Bethel Cemetery
Coppell, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
James Parrish came to Texas from Ohio prior to 1844 as a member of the Peters Colony. He and his wife Eliza Jane (Record) moved to Dallas County about 1848. They established a home in this area on the Elm Fork of the Trinity River which became known as the Parrish neighborhood. Sometime before James Parrish's death in October 1853, he and his wife set aside land on their farm for a community cemetery. Joshua Hill was buried here in 1859, the apparent victim of smallpox. More interments occurred in the following decades, including those of James Pinson Howell (1865), John L. Howell (1866), and Malinda Pemberton Howell (ca. 1871). Also believed to be buried here are five men and a boy who were victims of a lynching in 1869; several Confederate vererans of the Civil War; and two former slaves. Although descendants estimate there were at least two hundred graves here, all but two have been lost to vandalism and development of the surrounding area. The two remaining tombstones mark the graves of one-day-old Oda Kirby (1909) and three-year-old Ervin Wickersham (1910 - 1913). The Historic Bethel Cemetery Association, formed in 1987, cares for the graveyard.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Set aside before 1853 by Peters Colony pioneer James Parrish on his farm along the Elm Fork of the Trinity, this cemetery holds the layered history of a vanished community—smallpox victims, Confederate veterans, former slaves, and six people killed in an 1869 lynching. Of an estimated two hundred graves, all but two have been lost to vandalism and development, leaving the resting places of two small children as almost the only visible markers.
Why it matters
The graveyard is a fragile archive of frontier settlement, Civil War-era violence, and the lives of the enslaved and freed, much of it now erased by time and neglect.
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Related people
- · James Parrish
- · Eliza Jane Parrish
Themes & tags
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