Sardis Cemetery

Sardis has worn three names. The Handbook of Texas says Allen Roe settled the area as early as 1855 and Capt. William Wade Peevey took up 414 acres in 1858. A post office called Hurley Station opened in November 1886 and became Saralvo in 1888. When the post office was discontinued, residents renamed the community Sardis in 1907. By 1891 the place had several businesses and three churches, and Saralvo counted 152 people in 1904. After 1933 the population fell rapidly, from 150 that year to thirty in 1947, leaving the cemetery as an anchor.

What the plaque says

Sardis Cemetery The earliest marked grave in the Sardis Cemetery is that of Susan Jane Rachael (Peevey) Kelly, who died in childbirth in 1871. Early settler Robert Mayfield donated land for the graveyard for the use of families in the Sardis Community. The burial site contains the graves of veterans from several wars and of many area pioneers. Over the years, there has been an informal association with the nearby Methodist church. In 1924, the Sardis Cemetery Committee was organized to handle matters concerning this rural Ellis County graveyard. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ellis County Courthouse — 5.1 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 — 14 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 — 25 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 — 25 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

• Sardis United Methodist Church — 0.6 mi
• Getzendaner Memorial Park — 3.8 mi
• First United Methodist Church of Waxahachie — 4.6 mi
• Paul Richards Park — 4.7 mi