Lawrence Cemetery

Lawrence was a railroad village that never outgrew its first decade. The Handbook of Texas says settlers arrived in the early 1840s, the Texas and Pacific reached the area in 1872, and a post office opened in 1874. By the early 1880s the town had about 200 residents, three stores, a hotel, a church and a school, and farmers hauled crops to its corn and grist mills and to the railroad's grain cars. Population fell from 176 in 1904 to 75 by 1925, and the town lost postal service during the 1930s.

What the plaque says

Lawrence Cemetery In 1873, soon after the Texas and Pacific Railroad built a line through this area, a group of investors formed the Texas Colony Association with the goal of promoting a town. Named for one of the company directors, the town of Lawrence was established and soon boasted numerous homes and businesses. This community cemetery began that same year with the burial of seven-month-old Katie D. Hibbler. Now containing more than 400 graves, including those of many pioneers, the Lawrence Cemetery stands as a reminder of the area's early history. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 4.2 mi
  A free museum at Terrell's airport where about 2,200 RAF cadets learned to fly between 1941 and 1945, with logbooks, uniforms, letters and original training aircraft.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 14 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• Fair Park — 25 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 25 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

• Texas Midland Railroad — 2.3 mi
• Frank Reaugh — 2.6 mi
• Robert A. Terrell — 2.7 mi
• First United Methodist Church of Terrell — 3.2 mi