Historical Marker
Perry Cemetery
Carrollton, Dallas County · Texas
Erected 1976
This was the first burial ground of a town that arrived late. The Handbook of Texas says an agent for the unfinished Dallas and Wichita railroad filed a Carrollton plat at the courthouse in 1878, the year the post office opened. By 1885 the town had cotton gins, flour mills, a school, two churches and 150 people. The Cotton Belt crossed the Katy there in 1888, making it a shipping center, and Carrollton incorporated in 1913 with W. F. Vinson as its first mayor. A. W. Perry had earlier set up a mill at Trinity Mills, to the north.
What the plaque says
Perry Cemetery This cemetery opened with the burial of Sarah Huffman (Mrs. A. W.) Perry in 1896. Nearby was the Union Baptist Church, which stood on land given by A. W. Perry. On Feb. 18, 1897, he deeded land for this cemetery -- the first burial ground associated with the town of Carrollton. After it opened, a few burials were brought from private sites and reinterred here. The Union Church land was added to the cemetery about 1911, after the church moved away. The Rev. John M. Myers, a son of Union's founding pastor, is buried here with his wife. Most of the 482 graves are for pioneer families. (1976)
Where it stands
32.96381, -96.89697 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Dallas Museum of Art — 13 miA city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
- The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 14 miA plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
- Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 15 miDallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
- African American Museum, Dallas — 15 miFounded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.