Scott Cemetery

🏛️The era

In the 1850s, the blackland prairie of what is now Collin County was still frontier country. Settlers had come in large numbers only in the 1840s, many of them through the Peters Colony land-grant program, and Collin County itself was organized in 1846, shortly after Texas joined the Union. Families built farms on the rich soil, and small rural communities grew up around churches, schools, and burial grounds.

Those years were also the decade before the Civil War, and slavery was part of life in Texas. The state's enslaved population grew rapidly in the 1850s. Slavery was most concentrated in the cotton plantation counties of East and Southeast Texas, but enslaved people also lived and labored on farms across North Texas, often in small numbers within a single household.

Rural cemeteries from this era often began on a pioneer family's own land. With no established town graveyards nearby, families set aside a plot near home. As neighbors joined them over the years, those plots became community cemeteries, holding the story of everyone who lived and worked in the area, whether or not their graves were marked.

👥People & events

The cemetery takes its name from James Preston Scott, an area pioneer on whose land it was established. Its story begins with a small grave. Mary C. Taylor, Scott's granddaughter, was born in 1852 and died in 1854. She was the daughter of Scott's daughter Tabitha and her husband, A.J. Taylor. She was only about two years old when she became the first person buried here.

James Scott himself was a public figure. He was serving in the Texas Legislature when he died, and in 1858 he was buried in the cemetery that had begun with his granddaughter's grave. His burial joined his family's private grief to the larger civic life of early Texas.

The cemetery also holds people the record names only briefly. Two people enslaved by the family, Jake and Rhoda, are buried in the northwest corner of the graveyard. Their graves are unmarked, and the marker gives only their first names. We know almost nothing else about their lives, and that silence is itself part of the history of slavery: people whose labor built frontier farms often left few traces in the written record.

Today the cemetery holds more than 200 burials, at least 30 of them unmarked. It continues to serve the Bloomdale community and the rural area around it, a working burial ground with roots more than 160 years deep.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Scott Cemetery holds, in a single plot of ground, two sides of the antebellum American story. On one side are the pioneer families who settled new lands in the West, served in government, and built communities. On the other are enslaved people whose lives were bound to those families by force. Telling both stories honestly is what makes a place like this so valuable.

The naming of Jake and Rhoda on the historical marker matters. Across the South, the burial places of enslaved people were often left unmarked, forgotten, or lost to later development. A marker that acknowledges where they lie, even with so little information, recovers a small part of a history that was routinely erased.

The cemetery also reflects how quickly North Texas changed. Within a single lifetime, this land went from frontier settlement to established farm country, and the people who lived here went through statehood, civil war, emancipation, and everything that followed. A rural graveyard still in use today ties those generations together.

🧭If you visit

Scott Cemetery lies in the McKinney area of Collin County and serves the Bloomdale community and its rural surroundings. Although the region around it has grown rapidly, the cemetery remains a place of quiet reflection. Please visit respectfully, as it is still in active use.

As you walk the grounds, look for the older stones from the 1850s, among them the burial ground's earliest graves. Then make your way to the northwest corner, where Jake and Rhoda were laid to rest. There is no headstone to find there, and that is the point. Stand there a moment and remember that a third or more of the stories in many old cemeteries were never carved in stone.

This is a meaningful stop for anyone exploring the frontier and African American history of North Texas. It pairs well with a visit to historic McKinney, offering a quieter and more personal view of the people who lived in this region before and during the slavery era.