Skinner Cemetery
Pilot Point, Denton County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In the early days of Pilot Point, Lucinda (Glasscock) and Richard Skinner set aside a 2.44-acre piece of land to be used as a cemetery. The first recorded burial was that of 5-year-old Josiah Taylor in March of 1858; his father, Josiah Sr., died the following July. Predominantly of Anglo-Saxon Protestant descent, most of those buried here came from Kentucky, Virginia, Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Many were farmers or ranchers. Significant graves include that of J. D. Merchant, Sr., a local businessman who built the first brick building in the area. Also here are several victims of yellow fever, including Prissie and Sarah Wilson, sisters who died within 2 months of one another during the epidemic of 1872 and 1873. Two people named James Graham, born on the same date two years apart, died on the same September day in 1867. Lucinda Skinner, the last charter member of the Pilot Point First Baptist Church, died in 1890. By 1900, there were probably 200 graves in the cemetery. The land was sold by John Skinner to the Skinner Cemetery Association in 1905; the last recorded burial was that of Joe Mylo Phipps, an infant who died in 1928. The Skinner Cemetery remains a vital link to the early settlers of the Pilot Point community. (1998) HTC medallion added to post 2012.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In Pilot Point's early days, Lucinda and Richard Skinner set aside two and a half acres for a cemetery, and the first recorded burial—five-year-old Josiah Taylor—came in 1858. Most of those laid to rest were Protestant families from Kentucky, Virginia, Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee who had followed the frontier westward to farm and ranch. The stones record the hazards of the age, including sisters lost to the yellow fever epidemic of 1872–73, and by 1900 the ground held perhaps 200 graves.
Why it matters
Skinner Cemetery is a quiet archive of the Upper South migrants who settled North Texas and the epidemics that shadowed frontier life.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Skinner Cemetery was born in the earliest days of Pilot Point, when North Texas was a destination for families pushing west out of the Upper South in search of land. Texas offered exactly what they wanted: open country to farm and ranch, and room to build a community from the ground up. Setting aside a few acres for a cemetery was one of the first acts of permanence such settlers performed.
The graves here span the frontier era through Reconstruction and the Gilded Age — decades in which a scattering of homesteads slowly became a real town. The people who filled this ground were overwhelmingly of Anglo-Saxon Protestant background, and their origins read like a map of the American migration routes of the age: Kentucky, Virginia, Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee. They carried the customs, faith, and family names of the Upper South into a new Texas landscape.
Life in that world was rewarding and precarious in equal measure. The land could make a family, but disease, accident, and the ordinary dangers of a pre-modern age could unmake one just as fast. A frontier cemetery is the honest ledger of both.
People & events
The cemetery owes its existence to Lucinda Glasscock Skinner and Richard Skinner, who set aside a small parcel — under two and a half acres — for the community's dead. The first recorded burial, in March of 1858, was a five-year-old boy, Josiah Taylor; heartbreakingly, his father, Josiah Sr., followed him into the ground that same July. That pairing of names, months apart, opens the whole story of the place.
Among the notable graves is that of J. D. Merchant, Sr., a local businessman remembered for building the first brick structure in the area — a small but telling sign of a frontier settlement putting down permanent roots. Other stones carry the weight of epidemic disease: sisters Prissie and Sarah Wilson, who died within two months of one another during the yellow fever outbreak of 1872–73, are buried here among other victims of that scourge.
The ground holds curiosities as well as tragedies — two men both named James Graham, born on the same date two years apart, who died on the very same September day in 1867. Lucinda Skinner herself, the last surviving charter member of the Pilot Point First Baptist Church, was laid to rest in 1890. By 1900 the cemetery held perhaps 200 graves; the land passed to the Skinner Cemetery Association in 1905, and the last recorded burial, an infant named Joe Mylo Phipps, came in 1928.
Its place in the American story
Skinner Cemetery is a compact record of one of the great population movements in American history: the migration of Upper South families westward across the frontier line. The states named on these stones — Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Missouri, Arkansas — trace the very roads that carried American settlement toward and across Texas. Here, that abstract national story becomes a list of real families who made the journey and stayed.
The yellow fever dead connect this quiet ground to a terror that stalked 19th-century America. Before the disease's cause was understood, epidemics could sweep through a community and take the young and healthy within days. The Wilson sisters, gone within two months of each other, put a human face on a public-health crisis the whole country wrestled with.
And in the grave of the man who built the first brick building, you can see in miniature the transformation that played out across thousands of American towns — the slow shift from temporary frontier shelter to permanence, from passing through to belonging.
If you visit
Skinner Cemetery rewards the visitor who slows down. This is a peaceful, historic burial ground near Pilot Point, and its stories live in the inscriptions, so plan to read carefully rather than simply pass through. An HTC medallion marks its recognized historical status.
Seek out the earliest graves from the late 1850s, and look for the tight clusters of dates in the early 1870s that mark the yellow fever years — those groupings are the visible trace of an epidemic the community endured together. The many small graves are a sober reminder of how heavily childhood mortality once weighed on frontier families.
It makes a fine stop on a road trip through the historic small towns and open ranch country north of the Dallas–Fort Worth area, where the landscape still carries the feel of the frontier these families crossed. Take a few minutes to stand among the Upper South names carved into the stones and consider the long journeys — and the losses — that brought each of them to rest in North Texas soil.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Lucinda Skinner
- · Richard Skinner
- · J. D. Merchant, Sr.
Themes & tags
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