Mt. Zion Cemetery

The plaque says land was conveyed to the local farmers' Grange in 1875. The Handbook of Texas dates the first Texas Grange to July 1873 at Salado and the Texas State Grange to October 1873 at Dallas, and says the order offered farm families cooperation in business and educational opportunities. By 1876 it counted about 40,000 members in 1,275 lodges, counting Indian Territory. It then declined, hurt by the 1885 to 1887 drought and the rival Farmers' Alliance, and by 1906 nine sub-Granges remained. The plaque says the Panola group disbanded, and its acreage went to the cemetery.

What the plaque says

Mt. Zion Cemetery This site was originally part of a tract owned by pioneer area settlers Richard and Polly Golden. They later gave it to their daughter Elizabeth and her husband Cornelius Crenshaw, who buried a son here in the 1840s. They deeded the property to trustees of the Mt. Zion Methodist Church and Cemetery in 1850. Additional land, conveyed to the local farmers' Grange in 1875, was included when the group disbanded. Still in use, the burial ground contains the graves of many early leaders of Panola County and veterans of American military service. (1981)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tex Ritter Museum and Texas Country Music Hall of Fame — 18 mi
  Carthage's country music museum, with Tex Ritter's boots, guitars and saddles in a room styled like a movie theater, and exhibits on other Texas stars, Jim Reeves among them.
• Harrison County Historical Museum — 20 mi
  Galleries in Marshall's 1901 courthouse that run from the Caddo to the present, with Wiley College, Lady Bird Johnson's inaugural gown and a military gallery across the square in Memorial City Hall.
• Starr Family Home State Historic Site — 20 mi
  Maplecroft, the 1871 Greek Revival house Frank Starr built in Marshall, with Ruth Starr Blake's glass and china, an 1880s kitchen restored in 2019 and a retirement home built for a formerly enslaved person.
• Texas and Pacific Railway Depot and Museum — 20 mi
  The only surviving building of the Texas and Pacific shops at Marshall, a 1912 Mission Revival depot saved from demolition in the 1990s, still an Amtrak stop, with a railway museum and a Mikado locomotive.

More markers nearby

• DeBerry — 3.9 mi
• Bailey Anderson — 4.3 mi
• Site of Bethany — 4.7 mi
• Bell-Fountain Cemetery — 6.6 mi