Pleasant Grove Methodist Episcopal Church South Cemetery
New Salem, Rusk County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The East Texas farming community of Pleasant Grove, also known as "Shake Rag", was established during the 1850s by southern planters. Among the first settlers were Judge Stephen Decatur Morris (1819-1898) and his wife, Mary (Bradford) (1823-1906), on whose plantation early Methodist worship services in the area were held. About 1853, a sanctuary for the Pleasant Grove Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was built. The Methodist cemetery was established here in 1873, with the burial of James Bradford Morris (b. 1856). He was the son of Stephen and Mary Morris. Others buried here include Dr. Richard H.C. Shelton, an eminent southwestern surgeon; other friends and relatives of Stephen and Mary Morris; and pioneer settlers. Church trustees Seaton Moore, Simpson Moore, and G.D. Boatwright purchased this land for the church and cemetery in 1877. The Pleasant Grove church eventually disbanded, with the remaining members joining St. Paul's Methodist Church in Henderson (11 mi. NE). By 1929, the year of the last burial in this graveyard, most Methodist families were using the City Cemetery in Henderson. The Pleasant Grove cemetery remains an important part of the record of early settlement in this part of Rusk County. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Settled in the 1850s by Southern planters and nicknamed "Shake Rag," the Pleasant Grove community held its first Methodist services on the plantation of Judge Stephen Decatur Morris. A sanctuary rose about 1853 and this cemetery was consecrated in 1873 with the burial of the Morrises' young son. Among those laid to rest here are pioneer settlers and a noted surgeon, marking the graveyard as a record of early East Texas settlement.
Why it matters
The cemetery preserves the story of the Southern planters who carried their world westward into East Texas, one of countless communities that shaped the antebellum and postwar rural South.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1850s, East Texas was filling up fast. Texas had joined the Union only a few years before, and families from the older states of the Deep South were moving west in large numbers. They were looking for cheap, fertile land for cotton and corn. Rusk County, with its red-clay hills, pine woods and creek bottoms, drew many of them. They brought their customs, their churches and their plantation economy with them.
That economy rested on slavery. The planters who settled communities like Pleasant Grove brought enslaved people with them, and those people cleared the fields and worked the crops that made the region prosper. Any honest account of an antebellum East Texas plantation community has to remember them too, even when the surviving records name only the landowners.
The church these settlers built also belongs to that moment. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was born in 1844, when American Methodism split in two over slavery. For a Southern farming family in 1850s Texas, belonging to the Southern Methodist church meant carrying a whole regional identity into a new land.
The cemetery itself dates from a later and harder era. It began in 1873, during Reconstruction, when the old plantation order had collapsed after the Civil War and rural communities across the South were working out what came next. Over the following decades it recorded the slow change that came to so many country congregations: people drifted toward the towns, and the old gathering places emptied.
People & events
The story of Pleasant Grove begins with a family. Stephen Decatur Morris, later known as Judge Morris, and his wife Mary, born a Bradford, were among the first to settle here. Before the community had a church building, Methodist neighbors gathered on the Morris plantation to worship. Picture early frontier religion in a place like this: services in a home or a shaded yard, a traveling preacher, and neighbors who had come a long way on horseback or by wagon.
About 1853, the congregation had grown enough to build a proper sanctuary for the Pleasant Grove Methodist Episcopal Church, South. The settlement also picked up a nickname, Shake Rag. Many Southern communities carried that colorful name. Its origin here isn't recorded on the marker, and the folk explanations told elsewhere can't be confirmed for this place.
The cemetery began with a family's grief. In 1873 the Morrises buried their son James Bradford Morris, born in 1856, and his grave became the first in this ground. Relatives and friends of Stephen and Mary were later laid to rest nearby, along with pioneer settlers of the surrounding countryside. So was Dr. Richard H.C. Shelton, remembered on the marker as an eminent surgeon of the Southwest, which shows that this quiet rural graveyard held people of real standing in their day.
In 1877, church trustees Seaton Moore, Simpson Moore and G.D. Boatwright formally bought the land for the church and cemetery. Over time, though, the congregation dwindled. The remaining members eventually joined St. Paul's Methodist Church in Henderson, about eleven miles away, and by 1929 most Methodist families were burying their dead in Henderson's City Cemetery. The last burial at Pleasant Grove took place that year. Stephen Morris had died in 1898 and Mary in 1906.
Its place in the American story
Pleasant Grove is a small example of one of the largest movements in nineteenth-century American history: the westward spread of the Southern cotton frontier. Families like the Morrises carried a complete way of life from the older South into Texas, including its crops, its churches and its system of enslaved labor. They reproduced it on new ground with remarkable speed. Much of East Texas took shape this way in the years just before the Civil War.
The church's name tells part of that national story. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, existed because a question about slavery had already divided one of the country's largest denominations more than fifteen years before the nation itself split. Wherever a congregation of the Southern church rose on the Texas frontier, it carried that division with it.
The cemetery's later history reflects another widespread American pattern: the decline of the country church. Across the rural South and Midwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, better roads, growing towns and changing farm economies pulled people away from crossroads communities. Congregations merged into town churches, and old graveyards fell quiet. Pleasant Grove's move to Henderson was repeated thousands of times across the country.
The marker was dedicated during the Texas Sesquicentennial in 1986. Places like this are often the only surviving record of the communities that settled a region. Their stones hold names and dates that may appear nowhere else.
If you visit
Come here expecting quiet. This is a small, historic country graveyard in the East Texas countryside near New Salem, not a staffed attraction. Its appeal is its stillness and a real sense of the nineteenth century. Walk slowly and read the stones. The oldest graves here date from the 1870s, and you may notice the family names the marker mentions.
As you walk, look for the grave that started it all, a child's burial in 1873, and think about what it meant for a family to choose this spot as sacred ground. Old rural cemeteries often have weathered markers, hand-carved stones and family plots grouped together. Please treat every grave gently. Don't make rubbings on fragile stones, and stay on paths where they exist.
This stop fits naturally into an East Texas back-roads drive. Henderson, the Rusk County seat, is about eleven miles to the northeast. It is where the Pleasant Grove congregation eventually went, and it makes a good base for exploring the county's history. Pair a visit here with other Rusk County markers and you'll start to see how the region grew from scattered plantations and churches into the towns you drive through today.
Check road conditions and access before you go. Country cemeteries can sit on narrow rural roads, and some sit near private land.
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
- · Stephen Decatur Morris
- · Mary Bradford Morris
- · Richard H.C. Shelton
Themes & tags
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