Ford Cemetery
Grand Prairie, Tarrant County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Pinkney Harold Ford (1831-1901) was the leader of a Kentucky family who migrated to Texas in 1855. They settled in the area of North Arlington, then known as the Watson Community. John J. Goodwin held the original patent to this cemetery property. The oldest marked grave is that of Maria Trayler (b. 1799), who died in 1858. Ford, a Civil War veteran, purchased this property in 1879 and designated this site as a community burial ground. He and wife Elizabeth (d. 1898) farmed land nearby. Industrial development has surrounded this remnant of the pioneer community. (1982)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Pinkney Harold Ford led a Kentucky family to Texas in 1855, settling in the Watson Community near present North Arlington. The oldest marked grave, that of Maria Trayler, dates to 1858, and Ford—a Civil War veteran—bought the property in 1879 to serve as a community burial ground. Industrial Grand Prairie has since grown up around this last trace of the pioneer settlement.
Why it matters
Small pioneer cemeteries surviving amid modern development preserve the memory of the migrant families who first farmed North Texas before the cities arrived.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When Pinkney Harold Ford's family arrived in 1855, Texas had been a state for only about ten years. North Texas was still a frontier of blackland prairie and scattered timber. Families from Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and the upper South were moving in to claim farmland. They came by wagon, along rough roads, often in groups of relatives and neighbors who settled close together.
The cities that now cover this ground did not exist yet. Arlington took shape only after the Texas and Pacific Railway came through in the 1870s. Before that, the area was a patchwork of small rural settlements like the Watson Community, held together by family ties, shared churches and shared burial grounds.
The decades after the family arrived brought hard change. The Civil War pulled men away from their farms, and Reconstruction followed. Then the railroads tied this prairie to national markets. By the time Ford bought this land in 1879, the frontier was settling into a farming region. The towns that would one day swallow it were just starting to grow.
People & events
At the center of this story is Pinkney Harold Ford, born in 1831. In his mid-twenties he led his Kentucky family on the long move to Texas. They settled in the Watson Community, near what is now North Arlington, and farmed the land. Ford served in the Civil War, came home to the prairie, and lived out his life as a farmer beside his wife, Elizabeth.
The ground itself has a history older than Ford's purchase. The original land patent, the first legal title granted from the public domain, belonged to John J. Goodwin. People were burying their dead here long before the Fords owned it. The oldest marked grave belongs to Maria Trayler, born in 1799 and buried here in 1858. She was born in the presidency of John Adams and died on the Texas frontier. Her life covered almost the whole early history of the young republic.
In 1879 Ford bought the property and set it aside as a burial ground for the whole community. It was an act of neighborliness, typical of rural Texas. A family's private plot became a shared place where neighbors could lay their own to rest. Elizabeth died in 1898 and Pinkney in 1901. The cemetery he gave his community holds the memory of the settlement he helped build.
Its place in the American story
Ford Cemetery is a small example of one of the biggest movements in American history: the westward migration of farm families in the 1800s. Few of these families left diaries or famous names. Places like this are often the only record that they were here. Gravestones carry dates, kinship and origins that census rolls only hint at.
The Fords' path from Kentucky to Texas was a common one. Families from the upper South carried their farming habits, churches and customs onto the Texas prairie and shaped the culture of North Texas for generations. The Civil War service of men like Ford is a reminder that the frontier was never cut off from national events.
The cemetery's setting tells a second American story, about how fast the country urbanized. In about a century, the Dallas–Fort Worth area went from scattered farm communities to one of the largest metropolitan regions in the nation. This burial ground is what remains of an older landscape, and it shows what the boom paved over.
If you visit
Expect contrast. The marker notes that industrial development now surrounds the cemetery, so you will find this plot of old graves tucked in among warehouses, roads and modern Grand Prairie. That contrast is the point of visiting. You are standing in a surviving piece of the Watson Community, preserved while everything around it changed.
Walk slowly and read the stones. Look for the oldest dates, and think about Maria Trayler, born at the end of the 1700s and buried here in 1858. Watch for family names repeated across rows, which are clues to the kinship networks that held frontier communities together. Please treat the grounds with care. Stay on paths where they exist, and don't touch fragile or leaning stones.
Ford Cemetery takes only a short stop, and it fits well into a day exploring the Arlington and Grand Prairie area. Pair it with a visit to a local history museum or another pioneer cemetery nearby. Together they show how this busy part of Texas began as a scatter of family farms on open prairie.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Pinkney Harold Ford
- · Maria Trayler
- · John J. Goodwin
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
P.A. Watson Cemetery
Arlington, TX
The first burial here came in 1846, when a newly arrived family fashioned a coffin from their wagon bed and burned brush over the grave to hide it from Indian raiders. When Patrick Alfred Watson bought the land in 1853, he set aside an acre as a cemetery, and by 1870 he had donated ground for the community's first school and church, later West Fork Presbyterian. When the Dallas–Fort Worth Turnpike was routed past the site in 1956, the church was moved but the graves remained.
The Six Flags over Texas
Arlington, TX
Few places wear their layered past as openly as Texas, where six national flags have flown in turn. From Spain's banner planted beside missionary crosses in 1519, to La Salle's ill-fated French colony, to Mexican rule, the Republic of Texas born at San Jacinto, U.S. statehood, and the Confederacy, each era left its mark on the land. This exhibit distills more than three centuries of conquest, revolution, and settlement into the story of a single state.
Site of Bird's Fort
Arlington, TX
In 1840 Jonathan Bird raised a fort along the Military Road linking the Red River to Austin, part of the young Republic of Texas's effort to hold and settle its northern frontier. Nearby in 1843, Republic commissioners signed a major treaty setting a boundary line between Indian nations and white settlements, and the battered survivors of the failed Snively Expedition sought shelter here. The spot sat at the crossroads of diplomacy, migration, and conflict on the Texas prairie.
Jesse Chisholm
Arlington, TX
Jesse Chisholm, born of a Scottish father and Cherokee mother, was a scout, trader, and interpreter fluent in dozens of Indian languages who negotiated for the Republic of Texas and Sam Houston, including a peace conference near here at Bird's Fort in 1843. He is remembered for the wagon route he marked across Oklahoma and Kansas, which cowboys adopted to drive Texas longhorns north to railheads. After the Civil War wrecked the state's economy, those drives sent five-dollar cattle to thirty-dollar markets, and the Chisholm Trail became the most famous of the great cattle roads.