Bear Creek Cemetery
Nevada, Collin County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In the middle to late 19th century, settlers in this area established the community of Empire. Residents organized the Bear Creek Methodist Episcopal Church north of this site, which became the community's burial ground. H.C. Harless and M.C. Robinson donated the first few acres for creation of the cemetery. Here, W.P. Harris buried his wife, Margaret J. (Harless), and their infant daughter, Mary Lou, in 1873. Their graves are the first marked. Others buried in the cemetery include Uriah C. Harless, Confederate veteran and son of H.C. Harless; physician and minister J.L. Brockman; and several other community leaders. The graves of numerous Masons and Woodmen of the World are indicated by fraternal symbols on headstones. During the history of the burial ground, various groups, including the Empire Masonic Lodge, now located in Nevada, as well as an area Boy Scout troop, have cared for the site. Although Empire once boasted a boarding school and the Bear Creek Church, by the turn of the 21st century only the cemetery and the Masonic Lodge served as reminders of the early community. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2005
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the mid-1800s, settlers built the community of Empire and organized the Bear Creek Methodist Episcopal Church, whose graveyard took its first marked burials in 1873. Interred here are a Confederate veteran, physician-minister J.L. Brockman, and community leaders, their headstones bearing Masonic and Woodmen of the World emblems. Though Empire's boarding school and church are long gone, the cemetery and the relocated Masonic lodge endure as the settlement's last reminders.
Why it matters
The cemetery is the surviving trace of a vanished frontier community, preserving the names of the pioneers who briefly made Empire home.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the decades after the Civil War, the blackland prairie of North Texas filled with families looking for cheap, fertile ground and a fresh start. Collin County sat on that rolling farmland, and small farming communities sprang up wherever a church, a school, or a store could gather scattered homesteads together. One of them was Empire.
This was the age of the country church and the country cemetery. A settlement often organized itself around a congregation before it had much else, and a Methodist Episcopal church was among the first institutions that turned raw prairie into a place with a name. The graveyard that grew beside such a church was not an afterthought — it was often the most permanent thing a young community built.
These were hard, hopeful years. Families arrived with little, buried their dead in the ground they were still breaking to the plow, and marked those graves with whatever stone and skill they could muster. The land donated for the Bear Creek burial ground was, in a very real sense, the community setting down its roots for good.
People & events
The story of this ground begins with a gift. H.C. Harless and M.C. Robinson donated the first few acres so that Empire's Bear Creek Methodist Episcopal Church would have a place to lay its people to rest — an act of quiet generosity that shaped the community's memory for generations.
The earliest marked graves belong to a small family tragedy. In 1873, W.P. Harris buried his wife, Margaret J. Harless, and their infant daughter, Mary Lou. Mother and baby together, the first names carved in stone here — a reminder of how thin the margin of frontier life could be, and how often a family's first monument marked a loss rather than a milestone.
Around them gathered the community's leaders. Uriah C. Harless, a Confederate veteran and son of the man who helped give the land, rests here. So does J.L. Brockman, who served his neighbors twice over as both physician and minister — healing bodies and tending souls in a place that had few of either to spare. Many headstones carry the emblems of the Masons and the Woodmen of the World, the fraternal orders that bound rural people together in mutual aid and remembrance.
Its place in the American story
Empire is one of the countless small communities that flickered to life across America's expanding frontier and then quietly went out. Its boarding school and its church are gone; by the turn of the 21st century, only the cemetery and a relocated Masonic lodge remained to say the place had ever existed.
That pattern — settlement, brief flourishing, and slow disappearance — is one of the great untold stories of American westward expansion. For every town that grew into a city, dozens dissolved back into farmland when the railroad went elsewhere, the school consolidated, or the young people moved on. The graveyard is often the last witness left standing.
What endures here is the human record. The fraternal symbols, the veteran's grave, the physician-minister, the mother and infant of 1873 — together they preserve the names and roles of the ordinary people who did the extraordinary work of building a community from nothing. Their being remembered at all, cared for by lodge members and Boy Scouts and descendants, is itself a small triumph over forgetting.
If you visit
Come with a slow eye. A place like this rewards patience, not haste — walk the rows and let the headstones tell you who mattered here and how they saw themselves.
Look for the fraternal emblems carved into the stone: the square and compasses of the Masons, the tree-stump and axe motifs of the Woodmen of the World. These weren't decoration. They told a passing stranger that the person beneath belonged to a brotherhood that promised to remember and provide. Seek out the older markers, worn soft by more than a century of Texas weather, and you'll sense how long this ground has been holding these names.
Standing among the graves, picture the vanished community around you — the church that once stood to the north, the boarding school, the farms scattered across the prairie. Empire lived, and this quiet cemetery is its memory. It makes a fitting, contemplative stop on a back-roads drive through Collin County, a chance to trade the highway for a moment with the people who came first.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · J.L. Brockman
- · Uriah C. Harless
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Thompson Cemetery
Copeville, TX
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The Empire community once had a school, post office, churches, stores, and a cotton gin, and in 1884 twenty-five master masons chartered a lodge there, meeting on the Saturdays before full moons. As Empire faded in the 1880s the lodge followed the people to Nevada, endured the deadly 1927 tornado that leveled its building, and rebuilt with help from fellow lodges. Long after the Empire settlement vanished, the lodge adopted its last surviving remnant, Bear Creek Cemetery, and remained the oldest institution in Nevada.