Old Grover Cemetery

Grover has vanished from the map, but the Handbook of Texas still records what it was. It says the farm settlement near Highway 80 and Farm Road 968 was settled before 1896, when it had a voting box. In 1904 its school district ran six schools for 333 Black students and two for 61 white students. By 1948 the county highway map no longer showed Grover, though three businesses and several homes remained. By 1991 a Baptist church stood at the site, and the Texas Almanac lists the community as no longer existing.

What the plaque says

Old Grover Cemetery William McKinney conveyed adjacent land in 1848 for the establishment of a community school. Later, a Union church was included and the site became the center of Grover community, a widespread farm settlement. This cemetery is first noted in records of the 1850s. The oldest marked grave is that of Susan Green (d. 1875), who came to this area from Tennessee. Grover began to decline in the 1920s and the schoolhouse and church sanctuary were gone by 1930. The Old Grover Cemetery remains, however, as a reminder of the area's pioneer settlers. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Starr Family Home State Historic Site — 4.5 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.
• Harrison County Historical Museum — 4.8 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.
• Texas and Pacific Railway Depot and Museum — 4.9 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.
• Jefferson Historical Museum — 17 mi
  A four-floor museum in Jefferson's 1888-90 federal post office and courthouse, with rooms for African-American history, Jewish heritage, the Caddo and Diamond Bessie, bought by the historical society in 1965 for $8,100.

More markers nearby

• Wiley College Cemetery — 3.9 mi
• Melvin B. Tolson — 4.1 mi
• Matthew W. Dogan, Sr. — 4.1 mi
• H. B. Pemberton — 4.1 mi