Balch-Senterwood Cemetery

Slavery shaped Johnson County before this cemetery's first burial. The Handbook of Texas counts 513 enslaved people among 4,305 residents in 1860, and says the number nearly doubled during the war as refugees arrived with the people they held. After emancipation the Black population dwindled, and by 1900 about one resident in a hundred was Black. That year only ten of the county's forty-nine Black farmers owned their land. The cemetery, started for Black burials in 1856, records that community.

What the plaque says

Balch-Senterwood Cemetery This graveyard was established in 1856 adjacent to the Balch Cemetery for the African American population following the death of a slave girl killed by a black bear. The girl had come to Alvarado with George Sigler and his family, whose farm was located south of the Balch Community Cemetery. Among those buried here are victims of an epidemic of smallpox, and other diseases such as diphtheria, whooping cough, and tuberculosis. Casualties included numerous children. The need for burial space became acute by 1911 following these disease-related deaths. A. J. Senter, local businessman and undertaker, donated additional land to the Alvarado "Colored" Cemetery in 1911. The site was renamed Senterwood Cemetery in his honor. The need for more burial plots in the 1940s was resolved through the purchase of one acre of land by the Baker Funeral Home of Fort Worth. Interments in this cemetery include many business owners, church leaders, and veterans of World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War. Cemetery maintenance, previously dependent upon local volunteers, was performed under the direction of the Johnson County Cemetery Association. The Balch-Senterwood Cemetery continues to serve the surrounding communities. (1996)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ellis County Courthouse — 22 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.
• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 22 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.
• Cleburne State Park — 22 mi
  A 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps park on the old Chisholm Trail crossing country, with a spring-fed lake, a hand-carved three-tiered spillway and a CCC bridge in Johnson County.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 25 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.

More markers nearby

• Outlaws Benjamin Bickerstaff and Josiah Thompson — 0.3 mi
• Alvarado — 0.4 mi
• Site of Norman Springs & Norman Grove — 1.2 mi
• Site of Ezell-McLeroy Cotton Gin — 2.4 mi