Gholson Cemetery

Gholson began as Sardis. Texas Escapes says the community was settled in the late 1840s and had a post office in 1858 that stayed open through the Civil War but closed soon after. When a new post office opened in 1887, the application went in under the surname of the brothers Benjamin and Samuel Gholson, early settlers. The town had twenty-five residents in 1890 and three times that by the mid-1890s. The post office closed again in 1905, and Gholson stayed a farming community of under fifty people for decades.

What the plaque says

Gholson Cemetery This site was first used as a cemetery in 1871 when the infant daughter of pioneer area settlers Thomas W. and Charlotte Rozell was buried here. The oldest marked grave is that of Sarah Kiker (1802-1877). In 1885 W.F. Umberson, who settled in the area before the Civil War, set aside two acres here as public burial ground for the Gholson Communty. Located on the property was a one-room building, The Kellum School, which was also used for local church services. A cemetery tabernacle was built in 1925 and additional land was acquired in 1950. (1981)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 7.7 mi
  A bone bed on the Bosque River where a nursery herd of at least 19 Columbian mammoths was trapped and drowned by floodwater 65,000 to 72,000 years ago, left in place under a dig shelter.
• Waco Suspension Bridge — 12 mi
  A Brazos crossing opened in January 1870 as the longest single-span suspension bridge west of the Mississippi, tolled until 1889, closed to vehicles in 1971 and now walked.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 12 mi
  The 1906 bottling plant of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, built where Dr Pepper outgrew a Waco drugstore soda fountain, now the Dr Pepper Museum.
• Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum — 12 mi
  The official state repository of Texas Ranger memorabilia, opened in 1968 in Fort Fisher Park on the Brazos, named for a Ranger post of 1837 whose site no one has located.

More markers nearby

• John Silas Edens — 5.6 mi
• China Spring Tabernacle — 5.9 mi
• Ross — 6.3 mi
• China Spring Cemetery — 6.4 mi