Peoria Cemetery

Peoria was a rest stop that grew into a town. The Handbook of Texas says travelers and cattle drovers camped here, and one of them, B. F. Stewart, named the place for his home in Peoria, Illinois. It had twenty-one log huts in the 1840s, a square mile of streets laid out in 1853, a church in 1855 and a post office in 1856. About 500 people lived here in 1878. The railroad bypassed the town, and the post office closed in 1907. The marker dates the cemetery to the 1830s, earlier than the Handbook's first huts.

What the plaque says

Peoria Cemetery Established in 1830s as this community developed. First plot was donated by J. R. DeArman; 4 generations of the William Thomas Hill family made later grants. A child fatally bitten by a rattlesnake was first to be buried here. Many rural residents and transients lie in unmarked graves. (1969)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hill County Courthouse — 6.1 mi
  Wesley C. Dodson's limestone Second Empire courthouse of 1890 on the Hillsboro square, gutted by fire on New Year's Day 1993 and rededicated in 1999 after a rebuilding that two Willie Nelson concerts helped pay for.
• Bosque Museum — 25 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Cleburne State Park — 27 mi
  A 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps park on the old Chisholm Trail crossing country, with a spring-fed lake, a hand-carved three-tiered spillway and a CCC bridge in Johnson County.

More markers nearby

• Woodbury Missionary Baptist Church — 5.1 mi
• Boesch House — 5.7 mi
• Whitney Memorial Park — 5.7 mi
• Whitney — 5.8 mi