Bull Hill Cemetery
Cedar Springs vicinity, Falls County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This graveyard, one of the oldest in Falls County, was used for the interment of African Americans for more than a century. James Coryell, an Anglo frontiersman killed in 1837, may be on of the earliest burials. Bull Hill became the burial ground for the enslaved African Americans from the Churchill Jones plantation. Jones arrived in 1849 from Conecuh County, Alabama with nearly 60 enslaved African Americans and established a 28,000 acre plantation encompassing the former Sarahville de Viesca settlement. After emancipation, African American freedmen from the China Grove community continued to use Bull Hill to inter their deceased. The cemetery is one of the surviving vestiges of the China Grove community. About 1880, members of the Bailey, Broadus, Curry, Johnson, Mozee, Paul, Sneed, Stokes, Taylor, Tomlinson and Travis families formed this vibrant Freedman's community. Community members established the China Grove African Church, later renamed the China Grove Baptist Church, and built a school for their children. Many enslaved African Americans were brought to this area from Alabama by the Jones, Tomlinson and Stallworth families. Newly freed African Americans often remained in the area working as tenant farmers. Several families acquired land and some started businesses. The last burial in Bull Hill was in 1961. Recent archaeological, archival and oral historical research has helped reconstruct and preserve its history. Archaeology has confirmed oral history testimony stating there were more than 100 burials in Bull Hill. Grave marker materials include native stone, brick, concrete, marble, granite, metal and wood. Today, Bull Hill Cemetery remains a hallowed place and a vital link to the area's rich African American heritage. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2009
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
One of the oldest cemeteries in Falls County, Bull Hill served for more than a century as a burial ground for African Americans, first for people enslaved on Churchill Jones's vast plantation and later for the freedpeople of the China Grove community. After emancipation, families such as the Baileys, Currys, and Taylors built a church, a school, and a vibrant freedmen's settlement, with some acquiring land and starting businesses. Archaeology and oral history have since confirmed more than 100 burials at this hallowed site, where the last interment took place in 1961.
Why it matters
Bull Hill is a rare, physically preserved link from slavery through emancipation to a self-made Black community, reconstructed through the very archaeology and oral testimony that keeps such histories from being erased.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The land along the Brazos in central Texas has been layered with history for a very long time. Before the cotton plantations, before the Anglo settlers, there had been earlier frontier outposts and settlements here — the marker itself points back to a frontiersman killed in 1837 and to an older place called Sarahville de Viesca. By the middle of the 1800s, this stretch of Falls County was being transformed into plantation country, worked by the forced labor of enslaved African Americans.
The engine of that transformation was cotton, and cotton in Texas meant slavery on a large scale. In 1849 a planter named Churchill Jones arrived from Conecuh County, Alabama, bringing with him nearly sixty enslaved people and assembling an enormous estate — some 28,000 acres. The scale is worth pausing on: this was not a small farm but a vast agricultural enterprise built entirely on human beings who had been carried hundreds of miles from Alabama and denied every freedom.
Then came emancipation. When the Civil War ended slavery, the people who had been held on estates like Jones's did not simply disappear from the land — most stayed in the country they knew, and in the years that followed they built communities of their own out of almost nothing. This cemetery holds within its fences that entire arc, from bondage through freedom to a community that made and named itself.
People & events
Bull Hill is one of the oldest cemeteries in Falls County, and for more than a hundred years it was a burial ground for African Americans. Its story begins in slavery: it became the graveyard for the enslaved people of Churchill Jones's plantation, the men, women, and children brought from Alabama to work his 28,000 acres. The marker notes that others — enslaved people carried to the area by the Jones, Tomlinson, and Stallworth families — are part of this history too, and that an Anglo frontiersman, James Coryell, killed in 1837, may be among the very earliest people laid to rest on this ground.
After emancipation the story turns from what was done to these families to what they built for themselves. Freedpeople of the surrounding China Grove community kept burying their dead here, and around 1880 a cluster of families — the Baileys, Broaduses, Currys, Johnsons, Mozees, Pauls, Sneeds, Stokeses, Taylors, Tomlinsons, and Travises — formed a vibrant freedman's settlement. They raised a church, first called the China Grove African Church and later the China Grove Baptist Church, and they built a school so their children could learn. Many stayed on as tenant farmers, but some managed to buy land of their own and even to start businesses — remarkable achievements in that time and place.
The cemetery went on receiving burials until 1961. What makes Bull Hill extraordinary today is how its memory was recovered. Archaeologists, archival researchers, and people who carried the oral history in their families worked together to reconstruct its story — and the archaeology confirmed what the community's own testimony had long said, that more than a hundred people rest here. Their graves are marked with whatever was at hand and could endure: native stone, brick, concrete, marble, granite, metal, and wood.
Its place in the American story
The hardest thing about telling the history of enslaved and newly freed Americans is that so little of it was written down, and so much of what survived was allowed to decay. Plantations kept few honest records of the people they held; freedmen's communities were poor and often bypassed by railroads, roads, and the official memory of the county. That is exactly why a place like Bull Hill matters so much. It is a physical, unbroken link running from slavery, through the moment of emancipation, to a self-made Black community — a chain of evidence you can stand inside.
The freedmen's settlements that arose across the South after the Civil War are one of the great, under-told American stories. People who had owned nothing, not even themselves, built churches and schools first, because faith and literacy were the foundations of freedom. Some scraped together enough to buy the very land they had once been forced to work. The families named on this marker did all of that within a generation of bondage, and the church and school they raised are the proof.
There is also a lesson here about how history gets saved. Bull Hill was reconstructed not from a grand archive but from oral testimony passed down in families and then confirmed, spadeful by spadeful, by archaeology. The dignity of that partnership — believing a community's memory of itself, and then finding the physical evidence that bears it out — is a model for rescuing countless American histories that the written record left out.
If you visit
Come to Bull Hill as you would come to any sacred place — quietly, and with care. This is a hallowed burial ground, still tended in memory, and the right posture is respect: stay on the paths, disturb nothing, and let the stillness of the place settle on you.
Look closely at the grave markers, because they tell their own story. You will see stones of native rock and brick and concrete alongside cut marble and granite, and even wood and metal — a record, in materials, of a community's changing fortunes and of families honoring their dead with whatever love could provide. Each one stands for a life that the wider world once tried to keep unrecorded.
Set in the rural countryside of Falls County near Cedar Springs, Bull Hill rewards the traveler who wants more than roadside attractions — it belongs on a thoughtful route through the Brazos-country history of central Texas. Standing among these graves, remember what you are looking at: the resting place of people who were carried here in chains and of their descendants who built a free community with a church, a school, and land of their own. It is, as the marker rightly says, a vital link to a heritage that was very nearly lost, and kept alive instead.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Churchill Jones
- · James Coryell
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Rev. Nelson T. Denson and Marlin Missionary Baptist Church
Marlin, TX
Born into slavery in Arkansas in 1845 and brought to Falls County as a boy, Nelson Taylor Denson was taken into the Confederate Army by his enslaver during the Civil War before returning to Marlin as a freedman. Educated and inspired by Sam Houston's example, he founded Marlin Missionary Baptist Church in 1868—the county's earliest Black congregation—and established Black schools that opened formal education to the area's freed people. In 1882 he became the county's first elected Black official.
Greater Providence Missionary Baptist Church
Marlin, TX
In 1893 a dozen worshippers in the Missionary Baptist tradition, led by the Rev. N.T. Denson, gathered in a Marlin schoolhouse and named their new congregation Providence to mark what they saw as divine direction. They worshipped under a brush arbor before raising their first sanctuary, only to lose two buildings and their earliest records to fires in 1941 and 1963. Rebuilding after the second blaze, the members renamed the church Greater Providence and kept growing through music, teaching, and community outreach.
Cedar Grove Baptist Church
Satin, TX
On August 20, 1865, sixteen newly emancipated men and women gathered on a Brazos River plantation to form their own congregation, first called Buhl's Quarters Baptist Church, meeting in a log cabin. As floods, growth, and finally the stripping of nearby land for gravel forced repeated moves, the church was renamed Rock Dam and then Cedar Grove, carrying with it a bell given in 1890 that still called worshippers when the congregation built anew in Satin. Local memory even recalls a brother summoning members to service with a bugle.
Silvia King
Reagan, TX
Silvia King was already a married mother in Morocco when slave traders kidnapped her, carried her to France, and forced her through the Middle Passage to New Orleans. Sold at auction and marched hundreds of miles to a Texas cotton plantation near La Grange, she was placed in a forced marriage and made to cook and weave for her enslaver. In 1937 the WPA's Federal Writers' Project recorded her extensive oral history in Marlin, capturing rare firsthand testimony of slavery and acts of resistance such as the ring shout—she died that same year, reportedly at the astonishing age of 133.