Dougherty Community Cemetery

The Doughertys joined a colony whose legal footing was shaky. Charles Fenton Mercer got his empresario contract from Sam Houston on January 29, 1844, and Congress outlawed such contracts one day later. Squatters and speculators contested his surveys, and in 1850 the legislature guaranteed settlers' claims made before October 25, 1848. Mercer, a Virginian who had worked for years to send free Black people to Africa, was unpopular in Texas as a supposed abolitionist. A family that bought its 640 acres in 1851 later gave an acre of it to this community burial ground.

What the plaque says

Dougherty Community Cemetery James W. Dougherty and his wife Isabella brought their family to Texas from Kentucky in the late 1840s. Joining the colony of Charles Fenton Mercer, they settled in this area. In 1851 they bought 640 acres here, where Dougherty was a farmer and a tanner. In 1877 their son Robert N. Dougherty donated one acre at this site for public use as a community burial ground. Two additional tracts of land, deeded to the cemetery association in 1935 and 1964, were acquired from A. V. and Della Terry. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 23 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.

More markers nearby

• Emory Rains — 4.2 mi
• Emory United Methodist Church — 4.4 mi
• Near Offices of "Rains County Leader" — 4.5 mi
• Rains County — 4.5 mi