Sweet Rest Cemetery, off Bimms Drive in Tamina, is the burial ground of a community settled by freed people after the Civil War. By 1871 formerly enslaved people from nearby plantations had settled along the line of the Houston and Great Northern Railroad, which freedmen helped to build, about a mile east of the route Interstate 45 now follows and eight and a half miles south of Conroe. The promoter James H. Berry named the place after Tammany Hall in New York, and when it got a post office in 1897 the name was sent in spelled Tamina; some older residents still say Tammany. The cemetery covers about 12 acres and holds some 250 graves. A Grogan-Cochran Lumber Company mill sustained Tamina from 1917 until it closed in 1927, when the population fell to about 50.
Its school for Black children, with one teacher for seven grades, closed in 1949, and its pupils went to Booker T. Washington School in Conroe. Shenandoah incorporated next door in 1974 and Oak Ridge North in 1979, and Tamina was left as the one community nearby without public sewers. Attempts to bring them failed in the early 2000s and again in 2006 and 2007. Shenandoah finished the first lines, along Tamina Road, in 2024, and by early 2026 most of the community's water and sewer lines were complete, with up to $21 million of federal relief money behind the project.
The cemetery is low and wet, and drainage problems ended burials there. The Montgomery County Historical Commission dedicated a county marker for it in June 2024, and Tamina received a state historical marker at its community park on 6 December 2025.
Getting there
30.1794, -95.4360
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop is an audio tour guide app that tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
