Moore's Chapel Cemetery

A walk through Moore's Chapel Cemetery reads like a neighborhood ledger. According to the Commission's file, it holds 427 marked graves and 22 unmarked. Six markers stand in a row for children lost to typhoid. One family stone gives Moore Chapel as a place of birth, another as a place of death, and a third gives Bonham. One carries the words killed with an unloaded gun. The community church beside the cemetery burned in 1946 and was restored, and its dedication on November 2, 1947 filled the room. Inside stand 37 wooden pews.

What the plaque says

Moore's Chapel Cemetery Missouri native Alexander Moore married Virginia native Mary Jane Jones in St. Genevieve, Missouri, in 1856. They moved to Texas and purchased land in this area in 1857. The Moore donated two acres here to a rapidly growing community for cemetery purposes in the mid-1870s. The first recorded burial was that of Martha Cashion, early pioneer settler and a friend and neighbor of the Moores, on March 11, 1876. Area Baptists erected a sanctuary just north of the cemetery on land donated by the Moores that became known as Moore's Chapel Church. The community and this cemetery also became known as Moore's Chapel. An unusually high number of infant burials during the 1880s and 1890s reflect an outbreak of typhoid fever. Alexander Moore was buried here in 1915. Moore's Chapel Cemetery and adjacent church and school buildings made up the community center. The cemetery contains the burials of many of the area's pioneer settlers and their descendants and veterans of wars ranging from the Civil War to World War II. The cemetery is maintained by an association and continues to serve the community. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 5.1 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 27 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.

More markers nearby

• Charles Henry Christian — 3.4 mi
• Site of Booker T. Washington School — 3.7 mi
• Bonham Cotton Mill — 3.7 mi
• Inglish Cemetery — 3.7 mi