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.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · W. S. Peters
- · John Holford
- · James Holford
Related events
- · Peters Colony settlement
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
McCurley Cemetery
Lewisville, TX
The McCurley family came from Illinois to settle Denton County in 1852, and George Collins McCurley set aside land here for a burial ground, church, and school. His brother Abraham, who died in 1871, was the first family member laid to rest, and by 1877 neighbors were burying their dead here too. When Lewisville Lake was created in 1951, all 106 graves had to be relocated to this spot beside Old Hall Cemetery, where George McCurley himself is buried.
Peters Colony
Lewisville, TX
In 1841 the Republic of Texas granted W. S. Peters and his partners an empresario contract to plant hundreds of colonist families across this stretch of the frontier, promising each a cabin, seed, and hundreds of free acres. Despite internal upheavals and settlers' resentment over the company's land share — which boiled over into the 1852 "Hedgcoxe War" that drove out the company agent — some 1,800 colonists had arrived by 1848. The colony's reach eventually spread over five counties encompassing what became one of the state's largest metropolitan regions.
Bethel Community
Flower Mound, TX
Settlement of this stretch of Denton County began in the 1850s with pioneer families like the Smiths, Nowlins, Crawfords, and Lusks, who carved farms out of the prairie. The Frie and Nowlin families set aside land for a school and church, and after Bethel Presbyterian Church organized in 1883 the whole community took its name, growing to about a hundred families. Bypassed by the railroad in 1875, Bethel gradually faded in favor of Lewisville, and its farmland was eventually absorbed into Flower Mound and neighboring towns.
Milliken House
Lewisville, TX
William Dickerson Milliken, a Kentucky-born merchant, opened a store in Lewisville in 1877 and the following year built this frame house of native oak. The siding tells its own story of a pre-railroad economy: it was freighted overland from Jefferson, the busy riverport of East Texas. Home to Milliken, his wife Margaret, and their eight children, the house earned Recorded Texas Historic Landmark status in 1969.