Cottage Hill Methodist Church and Cemetery

The name Cottage Hill came from a school. A marker application says a school called Possum Trot went up in 1854, named for opossums feeding on the haws along Haw Branch. In 1859 the Rev. James Marshall, a teacher, Methodist minister and physician, had it moved on six yoke of oxen to his land and ran a boarding school there, called Marshall College. The cottages built beside it gave the community its name about 1860. The 1881 church was dedicated on the Saturday before the fifth Sunday in May, with lumber hauled from McKinney and Sherman.

What the plaque says

Cottage Hill Methodist Church and Cemetery According to local tradition this Methodist Church traces its origin to pioneer religious gatherings organized by the Rev. John Culwell and held in the home of his brother, Andrew J. Culwell, about 1846, and to the establishment of Methodist campground meetings held at nearby Honey Creek about 1848. The first documentary mention of Cottage Hill Methodist Church is contained in the minutes of the Trinity Conference held in Plano in 1874. A church structure was built on land donated by F.F. Morrill at this site in 1881; H.H. Sullivan served as pastor. The sizable number of early headstones bearing the name Culwell and the many unmarked graves surrounding the gravesite of Martha Culwell (d.1870), the cemetery's earliest recorded interment, suggests that the Cottage Hill Cemetery began as a family cemetery. Although located adjacent to each other and believed to have been connected as part of land deeded to the Cottage Hill Church during the 1880s and 1890s, the church and cemetery have not been formally associated since the establishment of the Cottage Hill Cemetery Association in 1890. The church structure, renovated in 1946, continues to serve the Cottage Hill Methodist Church. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary — 12 mi
  A 289-acre sanctuary in McKinney that Bessie Heard founded at the age of 80, with five habitats, a 50-acre wetland and 6.5 miles of trails.
• Denton County Courthouse-on-the-Square — 25 mi
  An 1896 courthouse by W. C. Dodson in Denton limestone, pink granite and two sandstones, restored in 2004, now a free county museum on a lawn holding the grave of John B. Denton.
• Great Hanging Memorial — 33 mi
  Two granite monuments in a Gainesville park, dedicated in 2014, for the Cooke County men the Confederate militia hanged in October 1862 on suspicion of Unionism.

More markers nearby

• First Christian Church of Weston — 3.6 mi
• Chambersville Methodist Church — 4.3 mi
• Chambersville — 4.3 mi
• Chambersville Cemetery — 4.3 mi