Isham Cemetery
Fort Worth, Tarrant County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Rev. W. Marion Isham (1831-1904) and his family came to Tarrant County from Georgia about 1870. Soon after arriving in the area Isham donated a one-acre plot of land to be used for a community cemetery. The oldest remaining legible grave marker here is that of N.L. Sweet (1824-1870), although earlier burials are documented by plain sandstone markers. Approximately five acres were added to the graveyard in 1941. Still in operation as a community burial ground, the historic graveyard is maintained by the Isham Cemetery Association. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When the Rev. W. Marion Isham brought his family from Georgia to Tarrant County around 1870, he donated an acre of land for a community burial ground. The oldest legible stone belongs to N.L. Sweet, who died in 1870, though plain sandstone markers hint at even earlier graves. Expanded in 1941 and still tended by a cemetery association, the graveyard remains an anchor of local memory.
Why it matters
Community cemeteries like this one map the arrival and endurance of pioneer families in North Texas after the Civil War, preserving names the written record often forgot.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · W. Marion Isham
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Ray-Manship Cemetery
Fort Worth, TX
This spot once held a small graveyard on the William Ray survey, where a dozen known burials and many unmarked graves held some of Tarrant County's earliest settlers. Ray, a colonist of the Peters colony that drew families to North Texas in the 1840s, was buried here with his wife Lucinda in the mid-1880s, and members of the pioneer Manship farming family lay nearby. As development pressed in, several graves were moved to Rose Hill Cemetery, and in 1984 the old burial ground was razed.
Harrison Cemetery
Fort Worth, TX
This one-acre burial ground began on the land of Tarrant County pioneer D.C. Harrison, its earliest known grave that of young Mary E. Harrison in 1871. In 1895 R.A. Randol, operator of the nearby Randol Mill, bought the tract and deeded it forever as a cemetery. Its roughly sixty graves gather early settler families, including Randol's brother John, killed in an 1894 mill accident.
Handley Church of Christ
Fort Worth, TX
A settlement first called Turkey Knob took the name Handley after 1876, when the Texas & Pacific Railroad built a depot and section house nearby. Local Protestants worshiped together in a union building until 1905, when J. Dan Thomas invited about twenty-two neighbors into his home to organize the Handley Church of Christ. The congregation soon outgrew that start and has kept to this location since 1919.
I. D. Parker Public Cemetery and Homestead
Hurst, TX
Isaac Duke Parker, son of the noted early Texas politician Isaac Parker, settled near this site with his family in 1853. He served as a Tarrant County commissioner before enlisting in the Confederate army during the Civil War, then took over the family homestead and cemetery around 1867. Near the end of his life he set aside the eastern half of the burial ground — with more than thirty graves — as a public cemetery.