Mt. Vernon Church and Cemetery

The Handbook of Texas says Mount Vernon was first settled in the late 1840s by Thomas Jefferson Payne and his wife, Nancy Warren Payne, four miles east of Ratcliff off State Highway 7. In the 1870s their son Henry Warren Payne built a school that served for many years as the church too. The Handbook has that building burning about 1883, with residents putting up a new one soon after and naming it Mount Vernon. By the mid-1930s there was a church, a cemetery and a number of houses; after World War II many residents left.

What the plaque says

Mt. Vernon Church and Cemetery Henry Warren Payne (1833-1898) and W.M. Conner gave this land for a church and a cemetery. In 1871 a church house used as a school was erected. The custom of fencing cemetery plots began in 1872 with the burial in the first marked grave of the son of James E. and Ann Payne Ashby. After a fire, Payne rode door-to-door raising money for a new church house which was built in 1884. The Mt. Vernon Baptist Church officially organized in 1888. Land from Louisiana and Texas Lumber Co. enlarged the Cemetery. In 1960 this building was erected. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Caddo Mounds State Historic Site — 13 mi
  Three earthen mounds of an ancestral Caddo village and ceremonial center on the old El Camino Real, settled about A.D. 800 and still sacred to Caddo people, with a grass house and visitor center.

More markers nearby

• Ratcliff — 3.3 mi
• Ratcliff CCC Camp — 3.3 mi
• Antioch Cemetery — 3.6 mi
• Plain Community — 3.7 mi