Connersville Primitive Baptist Church African American Cemetery
Round Top, Fayette County, Texas
Marker Inscription
African American citizens of Fayette County established Connersville Primitive Baptist Church sometime between Dec. 10, 1883, and Nov. 10, 1885. By the later date, Thomas Cooper owned 11 1/4 acres of land adjacent to Richter Cemetery on FM 1457. Cooper gave permission for the Black community to erect a building for the church. The Connersville Primitive Baptist Church African American Cemetery is the burial site of many slaves and their descendants who lived and died in the area. The cemetery site is located within the west property line of land once owned by the Ledbetter family. Oral tradition indicates that this site was used by several slave owners for burials long before the abolition of slavery. It is the only known Black cemetery within a three-mile radius. There are many unmarked graves within the cemetery but marked graves are significant. The earliest dated grave marker is for George Craft (1848-1904). One of the earliest births recorded is for Piggy Dwiard (1812-1912). The inscription reads "Asleep in Jesus peaceful rest, whose waking is supremely blest." Another inscription reads "In the back woods we lay," a reference to a common trait for historically African American cemeteries. Several markers are for people born shortly after Emancipation. Additional land was deeded to the church on May 20, 1957. The officers given the deed to hold in trust were Beatrice Breedlove, Shelley Ferguson, and Pastor J. Joseph Ferguson. In 2003, the sanctuary was relocated to the Carroll A. Wood Annex in Round Top by the Round Top Area Historical Society. The building was dedicated as the Connersville Primitive Baptist Church African American Museum in honor of African American pioneers of Fayette County. The cemetery remains as a testament to the lives and legacies of African Americans in Round Top and Fayette County. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2018
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
African American residents of Fayette County founded Connersville Primitive Baptist Church in the mid-1880s on land where Thomas Cooper let the Black community build. The adjoining cemetery holds many of the enslaved and their descendants, with a tradition that burials here predate emancipation; its stones — the earliest dated 1904, one for a woman said to have lived a century — bear epitaphs like "In the back woods we lay." The relocated sanctuary now serves as a museum honoring the county's African American pioneers.
Why it matters
The church and its burial ground are a rare surviving record of an African American community's faith, freedom, and endurance from slavery through the 20th century in rural Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the years after the Civil War, Texas entered the difficult era of Reconstruction, when four million people freed from slavery across the South set about building lives, institutions, and communities of their own. In rural counties like Fayette, that freedom was hard-won and closely watched. Emancipation reached Texas late — enslaved people here did not learn of their freedom until June 1865, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation — and the generation that gained its liberty then spent the following decades laying down roots.
For African American families in places like the Round Top area, the first act of community-building was almost always a church. A congregation was more than a place to worship: it was a school, a meeting hall, a mutual-aid society, and a burial ground rolled into one. Where formal institutions excluded Black citizens, the church stood in for all of them.
Connersville Primitive Baptist Church took shape in exactly this world, founded in the mid-1880s by African American citizens of Fayette County who wanted a place of their own. The land, the labor, and the leadership were theirs — an assertion of belonging in the very soil of the county where many had once been held in bondage.
People & events
The founding turned on an act of generosity and land ownership that would have been unimaginable a generation earlier. By the mid-1880s Thomas Cooper owned land adjacent to an existing cemetery, and he gave the Black community permission to raise a building for their church. That a Black man held title to acreage — and could grant its use for a congregation — is itself a quiet marker of how much and how fast life had changed.
The cemetery beside the church tells an even older and more layered story. Oral tradition holds that the ground was used for burials long before slavery ended, when it served as a resting place tied to nearby landholders. It is the only known Black cemetery within a three-mile radius, which made it the gathering point in death for a whole scattered community. Many graves are unmarked, their names now carried only by memory.
Among the stones that do survive, the earliest dated marker belongs to George Craft, who died in 1904, and another records a life said to have stretched nearly a full century. The epitaphs are their own kind of testimony. One stone offers the old consolation, “Asleep in Jesus, peaceful rest.” Another bears the plainer, more haunting line, “In the back woods we lay” — a phrase found in other historically African American cemeteries, speaking to where such burial grounds were so often placed. Several of the people buried here were born just after emancipation, the first free generation.
Its place in the American story
The story of Connersville is the story of Black America after slavery, written small in one Texas cemetery. Across the country, freed people answered emancipation by founding churches, and those churches became the load-bearing institutions of African American life — the places where literacy was taught, leadership was trained, and dignity was insisted upon when the wider society denied it.
What makes this site rare is not that it existed but that it survived. Countless Black cemeteries were lost — plowed under, forgotten, or erased by neglect — because they lacked the wealth and legal protection that shielded other burial grounds. The continued care of Connersville, its later deeding to trustees, and its formal recognition as a Historic Texas Cemetery mean that a record which so easily could have vanished is instead preserved.
When the original sanctuary was moved and rededicated as a museum honoring the county's African American pioneers, the community made a deliberate choice: to keep telling this history rather than let it fade. In a nation that has too often let the past of its Black citizens go unrecorded, that choice is itself significant.
If you visit
Come to this place expecting quiet. A cemetery like this rewards slow attention rather than a quick photo — walk the rows, read the stones that remain, and notice the ground between them, where many graves lie unmarked. The absence of names is part of the story, not a gap in it.
Look for the oldest surviving markers and the epitaphs carved into them. Lines like “Asleep in Jesus” and “In the back woods we lay” were chosen by grieving families with limited means, and they carry more feeling than any monument. Let yourself imagine the community that gathered here across the generations — mourning, singing, and holding on to one another.
The preserved sanctuary, now a museum honoring the county's African American pioneers, lets you connect the burial ground to the living congregation that once filled it. Together they make a single visit that moves from the pew to the grave and back — a compact, moving stop for any traveler curious about how freedom was built, one community at a time, in rural Texas.
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
- · Thomas Cooper
- · George Craft
Themes & tags
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