Brooks Williams Cemetery

Cherokee County, Texas

Brooks Williams CEMETERY

Located on the homeplace of Brooks Williams where he had been living with wife, Mary Ann, and children since 1821.

Ellis, Mary Ann Williams 1800 - unknown
Williams, Brooks, I 1791 - Apr. 7, 1836
Williams, John W. "Cherokee John" 1787 - 1835
Williams, Robert 1822 - 1860

Cemetery notes
In 1835, Certificate #2187 - "Certify that foreigner, Brooks Williams, is a man of good standing, married and with family." Petition to the Mexican government for this land was accepted and he was granted 2 leagues of land by Mexican government. (almost 9,000 acres in present Cherokee County, Texas.) Brooks Williams was killed by a group of young Cherokee braves the next year, in 1836 during the Texas Revolution. He was assigned by President Sam Houston to assist settlers fleeing in the Runaway Scrape. A group of settlers reached the banks of the flooded Neches River where a group of young Cherokee braves, who had been stirred up by Mexican soldiers, were milling about on the other side. Brooks Williams went over to see if the settlers could cross over in peace. He was killed and scalped by the Indians, his body retrieved by family and laid to rest on their homeplace by the grave of his brother, John "Cherokee" Williams, who had been murdered in the Cherokee village of Big Mush four years earlier.
The widow of Brooks Williams, Mary Ann Jefferies, (she had remarried) petitioned the Republic of Texas for title to this Mexican land grant for herself and her children. She was granted 1 league and 1 labor of land. Other family members may have been buried near the Williams brothers.

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