Balch-Senterwood Cemetery

🏛️The era

In 1856, Johnson County was a young place. Anglo-American settlers had been pushing onto the rolling blackland prairies south of the Trinity River for only a few years. They were building farms, laying out small towns like Alvarado, and bringing with them the whole system of Southern slavery. Texas had joined the Union barely a decade earlier as a slave state, and cotton and grain farming on the prairie depended in part on the forced labor of enslaved African Americans.

It was still a frontier, in ways that are hard to picture today. Black bears roamed parts of Texas in the mid-1800s, and the woods and creek bottoms held real dangers for anyone working or walking alone. Only five years after this graveyard opened, Texas left the Union, and the Civil War and emancipation would upend every relationship on the farms around Alvarado.

The cemetery's later history follows the long arc of African American life in Texas after freedom. Through Reconstruction, the Jim Crow decades and the civil rights era, Black Texans were shut out of white institutions. They built their own churches, schools, businesses and burial grounds. A separate "Colored" cemetery was a product of segregation. It also became something the community owned, cared for and filled with meaning.

Disease weighed heavily on small Texas towns in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough and tuberculosis killed families of every background, and children most of all. Vaccines, antitoxins and antibiotics would not arrive in force for decades. For a community with little access to doctors or hospitals, those epidemics could be devastating.

👥People & events

The cemetery began with a tragedy. An enslaved girl had come to Alvarado with George Sigler and his family, whose farm lay just south of the Balch Community Cemetery. She was killed by a black bear. Her name is not preserved in the marker's account, and that silence is itself part of the story of slavery. Her death led to a burial ground set aside for Alvarado's African American population, right beside the existing Balch Cemetery.

For the next half century the graveyard quietly grew. It holds the victims of the epidemics that swept through the area: smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis. Many of the dead were children. By 1911 so many had died that the community was running out of room.

That year A. J. Senter, an Alvarado businessman and undertaker, donated more land to what was then called the Alvarado "Colored" Cemetery. The grateful community renamed it Senterwood Cemetery in his honor. The need came again in the 1940s, and this time the Baker Funeral Home of Fort Worth bought an additional acre, so the cemetery could keep serving families as the town grew.

The people resting here are a portrait of a community that endured and built. There are business owners and church leaders, the backbone of Black civic life under segregation. There are also veterans of World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War, who served a country that often denied them equal rights at home. For years, local volunteers kept the grounds up by hand. Later the work passed to the Johnson County Cemetery Association, and the cemetery still serves the surrounding communities today.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Across the American South, African American cemeteries are among the most important and most endangered historical records we have. Many enslaved people and their descendants left few written documents behind. Burial grounds like this one may hold the only surviving record of their names, families and lifespans. Too many such cemeteries have been lost to neglect, development or simple forgetting.

Balch-Senterwood tells the national story in miniature. Slavery marks its founding in the 1850s. Its later growth reflects the self-reliant institutions Black communities built under Jim Crow. Its rows of veterans echo a painful paradox of American history: African Americans fought in the nation's wars abroad while being denied full citizenship at home.

The epidemic graves, with their many children, remind us how recently ordinary Americans lived at the mercy of diseases that vaccines and modern medicine have since tamed. The different ways land came to the cemetery — the first ground in 1856, Senter's gift in 1911, the funeral home's purchase in the 1940s — show how a community kept finding ways to honor its dead across more than a century of change.

🧭If you visit

Come to this cemetery the way you would come to any place of mourning: quietly, and with respect. It is still an active burial ground, and families may be visiting their loved ones. Stay on paths where you can, and never lean on or rub old headstones, which can be fragile.

As you walk, look at the dates. Clusters of deaths in the same years, and especially small graves for children, may point to the epidemics the marker describes. Watch for military headstones and flags marking veterans of the World Wars and Vietnam. Notice the older, simpler markers too; some early graves may be marked only by a fieldstone or an unmarked depression in the ground.

The neighboring Balch Cemetery sits right alongside. Seeing the two burial grounds together makes segregation, and the history of the place, visible on the land itself. Alvarado is an easy stop on a drive south from the Fort Worth area through Johnson County. Pair it with other historic markers and courthouse squares on the blackland prairie for a day of North Texas history.