Old Hall Cemetery
Lewisville, Denton County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In the 1840's the Republic of Texas government granted colonization contracts to people who would advertise and bring new settlers to Texas. The Peters Colony, led by W. S. Peters, was located in North Texas and included the area later known as Denton County. In 1844 families began arriving in this area, including those of John and James Holford of Missouri. The place where the Holford families settled, on the prairie west of Big Spring Creek (Big Elm), became known as Holford Prairie. By 1855 a two-story building was constructed for use as a community meeting place. Referred to as Holford Prairie Hall, it housed a Masonic Lodge on the second floor, and the first floor was used for school and church purposes. This cemetery, situated next to the lodge building, became known as Old Hall Cemetery. The earliest graves date to the 1850s and include many infants and children. According to local oral tradition, the first burial may have been that of a man who died as his family was traveling through the area. The cemetery contains over one hundred twenty-five burials from the nineteenth century. A cemetery association, organized in 1972, maintains the historic graveyard. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the 1840s the Republic of Texas granted colonization contracts to promoters like W. S. Peters, whose Peters Colony drew families into what became Denton County. Among the 1844 arrivals were the Holford families of Missouri, who settled the prairie that took their name, and by 1855 a two-story hall there housed a Masonic lodge above a floor used for school and church. The adjoining Old Hall Cemetery holds more than 125 nineteenth-century burials, many of them infants and children.
Why it matters
The site captures how empresario colonization schemes populated North Texas, and how a single frontier building could serve as lodge, school, church, and the anchor for a community's cemetery.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1840s, Texas was not yet the state we know but a young and independent republic, land-rich and people-poor. To fill its vast interior, the government struck colonization contracts with promoters who promised to advertise the frontier and deliver families to it. This was the empresario system, and North Texas — the rolling blackland prairie that would become Denton County — was one of its blank spaces on the map.
Into that opening came the Peters Colony, named for W. S. Peters, one of the men who held such a contract. The pitch was simple and powerful: come west, and there is land here for you. For families squeezed for opportunity back east, a prairie in a brand-new republic could look like a second chance worth the risk of the journey.
When settlers began arriving in this area in 1844, they were stepping into open country far from courts, markets, and churches. Everything a community needed, it would have to build for itself — and that is exactly the story this quiet cemetery preserves.
People & events
Among the 1844 arrivals were the families of John and James Holford, who had come down from Missouri. They settled on the prairie west of Big Spring Creek — also called Big Elm — and the land took their name: Holford Prairie. That is how frontier geography was often written, not by surveyors but by the first family to stay.
By 1855 the settlers had raised a two-story building to serve as a common gathering place, Holford Prairie Hall. Its design tells you what a scattered community valued: the second floor housed a Masonic lodge, while the ground floor did double duty as school and church. One roof sheltered fellowship, learning, and worship — the three institutions a young settlement leaned on hardest.
Beside that hall grew the burial ground now known as Old Hall Cemetery. Its earliest graves date to the 1850s, and many of them belong to infants and children — a sober reminder of how fragile frontier life could be. Local tradition holds that the very first person laid to rest here may have been a man who died as his family was simply passing through, a stranger the community chose to bury as one of its own.
Its place in the American story
The American story of the mid-nineteenth century is in large part a story of movement — families pulling up stakes and heading toward land they had never seen, trusting that a community could be built from scratch once they arrived. Old Hall Cemetery is a small, honest witness to that national impulse, playing out on a Texas prairie.
It also captures something easy to forget about how the West was actually settled: not by lone pioneers but by institutions people carried with them. A single building that was lodge, school, and church at once shows how settlers reassembled the fabric of ordinary life as fast as they could raise the walls to hold it.
And the cemetery reminds us who paid the price of that expansion. More than one hundred and twenty-five nineteenth-century burials — so many of them children — are the ledger of ambition and loss that lies beneath nearly every settled place in the country.
If you visit
Come expecting quiet. This is a historic graveyard on open North Texas prairie, and its power is in its plainness — weathered nineteenth-century stones standing where a frontier hall once anchored a community that has otherwise faded into the landscape around Lewisville.
Walk the older rows and read the dates. You will notice how many mark short lives; the clustering of infants and children is the marker's hardest and most human fact, and standing among those small stones says more about pioneer life than any textbook can.
A cemetery association organized in 1972 has cared for the grounds ever since, so what you see is a place deliberately kept, not abandoned. If you're threading together the story of how North Texas filled in, this makes a fitting, contemplative stop — a good place to stand a few minutes and imagine a two-story hall, a schoolroom, and a congregation where now there is only grass and stone.
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
- · W. S. Peters
- · John Holford
- · James Holford
Related events
- · Peters Colony settlement
Themes & tags
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