Harrington, Cassady and Clark Cemeteries
Little Elm, Denton County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Harrington, Cassady, and Clark Cemeteries are three separate historically African American cemeteries all located on 1.77 acres in Denton County. The land was originally owned by the Harrington family and is the site of the Harrington cemetery. Cassady and Clark Cemeteries were moved to their current location adjoining Harrington Cemetery in 1953 when the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers began construction of the Garza Little Elm Dam. The reinterred cemeteries have twelve foot boundaries around the perimeters. An entrance gate is located on Lloyd Road at the northeast corner of the cemeteries. Lloyd, an early farming community, dates back to 1850 and was named for A. P. Lloyd, Denton County’s first county clerk. Most graves in Harrington are marked with headstones of marble, granite, sandstone and concrete. Fieldstone and funeral home steel-plates mark many Cassady and Clark graves. The three burial grounds have approximately 170 graves. The only African American owner of the Harrington land was E. L. Lugrand. His brother’s father-in-law, Nick Oldem, was the first documented burial in Harrington Cemetery (1872). The sites of the original Cassady and Clark cemeteries were on land owned by African Americans. Jacob Cassady (1808-1908) purchased the Cassady cemetery land near Garza in 1872. He and his wife, Melinda (1821-1904), are buried in this family cemetery. Zack Rawlings and George Clark purchased the Clark Cemetery land west of Garza in 1876. The oldest legible marker is Nancie Rolling (1879). Present-day Lewisville Lake covers the area where these cemeteries were first established. Meggs & Son Funeral Home deeded Cassady and Clark Cemeteries to Denton County after relocating the burials. HISTORIC TEXAS CEMETERY – 2011
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Harrington, Cassady, and Clark Cemeteries are three historically African American burial grounds now sharing 1.77 acres in Denton County. Founded in the 1870s on land owned by Black families — Jacob Cassady bought his plot in 1872, and Zack Rawlings and George Clark theirs in 1876 — the Cassady and Clark grounds were relocated in 1953 when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Little Elm to create Lewisville Lake. Roughly 170 graves, marked in marble, granite, fieldstone, and funeral-home plates, record the community of the vanished farming settlement of Lloyd.
Why it matters
These cemeteries testify both to African American landowning families building community after slavery and to how mid-century public works displaced even the graves of the rural poor.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
These three cemeteries gather up a long stretch of American history on a single small parcel of Denton County ground. Their oldest roots reach into the years just after the Civil War — the Reconstruction and Gilded Age era, when newly freed African Americans across the South were doing something revolutionary in its ordinariness: buying land, building churches, and establishing burial grounds of their own.
The surrounding farming community of Lloyd dated back to 1850 and took its name from Denton County's first county clerk. Into and around such settlements, Black families carved out places to live, work, and finally to rest — and a cemetery owned by the community itself was no small thing. It was a declaration of permanence by people whose permanence had, within living memory, been denied them.
The marker's second era is the mid-twentieth century, when the machinery of modern public works reached this rural landscape. The story of these burial grounds is therefore a story of two Americas meeting: the world the freedpeople built, and the postwar nation of dams and reservoirs that would, quite literally, flood over parts of it.
People & events
The founding names on this land belong to people building for the future. Jacob Cassady, born in 1808, purchased the ground for his family cemetery near Garza in 1872; he and his wife Melinda lie buried there. In 1876 Zack Rawlings and George Clark bought the land that became the Clark Cemetery west of Garza. The Harrington ground carried the first documented burial of all, in 1872 — Nick Oldem, remembered through his family ties to E. L. Lugrand, recorded as the only African American owner of the Harrington land. The oldest legible marker, for Nancie Rolling, dates to 1879. These were not anonymous plots; they were family and community grounds, owned by name.
Then, in 1953, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began construction of the Garza–Little Elm Dam, and the water that would become Lewisville Lake rose to cover the very places where the Cassady and Clark cemeteries had first been established. The two burial grounds were disinterred and moved, reinterred beside the Harrington Cemetery on land the Harrington family had originally owned, each given a twelve-foot boundary. A local funeral home carried out the relocation and afterward deeded the two moved cemeteries to the county.
Today roughly 170 graves rest together on 1.77 acres, entered through a gate on Lloyd Road. Their markers range from marble and granite down to plain fieldstones and stamped steel plates from funeral homes — a range that tells you a great deal about who could afford what, and about the dignity families summoned regardless.
Its place in the American story
The founding of these grounds belongs to one of the most important and least celebrated chapters of American history: the effort by formerly enslaved people and their children, in the decades after emancipation, to own land and build lasting institutions. A community-owned cemetery was among the most durable of those institutions — a piece of earth that belonged to the people in it and could not be taken by a landlord's whim.
The 1953 relocation connects this quiet acre to a sweeping national pattern. Across the mid-twentieth century, federal dam and reservoir projects reshaped the American landscape, generating power and water and recreation — but also displacing communities, and disproportionately the rural and the poor. That the water reached even the graves, requiring the dead to be moved, is a stark reminder that such projects rarely fell evenly on everyone.
The humble materials — fieldstone and steel plate alongside carved marble — speak to the economic realities of Black rural life under segregation. And the survival of these cemeteries, gathered and protected and formally recognized, testifies to descendants who refused to let their ancestors be forgotten beneath a lake.
If you visit
Enter through the gate on Lloyd Road at the northeast corner, and give yourself time to move among all three grounds — they sit together now, each within its marked boundary, so you can walk from one community's founders to another's in a few steps.
Look closely at the markers, because their variety is the story. Polished granite and marble stand near rough fieldstones and thin metal funeral-home plates; each was someone's best effort to say a name would not be lost. Seek out the earliest legible stones and the founding family names, and remember that some of what you are reading was carried here in 1953 from ground now beneath the water.
That water is part of the visit. Nearby Lewisville Lake covers the places where the Cassady and Clark cemeteries first stood, so if your travels take you along its shores, you are looking at the reason these graves were moved. As a working, historically recognized burial ground, it asks for quiet and care — stay to the paths, disturb nothing, and let the gathered stones speak for the community that made them.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Jacob Cassady
- · George Clark
- · Zack Rawlings
Related events
- · Construction of Garza-Little Elm Dam
Themes & tags
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