Lafayette Cemetery

The community's life is easier to picture from a 1946 county history. LaFayette had a post office from the start of the settlement, with a star route from Pittsburg through to Coffeeville and mail three times a week. Missionary Baptists built first, a two-story house with a Masonic lodge upstairs, and a Methodist church followed. The first school met in a log house, and the whole school was later transferred to Union Ridge. The history says the settlers came from the southern states and brought enslaved people with them.

What the plaque says

Lafayette Cemetery The Lafayette community, named by early settler Matthew F. Locke for his son, Lafayette Locke, developed in this area in the 1850s. Locke deeded three acres of land to the Philadelphia Baptist Church for a cemetery in 1858. The land, which already contained two family burials, became known as Lafayette Cemetery. The oldest documented grave is that of T. E. Montgomery, Locke's brother-in-law, who died in 1855. Although the community began to decline in the 1920s, this and other nearby graveyards serve as visible reminders of the area's pioneer heritage. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Daingerfield State Park — 12 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.
• Lake Bob Sandlin State Park — 18 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.

More markers nearby

• Pleasant Grove Cemetery — 1.1 mi
• Center Point Community — 4.3 mi
• Center Point School — 4.5 mi
• Bolton Cemetery — 6.0 mi