Pioneer's Rest Cemetery

Pioneers Rest spent decades in a kind of legal fog. Wikipedia, drawing on a Fort Worth Genealogical Society history, says it was called the old cemetery or the Samuels Avenue cemetery until 1909, when the association took the name Pioneers Rest. In 1917 the city was found to have owned the ground since buying it for $76 in 1880, and the park board handed it back. During the Depression hobos camped among its shrubs near the railroad. The last burial came in 1993, and the National Register listed the cemetery in 2021.

What the plaque says

Pioneer's Rest Cemetery This burial ground was started in the summer of 1850 upon the deaths of Sophie and Willis Arnold, children of Major Ripley A. Arnold (1817-1853), commander of the troops at Fort Worth. Arnold's friend, Doctor Adolphus Gouhenant, set aside a three-acre burial site at that time. In 1871, after a cemetery association was begun, Baldwin Samuels gave three adjoining acres. Many early Fort Worth settlers, including 75 Civil War veterans, are buried here. This site also contains the graves of Major Arnold and General Edward H.Tarrant (1799-1858), for whom Tarrant County was named. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tarrant County Courthouse — 0.6 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 1.9 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 2.4 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 2.8 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.

More markers nearby

• General Edward H. Tarrant — steps away
• Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church — 0.5 mi
• Paddock Viaduct — 0.6 mi
• Eastern Cattle Trail — 0.6 mi