Douglassville Cemetery

Williamson Petty, who gave this land, ran a ferry across the Sulphur River. One local history calls his crossing the only suitable one in northeast Texas and dates his home beside it to 1850. John D. Hanes, writing for the Cass County Genealogical Society in 1976, dates Petty's settlement to 1853 and says he was later killed in a dispute with a man named Watson over a crossing fee, without giving a date. The marker gives his death as 1861. By 1870 Josh Crawford was teaching at a school beside the cemetery.

What the plaque says

Douglassville Cemetery Williamson Petty (1820-61), Sulphur River ferryman, donated land for this cemetery from a claim which he settled in 1850. Col. John C. Douglass (1818-63), from Georgia, bought in 1855 all of the Petty claim not previously reserved for school and church. The cemetery took its name from his town of Douglassville. The earliest legible stone (1859) marks the grave site of Mrs. Henrietta Cook and her infant twins. Additional land was acquired in 1928 and 1939. The cemetery has about 400 graves and a governing association. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Atlanta State Park — 6.5 mi
  A shoreline park on Wright Patman Lake, leased from the Army in 1954, where Caddo ancestors farmed the Sulphur River and wagon traces such as the Bobo Ferry trace still cross the woods.
• Daingerfield State Park — 23 mi
  A pine-and-hardwood park built in 1935-39 by a white and a Black Civilian Conservation Corps company, with a dammed lake, Bass Lodge and a 2.4-mile loop trail around the water.
• Museum of Regional History — 24 mi
  Texarkana's oldest museum, in an 1879 brick building on State Line Avenue, with Caddo pottery, one of Scott Joplin's pianos and a research library of city directories and photographs.

More markers nearby

• Methodist Episcopal Church of Douglassville — steps away
• Floyds' Hill Church - Cemetery — 6.1 mi
• John Robin Heard Cemetery — 6.3 mi
• John Robin Heard — 7.2 mi