Hickory Grove Cemetery
Roxton, Lamar County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Widespread settlement of this area of Lamar County began in the late 1840s and early 1850s. By 1852 the Hickory Grove Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was established and this cemetery was in use. The earliest documented grave here is that of Mary Isabella Alexander (1832-1852). Also interred that year were Franklin Day (1827-1852) and Nancy Smith (1842-1852). By the 1870s the Hickory Grove Cemetery was fully established as a community burial ground. The Methodist Church was relocated in 1881, providing more space for grave sites where the sanctuary had once stood. Additional land acquisitions, including property deeded by Sam and Dicie Swan in 1889 and F. E. and M. E. Simpson in 1907, enlarged the cemetery grounds. A building referred to as "the shed" was built in the 1920s for funeral services, but it burned in 1949. The Hickory Grove Cemetery contains over 1,000 graves. The tombstones, diverse in style and size, serve as reminders of the area's pioneer heritage. Many mark the graves of infants and children and are a testament to the often harsh conditions of pioneer life. Others interred here include veterans of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and Korea. A cemetery association maintains the historic graveyard.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
As settlers poured into Lamar County in the late 1840s and 1850s, a Methodist congregation took root by 1852 and opened the burial ground that became Hickory Grove Cemetery. Its more than a thousand graves—many for infants and children—stand as sober witness to the hardships of pioneer life, while others hold veterans stretching from the Civil War through Korea. The diverse tombstones read almost as a stone archive of a frontier community's growth.
Why it matters
A pioneer graveyard like this preserves the demographic reality of frontier Texas—high child mortality, tight-knit farm families, and generations of military service—in a way no written record quite captures.
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Themes & tags
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