Five Mile Cemetery

🏛️The era

In the 1840s, North Texas was open prairie and creek bottoms, largely unsettled by Anglo-American farmers. The Republic of Texas wanted that to change. To draw settlers, it granted large tracts to colonization companies, and one of the most important of these was the Peters Colony, which covered a huge swath of what is now the Dallas–Fort Worth region.

The colony offered free land to families willing to come and farm it, and newcomers arrived from Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois and beyond. They built cabins along the creeks, where water and timber were close at hand. Five Mile Creek, south of the young settlement of Dallas, was one of those places.

By the late 1850s, the frontier was turning into a community. Settlers needed churches, schools and burial grounds, and in rural Texas those three things often grew up side by side on donated land.

Then came the Civil War. Texas joined the Confederacy in 1861, and men from farming communities like this one went off to fight. Some of them came home to rest in the burial grounds their families had founded.

👥People & events

The Bast family made the long journey from Kentucky to North Texas to join the Peters Colony. Abraham and Lucy Bast, born Lucy Myers, came with seven children, a household large enough to be a small community on its own.

In 1859, Abraham Bast donated an acre on the south side of Five Mile Creek for a church and school. Notably, the church was meant to be nondenominational, open to the whole neighborhood rather than one congregation. Two other landowners, James Horton and David King, also gave land for the church and the graveyard.

The cemetery beside the church may have been used as early as the 1840s, but the earliest graves that can be identified today date to 1859. One belongs to Abraham Bast himself, who did not live long after making his gift. The other belongs to Arthur Ledbetter, who had lived in Dallas County for eleven years and founded four Baptist churches in that time, a remarkable record of frontier ministry.

Over the years, the burial ground filled with the area's pioneers, including two Confederate soldiers. The church that grew here became Five Mile Baptist Church, which moved to a new location in the 1960s. The cemetery stayed, and it still receives burials today.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Five Mile Cemetery is a small window into one of the great stories of American settlement: how open land became communities. Across the country, colonization schemes, land grants and homestead policies pulled families westward, and the Peters Colony played that role for North Texas.

The pattern here repeats across rural America. Neighbors pooled land for a church and a school, and a cemetery grew beside them. Those shared institutions were how scattered farm families became a community, long before towns and governments supplied such things.

The cemetery also carries the story of a region's transformation. The prairie where the Basts settled is now part of one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country. That a pioneer burial ground is still in use, surrounded by the modern city, links today's Dallas directly to the families who first farmed along its creeks.

🧭If you visit

Five Mile Cemetery is still an active burial ground, so you will see graves spanning more than a century and a half. Part of the pleasure of a visit is reading that range, from weathered pioneer stones to modern markers, and seeing how one place has served generation after generation.

Look for the oldest sections and think about the setting in 1859: a creek, a donated acre, a simple church and schoolhouse, and a few families building a community on the prairie. Keep an eye out for the graves of the two Confederate soldiers and the early settlers the marker describes.

Because the cemetery is still in use, visit respectfully. Families may be tending graves or attending services, so keep your voice low and give them space.

This stop fits naturally into a Dallas history day. Pair it with sites tied to the city's early settlement to see how a scattering of Peters Colony homesteads grew into a major American city.