Smith Cemetery
Lewisville, Denton County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This area of Denton County was known as Holford's Prairie in the mid-19th century, named for brothers John and James Halford (Holford), pioneer settlers who obtained 640 acres of land as members of the Peters Colony. Basdeal W. Lewis platted the town of Lewisville in 1853. Thomas Morgan (1814-1887) and Elizabeth A. (1815-1883) Smith purchased 318 acres of land here in 1859. They sold two and one-half acres of their farmland to the Lewisville Masonic Lodge in 1881 for the establishment of a community cemetery. The site had been used as a burial ground since 1862, when the Smiths' 20-year-old son, James J. Smith, died and was buried on the family farm. His is the earliest marked grave in the Smith Cemetery. Among the pioneer Denton County family names that can be seen on gravestones here are Herod, Sherrill, Clayton, Skillern, Cobb, Jenkins, Temple, Bourland, Hamilton, Fenlaw, Oliver and Fox. John Moore (1834-1922) and Ann Eliza (1849-1923) Fox had the sad task of burying six children here between 1863 and 1882, a testament to the often harsh conditions of pioneer life. Local oral history records suggest that some of the unmarked graves in the Smith Cemetery are those of former slaves of the Julius Kane Fox family. The Smith Cemetery Association, organized in 1950 to maintain the historic graveyard, purchased the site from the Masonic lodge in 1972. Currently containing more than 400 marked graves and an unknown number of unmarked ones, the cemetery remains in use by the community and by descendants of the pioneer families interred here. (2001)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This area was known as Holford's Prairie for the pioneer Halford brothers who claimed 640 acres through the Peters Colony, and Basdeal Lewis platted nearby Lewisville in 1853. Thomas and Elizabeth Smith bought farmland here in 1859, and after their 20-year-old son died in 1862 the family began a burial ground that in 1881 became a community cemetery. Its 400-plus graves carry the surnames of Denton County's pioneer families, and oral tradition holds that some unmarked graves are those of people once enslaved by the Fox family—a poignant record of the era's harsh realities.
Why it matters
Smith Cemetery preserves the founding families of Lewisville and, in its unmarked graves, the often-erased presence of the enslaved on the Texas frontier.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The land that became Smith Cemetery sits in what mid-nineteenth-century settlers called Holford's Prairie, in Denton County on the north Texas frontier. This was the era of the Peters Colony, one of the great empresario land grants through which the young Republic and then the State of Texas encouraged families to settle its northern reaches. Under such arrangements, pioneer families like the Halford brothers could claim hundreds of acres in exchange for putting down roots and improving the land.
When the town of Lewisville was platted in 1853, this was still raw country — open prairie broken by farms, its future far from certain. Families arrived, bought acreage, broke the sod, and built lives largely by their own hands. Thomas and Elizabeth Smith joined this community in 1859, purchasing 318 acres, and their farm would become the seedbed of one of the area's enduring landmarks.
The years that followed were among the hardest in the region's history. The 1860s brought civil war and its long, disordered aftermath, and everywhere on the frontier the ordinary business of survival — disease, childbirth, accident, the failure of a single harvest — carried risks that are difficult to imagine today. The graveyard that grew here is, above all, a record of that reality.
People & events
The story on the marker begins with a father's grief. In 1862 the Smiths' twenty-year-old son, James J. Smith, died and was buried on the family farm — his the earliest marked grave here, and the quiet origin of everything that followed. What began as a single family burial slowly became a place the whole community turned to in its own losses.
In 1881 the Smiths sold two and a half acres to the local Masonic lodge to formalize the ground as a community cemetery, and the gravestones that accumulated read like a roll call of the area's founding families — names such as Herod, Sherrill, Clayton, Skillern, Cobb, Jenkins, Temple, Bourland, Hamilton, Fenlaw, Oliver, and Fox. Each surname represents a household that helped build this corner of Denton County.
One family's sorrow stands out with particular force. Between 1863 and 1882, John and Ann Eliza Fox buried six of their children here — a devastating record of how heavily death fell on the young in pioneer times. The marker also carries a more shadowed memory: local oral history holds that some of the cemetery's unmarked graves belong to people once enslaved by the Julius Kane Fox family. That tradition is offered as remembrance rather than documented fact, but it points to lives that the written record too often left out. The Smith Cemetery Association, formed in 1950, took ownership in 1972 and still cares for the more than four hundred marked graves and the unknown number that bear no stone.
Its place in the American story
A frontier cemetery like this one is a small archive of the American westward story. The Peters Colony that drew these families was part of a vast national movement of settlement, in which governments traded land for the labor and risk of ordinary people willing to start over on the edge of the map. The surnames on these stones are the human residue of that policy, and of the ambitions that carried it out.
The cemetery also testifies to a truth that monuments to great men often omit: how fragile life was for the people who did the actual settling. Six children lost from one household, a young man dead at twenty — these were not exceptional tragedies but the common weather of frontier existence, and reading them here restores a dimension that the triumphant version of expansion leaves out.
Most quietly powerful of all are the unmarked graves. Across the South and the settled frontier, the presence of enslaved and formerly enslaved people was real but deliberately unrecorded, and countless such graves lie without names. That this community's oral memory has preserved even the suggestion of who rests in that unmarked ground is itself an act of historical recovery, insisting that these lives were part of the story too.
If you visit
Walk the rows here slowly and you can read a community's whole history in its stone. Look for the oldest markers — the 1860s dates — and for the clusters of shared surnames that show families staying, marrying, and burying their own across generations. The concentration of children's graves is sobering, and it tells you more about pioneer life than any textbook paragraph could.
The most important thing to notice may be what has no marker at all. As you move among the inscribed stones, keep in mind the graves that carry no name, and the tradition that some hold people who were enslaved. Standing quietly in that part of the ground is a way of honoring lives the written record tried to erase.
This is a working cemetery still tended by descendants and by the association that maintains it, so visit with the respect you would want shown to your own family's resting place. Set within the growth of modern Lewisville, it offers a rare, direct link to the people who were here at the very beginning — a good, contemplative stop for anyone drawn to the roots of a Texas community.
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
- · Thomas Morgan Smith
- · Elizabeth A. Smith
- · Basdeal W. Lewis
Related events
- · Peters Colony
Themes & tags
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