Lee Cemetery

The cemetery is older than the town around it. The Handbook of Texas says T. K. Seago built the general store that began Seagoville in 1876, and the post office came in 1881, six and eleven years after James J. Lee gave this ground. The Lee Cemetery Association was created on October 25, 1967, to provide perpetual care, according to a granite memorial listing its original fourteen directors; seven of them are buried here. The plaque counts about 1,500 burials, including a general of the Mexican War, some sixty people of Mexican descent and an enslaved person.

What the plaque says

Lee Cemetery In 1870, James J. Lee (1820 - 1901), a Confederate Army veteran from Mississippi, donated land for this cemetery, stipulating that no charges were to be made for plots. The 1.125-acre tract was the first cemetery in southeast Dallas County. Among the 1,500 burials are Lee and members of his family; Gen. James S. Raines (1817 - 1880), an officer in the Mexican War, 1846; some 60 people of Mexican descent; and a slave brought here in 1855. Land deeded for hitching horses has become part of the parking lot. The burial ground is maintained by Lee Cemetery, Inc. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fair Park — 15 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 — 15 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.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 16 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.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 17 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.

More markers nearby

• Kleberg — 3.4 mi
• Rylie Prairie — 5.4 mi
• City of Crandall — 6.2 mi
• Dawdy's Ferry — 7.5 mi