Harrison Cemetery

🏛️The era

In the years around the Civil War, the country east of Fort Worth was open farmland along the Trinity River, not city streets. Tarrant County was still frontier, settled by families who farmed, raised stock, and depended on one another for almost everything, burying their dead included.

In that world, cemeteries usually started on private land. A family lost a child or a parent and buried them on their own property. Neighbors then asked to bury their dead there too, and over the years a family plot became a community burying ground. Formal municipal cemeteries came much later, if at all.

Mills were just as central to rural life. A gristmill or sawmill was where farmers turned grain into flour and meal and timber into lumber, and it often became a gathering place for the surrounding neighborhood. Mill work was also dangerous, with heavy machinery that could injure or kill. Both of these parts of frontier life, the family burying ground and the mill, meet in this small cemetery.

👥People & events

The land first belonged to D.C. Harrison, a Tarrant County pioneer. The earliest known grave is that of Mary E. Harrison, who was born in 1864 and died in 1871, at only six or seven years old. Children were often among the first burials in pioneer cemeteries, and this one probably began with a family's grief over a young daughter.

The Harrison family's story ties into the Randols. R.A. Randol, born in 1850, ran Randol Mill, and he married Ronda Harrison. She died in 1882, in her early twenties. Her mother, Nancy Cannon Harrison, was buried here the next year. Within two years this family lost a young wife and then her mother.

More grief followed. In 1894, Randol's brother John C. Randol died in an accident at the mill. The marker states it plainly, but behind it is a reminder of how risky the machinery of rural industry could be, and how the business that supported a family could also take one of its members.

In 1895, a year after his brother's death, R.A. Randol bought this tract and deeded it forever as a burial ground. That turned an informal family and neighborhood cemetery into a permanent one. Today about sixty graves rest here, including those of the Edward Deason family. Randol himself lived until 1922.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Small cemeteries like this one exist all across the United States, and together they hold much of what we know about frontier life. Courthouse records were often thin, so gravestones are frequently the best evidence of who lived in a place, when they died, and how families were connected by marriage and loss.

This burial ground shows a pattern repeated wherever Americans settled new country: a private plot that became a community institution, and one person's decision to protect it permanently. Without Randol's deed, the graves might have been lost to development. That has happened to countless family cemeteries swallowed by growing cities, and the Fort Worth area grew enormously in the century after these burials.

The stones also record how much death touched ordinary families before modern medicine and workplace safety. A child dead at seven, a young wife in her early twenties, a man killed at a mill: these are the costs that came with the westward story.

🧭If you visit

This is a small, one-acre cemetery, now surrounded by the urban growth of the Fort Worth area. Part of its power is that contrast: a pocket of the nineteenth-century countryside that survived while the city grew up around it. Walk slowly and read the dates. Look for the Harrison and Randol stones and think about how closely the two families were tied.

Be respectful. This is a burial ground, and descendants of the families may still visit. Stay on paths where they exist, don't lean on or rub old stones, and leave everything as you found it.

The name Randol Mill survives in the area today, most visibly in Randol Mill Road. If you've driven it, you've already traveled a route named for the mill tied to this cemetery. Combining a stop here with other early Tarrant County sites makes a good half-day look at the region before the city.