Red Oak Cemetery

Red Oak began as Possum Trot, for the abundance of possums, and became Red Oak after Ellis County formed in 1849, taking the creek's name, the Handbook of Texas says. The first post office came in 1847 from Mitchell's Branch. Before the Civil War wheat was the main crop; cotton grew in the 1860s because more enslaved people were brought in from other southern states. When the Katy came in 1884, townspeople kept the tracks a mile off to protect the quiet, and the town later moved to the line. Bonnie and Clyde filmed here in 1967.

What the plaque says

Red Oak Cemetery Originally known as the Kemble Cemetery, this graveyard began as a family burial ground. Abraham Kemble acquired the land on which the cemetery is located about 1860. He and his wife Mary were both buried here in 1867. In 1892 Kemble descendants gave the land to Liberty Baptist Church, later renamed First Baptist Church, Red Oak. The cemetery became a public burial ground after the turn of the century. Those interred here include generations of Kemble family members, area pioneers, and veterans of several wars, beginning with the civil war. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ellis County Courthouse — 8.3 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.
• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 13 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 19 mi
  Dallas'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.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 19 mi
  A 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.

More markers nearby

• Parsons' Cavalry C.S.A. — 1.3 mi
• Ellis County — 1.3 mi
• Bell's Chapel Cemetery — 2.2 mi
• First Baptist Church of Ovilla — 4.7 mi