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Robert Jackson bought 35 acres of land in 1853. There was one grave on the land, so Jackson allowed that portion of his land to be used as a public cemetery. Burials on that land may have taken place as early as 1840, but there are no records of the earliest burials.
The oldest marked grave in the cemetery is that of Margaret Ann Ochiltree. She was the first wife of Hugh Ochiltree. Her date of death is marked as 1855. There is an erroneous transcription that gives her death date as 1875. That is probably because her tombstone is white marble, badly eroded and covered with a black fungal material. It was easy to misread the date. One has to look closely to decipher the numbers correctly.
After years of being referred to as “The City Cemetery”, the name Evergreen came into use in about 1899. The majority of those who died in the city of Orange between 1850 and 1953 were buried in Evergreen. Privately owned cemeteries came into use in the mid 1950s and many burials began to be conducted in them.
Evergreen contains the graves of most of the founders and early historical settlers of Orange. It contains graves of veterans from the Texas Revolution to the current wars. There are simple grave markers and also elaborate family mausoleums. A lot of the history of Orange can be read by taking a walk through the cemetery and reading the inscriptions on grave markers, and the historical markers throughout the cemetery.
[Source: The Orange Leader, Orange County Cemeteries, Repositories of History, January 6, 2013.]
This cemetery is located on 920 Jackson Avenue, Orange, Orange County, Texas.