Bethel Cemetery

The graves here were never fully counted. Descendants estimate at least two hundred burials, yet only two stones survive. The Coppell Historical Society says the ground was first called Sands Cemetery and renamed Bethel before 1885, and that the last known burial was in 1925. Its cemetery notes record that John and Silas Record, among men hanged in 1869, were buried here, though their markers stand in nearby Parrish Family Cemetery; its book on local figures names Josiah and John Record, father and son, as lynching victims. The sources do not agree on the names.

What the plaque says

Bethel Cemetery James Parrish came to Texas from Ohio prior to 1844 as a member of the Peters Colony. He and his wife Eliza Jane (Record) moved to Dallas County about 1848. They established a home in this area on the Elm Fork of the Trinity River which became known as the Parrish neighborhood. Sometime before James Parrish's death in October 1853, he and his wife set aside land on their farm for a community cemetery. Joshua Hill was buried here in 1859, the apparent victim of smallpox. More interments occurred in the following decades, including those of James Pinson Howell (1865), John L. Howell (1866), and Malinda Pemberton Howell (ca. 1871). Also believed to be buried here are five men and a boy who were victims of a lynching in 1869; several Confederate vererans of the Civil War; and two former slaves. Although descendants estimate there were at least two hundred graves here, all but two have been lost to vandalism and development of the surrounding area. The two remaining tombstones mark the graves of one-day-old Oda Kirby (1909) and three-year-old Ervin Wickersham (1910 - 1913). The Historic Bethel Cemetery Association, formed in 1987, cares for the graveyard. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 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.
• 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 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.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 17 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

• Grapevine Springs Park — 1.5 mi
• Missouri Colony — 3.4 mi
• Texas International Pop Festival — 3.7 mi
• Perry Cemetery — 4.6 mi