McCurley Cemetery
Lewisville, Denton County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The McCurley family of Illinois settled in Denton County in 1852. George Collins McCurley set aside land for a burial ground, church, and school. A traveling stranger may have been the first burial, but George's brother, Abraham, who died in 1871, was the first family member buried at the site. The first marked graves date from 1877, when the plot began to be used by neighbors. In 1951 the 106 graves which then comprised the cemetery had to be relocated because of the construction of Lewisville Lake. They were moved here, adjoining Old Hall Cemetery, burial place of George C. McCurley. (1984)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The McCurley family came from Illinois to settle Denton County in 1852, and George Collins McCurley set aside land here for a burial ground, church, and school. His brother Abraham, who died in 1871, was the first family member laid to rest, and by 1877 neighbors were burying their dead here too. When Lewisville Lake was created in 1951, all 106 graves had to be relocated to this spot beside Old Hall Cemetery, where George McCurley himself is buried.
Why it matters
The cemetery reflects both frontier family settlement and the mid-century reservoir projects that literally moved the resting places of the dead.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When the McCurley family arrived in Denton County in 1852, Texas was a young state, barely seven years into statehood, and the blackland prairie north of the Trinity was still raw frontier. Families came from the older states of the Midwest and Upper South looking for cheap, fertile land, and they came in kin-groups rather than as lone pioneers. A household from Illinois putting down roots on the open Texas prairie was living the westward story of its generation.
Settlement here meant building the institutions of a community from nothing. There were no towns to speak of, no established churches, no county services to fall back on. What a place had, the settlers made themselves — and often a single landowning family provided the ground on which the whole neighborhood's shared life would grow.
That is the world this burial ground was born into: a scattering of farms slowly knitting themselves into a community, one plowed field and one buried neighbor at a time.
People & events
The story turns on George Collins McCurley, who did something quietly generous and quietly practical: he set aside land for a burial ground, a church, and a school all at once. In one gesture he provided for a community's faith, its children, and its dead — the three things a frontier settlement could not do without.
Tradition holds that the very first person laid to rest here may have been a traveling stranger, someone passing through who died among people who did not know his name. It is a small, haunting detail, and a telling one: this was a place where even a stranger would be given a decent grave. The first family member buried here was George's own brother, Abraham, who died in 1871.
By 1877 the first permanently marked graves appear, and neighbors beyond the McCurley family had begun burying their own dead alongside them. What began as one family's private provision had become the whole settlement's common ground — the ordinary, organic way a family plot becomes a community cemetery.
Its place in the American story
The second half of this cemetery's story belongs to a distinctly twentieth-century American chapter: the great era of dam-building and reservoir creation. In 1951 the making of Lewisville Lake — one of the federal flood-control and water-supply reservoirs that reshaped river valleys across the country in the mid-century decades — meant that the 106 graves gathered here over three generations had to be moved.
This happened again and again across America. When engineers dammed a river and let the water rise, whole landscapes went under: farms, roads, sometimes entire towns, and very often the cemeteries. Relocating the dead was standard, sober practice for these projects, carried out with care but carrying an undeniable weight — the reordering of the most permanent thing a community owns.
So this modest country graveyard sits at the meeting point of two enormous American forces: the nineteenth-century settlement that filled the land, and the twentieth-century public works that remade it. The pioneers who came to claim the prairie could not have imagined that the ground they chose for eternity would one day be chosen for a lake.
If you visit
You are standing on a cemetery that was moved — and that fact is the thing to hold in mind as you walk it. The 106 graves relocated in 1951 were brought here to adjoin Old Hall Cemetery, where George C. McCurley himself is buried, so you are visiting a place deliberately reunited with its founder.
Look at the range of dates on the stones. The oldest marked graves reach back to the 1870s, and reading those weathered dates against the newer surroundings is a quiet reminder that the markers traveled here even if the years on them did not. Seek out the two cemeteries side by side; the seam between old and relocated is part of what makes this ground unusual.
Lewisville Lake spreads nearby, and once you know the history, the water reads differently — it is the reason this cemetery is where it is. This is a short, contemplative stop rather than a grand one: a place to stand among the transplanted dead of a frontier family and think about how much of Texas was built, and later rebuilt, by hand.
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
- · George Collins McCurley
- · Abraham McCurley
Themes & tags
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