Pelham Cemetery
Frost, Navarro County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This cemetery has served the African American community of Pelham since the late 19th century. Established in the years following the Civil War, Pelham was at first organized by free men who had recently received their freedom. Most early residents were farmers, and agriculture continues to play an important role in the community. The settlement was originally known as Fork of the Creeks, as three creeks (Ash, White Rock and Richland) came together just south of the settlement. Today, the junction is under the waters of Navarro Mills Lake. The earliest marked burial is that of Isaac Franklin (d. 1880), although there may be earlier, unmarked graves. Another early burial is of Elizabeth Allen (d. 1882). Members of early families, including the Caruthers (Carruthers), Porters and Stanfords, constitute other notable burials here. The cemetery is divided by a road into a western and an eastern portion, both of which contain graves. The Pelham Cemetery Association, established to care for the site in the late 1930s, still maintains the historical burial ground. Today, Pelham Cemetery continues to serve area residents. It is a testament to the hardships experienced by past and present Pelham residents, who continued on despite adversity ranging from slavery in the 1800s to displacements caused by the construction of nearby Navarro Mills Lake. Residents of Pelham treasure the heritage and history reflected in this community cemetery. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2006
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Pelham Cemetery has served an African American community founded in the years after the Civil War by freedpeople who had recently gained their liberty. Originally called Fork of the Creeks for the three streams that met nearby, the farming settlement buried its earliest known resident, Isaac Franklin, in 1880. Families like the Caruthers, Porters, and Stanfords rest here, and a community association has cared for the grounds since the late 1930s.
Why it matters
The cemetery testifies to the resilience of a freedmen's community that endured from the hardships of slavery to the displacement caused by a twentieth-century reservoir.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Pelham Cemetery belongs to one of the most hopeful and hard-won chapters in Texas history: the years right after the Civil War, when people who had been enslaved took their first steps as free men and women. Across the South in the late 1860s and 1870s, freedpeople gathered to build the things that freedom required — churches, schools, farms of their own, and burial grounds where their dead could rest with dignity.
The land here in Navarro County was well suited to farming, and the community that formed took its first name from the water that shaped it: Fork of the Creeks, for the meeting of Ash, White Rock, and Richland creeks just to the south. Most early residents worked the soil, and agriculture has remained central to Pelham's identity ever since.
This was the Reconstruction and Gilded Age landscape — a time when Black communities in rural Texas carved out independent lives against enormous odds, and when the ground they claimed and the cemeteries they consecrated became lasting declarations that they belonged.
People & events
The cemetery has served Pelham's African American community since the late nineteenth century. Its earliest marked grave is that of Isaac Franklin, who died in 1880, though the marker itself acknowledges that there may be older, unmarked burials — a reminder of how much of this history was recorded only in memory. Another early resting place belongs to Elizabeth Allen, who died in 1882.
Around these first graves gathered the families who built the settlement — names like Caruthers (sometimes spelled Carruthers), Porters, and Stanfords, whose members are among the notable burials here. The grounds are divided by a road into a western and an eastern portion, both holding graves, a layout that itself tells of generations added over time.
In the late 1930s, community members organized the Pelham Cemetery Association to care for the site, and it tends the grounds to this day. That act of stewardship carried the community through a wrenching later chapter: the creation of Navarro Mills Lake, whose waters now cover the very junction of creeks that gave the settlement its first name. From slavery in the 1800s to displacement by a twentieth-century reservoir, Pelham's people kept going.
Its place in the American story
After emancipation, hundreds of communities founded by freedpeople took root across the South, and their cemeteries are among the most powerful records we have of that generation. Where courthouse ledgers and census pages often reduced formerly enslaved people to a single line, a burial ground preserved their names, their families, and their claim to the land — a form of history written in stone by the community itself.
Pelham's story also captures a pattern repeated throughout twentieth-century America: the building of dams and reservoirs that brought water and recreation to some while flooding the places others called home. That a freedmen's community should be tested first by slavery and later by displacement is a hard truth of the national experience, and the cemetery stands as evidence of endurance through both.
To walk here is to understand that African American history is not a footnote to the American story but woven through its center — in the fields that were farmed, the associations that were formed, and the graves that were faithfully kept.
If you visit
A historic cemetery asks for a quiet, respectful visit, and Pelham rewards one. Notice how the grounds are split into western and eastern sections by the road; reading the older headstones, including that of Isaac Franklin from 1880, is a way of meeting the community's first generation face to face.
Look, too, for the family names that recur across the markers — Caruthers, Porters, Stanfords — and you begin to sense the web of kinship that held this farming settlement together. The care of the grounds reflects generations of devotion by the Pelham Cemetery Association, so tread gently and leave everything as you found it.
The setting near Navarro Mills Lake carries its own poignancy: somewhere beneath those waters lies the meeting of three creeks that first gave the place its name. If your travels take you through the Navarro County countryside, a pause here offers something a museum cannot — the feeling of standing where a free community made its home and honored its dead, and does so still.
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
- · Isaac Franklin
- · Elizabeth Allen
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Wesley Chapel Methodist Church
Frost, TX
Organized in 1877 at the forks of Richland and Ash creeks by an itinerant Methodist preacher, this congregation first gathered in a log schoolhouse before building its own sanctuaries, rebuilt in 1911 and again in 1934. It became a cornerstone of the rural, historically African-American Pelham community—home to the Sunday school where the area's children learned and the outreach that sustained its members young and old.
Ash Creek (Pelham) School
Frost, TX
Founded in 1899 in the historically African-American community of Pelham, this school first met in the local Methodist chapel before a two-story schoolhouse rose near the cemetery in 1908. Uncommon for a rural Black school of its era, it taught all twelve grades, sending graduates on to college. In 1921 its trustees drew on the Chicago-based Rosenwald Foundation—Julius Rosenwald's landmark partnership with Southern Black communities—to build a larger school, which served until consolidation in the 1960s.
Pelham Community
Frost, TX
Founded by Black families after 1866 and first called Forks of the Creek, Pelham was one of the freedmen's communities that took root in Texas after emancipation. Its residents organized churches — Wesley Methodist, Brown's Chapel A.M.E., and Union Baptist — the first of which also housed the community's school. Renamed Pelham when it won a post office in 1898, the town peaked at 350 people in 1926; though its stores, gin, and schools are gone, its heritage endures.
The Savage Schools
Malone, TX
Three schools in this Hill County area carried the Savage name, beginning with a one-room school on land donated by George W. Savage in 1885, where classes bent around the rhythms of farm work. A second school in the Walling community later folded its students into the growing original. A third, the Savage Colored School, taught Black children of the area until they transferred to Pelham School in neighboring Navarro County, and the last Savage school closed its doors in 1950.