Rockford Church and Cemetery
Biardstown, Lamar County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Before April 1864 church was founded by Cumberland Presbyterians, with the Rev. W. W. Havanaugh as pastor. Congregation affiliated in 1925 with Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.; and in 1958 was dissolved. Cemetery was opened as early as 1874; has more than 1,000 graves. (1972)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On the eve of the Civil War's final year, Cumberland Presbyterians gathered in rural Lamar County to found the Rockford church under the Rev. W. W. Havanaugh. The congregation later joined the larger Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., before dissolving in 1958, but its cemetery—opened by the mid-1870s—endured and grew to more than a thousand graves. The burial ground remains the community's lasting mark on the North Texas prairie.
Why it matters
Frontier congregations and their graveyards were the first permanent institutions of newly settled country, binding scattered farm families into communities.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · W. W. Havanaugh
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Antioch Cemetery and Old Antioch Church of Christ
Biardstown, TX
Founded in the first years of Texas statehood between 1846 and 1848, this was the first Church of Christ in Lamar County, organized by Elder Thomas Barrett with the pioneer family of Rebecca Stone Biard, who had come from Alabama to start the Biardstown community. William W. Biard donated his 20-foot log cabin—outfitted with split-log seats and a stick-and-dirt chimney—for the first sanctuary, and at his mother's death in 1848 he gave the land for the cemetery, where her grave was the first. Both the log church and its successor doubled as community schools, and though the congregation disbanded around 1920, burials continue to this day.
George Washington Stell, Sr.
Paris, TX
Born in Virginia in 1793 and a veteran of the War of 1812, George Washington Stell, Sr. joined the wave of settlers pouring into the young Republic of Texas in the late 1830s. A farmer, surveyor, and builder who was deaf, he raised the first courthouse in Paris after it became the Lamar County seat in 1844. He also charted the Central National Road, a 130-mile artery from the Trinity River to the Red River that helped draw settlers into northeast Texas.
Shady Grove Cemetery
Paris, TX
This shaded grove near a creek crossing began as a resting place in 1844 for a dying young traveler who asked to be buried in the beautiful spot, and it soon became ground for camp meetings led by traveling frontier preachers. A local family deeded the land in the 1840s, and a Methodist church grew directly from those open-air revivals. An adjoining African American burial ground, its earliest marked grave from 1875, tells of the Black community that lived and worshiped alongside.
Thomas Wilson Stegall
Lake Creek, TX
Thomas Wilson Stegall was born in North Carolina in 1832, served as a Confederate private late in the Civil War, and moved his large family through Tennessee and Mississippi before settling in Delta County, Texas, in 1873. A Baptist preacher remembered for his kindness—he once cut a gap in his prized rose hedge just to give a neighbor a shortcut—he built a blacksmith shop that became the gathering place at the heart of the new town of Lake Creek. From that community nucleus a town grew.