HistoricSiteMarkers
Reconstruction & Gilded Age

Reno Historic African American Cemetery

Reno, Lamar County, Texas

Marker Inscription

Established 1888. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2017

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

Established in 1888, this burial ground served the African American community of Reno, Texas, in the decades after emancipation. Though its marker records only a founding date, the cemetery itself is a lasting record of the families who lived, worked, and were laid to rest here, and it carries an official Historic Texas Cemetery designation.

Why it matters

Historic Black cemeteries preserve the presence and dignity of post-emancipation communities whose stories were too often left out of the written record.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

Paris Public Schools

Paris, TX

Paris organized its modern public school system in 1884 after earlier efforts, when civic leaders and Mayor John C. Gibbons appointed a board of trustees. Three schools opened that year, among them a school for Black students that later became Gibbons High School. Under long-serving superintendent J. G. Wooten the system expanded, even absorbing Paris Junior College from 1924 to 1949.

St. Paul Baptist Church

Paris, TX

Organized in 1867, just after the Civil War, St. Paul Baptist Church became one of the founding congregations of the Zion District Baptist Association in 1872. Its first pastor, the Rev. Elisha Barnes, served two decades and led members to build their first sanctuary around 1876, and a later brick church rose under the Rev. C. N. Hampton before it was lost in the great Paris fire of 1916. The present church was completed under the Rev. J. H. Harris, and generations of pastors have carried the congregation forward.

Mt. Canaan Baptist Church

Paris, TX

After emancipation, freedpeople in Paris gathered in informal prayer meetings, drawn to Baptist worship for its message of equal redemption. Rev. Sam McCarley formally organized Mt. Canaan Baptist Church in 1886 in the "TP" neighborhood beside the Texas & Pacific Railroad, where the booming cotton industry employed many Black workers. The congregation built its lasting church in 1900 and has served the same community β€” mill workers, ginners, and teachers at the segregated Bankhead school β€” ever since.

Old Cemetery of Paris

Paris, TX

On land once owned by George Washington Wright, founder of Paris, this was the town's primary burial ground from 1845 to 1865, its oldest grave said to be that of a free Black man who worked for Wright. When the newer Evergreen Cemetery opened in 1866, many graves were moved, yet Wright himself was buried here in 1877, and a granite marker honors soldiers of the 9th Texas Infantry, C.S.A., who died in a measles epidemic in 1862. Of roughly 325 graves, about a hundred stones survive, most from 1870 to 1910.