Caruth Pioneer Cemetery

The plaque speaks of plantation tenants. D Magazine reports that William and Walter Caruth came to Texas in the 1840s, bought their first thousand acres in 1852 and built a farm that grew past 30,000 acres, with a homestead running from White Rock Lake west to Preston Road. It also reports that the family held 21 enslaved people in 1860, one of the area's largest slaveholdings. Part of the land was later given to help found Southern Methodist University. The sources give no names for those held in bondage.

What the plaque says

Caruth Pioneer Cemetery Established early 1860s by William and Mattie Worthington Caruth, pioneer settlers.Across road was old Caruth Chapel where circuit-riding preachers officiated at baptisms, marriages and funerals for Caruth Plantation tenants and other local people. Gravesites donated by Caruth family. 1967

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Museum of Art — 5.6 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.
• Fair Park — 6.1 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 6.1 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.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 6.2 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.

More markers nearby

• John Goodwin Tower — 0.3 mi
• Zion Lutheran Church — 1.8 mi
• Highland Park Methodist Church — 2.1 mi
• Preston Road — 2.5 mi