Grape Creek Cemetery
Corsicana, Navarro County, Texas
Marker Inscription
G. W. Eliot donated land at this site for a school, Methodist church, parsonage, and graveyard. Burials in the cemetery began about 1881. The Doolen, Duncan, Eliot, Humphries, Metcalf, Rakestraw, Smith, Stokes, Wimberly, and other families lived in the area at that time. The school consolidated with Navarro in 1928 and the building was relocated. The church meetinghouse was destroyed by fire in 1975. The next year a steel tabernacle was erected. It serves as the location for the annual memorial services of the Grape Creek Cemetery Association.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the early 1880s, landowner G. W. Eliot set aside ground at this rural Navarro County site for the fourfold anchors of a frontier settlement: a school, a Methodist church, a parsonage, and a graveyard. Families like the Doolens, Duncans, and Wimberlys built their community around these institutions, with burials beginning about 1881. Time thinned the settlement — the school consolidated away in 1928, the church burned in 1975 — but the cemetery and an annual memorial gathering keep the community's memory alive.
Why it matters
It captures the familiar arc of countless post–Civil War Texas farm communities, where a single donor's land gift seeded a settlement that endures now mainly in the names carved on cemetery stones.
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Related people
- · G. W. Eliot
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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