Rockford Church and Cemetery

Rockford is a place name, and the Handbook of Texas explains it: the settlement was named for a rocky ford of the North Sulphur River. A post office served it from 1891 to 1909, and in 1940 it had twenty-five people and one business. After World War II many residents moved out, and by the mid-1960s its only store had closed. By the early 1990s it was a dispersed rural community. The plaque counts more than 1,000 graves in the cemetery, far more than the 1940 population.

What the plaque says

Rockford Church and Cemetery Before April 1864 church was founded by Cumberland Presbyterians, with the Rev. W. W. Havanaugh as pastor. Congregation affiliated in 1925 with Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.; and in 1958 was dissolved. Cemetery was opened as early as 1874; has more than 1,000 graves. (1972)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Eiffel Tower — 10 mi
  A 65-foot Eiffel Tower with a red cowboy hat, built by the local welders' union in 1993 beside Paris's Love Civic Center.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 11 mi
  Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 12 mi
  The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.
• Cooper Lake State Park — 14 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.

More markers nearby

• Biardstown School — 3.2 mi
• Antioch Cemetery and Old Antioch Church of Christ — 4.0 mi
• Wilson, John William — 5.6 mi
• Thomas Wilson Stegall — 6.8 mi