Pleasant Grove Cemetery
Bettie, Upshur County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Many of the pioneer families who settled in this area and established the Lafayette community in the 1850s immigrated from the southern United States. The 1860 burial of one-year-old Thomas J. Harrison, son of Georgia immigrants Abram and Harriet Harrison, is the first recorded in the cemetery. Land for church and cemetery purposes was set aside by J. M. Brison in 1870. Iron ore, mined commercially here in the 1890s, was used to mark several grave sites of the area's earliest settlers. The cemetery is maintained by an association organized in 1973. (1994)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the 1850s, families from the Deep South pushed into the piney woods of East Texas and founded the Lafayette community, burying their dead in what became Pleasant Grove Cemetery — the first grave, in 1860, that of a one-year-old child of Georgia immigrants. Land was formally set aside for church and cemetery use in 1870, and in a distinctly local touch, iron ore mined commercially nearby in the 1890s was used to mark the graves of the area's earliest settlers.
Why it matters
A pioneer burial ground like this one maps the quiet, everyday story of Southern migration into antebellum Texas and the tight-knit farm communities that took root there.
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Related people
- · Thomas J. Harrison
- · Abram Harrison
- · Harriet Harrison
- · J. M. Brison
Themes & tags
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