Garvin Memorial Cemetery

Two burial grounds share this site on Northwest Highway. The City of Dallas says the Garvin tract dates to 1874, and that an African American tract began in 1894 when Confederate veteran John Cochran gave land to the Black community, though another line says the early 1900s. Little is known about who lies there, and the graves' locations are unknown. A descendant's oral history suggests members of the Green, Turner and Shepards families, linked to the freedmen's town of Elm Thicket. Members of the James Smith Masonic Lodge are also buried here.

What the plaque says

Garvin Memorial Cemetery This burial ground served the pioneer families who settled in the area. Graves here date from the 1870s. The land for the cemetery was donated to the community by James G. Garvin (1830-1897), a former Dallas merchant, his wife Eliza, and brothers Col. William L. Crawford (1839-1920) and Judge M. L. Crawford (1841-1910), prominent attorneys of the county. Several veterans of the Civil War are interred here, including Col. Pleasant G. Swor (1834-1878), who led an assault against Union forces at the Battle of Corinth. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Museum of Art — 5.8 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.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 6.1 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 Heritage Village at Old City Park — 7.0 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 — 7.5 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.

More markers nearby

• Cochran Chapel Cemetery — 0.5 mi
• Cochran Chapel Methodist Church — 0.5 mi
• Texas' First Airmail and Passenger Service — 1.5 mi
• Love Field — 1.5 mi