Elizabeth Cemetery

The town that lies under this graveyard's history was Elizabethtown. The Handbook of Texas says Peters Colony settlers arrived about 1850, and by 1852 it served as a supply station for cowboys driving herds north. By 1859 it had six saloons, a hotel and a post office, with a doctor as postmaster. Residents of nearby Justin said it was nicknamed Bugtown, after bugs swarmed a camp meeting's lights so thickly that preaching stopped. A Masonic lodge met from 1873 to 1876. In 1881 the Texas and Pacific bypassed the town by two miles and its people moved to Roanoke.

What the plaque says

Elizabeth Cemetery Elizabeth town, settled between 1860 and 1862, became a trade center with businesses, churches, a school and a Masonic lodge. Family tradition says William Perry Harmonson (1836-1907) donated land for the 1.5-acre community graveyard upon the death of his mother Anna (1796-1867). The town began to decline in 1881 after being bypassed by the Texas and Pacific Railroad. In 1949 former school lands were used to enlarge the cemetery to two acres. Still in use, this burial ground contains almost 400 graves and is all that remains of the once thriving village. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Denton County Courthouse-on-the-Square — 16 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.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 16 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Tarrant County Courthouse — 18 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 19 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.

More markers nearby

• Roanoke — 2.7 mi
• Justin — 4.4 mi
• Bourland Cemetery — 5.0 mi
• Jellico — 7.3 mi