Trinity Farms/Rancho Grande Cemetery
Dallas, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This cemetery represents the last remaining physical reminder of the community of people who worked and lived on a vast commercial farm here known as the Dallas County Trinity Farms from about 1915 to 1946. The farm covered about 3,000 acres of land which had been farmed for many years. Dallas County Trinity Farms was one of several large farms owned by E. P. Harwell of Tulsa, Oklahoma, C. H. Clark of Wichita Falls, Texas, and T. H. Harbin of Waxahachie, Texas. The Trinity Farms Company provided housing, schools, and a general store/commissary for use by the farm laborers and their families. Farm laborers consisted mostly of Mexican citizens, many of whom arrived during the Mexican Revolution, and a sizable number of African Americans. Harbin lived in a large white ranch house and operated the farm which was also known as Rancho Grande. The earliest recorded burials occurred in the early 1920s. The children of Hispanics and African Americans who worked on the farm attended separate schools. Similarly, the cemetery contains separate sections for Hispanics and African Americans. The last burial occurred in the early 1940s. The cemetery is maintained by descendants of the families interred here. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845 - 1995
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This cemetery is all that remains of the community that lived and labored on the Dallas County Trinity Farms, a 3,000-acre commercial operation — also called Rancho Grande — that ran from about 1915 to 1946. The farm provided housing, schools, and a commissary for its workers, who were largely Mexican citizens, many fleeing the Mexican Revolution, and a sizable number of African Americans. In keeping with the era's segregation, the children attended separate schools and the dead were buried in separate sections.
Why it matters
The segregated ground preserves the story of the immigrant and African American labor that powered Texas agribusiness, and the color line that divided them even in death.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the fertile bottomlands along the Trinity River near Dallas were prime ground for a new kind of farming — not the family homestead, but the large commercial operation run like a business, with distant investors, thousands of acres, and a hired workforce that lived where it labored. Dallas County Trinity Farms, which stretched across roughly 3,000 acres from about 1915 into the 1940s, was one of these vast enterprises.
This was the Progressive era, a time when American agriculture was industrializing and consolidating. Land that had been worked for generations was gathered into single operations owned by men who often lived hundreds of miles away — in this case investors from Tulsa and Wichita Falls, alongside T. H. Harbin of Waxahachie, who lived on-site in a large white ranch house and ran the place day to day.
All of it unfolded in a Texas governed by strict segregation. The color line ran through schools, workplaces, and public life — and, as this ground quietly testifies, through the cemetery as well.
People & events
The farm the locals also called Rancho Grande was a self-contained world. The company provided housing, schools, and a general store and commissary, so that the families who worked the fields could live their whole lives within its bounds. T. H. Harbin managed the operation from his ranch house while his distant partners held their shares from Oklahoma and elsewhere in Texas.
The hands who actually raised the crops were largely Mexican citizens — many of them people who had crossed the border during the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution, when violence and hardship pushed hundreds of thousands north in search of safety and work. Alongside them labored a sizable community of African Americans. Together they made the farm run.
The cemetery is the record they left. The earliest recorded burials date to the early 1920s, and the last came in the early 1940s — roughly the working life of the farm itself. Its most eloquent detail is a painful one: just as the children of these families attended separate schools, the dead were laid to rest in separate sections, Hispanic and African American, the divisions of life carried into the ground.
Its place in the American story
The story here is the story of who actually built modern American agribusiness — and it is not the story of the investors whose names appear on the deeds. It is the story of immigrant and Black laborers whose work made the profits possible and whose lives left almost no other physical trace.
The Mexican Revolution reshaped the American Southwest, sending waves of people into Texas and the border states, where they became the backbone of farms, ranches, and railroads. Overlay that on the entrenched segregation of the Jim Crow South, and you get exactly what this ground preserves: two communities, drawn from different histories, working the same fields and kept apart by the same rigid line.
That the color line held even in a cemetery — that segregation followed people past the end of their lives — is one of the plainest, hardest lessons an American historic site can offer. This is where an abstraction becomes concrete.
If you visit
Come to this place expecting quiet. There is no grand monument here — the cemetery itself is the monument, the last physical reminder of an entire community that once lived, worked, worshiped, and died on the land around you. Everything else is gone.
Look for the layout. The separate sections are the marker's central truth, and standing between them you can feel the distance the era enforced. These were neighbors and coworkers; the ground still keeps them apart.
The cemetery is tended by the descendants of the families buried here, which gives the site a living thread back to Rancho Grande. Treat it as the sacred family ground it remains. If you are building a day of Dallas-area history, let this be your reflective stop — the place that reminds you the region's prosperity was carried on the shoulders of people whose names rarely made the record.
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
- · T.H. Harbin
Related events
- · Mexican Revolution
Themes & tags
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