Prairie Dale Cemetery
Hillsboro, Hill County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Established 1877 Historic Texas Cemetery - 2007
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Prairie Dale Cemetery was established in 1877, in the years when settlers were filling in the Blackland Prairie of Hill County. Recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2007, it marks the resting place of one of the area's early rural communities.
Why it matters
A frontier-era cemetery like Prairie Dale is often the last surviving trace of a farming community, preserving the memory of the families who first broke the prairie sod.
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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Eureka Cemetery
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Eureka Cemetery served a small farming community drawn to Hill County's rich blackland soil in the 1870s to grow cotton. The graveyard began, oral tradition says, with the burial of a young niece of landowner William R. Kimmons, though the earliest documented grave is that of an infant Kimmons son in 1887; of its twenty marked graves, thirteen belong to children under ten. With the old school and church long gone, the cemetery is the last physical trace of Eureka itself.
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Founded about 1851 on Jack's Branch, Lexington was Hill County's very first settlement—and, when the county organized in 1853, its only polling place. For four months two log cabins did double duty as a courthouse, until a special election moved the county seat to Hillsboro and Lexington faded away. The marker itself was relocated to the courthouse square in 2006.
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