Bascom Cemetery

Bascom began at a spring on a crossing of Indian trails, the Handbook of Texas says, and was settled by 1846, when William McAdams built one of the county's first gristmills. Workers from that mill helped cut the Tyler to Henderson road in 1849. Jesse Cook deeded two acres for a Methodist church in 1857, with the Rev. Caleb H. Smith as first pastor, and a school was running by 1860. The mill exploded in 1895 and killed its owner, John Speer. The community is apparently named for Bishop Henry Bidleman Bascom of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

What the plaque says

Bascom Cemetery Bascom was settled in the mid-1840s and named for a Tennessee Methodist bishop by early settler Lazariah Smith. Burials took place just north of this site until 1857 when one acre west of the Tyler to Henderson Road (present-day FM 848) and two acres east of the road were set aside for cemetery purposes. Graves from the early site were reinterred in Bascom Cemetery. The first recorded burial was that of John Pinkerton in 1851. Included among the more than 2,000 interments are those of the area's earliest settlers and their descendants and at least one veteran of the War of 1812. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Goodman-LeGrand House and Museum — 6.8 mi
  A Tyler house begun in 1859 as four rooms, enlarged by the Goodman family over 73 years, and left to the city in 1939 with its furnishings, in a garden that fills a city block.
• Tyler Rose Garden and Rose Museum — 7.5 mi
  More than 38,000 rose bushes of about 600 cultivars in a free city garden, beside a museum of the Texas Rose Festival, which began in 1933, and of the rose industry.
• Camp Ford Historic Park — 7.7 mi
  A free county park north of Tyler on the site of the largest Confederate prison camp west of the Mississippi, with a kiosk, an interpretive trail and a historical society museum downtown.
• Tyler State Park — 14 mi
  A 985-acre park eight miles north of Tyler, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps from 1935 to 1941 around a 64-acre spring-fed lake, with more than 13 miles of trails.

More markers nearby

• Colonel Richard B. Hubbard — 4.6 mi
• Tyler Junior College — 5.1 mi
• Murphey the Jeweler — 5.6 mi
• Colonel Thomas R. Bonner — 5.9 mi