Ford Cemetery

The man who set aside this ground earned his living in motion. Pinkney Ford, mainly a farmer, hauled provisions by ox-drawn wagon from Galveston to the military outpost at Fort Worth, according to the Grand Prairie Genealogical Society. He served as a mounted volunteer in the Johnson Station Rangers during the Civil War and in 1879 was ordained an elder of the Good Hope Cumberland Sabbath School in the Watson community. About fifty graves are legibly marked, the last one a woman who died in 1942. Warehouses of an industrial district now nearly surround the cemetery.

What the plaque says

Ford Cemetery Pinkney Harold Ford (1831-1901) was the leader of a Kentucky family who migrated to Texas in 1855. They settled in the area of North Arlington, then known as the Watson Community. John J. Goodwin held the original patent to this cemetery property. The oldest marked grave is that of Maria Trayler (b. 1799), who died in 1858. Ford, a Civil War veteran, purchased this property in 1879 and designated this site as a community burial ground. He and wife Elizabeth (d. 1898) farmed land nearby. Industrial development has surrounded this remnant of the pioneer community. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 11 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.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 14 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 15 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 15 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.

More markers nearby

• Cable Tool Rig — 1.9 mi
• Narrow Gauge Railway — 1.9 mi
• Dr. H. V. Copeland Home — 3.8 mi
• First United Methodist Church of Arlington — 4.2 mi