Plum Grove Baptist Church and Cemetery
La Grange, Fayette County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This cemetery is the enduring physical reminder of the Baptist congregation that worshiped at this site from 1870 until about 1904. Plum Grove Baptist Church and the Pleasant Retreat Baptist Church of Christ combined their congregations in 1869 and built a sanctuary the following year. Church services were held once a month with annual revival meetings until the area population and church membership declined about the turn of the 20th century. The first burial in the church's cemetery, that of four-year-old William A. Routh, took place in 1872. Burials ceased in 1945, until a new section opened for interments in 1985. (2001)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When the Plum Grove and Pleasant Retreat Baptist congregations joined forces in 1869, they built a sanctuary the following year and worshiped here through monthly services and annual revivals until the community faded around 1900. The first burial, in 1872, was four-year-old William A. Routh, and the churchyard filled until interments ceased in 1945, resuming only when a new section opened in 1985. Today the cemetery is the enduring physical trace of a vanished rural congregation.
Why it matters
The cemetery marks the rise and quiet dissolution of the small country churches that once dotted post–Civil War rural Texas, outlasting the congregations that created them.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · William A. Routh
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Old Plum Grove Cemetery
West Point, TX
This ground began as a family plot when Texas pioneer John Y. Criswell—part of Stephen F. Austin's Third Colony—buried his wife Eleanor here, with the oldest grave dating to 1835. In 1839 the Plum Grove Baptist Church, one of the earliest Baptist congregations in Texas, took shape nearby, and in 1851 John Click deeded land for church and cemetery alike. As the town of West Point grew, the burial ground served the wider community, with separate sections that reflected the segregation of the era.
Fayette County Jail
La Grange, TX
When the Republic of Texas carved out Fayette County in 1837, the young town of La Grange became its seat of government, and a jail followed within a year. The stone building that stands today dates to 1883, raised after an arsonist destroyed its predecessor, with rock hauled from Buckner's Creek and Muldoon sandstone shaped into a solid, Victorian Gothic form. For more than a century it held prisoners and housed the sheriff's family before finding new life serving the community.
Rabb's Prairie
La Grange, TX
This corner of Fayette County bears the name of William Rabb, a Pennsylvania miller who joined Stephen F. Austin's first colony in 1821 and received one of the earliest and largest land grants in Texas. In exchange he promised to build a gristmill for the colony, importing one-ton grinding stones from Scotland and famously rigging them as makeshift wheels to haul the load some hundred miles by ox team. Rabb died in 1831 not long after, but his family helped shape early Texas, and the community took his name.
Cedar Cemetery
LaGrange, TX
The Lewis family settled the La Grange area in the 1830s and set aside this ground as a family burial place, where the earliest marked grave dates to 1857. German immigrants left a deep imprint here—records were kept in German until 1931 and their culture is carved into many of the tombstones. Renamed several times as it grew into a community cemetery, it holds veterans of every American conflict from Texas independence through the Korean War.