Pleasant Grove Cemetery

Pleasant Grove was a community by 1879, when minister William Pendergrass founded the Black Mount Moriah Baptist Church with a congregation of nine meeting under a brush arbor. Ten years later the church put up a building beside Westbrook Cemetery. In 1893 the Pleasant Grove Presbyterians belonged to the Elgin Presbyterian Circuit. The settlement never grew large enough for a post office or a population count. In 1933 it had two small schools, one for Black children and one for White, and by the mid-1980s only the church and cemetery marked the place.

What the plaque says

Pleasant Grove Cemetery By 1860, a log structure near this site served as a school and church. In 1871, E.E. Smith sold land to trustees of the Pleasant Grove School. The farming and ranching settlement of Pleasant Grove grew, and by 1890, the school served 51 students; the community's cemetery developed nearby. Residents built a two-story Woodmen of the World lodge in 1908 and used the first floor as a school. After razing the building in 1924, they reused the lumber for a new schoolhouse. Pleasant Grove School consolidated into the Elgin District in 1949, and the Pleasant Grove Cemetery Association purchased the former schoolhouse in 1967. Today, the burial ground remains the primary connection to the Pleasant Grove community. Although some of the many unmarked burials in the cemetery predate it, the earliest marked grave dates to 1871. The earliest birth year found on a gravestone is that of Clairbourn Scroggins, born in 1799. Among those buried here are military veterans of conflicts from the Civil War to the present. The cemetery is a link to their memory and to the history of Pleasant Grove. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2004

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bastrop State Park — 19 mi
  The westernmost loblolly pines in the United States, cut off from the East Texas forest by a hundred miles of post oak, burned almost entirely in 2011 and growing back.
• LBJ Presidential Library — 26 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.
• George Washington Carver Museum — 26 mi
  East Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.
• Texas State Cemetery — 26 mi
  A hill east of the Capitol that began with one general's grave in 1851 and now holds Stephen F. Austin, governors, Barbara Jordan and more than 2,000 Confederate veterans and widows.

More markers nearby

• Elgin Lodge No. 328, A. F. & A. M. — 4.2 mi
• City of Elgin Centennial, 1872-1972 — 4.3 mi
• Lund — 5.0 mi
• Three Oaks (Goerlitz) Cemetery — 6.4 mi