry, Jessie Smith, Edmond Taylor, David Bradley, and Nelson Weatherspoon) from a local landowner for $30.00 on September 20, 1883. From stake to stake it covered a mass of 3 1/2 acres. To cite a copy of the Deed, both parties agreed to mutually create a desire to promote public morality and religion. At 128 years old, Long Branch is one of the oldest African American cemeteries in Falls County.
Said to have been built of white clapboard, the Methodist Episcopal Church of Long Branch (later to be renamed the Long Branch United Methodist Church) sat adjacent to the cemetery. Regrettably, in response to a likely declining population, the church was forced to close its doors. According to a descendant the building survived into the 1990's but eventually fell victim to arson. The 28 or so hand crafted cement blocks on which the body of the church rested, are all that remain. County courthouse records confirm that on September 30, 1971, three representatives for Long Branch United Methodist Church, Mr. Roy E. Graves, Mrs. Johnnie Mae Newton, and Mrs. Alice Weatherspoon, executed an official document to merge LBUMC with Davis Chapel United Methodist Church in Marlin. The certificate was filed for record on October 4, 1971 and formally recorded in Vol. 20, page 439, on October 5, 1971.
Like so many cemeteries of the time, Long Branch was known as a community cemetery. This meant that anyone who was born or had lived in the community at any time in their lives could be buried there. Former residents have been returned from as far away as Detroit Michigan, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, to be laid to rest beside those they loved best. As evidenced by early census records, a good portion of the populace of Long Branch journeyed to Texas from other slaveholding states, some quite possibly in the wake of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, signed and issued on January 1, 1863. While a great many of them arrived from South Carolina, others arrived en masse from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia.
Although Long Branch was in use for many years prior, the earliest documented burial to be found amongst existing census data was not until 1910 when a young wife and mother named Lucy Cline passed away at the age of 33. While the U. S. began polling census numbers in 1790, facts and figures relating to overall information, as well as places of burial, appeared still to be an inexact science. Family bibles were once a trusted source to help fill in chronological gaps of a bygone era, but this reality was not always guaranteed. Bibles tended to be mislaid or lost altogether down along the years, or worse, ran the risk of winding up in the company of those who did not appropriately appreciate the importance of their value. The biggest setback, however, to any forward motion of genealogical research is the act of death itself. As a generation dies, so too does the wealth of information they take with them.
Long Branch, fenced in by century-old barbed wire, weathered cedar postings, and surrounded by a thickly wooded tree line, reveal there to be an estimated 240 known burials inside its boundary. Of that number, fewer than eighty sites have visible headstones. Many gravestones, owing to one hazard or another, have been destroyed. Most of the markers are congregated towards the front portion and to the east and west sides of the cemetery. The back side, unfortunately, is mostly open ground, a clear indication that graves situated in these sectors have either lost headstones over the years or had no long term identifying references to begin with. Dotted here and there, and easily overlooked, are the occasional tablet-sized flat memorials that lay level to the ground. Two of these cenotaphs are an infant boy and girl born in 1875 and 1879, respectively, to parents Andrew and Sarah Jackson. Another flat memorial is that of Thornton Craig, born in South Carolina in 1831. Further burial sites are duly noted by the general rise and fall of countless ground depressions. Several gravestones appear to have been placed post death, meaning family members have purchased current-day memorials even though the person may have passed by many, many, years. One very distinct older flat gray stone marker lies at the far west corner of the cemetery. The stone is noticeable by its distinct and very unusual raised lettering. This is the grave of a woman named Lillie Giffen. Born in Limestone County in 1878, wife to John and mother of 6 children, she died on 24 January 1936. Another exceptional monument at the back of the cemetery along the periphery is a small arched medieval-styled smoke gray stone belonging to the 16 month old infant son of Jerry & Martha Leveston, 1894 - Sep 8, 1895. Civil War soldier, Anthony Shaw's grave sits to the east side of Long Branch. Born 1 Jan 1843 in Williamsburg, South Carolina, Mr. Shaw was attached to Company G, 104th Regiment, U.S. Colored Infantry, mustered originally at Beaufort, S.C. The father of 8 children with wife Sarah Bradley-Shaw, he died in Marlin of Influenza on January 21, 1941.
Descendants and visitors to the graveyard over the decades have stated that they have witnessed shards of colorful glass, strings of lighting, bricks, coins, cans, bottles, sea shells, and various other items placed on and around numerous graves. This practice was most probably a personal or ritualistic custom. Some of these symbols may have been left in a makeshift manner to single out a particular gravesite; others, perhaps, were more ceremonial, rites of passage, for instance, to the after-life. Long Branch has no interior roadways, footpaths, or other thoroughfares. And excepting for the eight or so oak and crape myrtle trees scattered within the property itself, it is simply one long and uninterrupted lay of land. Resting amid the sprawling acreage are the remains of military veterans, laborers, sharecroppers, domestics, hotel staff, taxi drivers, school bus drivers, hairdressers, seamstresses, midwives, teachers, carpenters, butchers, brick masons, farmers, and the remains of 25 identified former slaves.
Long Branch Cemetery has been proven also to be the eternal resting place of renowned former slave Silvia King. Interviewed in Marlin by The Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1937 during the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidency, her story was immortalized for the ages in Washington D. C. at The Library of Congress. Born in Morocco in northern Africa in 1803, French-speaking Silvia was abducted from her land and taken to Bordeaux, France, where she was given drug laced coffee and forced in the bottom of a slave ship with many of her fellow countrymen. Already a married woman, she was also the mother of three children when she was taken. Long days of sea travel followed. When the ship finally came to dock in the Port of New Orleans, Louisiana, she was promptly put on the auction block and sold to a cotton planter from La Grange, Fayette County, Texas. In the wake of slavery, Silvia spent in excess of 20 years in Milam County. Records show her individually having lived in the precincts of both Rockdale, and more briefly, in Cameron. Her northward movement and gradual progression toward the Central Texas agricultural communities of Rosebud and Reagan/Blue Ridge areas seemed to have begun some time between the years 1900 and 1910.
Nearing the close of the 1930's, Silvia was living in the household of one of her great grandsons. At 11:50 a.m. on Wednesday morning, November 10, 1937, Silvia King passed away. At the time of her death she was weeks away from celebrating her 134th birthday. Her death certificate states she was laid to rest in Long Branch Cemetery on Sunday, November 14, 1937.
No marker has yet been found to verify the location of her grave site.
As of this writing, a formal appeal has been requested of the Texas Historical Commission to have Long Branch Cemetery recognized as a state historical site.
Family surnames long associated with the African American community of Long Branch are: Appleton, Bailey, Bradley, Carter, Craig, Graves, Hicks, Horton, Johnson, Massey, Massingill, Shaw, Randle and Weatherspoon. 1883-2011
