Webb Chapel Cemetery
Farmer's Branch, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Isaac B. (1802-1880) and Mary H. (1816-1887) Webb and their family came to this area of the Peters Colony in 1844. Within a year, the couple led in the formation of a Methodist society, the first church organized in Dallas County. A log structure, known as Webb Chapel, that also served as the first school of this growing settlement, was built in 1846. The churchyard became a cemetery when the Webbs'seven-year-old daughter, Alice, fell ill and died in 1847. The Webb family and many other north Texas pioneers and their descendants are buried at this site that today is administered by the Webb Chapel Cemetery Association Historic Texas Cemetery – 2002
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Isaac and Mary Webb brought their family to the Peters Colony in 1844 and within a year helped form a Methodist society—the first church organized in Dallas County. Their log Webb Chapel, built in 1846, doubled as the settlement's first school, and the churchyard became a cemetery in 1847 when the Webbs' young daughter Alice died. Generations of north Texas pioneers now rest at the site, still tended by a cemetery association.
Why it matters
Webb Chapel Cemetery marks the birthplace of organized religion and schooling in Dallas County, where a single pioneer family planted the community's first church, school, and burial ground.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1844, when Isaac and Mary Webb brought their family to this part of north Texas, the area was open frontier known as the Peters Colony — an empire-of-grass settlement scheme meant to draw pioneers onto the prairie of what would become Dallas County. Texas itself was still an independent republic in that year, not yet a state, and this was raw, thinly settled country.
The families who came here faced the full weight of frontier life: building shelter from what timber they could find, breaking the tough prairie sod, and living far from the churches, schools, and doctors of the settled East. Community was not something you arrived to — it was something you built, often within the first year.
That is exactly what happened here. Within a year of the Webbs' arrival, the essential institutions of a settlement began to take shape on this ground. What is now a cemetery began as the center of a growing community's spiritual and civic life — the place where faith, learning, and finally mourning all took root together.
People & events
Isaac B. Webb (1802–1880) and his wife, Mary H. Webb (1816–1887), were not content merely to survive on the frontier — they helped organize it. Within a year of settling, the couple led in forming a Methodist society, remembered as the first church organized in Dallas County. In 1846 the community raised a log structure, Webb Chapel, that doubled as the settlement's first school. In one humble building, a scattered pioneer population gained both a place to worship and a place to teach its children.
Then came sorrow. In 1847 the Webbs' seven-year-old daughter, Alice, fell ill and died, and the churchyard became a cemetery with her burial. It is a poignant origin: the same family that gave the settlement its first church and school also gave it, through the loss of a child, its first grave. Faith, learning, and grief are bound together in the founding of this place.
Over the generations that followed, the Webb family and many other north Texas pioneers and their descendants were laid to rest here. Today the site is cared for by the Webb Chapel Cemetery Association, which keeps the memory of those founding families alive.
Its place in the American story
The Webb story captures something essential about how American communities were built on the frontier. Again and again, settlers who reached a new country did not wait for institutions to come to them — they created the church, the school, and the burial ground themselves, often almost simultaneously. Webb Chapel, serving as both meetinghouse and schoolhouse, is a textbook example of that frontier ingenuity, where a single log building carried the whole weight of a community's civic and spiritual life.
Methodism in particular was a powerful force on the American frontier, spreading rapidly through circuit riders and local societies into newly settled lands. That the first church organized in Dallas County was a Methodist society reflects a pattern repeated across the expanding nation, as faith communities followed — and often led — the line of settlement.
So this quiet cemetery marks far more than a family plot. It marks the birthplace of organized religion and formal education in what became one of Texas's great population centers. The institutions that anchor modern life here can trace a direct line back to one pioneer family's decision, in the 1840s, to build a community from the ground up.
If you visit
Standing in this churchyard, remember that you are on the ground where Dallas County's first church and first school once stood together in a single log building. There may be little of that original structure to see, but the place itself is the artifact — the spot where organized faith and learning in this region began.
Look for the graves of the founding family, and for the earliest dates reaching back to the 1840s. Among the oldest is the resting place of a young child whose death in 1847 first made this churchyard a cemetery — a small stone with a large place in the community's story. Around it lie generations of north Texas pioneers and their descendants.
The grounds are tended by a cemetery association, so treat the site with the quiet respect it invites. A stop here rewards travelers curious about origins — the deep roots beneath a now-populous corner of Texas. Come to trace how a single family's log chapel seeded a church, a school, and the enduring community whose forebears rest all around you.
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
- · Isaac B. Webb
- · Mary H. Webb
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First Methodist Society, Dallas County's
Farmers Branch, TX
When Isaac Blackman Webb moved his family from Missouri into the Peters Colony in the winter of 1843–44, he sent for a missionary, and in March 1844 the first known Methodist minister to visit the colony preached in a nearby log cabin. A society formed in 1845, and by 1846 an 18-by-18-foot log cabin rose on Webb's land as the colony's first church—doubling as schoolhouse, meeting hall, and post office. The congregation, now Webb Chapel United Methodist Church, claims continuous services since 1845.
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