Edgewood Cemetery

Lancaster was a Kentucky name laid on a Texas prairie. The Handbook of Texas says Abram Bledsoe bought half of the Roderick Rawlins survey in 1847 and in 1852 laid out a township named for his birthplace, Lancaster, Kentucky. His daughter Virginia, a schoolteacher, married Roderick A. Rawlins, son of the settler whose name appears on this plaque. The town received a post office in 1860 and incorporated on May 22, 1887, long after the cemetery's first grave.

What the plaque says

Edgewood Cemetery Earliest grave here is that of Lizzie Richardson, a pioneer child who died in the summer of 1845. The site for the cemetery was chosen by Roderick Rawlins, one of the area's first settlers; he was buried here in 1848. Among the graves in the older section is that of James Lemon, veteran of the American Revolution, who died on July 4, 1858. The land was not officially set aside as a cemetery until it was acquired from Thomas McKee Ellis in 1877. Since then the Lancaster Cemetery Association has bought additional land and currently maintains over 1500 graves. Marker Donor: Lancaster Historical Society (1974)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 13 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 14 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 14 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.
• Fair Park — 14 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.

More markers nearby

• Town of Lancaster — 0.9 mi
• Site of Confederate Arms Factory — 1.0 mi
• Former Site of Head House — 1.0 mi
• First Christian Church of Lancaster — 1.3 mi