Morris Cemetery
Canton, Van Zandt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The oldest documented burial in this cemetery is that of Sarah Morris (1807-1866). Sarah had come to Texas from Kentucky in 1857 with her husband Thomas Banister Morris and family. The land on which the cemetery is located was part of a farmstead which was purchased in 1886 by Elijah Newton Morris, son of Sarah and Thomas. It eventually became a community cemetery for the people of the China Grove/Denman area. Gravestones here document burials of Civil War and World War I Veterans, as well as victims of early epidemics. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When Sarah Morris was laid to rest here in 1866, she had been in Texas less than a decade, part of the wave of Kentucky and Upper-South families who resettled the blackland country before and after the Civil War. Her son Elijah bought the surrounding farmstead in 1886, and the family plot grew into the community burying ground for the China Grove and Denman neighborhoods. Its stones quietly record the arc of a rural settlement — Confederate and World War I veterans, and the children and elders lost to the epidemics that swept such isolated communities.
Why it matters
Community cemeteries like this one are among the most honest records we have of frontier settlement, preserving in stone the ordinary families, soldiers, and epidemic victims who never made the history books.
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Related people
- · Sarah Morris
- · Thomas Banister Morris
- · Elijah Newton Morris
Themes & tags
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