Mt. Zion Churches and Cemetery

Mount Zion was settled before 1898, the Handbook of Texas says, when it had two schools: one for fifty-six white students and one for nineteen Black students. By the mid-1930s the community had a school, a cemetery, three churches and a scatter of houses. After World War II most residents moved away, the schools consolidated into the Cumby district, and by the early 1960s only a church and a cemetery remained. The separate school for Black children is the one trace the Handbook keeps of the Black families who lived here.

What the plaque says

Mt. Zion Churches and Cemetery Mt. Zion Methodist Episcopal Church organized here before creation of Hopkins County, 1846. Also at Mt. Zion, 1849, Harmony Cumberland Presbyterian Church was organized with 13 members, by the Rev. Anthony Travelstead. After years of worship in oak groves, brush arbors and homes, church edifice was built jointly 1861. Site given by David Findley, Nicholas Harlow. More land given 1904 by J. A. Rains, Chas. E. Brown. In 1901 Harmony Cumberland Presbyterian Church became Mt. Zion Cumberland Presbyterian Church; continues to function. Methodist moved away in 1914. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cooper Lake State Park — 14 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.
• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 16 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.

More markers nearby

• Oakland Cumberland Presbyterian Church — 3.9 mi
• Stewart Cemetery — 4.0 mi
• Cumby — 4.5 mi
• Incorporation of Commerce — 5.1 mi