Routh Cemetery
Richardson, Collin County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Brothers Jacob, George Washington, Joseph and Thomas Jefferson Routh, and their sister Elizabeth Routh Thomas, were cousins of the Vance Family which held the original land grant that encompassed this site. Jacob Routh (1818-1879), a Baptist minister, acquired the 440-acre J. V. Vance survey in 1851, and brought his mother and other relatives from Tennessee to Texas. The Routh family were instrumental in the establishment of the community surrounding their land. Routh family members helped to organize a school, church, and store in addition to the family cemetery. Early Collin County settlers Nancy De Lozier Beverly (1806-1851)and seven year old William Klepper, along with an unknown child whose parents were camping nearby at the time of his death, were already buried on this site when Jacob Routh set aside one acre as a family burial ground. Jacob's mother, Elizabeth Mashman Routh (1788-1852), died soon after her arrival in Texas and was the first family member to be interred here. Jacob Routh, his wife Lodemia Ann Campbell, and two unmarried daughters, Rose and Clara Routh, are buried several hundred yards north of the cemetery in a private plot. Of the approximately two hundred graves here, fewer than one hundred are marked. The last burial to occur here was that of Serefta Ellen Campbell Miller, who was born in 1836 and dies in 1922. The Routh cemetery continues to serve as a record of the pioneers of north Texas. (1998)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Baptist minister Jacob Routh acquired a 440-acre survey here in 1851 and brought his mother and kin from Tennessee, helping organize a school, church, and store that grew into a community. When he set aside an acre as a family burial ground, a few early settlers already lay there, including a woman, a seven-year-old boy, and an unknown child. Of roughly two hundred graves, fewer than half are marked, the last burial coming in 1922.
Why it matters
Pioneer family cemeteries like Routh are among the most durable records of the settlers who first broke and built north Texas, preserving names that would otherwise be lost.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the blackland prairie of what is now Collin County was open, promising, and thinly settled — a place where a family with faith and stamina could carve out a homeplace from the tall grass. The land here had been organized into surveys, tied back to an early land grant, and men who could farm and lead were exactly what the raw country needed.
Jacob Routh arrived in 1851, at the leading edge of that settlement wave. The nation to the east was already tightening toward the crisis that would become the Civil War, but out here the daily reality was simpler and harder: break the sod, raise a crop, bury your dead, and try to hold a community together across the miles.
Into that landscape came whole families rather than lone pioneers. The Rouths brought kin from Tennessee and set about doing the unglamorous work that turns a survey line on a map into a place with a name — and, eventually, a cemetery to remember it by.
People & events
Jacob Routh was a Baptist minister, and it shows in how his family built their corner of the prairie. In 1851 he acquired the 440-acre Vance survey — land connected by kinship to the Vance family who held the original grant — and he did not come alone. He brought his mother and other relatives up from Tennessee, planting a clan rather than a homestead.
With his brothers George Washington, Joseph, and Thomas Jefferson Routh, and his sister Elizabeth, the family helped organize the practical machinery of a community: a school, a church, and a store. These were the three institutions that told scattered farm families a real settlement had taken root.
Grief came quickly, as it so often did on the frontier. Jacob set aside one acre as a family burial ground, but a few graves were already there — an early settler named Nancy De Lozier Beverly, a seven-year-old boy named William Klepper, and an unknown child whose parents were only passing through, camped nearby when the child died. Jacob's mother, Elizabeth Mashman Routh, who had died soon after reaching Texas, became the first of the family laid to rest here. The burials continued for generations, the last coming in 1922 with Serefta Ellen Campbell Miller.
Its place in the American story
Across the nineteenth century, America was settled not chiefly by armies or governments but by families like the Rouths — people who loaded their lives onto wagons, followed relatives who had gone ahead, and rebuilt church, school, and store wherever they stopped. Their story is the American westward story in miniature.
What makes a pioneer cemetery so valuable is that it outlasts almost everything else those settlers made. The cabins rot, the first stores close, the crossroads shift — but the burial ground endures, holding names that appear in no other record. Of the roughly two hundred graves here, fewer than half are marked, a plain reminder of how much of ordinary frontier life was never written down at all.
A place like this is a primary source in the most literal sense. It preserves the arithmetic of settlement — who came, who died young, who lived into old age — for the people who first turned this prairie into farmland and community.
If you visit
Come to Routh Cemetery in the spirit of quiet attention rather than spectacle. This is a resting place, and its power is in what it has kept safe: the names of the people who first settled this stretch of North Texas.
Walk the marked stones and let the dates do their work. You will find the long span of a life that reached into the 1920s and, elsewhere, the short heartbreaking span of a child. Remember, too, that for every stone you can read, there is likely another grave nearby with no marker at all — the unmarked outnumber the marked here.
It fits naturally into a day spent tracing the older layers of Collin County. Stand a moment, read a few names aloud if you like, and consider that a family of Tennessee emigrants built the school, church, and store that once surrounded this ground — and that this acre is the piece of it that remains.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Jacob Routh
- · Elizabeth Mashman Routh
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Plano Cemetery
Plano, TX
This graveyard lies on a Peters Colony land grant held by Joseph Klepper, an Illinois immigrant who reached Collin County around 1845. It holds the graves of five Peters colonists and their families alongside other early settlers, and over time became the community's only burial ground for its Black residents. The cemetery has long been tied to the First Methodist Church, which once stood on adjacent land Klepper deeded.
First Baptist Church of Plano
Plano, TX
Established in 1852 as the Spring Creek Baptist Church on land owned by Jacob Routh, this congregation formally organized in 1853 and helped form the Elm Fork Baptist Association a year later. When the railroad reached Plano in 1872, the church took the town's name and built a new sanctuary here, becoming First Baptist around 1936 as the oldest Baptist congregation in Plano. Over the decades it helped plant several other area churches and sustained wide-ranging mission work.
Blewett Cemetery
Richardson, TX
When the Rev. George L. Blewett's daughter Ann died in 1855, he opened this ground for family and community burials. A Cumberland Presbyterian minister, Blewett had come to Texas from Kentucky in 1853 with his family and fellow pioneers. Nine of his children lie here alongside George and his wife Nancy, and for decades it served as one of the primary burial grounds for the Richardson community.
First Baptist Church of Richardson
Richardson, TX
Founded in 1865 as Mt. Calvary Baptist Church with nineteen charter members, this congregation first met in the Elm Grove Schoolhouse before pioneer William Huffhines donated two acres for a sanctuary. In 1885 the members voted to move five miles north to the new railroad town of Richardson, where a succession of sanctuaries rose and fell to storms over the decades. The church took its present name in 1954.