Bell's Chapel Cemetery

The neighborhood around Bell's Chapel began as Liberty in 1846, the Handbook of Texas says, and took the name Rockett in 1852 for John Rockett, a pioneer settler. Growth was slow. A cotton gin was running by 1900, and a post office operated from 1894 until 1907. By 1933 about 150 people and two businesses remained, and after 1945 the Handbook lists no businesses at all. It places Rockett five miles northwest of Waxahachie on Farm Road 813, a small farming crossroads.

What the plaque says

Bell's Chapel Cemetery Founded 1875. Site for church cemetery was given on Dec. 27, 1875, by local landowners John and Elizabeth Gibbons. This tract and some later purchases were deeded to the Methodist Episcopal Church South. Church and cemetery were named in honor of confederate war veteran Jodie M. Bell, a church and civic leader in Rockett Community, and first person to be buried here, 1877. Red Oak Masonic Lodge No. 461, chartered in 1876, helped build 2-story chapel and meeting hall. The lodge moved to Red Oak in 1894. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ellis County Courthouse — 7.4 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 — 15 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 — 20 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.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 21 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.

More markers nearby

• Red Oak Cemetery — 2.2 mi
• Parsons' Cavalry C.S.A. — 2.4 mi
• Ellis County — 2.4 mi
• First Baptist Church of Waxahachie — 5.5 mi