Lee Cemetery
Celeste, Hunt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Lee Cemetery Established circa 1860 Historic Texas Cemetery - 2000
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This burial ground took shape around 1860, in the years when families were still carving farms and communities out of the North Texas blackland prairie of Hunt County. A rural cemetery like this one served scattered settlers as both a resting place and a fixed point of community memory, long before the surrounding towns had churches or courthouses of their own. Its later designation as a Historic Texas Cemetery recognizes that continuity across more than a century of local life.
Why it matters
Pioneer cemeteries are among the most durable records of who settled a place and when, preserving the names of ordinary families that rarely appear in official histories.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First Baptist Church of Trenton
Trenton, TX
In January 1877 the Baptists of Trenton first gathered to worship in the Burns school house, organizing soon after as Smyrna Baptist Church of Christ under their first pastor, Martin W. Gentry. The congregation raised a frame sanctuary on this site in 1897 and, after fire destroyed it in 1953, met in the high school auditorium until a new church was finished in 1954. Through associational ties and a century of rebuilding, the church has remained a fixture of community life in Fannin County.
Grounds Cemetery
Blue Ridge, TX
Grounds Cemetery was established in 1875, in the early decades of Anglo settlement in Collin County, Texas. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery, it marks one of the small rural burial grounds that served scattered farming families of the era. Such graveyards are often the last physical trace of communities that have otherwise disappeared from the landscape.
Blue Ridge
Blue Ridge, TX
Named for the blue-flowering grass that hazed its hilltop between Desert and Pilot Grove Creeks, Blue Ridge drew pioneers beginning in the 1830s, including Republic of Texas land-grantee Matthew Mowry and the area's first doctor, W.C. Holmes. The Moyers brothers opened the first store—a one-room log cabin—in the 1870s, soon joined by a school, a Masonic lodge, cotton gins, a bank, and shops around the town square. Farmers and ranchers raising cotton, corn, and cattle sustained the town, whose 1937 high school was built with WPA labor.
Merit Cemetery
Merit, TX
Merit began as an Upland South farming settlement on the rolling Blackland Prairie of Hunt County, its Methodist congregation organized in 1871 and its name drawn from a visiting judge, William W. Merritt. The railroad's arrival in 1886 spurred cotton, stores, lodges, and a newspaper — and in 1912 robbers famously blew the bank vault open with nitroglycerin for $4,500. The community cemetery, deeded by Dr. Alexander Murchison in 1907, still holds veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam and is one of the county's few surviving swept-grave burial grounds.