Pleasant Grove Cemetery

🏛️The era

The land that became Pleasant Grove Cemetery took its first grave in 1891, deep in the era historians call Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. By then the great push of settlement across the Texas frontier was well underway, and Collin County — north of the young city of Dallas — was filling with farming families drawn by rich blackland prairie soil.

This was pioneer country in the most literal sense. Life on the north Texas frontier was hard and often short. Medicine was rudimentary, distances to help were great, and childhood illness, childbirth, and infectious disease claimed lives that a later century might have saved. A rural burial ground was not a somber afterthought here but a civic necessity, one of the first shared institutions a scattered community built.

Threaded through all of this was a darker national history that reached back a half-century. The people who founded this place carried in their own family memory the forced removal of the Cherokee from their southeastern homelands to Indian Territory — the events that would later be remembered as the Trail of Tears. That history did not stay in the history books; it walked into Collin County in the person of the woman first laid to rest here.

👥People & events

The cemetery's story begins with Malissa Dodson Sides, who in March 1891 became the first person buried on this ground. Believed to have been of part–Native American descent, she and her Cherokee half-sister, Ellen Murphy, had lived through the U.S. government's relocation of the tribe when they were young. The two women survived that upheaval and, years later, made their way to Collin County from Indian Territory alongside Malissa's husband, Henry L. Sides.

Her grave might have remained a lone marker on open prairie had it not been for a second family. In October 1891, Franklin J. Rominger and his wife, Nancy Van Hues Rominger — charter members of the local Methodist congregation — donated an acre of land that included Mrs. Sides' resting place to the trustees of the Pleasant Grove Methodist Episcopal Church, South, to serve as a public burial ground. In one gesture a private grave became a community's cemetery.

The founders did not simply hand the place off; they stayed. The Romingers, Henry Sides, and Ellen Murphy are all interred here, joined over the generations by descendants of these and other pioneer families. For decades the cemetery's trustees kept the grounds through community effort — raising money with stew suppers and gathering each year for "decoration days," the old rural tradition of cleaning graves and laying flowers.

By a 1996 count the grounds held more than a thousand graves. Among them, in an older north section, lie 141 infants — a quiet, sobering record of how unforgiving frontier life could be. Seven Confederate veterans and fifty-two other veterans of American and international conflicts rest here as well.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

What makes this modest country cemetery resonate far beyond Collin County is the way two of the great currents of nineteenth-century American history meet in a single family plot. The removal of the Cherokee and the westward settlement of Texas are usually told as separate chapters. Here they are the same story, carried by the same people.

Malissa Sides and Ellen Murphy embody a truth often lost in the sweep of national narrative: the survivors of removal did not vanish. They lived on, raised families, migrated again, and helped build the very frontier communities that the era celebrated. Their presence at the founding of this cemetery folds the Cherokee experience directly into the settlement of north Texas rather than treating it as a closed episode elsewhere.

The cemetery also captures, in miniature, the ordinary machinery of American community-building — a church congregation, a donated acre, volunteers raising funds supper by supper, veterans of the nation's wars laid among farmers and their children. It is the story of how thousands of American places came to be, told in one acre of Texas prairie.

🧭If you visit

Come to a rural Texas cemetery like this one expecting quiet, and let the quiet do its work. This is a place to walk slowly and read stones, not to rush through.

Seek out the older north section, where the graves of the infants lie. Nothing on the grounds speaks more plainly about what pioneer families endured than that concentration of small markers. Nearby you'll find the resting places of the founders whose choices made the cemetery possible — and, if you look, the veterans' graves that tie this ground to the nation's wars.

As you stand here, remember that the woman buried first survived one of the hardest journeys in American history before ever reaching Texas. A cemetery can feel like a place where stories end, but this one is really about where they began: with people who endured removal, crossed into a new country, and put down roots that a community still tends today.

A stop like this fits naturally into a north Texas back-roads drive through Collin County, a chance to trade the interstate for the older layer of the landscape. Treat the grounds gently, keep to the paths between plots, and take the story with you rather than anything else.