Dry Creek Cemetery

The graves outlived the town they served. Elisha Turner won his patent to a league and a labor of land on July 22, 1845, from President Anson Jones, and settled on the old Shreveport-Dallas road at a place that became Turner's Point. The Handbook of Texas says a post office and school came in 1858. When the Texas and Pacific reached Terrell in 1873, merchants such as Joe Rushing and John Stevenson moved there, and the rest drifted to the present Poetry. The Handbook places Dry Creek Cemetery near the old Turner's Point site.

What the plaque says

Dry Creek Cemetery Named for a nearby ravine, this burial ground originally served the community of Turner's Point. Located on the stage road between Shreveport, Louisiana, and Dallas, the settlement was established by Elisha Turner in 1845. In the 1870s the town was moved to a new location (1.5 miles southeast) and renamed Poetry. The earliest marked grave at this site is that of Samuel Key (1840-1871). Now closed for burials, the cemetery has 279 marked graves bearing names of the English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh pioneer settlers of the area. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 8.5 mi
  A free museum at Terrell's airport where about 2,200 RAF cadets learned to fly between 1941 and 1945, with logbooks, uniforms, letters and original training aircraft.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 13 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 22 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.
• Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary — 30 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.

More markers nearby

• Poetry Methodist Church — 1.4 mi
• Poetry Baptist Church — 1.4 mi
• Porter Farms — 4.5 mi
• Public Education in Terrell — 5.4 mi