Bullard Cemetery
Bullard, Smith County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Established c. 1870. Historic Texas Cemetery-2001
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Bullard Cemetery was established around 1870, in the years after the Civil War when the community that became the town of Bullard was taking shape. Recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2001, it holds the graves of the area's early settlers. Such burial grounds are often the oldest surviving record of a community's founding families.
Why it matters
Pioneer cemeteries preserve the names and memory of the ordinary settlers who built rural East Texas in the Reconstruction era.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Bullard Water Well
Bullard, TX
This marks the site of Bullard's historic town well, the reliable water source around which the community grew. When the Kansas and Gulf Short Line railroad pushed south from Tyler in 1883, the new town of Bullard—named for postmaster John Henry Bullard—supplanted the older settlements of Etna and Hewsville. Drawing on the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer, the well watered people and animals alike and served as an early social gathering place.
Frank Bell House
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Frank and Sarah (Swann) Bell, descended from 1850s East Texas pioneers, built this classical revival house in Tyler in 1900, raising eight children while Frank ran a store and a farm. One son, Frank M. Bell, served as Tyler's postmaster from 1942 to 1966, and banker-civic leader Henry Marsh Bell inherited the home. Threatened with demolition, it was moved and restored in 1974.
Smith Cemetery
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This burial ground grew from land granted to Mary M. "Polly" Long by the State of Texas in 1846, part of which her son preserved as a cemetery when he sold the tract in 1881. In use as early as 1857, it holds the graves of local settlers, many of them Long relatives and neighbors, including early county commissioner William Green and Civil War veterans. Its name honors the many members of the Smith family laid to rest among the pioneers here.
First Baptist Church of Whitehouse
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As Anglo settlers pushed into Smith County in the 1840s and gathered around a white-painted schoolhouse, a Baptist congregation took root in 1869 as the New Hope Church of Christ, Baptist. Early members worshipped once a month, built a one-room sanctuary in a pine grove in 1887, and followed the town as the railroad drew the community to a new center. Through relocations and rebuildings the congregation endured, taking the name First Baptist Church and becoming a fixture of Whitehouse life for well over a century.