Bethel Cemetery
Rural, Ellis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1852 N.P. Sims (1806-1902) gave 10 acres of land at High Springs (4 mi. W) for a church and burial ground to trustees of Bethel Methodist Church. Several graves remain there. G.H. Cunningham (1828-1916) and P.C. Sims (1819-1903) gave church trustees 10 acres here at Bethel in 1868. Earliest marked grave is that of the Rev. J.W. Reynolds (1816-1873). In 1918 trustees of Bethel Cemetery Association bought 3.9 acres of the 10-acre plot from the Church. Heirs of Cunningham and P.C. Sims gave 14 adjoining acres in 1961. The site has over 400 graves, including those of the 3 original land donors. (1978)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On the rolling farmland of Ellis County, this burial ground grew from land that N.P. Sims and later G.H. Cunningham and P.C. Sims deeded to Bethel Methodist Church trustees between 1852 and 1868. As the surrounding community took root before and after the Civil War, the churchyard became its enduring anchor, with the Rev. J.W. Reynolds among the earliest laid to rest here in 1873. Additional gifts of adjoining land in the 20th century expanded a resting place that now holds more than 400 graves, including those of the founding donors.
Why it matters
Pioneer church cemeteries like Bethel are the quiet ledgers of frontier settlement, preserving the names and lineages of the families who first broke the Texas prairie.
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Related people
- · N.P. Sims
- · G.H. Cunningham
- · P.C. Sims
- · Rev. J.W. Reynolds
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Bethel Methodist Church
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Bethel's Methodist congregation traces to an 1853 brush arbor at High Springs, meeting in log schoolhouses before raising its first frame meetinghouse in 1872. Storm and time claimed successive buildings, the present sanctuary rising in 1924, while a 1907 tabernacle hosted the camp meetings and "God's Acre" sales that knit the rural community together. The story is a century of frontier faith rebuilt again and again on Baker's Branch.
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Archibald and Mary Greathouse settled here in 1848 and gave their name to a creek and the rural community that grew around a church, school, and cemetery. Settlers hauled lumber by oxcart from Waxahachie to build the Greathouse Missionary Baptist Church, and the little community even produced four ministers and a state appellate judge. When the railroad reached nearby Maypearl in 1904, families drifted away; the school closed in 1912 and the church around 1927, leaving the well-tended cemetery as the community's last witness.
The Sims Family of Ellis County
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