Balch-Senterwood Cemetery
Alvarado, Johnson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This graveyard was established in 1856 adjacent to the Balch Cemetery for the African American population following the death of a slave girl killed by a black bear. The girl had come to Alvarado with George Sigler and his family, whose farm was located south of the Balch Community Cemetery. Among those buried here are victims of an epidemic of smallpox, and other diseases such as diphtheria, whooping cough, and tuberculosis. Casualties included numerous children. The need for burial space became acute by 1911 following these disease-related deaths. A. J. Senter, local businessman and undertaker, donated additional land to the Alvarado "Colored" Cemetery in 1911. The site was renamed Senterwood Cemetery in his honor. The need for more burial plots in the 1940s was resolved through the purchase of one acre of land by the Baker Funeral Home of Fort Worth. Interments in this cemetery include many business owners, church leaders, and veterans of World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War. Cemetery maintenance, previously dependent upon local volunteers, was performed under the direction of the Johnson County Cemetery Association. The Balch-Senterwood Cemetery continues to serve the surrounding communities. (1996)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This burial ground was established in 1856 beside the Balch Cemetery to serve Alvarado's African American community, its first grave that of an enslaved girl killed by a black bear. Over the decades it received victims of smallpox, diphtheria, and other epidemics, many of them children, and in 1911 undertaker A. J. Senter donated land that gave the renamed Senterwood Cemetery its name. Those laid to rest here include business owners, church leaders, and veterans of the World Wars and Vietnam.
Why it matters
A community cemetery like this is an irreplaceable record of African American life across slavery, Jim Crow, and the twentieth century, written in the names and dates of ordinary people who built and served the town.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · A. J. Senter
- · George Sigler
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Outlaws Benjamin Bickerstaff and Josiah Thompson
Alvarado, TX
In the unsettled years after the Civil War, this stretch of Johnson County was plagued by outlaws, among them Benjamin Bickerstaff, a former Confederate soldier wanted for murder in Louisiana, and his associate Josiah Thompson. When the pair rode into Alvarado on April 5, 1869, organized townspeople shot them dead. Both were buried in the old Alvarado cemetery.
Myers Cemetery
Alvarado, TX
Samuel Houston Myers brought his wife Patsy and six children to Texas in 1851, establishing a family farm; over the following years he outlived three wives and buried several kin on the land. The cemetery's first recorded burial came in 1873 with his granddaughter Mary, and early graves include Myers himself, a traveler who drowned in Quil Miller Creek, and a formerly enslaved woman remembered as "Aunt Rachel." A darker chapter unfolded in 1880, when young Sam Houston Myers, Jr. was hanged for a murder his brother-in-law later confessed to.
Grandview Cemetery and Original Grand View Town Site
Grandview, TX
Grand View reportedly took its name in 1854 when John Whitmire exclaimed "What a Grand View!", and settler F. L. Kirtley soon donated land for a Baptist church and cemetery. The town grew with general stores, a blacksmith, and Johnson County's first Masonic lodge, though its founder James Scurlock died during the Civil War. The cemetery holds pioneers, the mysterious murdered traveler remembered only as "Annie," and an African American section including early settlers Scott and Elmira Matlock. When the railroad passed a mile away in 1881, the town migrated to the tracks and the cemetery gradually reclaimed the original site.
Bethel Salter A.M.E. Church
Cleburne, TX
Founded in Cleburne in 1887 by the Goodwin and Sims families with help from Fort Worth's Allen Chapel, this African Methodist Episcopal congregation took its name from Bishop Moses B. Salter. Its sanctuary moved across town in 1926 on land donated by a local family and with support from the Colored Knights of Pythias, while a sister congregation grew in nearby Oak Hill. The two merged in 1988 as Bethel Salter A.M.E., raising a new building by community hands in 1992.