Gray Rock Cemetery

Gray Rock got its post office in 1848, as Mount Vernon did, and kept it until 1906. The post office predated Franklin County itself by 27 years. Estimates, not census counts, put the town at about 50 people in the mid-1880s and about 150 around 1895. By the 1930s a single store and scattered houses remained, and by 1985 the cemetery was nearly all that did. The community lies about six miles southeast of Mount Vernon.

What the plaque says

Gray Rock Cemetery Unmarked graves here may date from the 1840s, when the nearby town of Gray Rock was settled along a frontier highway. Of the 411 marked graves, the oldest is that of an infant, Lula Smith, who died Feb. 15, 1872. Although the land was deeded to two deacons of the Baptist church in 1887, it has always served as a community cemetery. An 1899-1900 epidemic of typhoid fever accounts for some of the burials. The town of Gray Rock vanished after the railroad bypassed it, but the cemetery is still in use. Gray Rock Cemetery Committee, organized in 1906, now maintains the site. (1975)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Bob Sandlin State Park — 7.5 mi
  A 1987 state park on a 9,000-acre reservoir, where a Republic of Texas stockade called Fort Sherman stood in 1838 and the Caddo lived from A.D. 800 to 1860, now with fishing piers, trails and cabins.
• Daingerfield State Park — 27 mi
  A pine-and-hardwood park built in 1935-39 by a white and a Black Civilian Conservation Corps company, with a dammed lake, Bass Lodge and a 2.4-mile loop trail around the water.

More markers nearby

• Ripley Massacre — 1.9 mi
• Joshua Foster Johnson — 5.4 mi
• Franklin County Courthouse — 5.8 mi
• Franklin County — 6.4 mi