Tyson Cemetery
Pilot Point, Denton County, Texas
Marker Inscription
J. P. Newton (1821-56), a settler from Tennessee, is the earliest known burial in this cemetery. Charles Hammons (1854-64) has the second oldest stone. He was a grandson of another Tennessean, Charles Lee Sullivan (1810-68), a leader in this community. This burial ground, bought 1869 by Mr. and Mrs. G. W. Hammons, Sullivan's son-in-law and daughter, later was donated to the public by James R. Tyson (1829-99), father of Sullivan's daughter-in-law, Angeline Tyson Sullivan. There are 44 Sullivan graves in 1976. An active cemetery association maintains this burial ground (1976)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The oldest stone in this North Texas burial ground marks J. P. Newton, a Tennessee settler who died in 1856, and many of the graves trace back to the Sullivan family, community leaders who came west from Tennessee. The Hammonses, kin by marriage, bought the ground in 1869, and James R. Tyson later deeded it to the public. By the nation's bicentennial in 1976, more than forty Sullivan graves lay here, tended by an active cemetery association.
Why it matters
Family cemeteries like this one map the migration of Upper South settlers into Texas and keep alive the tangled kinships that bound early communities together.
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Related people
- · J. P. Newton
- · Charles Lee Sullivan
- · James R. Tyson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
City of Pilot Point
Pilot Point, TX
In the late 1840s, pioneers drawn by rich soil, water, and game settled at the edge of Texas's Cross Timbers, near a high stand of timber that guided travelers and gave the town its name. Platted in 1854 and served by an early immigrant trail and the Butterfield stage route, Pilot Point grew into a market hub for farmers and stock raisers, gaining a seminary, newspaper, bank, grist mill, and cotton gin. The arrival of two railroads in the 1880s cemented its place as a regional trade center.
Pilot Point Church of Christ
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This congregation formed around 1865, two decades after families of the Peters Colony began homesteading the Pilot Point area of Denton County. In 1874 the deacons bought this ground, and the next year raised a one-room frame chapel under builder A. W. Cooke, expanding it as membership grew. Long a fixture of local life, the church helped organize a sister congregation in nearby Aubrey in 1959.
Skinner Cemetery
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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.
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