McLarry Cemetery
McKinney, Collin County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This site was first used as a cemetery in 1851 when property owner John R. Jones buried his infant son here. The land was later donated as a public burial ground for the pioneer settlers of the surrounding Wilmeth settlement by Mary Virginia Dunn McLarry and her father Robert A. McLarry. The earliest marked graves are those of a brother and sister, Henry E. and Adella M. Hall, who died in 1870. Also buried here is J.B. Wilmeth, for whom the community was named. The site is now used by descendants of the pioneer area families. (1981)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This burial ground began in 1851 as a private grief, when settler John R. Jones laid his infant son to rest here, and it soon grew into a public cemetery for the pioneer families of the Wilmeth settlement. The McLarry family donated the land, and the community namesake J.B. Wilmeth lies among the graves. Generations of descendants still tend the site, making it a living register of Collin County's earliest settlers.
Why it matters
Pioneer cemeteries like this one preserve the names and kinship networks of the ordinary families who turned frontier land into settled communities across nineteenth-century Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1851, when this ground first became a burial place, Collin County was still a young frontier county. The surrounding Blackland Prairie of North Texas was being settled through the 1840s, much of it under the Peters Colony land-grant program, which drew families from the Upper South and Midwest with promises of farmland. The county itself was organized in 1846. It was named for Collin McKinney, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, and the county seat took his name too.
Life for these early settlers was hard and often short. Doctors were few and far between, and disease was a constant danger. Infants and young children died at rates that are hard to grasp today. Families buried their dead close to home, often on their own land, because there was nowhere else. Many of North Texas's oldest cemeteries began this way: a single private grave that over time became a community's shared burial ground.
Small rural settlements grew up around particular families, a church, a school or a crossroads, and often took the name of a prominent settler. The Wilmeth settlement was one of these. Communities like it formed the basic fabric of rural Texas before the railroads and bigger towns pulled people toward new centers.
People & events
The cemetery's story begins with a loss. In 1851 John R. Jones, who owned this land, buried his infant son here. Nothing more about the child survives on the marker, but that single burial turned an ordinary piece of prairie into sacred ground.
The land later became a public burial ground through the generosity of Mary Virginia Dunn McLarry and her father, Robert A. McLarry, which is why the cemetery carries the McLarry name. Giving land for a cemetery was a meaningful civic act on the frontier. It promised every family in the settlement a place to lay its dead to rest, whatever their means.
The oldest graves that still have markers belong to a brother and sister, Henry E. and Adella M. Hall, who both died in 1870. Two children of one family lost in the same year says a great deal about how fragile life was then. Earlier burials, Jones's infant son among them, may have been marked with fieldstones or wood that has not survived. Also resting here is J.B. Wilmeth, for whom the surrounding community was named. Descendants of these pioneer families still use the cemetery, so it remains in active use rather than being a relic.
Its place in the American story
Places like McLarry Cemetery are where the grand story of American westward expansion becomes personal. Textbooks describe settlement in terms of land policy, migration routes and population figures. A pioneer cemetery shows what it actually cost: infant sons, a brother and sister lost together, and families who stayed anyway and built a community around their losses.
Rural cemeteries are also irreplaceable historical records. Before birth and death registration became routine, gravestones were often the main written record of who lived in a place, when they died and how families were connected. Genealogists and historians rely on them to rebuild the kinship networks that held frontier communities together.
The cemetery's continued use by descendants shows another quiet part of the American story: continuity. Across the country, families who arrived as pioneers often stayed for generations, and their burial grounds tie today's suburbs and cities to the farm settlements they replaced. In fast-growing Collin County, that link to the past is especially worth keeping.
If you visit
Please approach this as what it is: an active family cemetery that descendants still use and care for. Visit quietly and respectfully, stay on paths where you can, and do not touch or make rubbings of fragile old stones. Older headstones can be worn and easily damaged.
As you walk, look for the oldest marked stones from around 1870 and notice how styles and inscriptions change over the decades. Family names repeat across generations, and that is the cemetery's real story: the same families staying in one place through more than a century of change. Small graves are a sobering reminder of the child mortality the marker describes.
The McKinney area has grown rapidly into a busy part of the Dallas–Fort Worth region, and that makes a quiet pioneer burial ground all the more striking. Pair this stop with a visit to McKinney's historic town square and other area markers for a day about how prairie farm settlements became modern North Texas.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Mary Virginia Dunn McLarry
- · Robert A. McLarry
- · J.B. Wilmeth
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Wilmeth-McKinney Homestead
McKinney, TX
When J.B. and Nancy Wilmeth staked out 320 acres of untouched Collin County prairie in 1846, Texas had been a U.S. state for less than a year and the frontier was still raw. Their two-story home became a hub of pioneer life—a place of worship for the First Christian Church congregation J.B. organized, and a free school he and his children taught for nearly four decades. J.B. helped choose the county seat and served as district clerk and county judge, while marriages knit his family to that of Collin McKinney, the county's namesake and a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence.
McKinney
McKinney, TX
McKinney was founded in 1845 and named for Collin McKinney, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence—the same man who gave his name to the surrounding county. During the Civil War, future Texas governor J. W. Throckmorton raised Company K of the 6th Texas Cavalry here, a well-regarded Confederate unit. The town grew into a center of manufacturing, trade, and medicine for the region.
First Presbyterian Church of McKinney
McKinney, TX
Organized in 1874 at the home of local physician Dr. E.N. McAuley, this was the first congregation in Collin County tied to the Presbyterian Church in the United States, a Southern denomination born during the Civil War. From eighteen charter members it grew steadily, outgrowing a modest frame chapel and a brick sanctuary before settling into its present home in 1966, still ringing a bell cast for the fellowship in its earliest years.
Davis House
McKinney, TX
John N. Davis, a traveling buggy salesman, and his wife Maggie (Hamilton) built this L-plan vernacular house in 1902, where all seven of their children were born—though only three reached adulthood. After Maggie's death in 1908, her mother Cornelia Allen Hamilton moved in to help raise the family. The home, with its front bay and wraparound porch, stayed in the Davis family until 1978.