Absalom H. Chivers Cemetery
Southlake, Tarrant County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This cemetery was established for the family of Absalom H. Chivers, a prosperous farmer and stockman who came here from Mississippi about 1852. With the help of his five slaves, he operated a farm along Dove Creek until his death in 1856. Chivers' grave is thought to be the first in this burial ground, located on his original homestead. The land was set aside as a family cemetery in 1889 by his widow Eleanor (Joyce) Chivers (1816-1896), whose grave is believed to be the last placed here. Native sandstone cairns reflect some of the pioneer burial customs. (1982)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When Absalom H. Chivers left Mississippi for the Texas frontier around 1852, he brought the plantation economy with him, working a farm along Dove Creek with five enslaved people until his death in 1856. His grave is believed to be the first in this family burial ground, formally set aside as a cemetery in 1889 by his widow Eleanor. The native sandstone cairns marking the graves preserve the improvised burial customs of pioneer North Texas.
Why it matters
The cemetery is a quiet record of how slaveholding Southerners transplanted their world onto the Texas prairie in the decade before the Civil War.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Absalom H. Chivers
- · Eleanor (Joyce) Chivers
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Roanoke
Roanoke, TX
When the Texas & Pacific Railroad pushed through North Texas in 1881, a surveyor homesick for Roanoke, Virginia gave this new depot town its name — though settlers had been working the land here since the 1840s. Sitting halfway between Fort Worth and Denton, Roanoke thrived as a shipping point where ranchers loaded cattle for northern markets and farmers sent out wheat and cotton. By 1890 it had four churches, a school, and a cotton gin; by the early 1900s a newspaper, bank, and grain elevator. Notably, the property of John and Almedia Jones served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Chinn's Chapel Cemetery
Copper Canyon, TX
Elisha and Mary Stowe Chinn bought this hilltop north of Lockhart Spring in 1853 and gave ten acres for a chapel and graveyard, where early settlers were buried as deaths came to the young community. A road built in 1885 finally connected the isolated cemetery to nearby Waketon, following an old wagon trail. Its markers range from rough fieldstones and native limestone to ornate later monuments, and some plots bear shell-outlined earthen mounds — a folk burial tradition brought to America by enslaved Africans.
Bethel Cemetery
Coppell, TX
Set aside before 1853 by Peters Colony pioneer James Parrish on his farm along the Elm Fork of the Trinity, this cemetery holds the layered history of a vanished community—smallpox victims, Confederate veterans, former slaves, and six people killed in an 1869 lynching. Of an estimated two hundred graves, all but two have been lost to vandalism and development, leaving the resting places of two small children as almost the only visible markers.
Smith Cemetery
Lewisville, TX
This area was known as Holford's Prairie for the pioneer Halford brothers who claimed 640 acres through the Peters Colony, and Basdeal Lewis platted nearby Lewisville in 1853. Thomas and Elizabeth Smith bought farmland here in 1859, and after their 20-year-old son died in 1862 the family began a burial ground that in 1881 became a community cemetery. Its 400-plus graves carry the surnames of Denton County's pioneer families, and oral tradition holds that some unmarked graves are those of people once enslaved by the Fox family—a poignant record of the era's harsh realities.