Pleasant Grove Cemetery

A cemetery deed can state its welcome and its limit in the same sentence. Joy Gough's survey reports that F. J. Rominger's deed says no white person would be denied burial for poverty or religious opinion if there was room, so its promise named only white families. She found the graves on three sides of the small white church, with a covered pavilion behind and an arch over one drive. Visitation day is the second Sunday in June. The Midway School stood just south, its flagpole still standing, and FM 2756 follows the old Farmersville road.

What the plaque says

Pleasant Grove Cemetery Malissa (Dodson) Sides became the first person to be buried on this site in March 1891. Believed to have been half Native American, Mrs. Sides and her Cherokee half sister Ellen Murphy survived the U. S. government relocation of the tribe during their youth. The pair came to Collin County from Indian Territory with Malissa's husband Henry L. Sides. In October 1891, charter Methodist church members Franklin J. and Nancy (Van Hues) Rominger donated an acre of land including Mrs. Sides' gravesite to the trustees of the Pleasant Grove Methodist Episcopal Church, South, to be used as a public burial ground. The Romingers, Henry Sides and Ellen Murphy are all interred in the cemetery, as are descendants of these and other pioneer families. For many years cemetery trustees raised funds and maintained the grounds through stew suppers and annual decoration days. A 1996 count revealed more than 1,000 graves, most with markers of some kind. The graves of 141 infants in the old north section bear witness to the harsh conditions of pioneer life; 7 Confederate and 52 other veterans of U. S. and international conflicts are interred here. Pleasant Grove Cemetery continues to serve the area. (1998)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary — 11 mi
  A 289-acre sanctuary in McKinney that Bessie Heard founded at the age of 80, with five habitats, a 50-acre wetland and 6.5 miles of trails.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 19 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 21 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

• Verona Methodist Church — 3.2 mi
• Huson Cemetery — 3.9 mi
• Altoga Cemetery — 3.9 mi
• Site of World War II Prisoner of War Camp — 4.3 mi