Shady Grove Cemetery

A deed filed on January 13, 1877, shows L. H. Caster and his wife, Ruth Jane Lusk, giving an acre to the trustees of the Shady Grove school for a graveyard and a schoolhouse that would also serve as a church. About October 1888 two acres from the John Spoon survey were conveyed as a burial ground for white citizens of the community, so the cemetery began segregated. Residents cleaned it each Memorial Day and built coffins by hand, padded with cotton and lined with white cloth. Grand Prairie named it a Significant Landmark on May 16, 1981.

What the plaque says

Shady Grove Cemetery In 1877 Louis H. Caster (1826 - 1908) deeded one acre for a community graveyard, church, and schoolhouse. His son-in-law Lewis Dowd gave further acreage in 1888. Once a center of social life for the pioneer families of Shady Grove, the church and school have been relocated. The cemetery remains in use. Oldest of the 450 marked graves is dated 1878. Veterans of the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the Korean War rest here. A cemetery association, formed in 1962, maintains the site. Additional land was given in 1971 by the W. Q. Seale family and by Gifford Hill & Co., Inc. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 12 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.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 12 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.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 13 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 14 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.

More markers nearby

• Ford Cemetery — 2.4 mi
• Daniel Webster Gilbert, M. D. — 2.5 mi
• Sowers Cemetery — 2.6 mi
• West Fork United Presbyterian Church — 2.7 mi