Bear Creek Cemetery

The Bear Creek country had a settlement older than Euless. The Handbook of Texas says Isham Crowley led a small party of pioneers to the meeting of Big Bear and Little Bear creeks in 1845, and that a post office called Estill's Station opened in 1857, with a school, church, store and cotton gin nearby. The office closed in 1868 and reopened from 1881 to 1904 as Estelle. Most of the community gradually moved toward present Euless and Irving, where Elisha and Julia Euless built a home and gin in 1881 and gave the town its name.

What the plaque says

Bear Creek Cemetery This cemetery was developed adjacent to the site of the Bear Creek Missionary Baptist Church, which was organized in 1853. The earliest marked grave is that of Hiram Jackson Farris (d. 1858), the infant son of G.W. and Mary Farris. Isham Crowley (1798-1878), who came to Texas as a member of Peters Colony, donated the burial ground and deeded it to church trustees in 1876. The congregation later moved to Dallas County and was renamed Western Heights Missionary Baptist Church. Still in use, Bear Creek Cemetery is the burial site of many eastern Tarrant County pioneers. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 16 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 16 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 16 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.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 17 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.

More markers nearby

• Minter's Chapel Cemetery — 2.0 mi
• Elisha Adam Euless — 2.1 mi
• Bedford Cemetery — 4.2 mi
• Shady Grove Cemetery — 4.4 mi