Moore's Chapel Cemetery
Bonham, Fannin County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Missouri native Alexander Moore married Virginia native Mary Jane Jones in St. Genevieve, Missouri, in 1856. They moved to Texas and purchased land in this area in 1857. The Moore donated two acres here to a rapidly growing community for cemetery purposes in the mid-1870s. The first recorded burial was that of Martha Cashion, early pioneer settler and a friend and neighbor of the Moores, on March 11, 1876. Area Baptists erected a sanctuary just north of the cemetery on land donated by the Moores that became known as Moore's Chapel Church. The community and this cemetery also became known as Moore's Chapel. An unusually high number of infant burials during the 1880s and 1890s reflect an outbreak of typhoid fever. Alexander Moore was buried here in 1915. Moore's Chapel Cemetery and adjacent church and school buildings made up the community center. The cemetery contains the burials of many of the area's pioneer settlers and their descendants and veterans of wars ranging from the Civil War to World War II. The cemetery is maintained by an association and continues to serve the community.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Alexander Moore and his wife Mary Jane brought their family from Missouri to this part of Fannin County in 1857, and in the mid-1870s donated two acres to a growing community for a cemetery, with neighbor Martha Cashion the first recorded burial in 1876. A Baptist sanctuary rose just to the north on land the Moores also gave, and church, school, and graveyard together became the community center known as Moore's Chapel. A grim cluster of infant graves from the 1880s and 1890s records a typhoid outbreak, while veterans from the Civil War through World War II rest among the pioneer families still tended by a cemetery association.
Why it matters
The cemetery preserves the whole life of a Texas farming community—its founders, its faith, its epidemics, and its soldiers—across more than a century of settlement.
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Related people
- · Alexander Moore
- · Mary Jane Jones
- · Martha Cashion
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Col. James Tarleton
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In late 1835 James Tarleton raised a company of 36 riflemen in his native Kentucky and set out for Texas, arriving to find San Antonio already liberated. Though an officer, he fought in the ranks at the victory of San Jacinto in April 1836. Having lost his wife Nancy in Kentucky that same year, he settled afterward in Fannin County with his son Robert.
Fannin County
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Anglo-American settlers reached this stretch of the Red River by steamboat in 1836, and Fannin County was created the next year, organized in 1838. It honors James W. Fannin, executed with his surrendered command at Goliad in March 1836, one of the darkest episodes of the Texas Revolution. County officials first met at Jacob Black's cabin, and the seat wandered from Warren to Bois d'Arc — renamed Bonham in 1844 for Alamo defender James Butler Bonham.
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A Tennessee native, John P. Simpson reached the raw new county of Fannin about 1837 and signed the petition that created it, in a region named for a hero of the Texas Revolution. He farmed here and became one of its first officeholders, serving as sheriff and chief justice, and he donated the land that became Bonham's courthouse square and downtown. He also led the Fannin Guards, a citizen militia that guarded this stretch of frontier.
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