Allen Cemetery
Wills Point, Van Zandt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This burial ground first served pioneer settlers of the Turner community. The earliest marked grave is that of Hiram White (b.1811), who died in 1867. The site was originally named for the White family members interred here, but became known as Allen Cemetery after William J. Allen formally deeded the property to trustees in 1909. Allen and his wife Elizabeth Jane, both buried here, migrated to this area in 1850. Others interred here include military veterans, European Immigrants, and descendants of pioneer families. (1988)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This burial ground first served the pioneer families of the Turner community, its earliest marked grave that of Hiram White, who died in 1867. Named at first for the White family, it became Allen Cemetery after William J. Allen deeded the land to trustees in 1909; he and his wife Elizabeth Jane, who had come to the area in 1850, both rest here. Among the graves are military veterans, European immigrants, and the descendants of the region's first settlers.
Why it matters
A rural cemetery like this is a quiet archive of frontier settlement, recording in stone the mixed origins of the people who built a Texas community.
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Related people
- · Hiram White
- · William J. Allen
- · Elizabeth Jane Allen
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Dallas-Shreveport Road
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This route began as a trail blazed by Caddoan peoples and later followed by French traders. By the mid-1830s it had become a principal road bringing emigrants and cargo into North Texas from the river port of Shreveport, and Van Zandt County's first courthouse rose along it in 1848. Used heavily for Civil War troop movements, the road carried ox teams and settlers into the 1900s.
County Seat War
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A surveyor's error in 1850 placed Van Zandt County's seat on private land, and by 1877 discontent boiled over into a full-blown "county seat war." When Judge Cadwell Walton Raines ordered the records moved from Canton to Wills Point, some 200 armed men marched in protest, and Governor R. B. Hubbard had to send militia to keep the peace. Bloodshed was averted, the records went back to Canton in 1878, and the seat stayed there for good.
William A. Wills
Wills Point, TX
Tennessee native William A. Wills moved his family to Texas in 1847 and settled along the Dallas–Shreveport Road, where the Wills home became a welcome stop for travelers. He served the young county as tax assessor-collector, road overseer, and commissioner, and by 1855 court records were already calling the area around his property 'Wills Point.' When the town was laid out along the Texas and Pacific Railroad in 1873, it took his name for good.
White Rose Cemetery
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Wills Point grew up in the early 1870s along the Texas and Pacific Railroad, taking its name from William Wills, who kept a log-cabin trading post on the old Dallas–Shreveport Road. The cemetery began with Wills's own burial on family land in 1864; his widow, Mary Ann, later platted eight acres in a grid and sold lots for community graves. Organized as the White Rose Cemetery Association in 1874 and formally chartered under that name in 1909, the grounds grew to some 45 acres holding roughly 31,500 burials — pioneer settlers, their descendants, and veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam.