Oscar Hope Cemetery History

 

THE OSCAR HOPE CEMETERY
By Robert Cargill, Jr.
(a great-great-grandson of Oscar Hope)
April 19, 2006

The Oscar Hope Cemetery sits near the northwest corner of a 1000-acre tract purchased by Oscar Hope in 1845 near Caddo Lake. The cemetery and Hope’s home were between Port Caddo and what is now Karnack in northeast Harrison County, in what was then The Republic of Texas. Oscar Hope was buried here in 1848, and the cemetery now contains 67 graves of his descendants and neighbors, including the Moore and Baker families. The most recent burial was that of Betty Moore Ward on August 10, 2002.

A group of Oscar Hope’s descendants established the Oscar Hope Cemetery Association, Inc. for the purpose of acquiring and maintaining this historic cemetery. We obtained title to the cemetery in 2001 from the heirs of T. J. Taylor who had bought the Hope lands and surrounding tracts in 1940 and had conveyed some 3600 acres to the U.S. Government in 1941 for the Longhorn Army Ammunition Plant.

A brief history of the cemetery and its occupants follows.

Brief Notes on the Individuals Buried in the Oscar Hope Cemetery
The Hopes
Oscar Hope, his wife Rebecca (Perkins) and three children, sons Adam and Alonzo, and daughter Elizabeth, left their home in Benton, Yazoo County, Mississippi and headed for East Texas. They were a prosperous family in early 1845 when Oscar was 36 and Rebecca was 30. They purchased two steamboats in New Orleans (Why two boats?) on which the family of five, and presumably a number of Negro slaves, made their way up the Red River, Twelve Mile Bayou, and the Cypress Bayou to Port Caddo, by then a major port along the way between New Orleans and Jefferson. The Hopes had arrived at their destination by early March as is evidenced by a letter addressed to Oscar Hope in Port Caddo dated March 17, 1845 from a W. Dorsey of Yazoo City, Mississippi.

On June 11, 1845 Hope purchased 1000 acres of land for $2000 from Henry Martin, the original grantee of 12,112,845 square varas (2146 acres) from the Republic of Texas. On this site he constructed an 8-room house from large pine logs hewn on his newly acquired land, and fastened together with wooden pegs. Rebecca bought a spiral staircase in New Orleans and brought it home to Port Caddo and had it installed in her new home.

As the house was being constructed, a second daughter, Annie Rebecca, was born on January 5, 1847. In late summer 1848 Rebecca, along with little Annie went to the home of her parents, the Reverend Isaac and Hannah Perkins, in Mine Creek (now Nashville) in Hempstead County, Arkansas, where on October 22 she gave birth to her fifth child, Oscar, Jr. During Rebecca’s absence, her husband contracted pneumonia and died on September 30, just 23 days before the birth of his last child. During this last illness Hope’s friends and neighbors, James and Annie McCathern, cared for him, and eventually buried him in a plot near the northwest corner of his land, the first burial in what is now known as the Oscar Hope Cemetery. The McCathern’s daughter Annie Eliza would eventually marry the youngest Hope son, Oscar Jr.

Oscar Hope descended from a long line of influential ancestors. His father Adam Hope had been an officer in Andrew Jackson’s army during the War of 1812. His maternal grandfather Lardner Clark is described in the Tennessee Historical Journal of 1917 as “Nashville’s First Merchant and Leading Citizen” and he was a cofounder of Peabody College. Lardner Clark, a graduate of Princeton in 1775, his brother Elisha, his brother-in-law James van Uxem (also Vanuxem), and his father Elijah Clark, were privateers during the American Revolution.
Oscar’s wife Rebecca Ann Perkins was the daughter of Reverend Isaac Cooper Perkins, a Baptist preacher who founded the town of Mine Creek – now Nashville- Arkansas in 1836, the Baptist Church there, and presided at the founding of the Arkansas Baptist Convention in 1848. Rebecca was a plain-looking woman but clearly a good businesswoman. She managed the Hope plantation from the time of Oscar’s death in 1848 until after the Civil War. Receipts from several merchants in New Orleans reveal that she regularly purchased large amounts of supplies and had them shipped by steamer to Port Caddo. She and her sons warehoused and shipped cotton from Port Caddo to New Orleans, and oral history says that she owned one or more steamboats that plied the run between New Orleans and Jefferson.

Oscar and Rebecca Hope are the patriarch and matriarch of the Hope family in East Texas and the couple around which the subject cemetery is organized. Rebecca died in 1888, after the deaths of her son Adam (in 1868, eventually of wounds received in the Civil War), her daughter Elizabeth (in 1862, of complication of childbirth), her granddaughter Elizabeth Coleman (in 1865, at age two), and just before the death of an infant child born to Oscar Jr and wife Annie Eliza. All of these named descendants of Oscar and Rebecca are buried in the Oscar Hope Cemetery except Adam, who was buried somewhere along the journey from Little River, Arkansas to Port Caddo by his widow.

Aside from these named individuals only three others were buried here until 1900. These three were friends and neighbors, but not relatives of the Hopes and will be mentioned with their respective families.
Oscar Hope, Jr and his wife Annie Eliza (McCathern) maintained the original Hope Plantation and resided there until Oscar’s death in 1924. In addition to operating the family farm, Oscar served from 1885 until 1898 as Clerk of the Border Baptist Church, a church founded in 1843 at the village of Border, a mile or so northeast of the present site of Jonesville, and some 15 miles southeast from Port Caddo. The original church records are preserved and are cared for by Mrs Virginia Summers of Karnack. Oscar was the local educator; he held school for the white children for half a day and for the Negro children the other half. His daughter Mary Atelia, having been schooled only by her father, attended and graduated from the Sam Houston State Normal School (now Sam Houston State University) in 1899. Oscar and his brother A P (for Alonzo Perkins) helped establish property law when they and several partners filed a lawsuit that resulted in an appellate court decision that lands created by the removal of the Red River Raft and the resulting lowering of Caddo Lake did not belong to the original grantee (whose title extended to the original lakeshore) but rather to the state. Thus the plaintiffs were awarded some 1700 acres of newly created lands. The town of Uncertain, Texas stands on land granted under this suit to Oscar Hope. Oscar and Annie lie buried near his parents.
Ruby Alice, a daughter of Oscar and Annie Eliza, died in 1903 at the age of 21, and is interred along with the Hope family, and is the only one of her generation buried in the family plot who attained adulthood. (Two of Ruby’s infant sisters were buried here in 1888 and 1900,)
The last two Hopes buried here were Oscar Carlisle Hope, Jr (1982) and his son Robert William Hope (1981). O C, Jr was a member of General George S Patton’s staff in the European Theatre of World War II, and a highly respected officer. Robert met an untimely death as a young man.