Grounds Cemetery
Blue Ridge, Collin County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Grounds Cemetery Established 1875 Historic Texas Cemetery - 2005
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Grounds Cemetery was established in 1875, in the early decades of Anglo settlement in Collin County, Texas. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery, it marks one of the small rural burial grounds that served scattered farming families of the era. Such graveyards are often the last physical trace of communities that have otherwise disappeared from the landscape.
Why it matters
Cemeteries like this one preserve the memory of the ordinary settlers who built rural Texas in the generation after the Civil War.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Blue Ridge
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Named for the blue-flowering grass that hazed its hilltop between Desert and Pilot Grove Creeks, Blue Ridge drew pioneers beginning in the 1830s, including Republic of Texas land-grantee Matthew Mowry and the area's first doctor, W.C. Holmes. The Moyers brothers opened the first store—a one-room log cabin—in the 1870s, soon joined by a school, a Masonic lodge, cotton gins, a bank, and shops around the town square. Farmers and ranchers raising cotton, corn, and cattle sustained the town, whose 1937 high school was built with WPA labor.
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This burial ground took shape around 1860, in the years when families were still carving farms and communities out of the North Texas blackland prairie of Hunt County. A rural cemetery like this one served scattered settlers as both a resting place and a fixed point of community memory, long before the surrounding towns had churches or courthouses of their own. Its later designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery recognizes that continuity across more than a century of local life.
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