Pleasant Grove Cemetery

The iron ore markers on early graves date from a boom the plaque barely mentions. A 1946 county history says there was a great iron ore boom at LaFayette in 1892 or 1893. Families moved in, new homes went up and other businesses opened, and prospects for a real town looked good. Then a money panic came on about the same time, and for lack of financial support the iron ore enterprise failed to materialize. J. M. Brison, who set aside the cemetery land in 1870, is buried here.

What the plaque says

Pleasant Grove Cemetery Many of the pioneer families who settled in this area and established the Lafayette community in the 1850s immigrated from the southern United States. The 1860 burial of one-year-old Thomas J. Harrison, son of Georgia immigrants Abram and Harriet Harrison, is the first recorded in the cemetery. Land for church and cemetery purposes was set aside by J. M. Brison in 1870. Iron ore, mined commercially here in the 1890s, was used to mark several grave sites of the area's earliest settlers. The cemetery is maintained by an association organized in 1973. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Daingerfield State Park — 13 mi
  A pine-and-hardwood park built in 1935-39 by a white and a Black Civilian Conservation Corps company, with a dammed lake, Bass Lodge and a 2.4-mile loop trail around the water.
• Lake Bob Sandlin State Park — 17 mi
  A 1987 state park on a 9,000-acre reservoir, where a Republic of Texas stockade called Fort Sherman stood in 1838 and the Caddo lived from A.D. 800 to 1860, now with fishing piers, trails and cabins.

More markers nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery — 1.1 mi
• Center Point Community — 4.7 mi
• Center Point School — 4.9 mi
• Bolton Cemetery — 5.1 mi