Cannon Cemetery

🏛️The era

When Elijah Cannon brought his family to Texas in 1852, the state was in the middle of a great migration. Settlers from the older Southern states, including the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama, were streaming into Texas in search of cheap, fertile land. North Texas, including what is now Grayson County near the Red River, was still frontier country, only lightly settled.

Many of those migrating families were slaveholders who brought enslaved people with them. Slavery expanded rapidly in Texas in the 1850s, and enslaved people did much of the hard work of clearing land and building farms on the new frontier. Their labor and their lives are woven into the history of places like this one, even when the written records say little about them.

The Civil War and emancipation transformed that world. After slavery ended in Texas in 1865, freed people began building their own families, churches, and communities, and often their own burial grounds. Communities across Texas, like this one, were remade in the decades that followed.

👥People & events

The story of this ground begins with Elijah Cannon, who moved from South Carolina to Texas in 1852 with his eleven sons and the people he held in slavery. They settled near here, and like many frontier families they set aside a patch of their own land to bury their dead.

The oldest documented grave belongs to a child: ten-year-old Nancy J. Bowen, buried in 1857. Her small grave is a reminder of how hard frontier life could be for families, when illness or accident could take a child with little warning.

In 1874, O. M. Cannon deeded land that included the family graveyard as a community burial place, so the private family plot became a resting place for the whole area. Next to it, a separate section was set aside for formerly enslaved people. The earliest known burials there are Billy and Glory Boyd, laid to rest in August 1880. We know little more about them than their names and that month, but their graves mark the lives of people who came through slavery and into freedom.

Over the generations the cemetery grew to more than 700 graves. They include pioneer settlers, veterans of several wars, and members of fraternal organizations, whose emblems often appear on old headstones. It is still in use today.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Cemeteries like this one are some of the most honest historical records we have. Cannon Cemetery tells two American stories side by side. One is the westward migration of Southern families into Texas. The other is the history of the enslaved people they brought with them, and of those people's descendants after emancipation.

The separate section for formerly enslaved people reflects the segregation that shaped American life, and death, for generations after the Civil War. Across the South, Black and white Americans were often buried apart even when they had lived and worked on the same land. That divided ground reminds visitors how deeply those lines were drawn.

Names like Billy and Glory Boyd also matter because so many enslaved and freed people left few written traces. Their graves, and the records that keep their names, are often among the only lasting evidence of their lives. Preserving cemeteries like this one helps keep that part of the American story from being lost.

🧭If you visit

Cannon Cemetery lies in the countryside of southern Grayson County, near the town of Van Alstyne, north of Dallas. It is an active cemetery that is still in use, so please visit quietly and respectfully. Stay on paths, and do not disturb graves, flowers, or mementos families have left.

Take time to walk among the stones. Older markers often carry weathered carvings, and many bear the symbols of fraternal organizations or the insignia of military service. Look for the oldest dates you can find, and notice how the cemetery's two sections tell different parts of one community's story.

This is a meaningful stop for travelers exploring North Texas history, especially the lives of early settlers and the African American families who helped build the region. Pair it with a visit to Van Alstyne and other historic towns in Grayson County for a day that shows how frontier Texas grew and changed.