Murray Cemetery
Rockdale, Milam County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Originally named Pleasant Grove Cemetery, this burial ground was at first associated with the Pleasant Grove Community. The settlement's school was also once located on this site. In 1872, residents organized the Pleasant Grove Church, which in the schoolhouse. Members later merged with a nearby congregation to form Mt. Zion Baptist Church, worshipping several miles east of here. The current name for this cemetery can be traced to Madison Murray (1821-1897), a Civil War veteran who in the late 1860s moved here from Mississippi with two brothers. He became a community leader and educator, obtaining possession of the Pleasant Grove schoolhouse and operating it as a private institution. After Mt. Zion Baptist Church formed, this burial ground became known as Murray Cemetery. The earliest marked grave here, that of Nancy Phillips, dates to 1856. Other notable burials include Joseph Hook, a Rockdale blacksmith, and George Banzhaf, a celebrated Milam County agricultural extension agent. Also interred here are early area pioneers and veterans of conflicts dating to the Civil War. The cemetery features Woodmen of the World markers, vertical stones, curbing and interior fencing. Although the Pleasant Grove community declined, the cemetery later also served the Bushdale and Bethlehem settlements. In 2004, the Murray Cemetery Association organized to care for the burial ground, which remains a memorial to the early settlers of southwest Milam County. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2007
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
First known as Pleasant Grove Cemetery, this Milam County burial ground shared its site with the community's school and church, its earliest marked grave dating to 1856. It took its lasting name from Madison Murray, a Civil War veteran who moved from Mississippi in the late 1860s, became a community leader, and ran the old schoolhouse as a private academy. As settlements rose and faded, the cemetery went on serving the Pleasant Grove, Bushdale, and Bethlehem communities, cared for by an association organized in 2004.
Why it matters
Murray Cemetery preserves the layered story of settlement, education, and worship in southwest Milam County, where a single site served generations of pioneers.
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Related people
- · Madison Murray
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
St. Thomas Episcopal Church
Rockdale, TX
Rockdale's first Episcopal services were held in a store in 1875, shared with other faiths, before Bishop Alexander Gregg organized St. Thomas Mission in 1876. The congregation bought this site in 1879 with a gift from the Solon Joynes family and raised a frame chapel in 1880, still preserved within the later church. A 1920s rector hand-carved the altar, and the growing parish added a hall and expanded the building in 1952.
First Baptist Church of Rockdale
Rockdale, TX
Rockdale grew up around a railroad camp in 1873, and the following year the Rev. B. B. Baxter gathered 18 charter members into a Baptist congregation that first met in a room above a dry-goods store. A simple sanctuary went up in 1881, replaced by a new building in 1919 as the church grew with the town. A Latin American mission begun in the 1950s later became its own Southern Baptist congregation.
Jewish Cemetery
Rockdale, TX
When the railroad reached Rockdale in 1874, Jewish merchants were among its earliest residents, including the Lowenstein brothers, who sold goods from a tent before the tracks even arrived. By 1879 some 100 Jewish residents supported an active B'nai B'rith lodge, and in 1877 the Hebrew Benevolent Association established this dedicated burial ground. Its graves—among them a Confederate veteran and victims of an 1888 hotel fire—chronicle a community whose last burial came in 1939.
Moss Ragsdale Cemetery
Rockdale, TX
This family burial ground dates to the 1850s, on land formally set aside in 1902 "to be used exclusively as a burying ground." It is named for Matthew Moss—a Virginia-born War of 1812 veteran and Red River steamboat man who brought his family to Milam County around 1845—and his son-in-law James Ragsdale, a veteran of the Texas Revolution and the first person buried here. Several Confederate veterans and members of the extended Moss family lie nearby, close to the vanished townsite of San Andres.