Hickory Grove Black Cemetery
Petty, Lamar County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This historic burial ground is the resting place of former slaves, freedmen and descendants of African Americans who came here in the 1800s. Samuel and Dicie Lucinda (Lee) Swann bought 153 acres, including this cemetery site, from W. T. and Cornelia Booth in 1881. Dicie’s mother Cherry Lee (d. 1883) is the earliest marked burial here. She came to Lamar County from Alabama with Herbert Lee and his family and slaves. In 1899, Samuel Swann deeded three acres to the Methodist Episcopal Church as a burial ground. Among those buried here are military veterans, a preacher, several masons and eastern star members, community leaders and families who have called this area home for generations.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Hickory Grove is the resting place of former slaves, freedmen, and their descendants who made Lamar County home in the 1800s. Samuel and Dicie Lucinda Swann bought the land including this site in 1881, and in 1899 Samuel deeded three acres to the Methodist Episcopal Church as a burial ground; the earliest marked grave, from 1883, belongs to Dicie's mother Cherry Lee, who had come from Alabama in bondage. Among those buried here are veterans, a preacher, Masons and Eastern Star members, and families rooted here for generations.
Why it matters
This ground traces the passage from slavery to landowning freedom, preserving an African American community's roots across the very generation that emancipation transformed.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Hickory Grove lies in the countryside near Petty, in Lamar County, in the Northeast Texas farmland that drew settlers — free and enslaved — through the middle of the nineteenth century. This burial ground holds former slaves, freedmen, and the descendants of African Americans who came to this area in the 1800s, and it opens a window onto how a Black community took root here and endured.
The years after emancipation were a time of both peril and possibility for African Americans in Texas. The old world of bondage had ended, but the new one offered freedom without much security. In that uncertain landscape, land and a church of one's own were the surest foundations a community could lay.
The story woven into this cemetery is exactly that story — of people who arrived, in some cases, in chains, and who within a generation were buying land, deeding ground to a church, and burying their dead in a place they owned and controlled.
People & events
The record names real people. In 1881, Samuel and Dicie Lucinda Swann — Dicie's maiden name was Lee — purchased 153 acres, including this cemetery site, from W. T. and Cornelia Booth. That a Black couple could buy such a farm just sixteen years after slavery ended in Texas is itself a quiet triumph.
The earliest marked grave belongs to Dicie's mother, Cherry Lee, who died in 1883. She had come to Lamar County from Alabama with Herbert Lee and his family — arriving, the record indicates, among those the household held in bondage. Her grave, then, marks a life that reached from slavery in the Deep South to burial in ground her own daughter's family would come to own.
In 1899, Samuel Swann deeded three acres to the Methodist Episcopal Church as a burial ground, giving the community a permanent, church-anchored place of rest. Among those laid here over the years are military veterans, a preacher, several Masons and Eastern Star members, and community leaders — the full fabric of a settled, self-organized community, and families who have called this area home for generations.
Its place in the American story
Hickory Grove traces, in a single plot of Texas ground, the passage from slavery to landowning freedom that defined a generation of African American life. The dates line up almost too neatly to believe: a woman who came from Alabama in bondage lies buried by 1883, and by 1881 her daughter's family had already bought the very land around her.
That arc — from enslaved to landowner in the span of one family — is one of the most important and least-told chapters of the American story. Black landownership in the decades after emancipation was hard-won and often precarious, and every farm deed and church grant like the Swanns' represents a stake driven into the future.
The people resting here — the veterans, the preacher, the fraternal-order members, the community leaders — show a free community doing what free communities do: serving their country, keeping their faith, organizing their fellowship, and raising generations rooted in one place. This ground is a monument to that achievement.
If you visit
Visit gently. This is sacred ground to the families whose ancestors rest here, and it rewards a quiet, unhurried presence more than anything else.
As you read the dates, let yourself trace the family story the record preserves. Think of Cherry Lee, who came from Alabama and whose 1883 grave is the earliest marked here, and of her daughter Dicie and son-in-law Samuel Swann, who bought this land in 1881 and later set aside three acres of it as a burial ground. You are standing in the space between bondage and belonging, held by a single family across a single generation.
For a traveler interested in the deeper currents of American history, Hickory Grove is a place to slow down and reflect on how communities were built out of freedom itself. Come respectfully, read the ground as the record it is, and carry away the sense of a community that has called this corner of Lamar County home for generations.
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
- · Samuel Swann
- · Dicie Lucinda Lee Swann
- · Cherry Lee
Themes & tags
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