Bridges Cemetery
The Colony, Denton County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Bridges settlement, named for the W. A. Bridges family and reportedly the oldest in Denton county, began in 1843 and was a center of activity of the Peters Colony. This cemetery, on land granted to Bridges in 1850, dates to 1855, although illegible stones may be slightly older. Site of the burials of the Bridges and other early immigrant families, stones here document graves of many children and Civil War soldiers. Deeded to the county by F. M. and Sallie Bridges in 1889, the cemetery contains over one hundred sandstone and granite markers. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986 Historic Texas Cemetery medallion attached to post
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Bridges settlement, reportedly the oldest in Denton County, took root in 1843 as part of the Peters Colony land-grant venture. This cemetery, on land granted to W. A. Bridges in 1850, holds burials dating to 1855, including many children and Civil War soldiers among its early immigrant families. Deeded to the county in 1889, it preserves more than a hundred sandstone and granite markers.
Why it matters
The graveyard is a tangible record of the Peters Colony pioneers who opened North Texas to settlement in the mid-19th century.
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Related people
- · W. A. Bridges
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Frankford Cemetery
Dallas, TX
Frankford Cemetery began as a resting place for pioneers along the old Preston Road cattle-drive route, its first burial dating to 1862. Among those interred is John T. Coit, a South Carolina lawyer who raised a Dallas-area regiment and served as a Confederate colonel in the Civil War, later reinterred here. The burial ground has been tied since the 1870s to the White Rock Masonic Lodge, whose hall doubled as church and school.
Young Cemetery
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Sam and Patience Young came to Collin County from Illinois in 1842, part of a wave of Midwestern settlers drawn to North Texas farmland. Young bought land, founded a school, and opened this cemetery when Patience died in 1847. Eleven pioneer families rest among its fifty-one known graves, including veterans of both the War of 1812 and the Civil War.
Bethel Cemetery
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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.
Marsh Cemetery
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Harrison and Mary "Polly" Marsh brought their five children from Missouri to Texas in 1844, settling in Peters Colony along Farmers Branch Creek where they raised stock and farmed. Polly helped charter the church that became First Baptist of Farmers Branch, and the family prospered across farming, ranching, and civic life — with sons Thomas Corbin and John David serving in the Confederate Army. In the 1880s John David donated an acre for a family graveyard whose earliest recorded burial dates to 1874.