Waxahachie City Cemetery
Waxahachie, Ellis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The first burial here occurred on Jan. 1, 1852, after the death of pioneer merchant Silas Killough (b. 1805), one of the founders of this community. The original 4.16 acre tract was given in 1858 to trustees of the Methodist church by Emory W. Rogers (d.1874), who was Waxahachie's first settler (1846) and donor of land for the townsite. About 1900, the cemetery was transferred from church to municipal jurisdiction. By gifts and purchases of additional land, the site has grown to 65 acres and contains about 10,000 graves.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The first grave here was dug on New Year's Day 1852 for pioneer merchant Silas Killough, one of the community's founders. Emory W. Rogers — Waxahachie's first settler and the man who donated the land for the townsite — gave the original acreage to Methodist trustees in 1858, and the church managed the ground until the city took it over around 1900. It has since grown to some 65 acres and 10,000 graves.
Why it matters
The cemetery's founding families are the same people who platted Waxahachie itself, making the burial ground a physical index of a North Texas town's earliest settlement.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When Silas Killough was buried here on New Year's Day 1852, Texas had been a state for barely six years. The republic that won its independence in 1836 had joined the Union in 1845, and settlers were pouring onto the rich, dark soils of the Blackland Prairie south of the Trinity River. Ellis County itself was brand new, and Waxahachie had only recently been picked as its seat of government.
This was frontier country in the most literal sense. There was no railroad and no cotton empire yet. What stood here was a scattering of cabins, a few stores and trading posts, and families betting everything on land that had not yet been plowed. A town at that stage had to decide early where its courthouse, its churches and its dead would go. In many Texas communities, the burial ground came before much else.
The cemetery's later history follows the town's. Churches were often the first organized institutions on the frontier, so it made sense for the land to go to Methodist trustees in 1858. By around 1900 Waxahachie was a prosperous county seat grown on cotton and the railroad, and the job of caring for its dead moved from the congregation to the city. That same shift from church-led to civic responsibility happened in countless American towns around the turn of the century.
People & events
The first grave here holds Silas Killough, a pioneer merchant born in 1805 and counted among the founders of this community. A merchant was a vital figure in a young settlement. His store was where families bought what they could not make and sold what they grew, and where news was traded along with goods. Losing one of the town's founders so early, on the very first day of 1852, must have felt like a blow to a community that was still only a handful of households.
The land itself came from Emory W. Rogers, remembered as Waxahachie's first settler after his arrival in 1846. Rogers also donated the land for the townsite, so the same man who helped lay out the streets of the living also gave ground for the dead. In 1858 he deeded the original 4.16 acres to the trustees of the Methodist church, which tied the cemetery to one of the town's earliest congregations. Rogers died in 1874 and was buried in a town that had grown up on land he gave.
The cemetery has kept growing with the town. Through gifts and purchases it has spread from its first few acres to about 65, and it holds roughly 10,000 graves. Each is a thread in Waxahachie's story: early settlers and merchants, farm families, and the generations who came after them.
Its place in the American story
The story of Waxahachie City Cemetery is the story of American town-making in the mid-1800s. Across the West, a first settler claimed land and a few merchants set up shop. Then someone gave ground for a townsite, a church and a graveyard. Those donations turned a crossroads into a place where people meant to stay, and a cemetery was often the clearest sign that a community saw itself as permanent.
It also shows how Texas changed after statehood. Settlers arriving in the late 1840s and 1850s pushed farming and trade onto the prairies of North Texas, laying the groundwork for the cotton economy that later made towns like Waxahachie rich. The people buried here lived through that whole arc, from log-cabin beginnings to a busy county seat.
Finally, the move from church to city care around 1900 reflects a wider American pattern. As towns matured, jobs that had fallen to congregations and volunteers, like schools, charity and burial grounds, were often taken on by local government. A cemetery that began as church land and became a city responsibility captures that civic coming-of-age in a single place.
If you visit
Give yourself time to wander. A cemetery that has grown from four acres to 65 over more than a century and a half reads like a timeline. Older sections tend to hold weathered stones and family plots, and newer ground spreads out from there. Look for the earliest dates you can find and think about how few people lived here when those graves were dug.
Old Texas cemeteries reward a slow walk. Watch for the changing styles of grave markers over the decades, family names that repeat across generations, and inscriptions that hint at the lives of early settlers. Please treat it as the active, sacred ground it still is: stay on paths where they exist, and never lean on or rub fragile stones.
Waxahachie is an easy stop on a North Texas road trip. Its historic downtown, anchored by the ornate Ellis County Courthouse, makes a natural companion to this visit: the town whose founders rest here, grown up around the square they helped create. Pair the two for an afternoon on how a frontier crossroads became a county seat.
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
- · Silas Killough
- · Emory W. Rogers
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Hawkins House
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Benjamin Franklin Hawkins, a member of the Peters Colony that drew settlers to North Texas, helped organize Ellis County and built a one-story house on this site in 1851. Over the following decades the home grew—expanded to two stories in the 1880s and remodeled by his son into an elegant Colonial Revival residence in 1903, complete with fluted Corinthian columns and a second-story balcony. Its layered construction reads like a timeline of the family's rising fortunes.
First Presbyterian Church Building
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The Rev. J.A. Smiley gathered sixteen charter members into Waxahachie's First Presbyterian Church in 1871, and after an 1876 building the congregation raised this classical sanctuary in 1916–17, with modified Doric columns, beaux-arts detailing, and art-glass windows. When the church merged with another in 1979, the building became a fine-arts museum under the Ellis County Art Association. Its dignified front still commands its corner of the county seat.
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Rising from Texas granite, limestone, and marble between 1895 and 1897, the Ellis County Courthouse is a soaring example of Romanesque Revival design by noted architect J. Riely Gordon. Local legend holds that a sculptor carved the face of a beautiful local woman he admired above the east door — a romantic flourish on one of the era's grandest civic buildings.
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Ellis County went through three modest courthouses — cedar logs in 1850, then buildings in 1853 and 1874 — before commissioning San Antonio architect James Riely Gordon to design this fourth one in 1894. Its cornerstone laid on July 4, 1895, the courthouse was built of Central Texas granite and Pecos River red sandstone, with entrances oriented to the true compass points and faces carved by European stonemasons. Gordon's Richardsonian Romanesque masterpiece set a new standard for public buildings across Texas.