Carrollton Black Cemetery
Carrollton, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Carrollton's early African-Americans, many of whom were former slaves, helped settle and build the community. By 1871, this portion of forty acres belonging to Scott Boswell, Sr., an African-American farmer, was a community cemetery. In 1915, C.B. Baxley acquired the cemetery and surrounding land. Although the site holds dozens of burials, only three names (Ned Welch, Loving, and Davis) are now visible. Joyce Collins (1960) is believed to be the last burial. No records exist for others buried here; flooding from the Elm Fork of the Trinity River destroyed many grave markers. Once threatened by new development, the site is a precious record of the early history of Carrollton. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2010
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Carrollton's early African-American residents, many of them formerly enslaved, helped settle and build the town, and by 1871 a corner of farmer Scott Boswell Sr.'s land had become their community cemetery. Though it holds dozens of burials, only three names remain legible, and flooding from the Elm Fork of the Trinity River destroyed many grave markers over the years. Once threatened by development, the ground survives as one of the few tangible records of Black Carrollton's earliest generation.
Why it matters
The cemetery is a precious and fragile record of freedpeople who built a Texas community yet were nearly erased from its written history.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This ground belongs to the years right after emancipation, when the people who had been enslaved in Texas set about building free lives — and free communities — often on the very land where they had labored. The Reconstruction era in North Texas was a time of both possibility and hardship, as freedpeople claimed churches, schools, farms, and, inevitably, burial grounds of their own.
Carrollton in this period was a young farming community in the fertile bottomlands near the Elm Fork of the Trinity River. Black residents, many of them formerly enslaved, were part of settling and building the town from its earliest days — clearing, farming, and laboring in a place whose written records would rarely give them their due.
A community cemetery was among the first institutions such a community needed and made for itself. By 1871, only a few years past slavery's end, this corner of land had become exactly that: a place where Black Carrollton could bury and honor its own.
People & events
At the center of the story is Scott Boswell, Sr., an African-American farmer who owned forty acres here. By 1871 a portion of his land had become the community cemetery — a quiet act of provision by one of the town's own Black landowners, giving his neighbors a permanent place of rest.
The land changed hands over the decades; in 1915 C. B. Baxley acquired the cemetery and the surrounding property. But the cemetery kept its purpose, and burials continued here for generations, with Joyce Collins, believed to be the last, laid to rest in 1960.
And yet most of the people buried here have slipped out of the written record entirely. The site holds dozens of graves, but only three names remain visible today — Ned Welch, Loving, and Davis. No records survive for the others, and flooding from the nearby Elm Fork of the Trinity River destroyed many of the grave markers over the years, carrying away the very stones that might have kept the names.
Its place in the American story
The story of Black cemeteries in America is, too often, a story of erasure — not through any fault of the people buried there, but through neglect, flooding, development, and the simple failure of the wider society to keep their records. Carrollton's is a painfully clear example: the freedpeople who helped build a town were nearly written out of its history, their names washed away by a river and left unrecorded on paper.
That makes a ground like this precious out of all proportion to its size. When a community's contributions go unnoted in official histories, its cemetery becomes one of the only tangible proofs that those lives existed at all — a record made of earth and stone rather than ink.
The fact that this site, once threatened by new development, was recognized and preserved reflects a broader national reckoning: a growing effort to find, protect, and honor the historic Black cemeteries that generations of Americans overlooked. Saving this ground is a way of insisting that the people who built the country be remembered as its builders.
If you visit
Approach this place with the reverence it asks for. It is a small, fragile site, and much of what it once held — headstones, names, the record of dozens of lives — has been lost to time and to the river's floods. What remains is quiet, and that quiet is part of the truth of it.
Look for the three names that are still legible — Welch, Loving, and Davis — and let them stand in for the many that are gone. Knowing that the Elm Fork of the Trinity River rose again and again over this ground helps you understand why so little is left, and why what survives matters so much.
This is not a stop for spectacle; it is a stop for remembrance. On a road trip through the Dallas area's history, pairing it with other sites of early Black community life makes for a deeper, more honest picture of who built these towns. Stand for a moment, read the marker slowly, and give this ground the attention that the written records never did.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Scott Boswell, Sr.
Themes & tags
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