The
countryside around Montalba,
north of Palestine in Anderson
County, is among the most beautiful in East
Texas with its small mountains, winding roads and scenic streams.
Visiting the area, you can easily understand why three families named Fitzgerald
moved here in the 1840s and purchased land along Mound Prairie Creek.
The
area soon became known as Fitzgerald and, as the years passed, the community’s
people built a school, a church, a post office, a cemetery and likely a store
or two.
The
church was named Concord Baptist Church for a community in Louisiana, where
some of the Fitzgeralds had lived. A wooden building served the settlement from
the early 1900s until 1940 when it was destroyed by fire. A brick building was
soon built.
The first burial in Concord Cemetery was Joel P. Kelley,
who was born in North Carolina in 1825. Joel was a Baptist preacher and had given
the land for the cemetery a year before he died in 1872.
Joel’s family
moved to Texas in 1869, along with his brothers and sisters. After they crossed
the Sabine River, Joel’s brother, Jack and his family, left the caravan and were
never seen again by the family.
Some of the Fitzgeralds, William and his
family, left Anderson County in the 1860s and moved to Coleman County, Texas.
A family story says that on the night that William’s wife was giving birth to
a son, the family’s cabin roof was shot full of arrows by Indians.
Understandably
William moved his family back to Concord, where the Indians were friendlier.
When
the Civil War erupted in the 1860s, many of Concord’s men marched off to war.
Some returned; some didn’t. Several Confederate veterans were buried in Concord
Cemetery when they died.
One such veteran was Clayton Alexander Fitzgerald,
who was born in 1846 in San Augustine County. He and his parents, Michael and
Matila Fitzgerald, came to Concord in 1850.
Clayton fought with Bates’
Regiment of the 13th Texas Infantry. A private, he served from the spring of 1864
to the end of the war, and was later transferred to the First Texas Artillery,
which was stationed at Sabine Pass.
Clayton died on Christmas Day, 1929,
at the home of his son Hugh, and his grave in Concord Cemetery is one of two with
a Confederate marker.
Concord has some 200 marked graves, but many other
graves are marked only with rocks.
Bob
Bowman's East Texas
November 29, 2009 Column
A weekly column syndicated in 109 East Texas newspapers
Copyright
Bob Bowman |
