Keenan Cemetery

The cemetery has had keepers ever since. A profile of its longtime volunteer caretaker says the ground holds pioneers, lawmen and gunfighters, among them Sanford Commodore Perry, killed in a gunfight at Poor's Tavern in 1876, and Constable Riley Burnett, shot in 1893. John Keenan, the two-month-old whose 1843 death began the burial ground, was the first child born to settlers in what became Dallas County, as his own marker says. A caretaker joined the association in 1976, and volunteers reset stones, cleared the grounds and put in a waterline.

What the plaque says

Keenan Cemetery Thomas (1808 - 1879) and Sarah McCallister Keenan (1807 - 1872) came to this area as members of the Peters Colony in 1842. When their two-month-old son, John, died on November 11, 1843, they buried him at this site, establishing one of the earliest cemeteries in present-day Dallas County. The large number of early infant graves are testimony to the hardships endured by the area's pioneer settlers. Thomas and Sarah Keenan and many of their descendants are buried here. The area's first Baptist Church, Union Baptist, was organized in the Keenans' log cabin in 1846 by the Rev. David Myers, who was buried here in 1853. The church, which erected a sanctuary nearby, was closely associated with the cemetery and in a deed executed by John R. West conveying 1.5 acres to the church in 1875 the cemetery was legally set aside. The Farmers Branch (Keenan) Cemetery Association was established in 1938 to maintain the grounds. The cemetery covers three acres and contains about 600 marked and an estimated 100 - 200 unmarked grave sites. Among the people buried here are many of the area's earliest settlers and their descendants and verterans of conflicts ranging from the Civil War to the Vietnam Conflict. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Museum of Art — 11 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 — 11 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 — 12 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 — 12 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

• David Myers — steps away
• Texian Land and Emigration Company — steps away
• First Baptist Church of Farmers Branch — steps away
• First Methodist Society, Dallas County's — steps away