Frankford Cemetery

🏛️The era

Before North Dallas was suburbs and highways, this was open prairie crossed by trails. The Preston Road was one of the important early routes through North Texas, running north toward the Red River crossing at Preston. Travelers, settlers and cattle drives moved along it, and the area around this cemetery became a natural stopping place.

In the 1850s and 1860s, North Texas was a fast-growing frontier, filling with families from the Upper South and elsewhere who were drawn by fertile land. Then came the Civil War, which pulled many local men into Confederate service, and Reconstruction after it. Burial grounds like this one began in that unsettled period.

After the war, small communities took shape across the prairie, each with its post office, church and lodge. Frankford was one of them, with a post office until the early 1900s. Many such communities later faded or were swallowed by bigger towns as railroads and then cities reshaped the map.

👥People & events

The earliest known burial here is that of area pioneer Eliga M. Yaeger, in 1862. That year the Civil War was well under way, and frontier life went on alongside it. The earliest grave with a surviving marker belongs to John T. Coit, born in 1829. He was a lawyer who came to Texas from South Carolina. During the war he raised a regiment in the Dallas area and served as its colonel. He died in 1872 and was first buried on a bluff above the Trinity River before being moved here.

Margaret McKamy, born in 1786, is buried here as well. She came to Texas with her son, William C. McKamy, who became a prominent landowner in the area. She was born just after the American Revolution and died in 1873 on the Texas frontier, so her lifetime spanned nearly the whole early history of the United States.

The cemetery also holds town founders. Sidney Noell founded Noell Junction, the early settlement that grew into Addison. Addison Robertson, for whom the town was later renamed, lies here too. The two men are linked by the town that bears one of their names.

Since the 1870s, the cemetery has been tied to White Rock Masonic Lodge No. 234, organized at Walnut Grove in 1858. The lodge hall built here in 1872 also served as a church and a school, which was typical of frontier life, when one building had to do many jobs. Lodge members still serve on the cemetery's board.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Frontier cemeteries like Frankford hold the whole pattern of American westward settlement in miniature. Here are trail travelers, a Civil War officer, a pioneer mother born in the early years of the Republic, and founders of towns that became part of a major metropolitan area.

The Masonic connection reflects a national pattern too. In the nineteenth century, fraternal lodges were among the most important institutions in rural America. They offered fellowship, mutual aid and community leadership, and their halls often doubled as schools, churches and meeting places when nothing else existed.

Today the cemetery sits within one of the fastest-growing urban regions in the country. It is a reminder that modern metropolitan areas were built over older layers of trails, farms and vanished villages, and that some of their oldest residents are still here.

🧭If you visit

Frankford Cemetery is a quiet pocket of the nineteenth century surrounded by modern North Dallas. Stepping inside, you trade traffic noise for old headstones and shade, and it is worth slowing down to read the names and dates.

Look for the older stones, including the marked grave of John T. Coit, and notice how the inscriptions change as the decades pass. In 2013 the cemetery received a Historic Texas Cemetery medallion, which recognizes its historical value.

This is still an active, cared-for burial ground, so visit respectfully and leave everything as you found it. The cemetery pairs well with a visit to nearby Addison, the town that grew from Noell Junction, and with a drive along Preston Road, which follows a route travelers used long before the city arrived.