Houston Cemetery, Morgan County IL

Cemetery transcription by members of the Jacksonville Area Genealogical and Historical Society


Houston Cemetery consists of a single known grave in a cluster of trees that is surrounded by a cultivated field. Until the 1950s the area, atop an Illinois River Valley bluff, was all timberland. The tombstone is flat on the ground and broken into three pieces but it is very legible. The initialed foot stone is still standing. The gravesite is about ½ mile east of Heffner Cemetery. Houston Cemetery is about four miles northwest of Concord and about 1½ miles south of the Morgan and Cass county line. Legal description of the site is in the northwest quarter of Section 1 in Township 16 N Range 12 W. The burial site cannot be seen from the nearest roadway and the lane leading to the cultivated field disappears before the gravesite is reached. The compilers are indebted to Mrs. Charles Hendricker who took them to the site of the burial.

(Starret B. Houston's marriage license is not recorded in the Morgan County Clerk's office. However, Deed Book SS, page 171, shows that Starrett B. Houston sold land in Morgan and Cass counties to William Houston on March 29, 1861. In Deed Book WW, pages 342-344, is copied a decree rendered at the August, 1863, term of the Cass County Circuit Court. The decree empowered Hazen Skinner, administrator of the estate of Starrett B. Houston, to settle the estate. Skinner sold a portion of Houston's land for $8 per acre, for a total of $368. The remainder of the land went to Mary Ellen Houston, widow of Starrett B. Houston, as her dower interest in his estate. The tracts of land mentioned in the court decree include the burial site of Starrett .


Words in brackets [ ] or parenthesis ( )are not on stone.

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