Telico Cemetery

Telico was meant to be a mill town. The Handbook of Texas says the community, first called Trinity City, took its name from Tellico Plains, Tennessee, a plantation and manufacturing center. In 1854 Thomas A. McCray founded the Telico Manufacturing Company and with other investors spent over $100,000 on a plant of four large engines that made cotton and wool cloth. By 1856 there were several businesses and a hotel. The Civil War ended both the company and the original settlement. A new Telico grew west of it before 1894 and had a post office until 1905.

What the plaque says

Telico Cemetery The first burial in this cemetery was that of the Rev. William J. Kirkpatrick, a local Cumberland Presbyterian Minister, who died on May 1, 1867. Shortly after his death, a congregation organized by the Rev. W.G.L. Quaite was named in Kirkpatrick's honor, and a place of worship was constructed later near the gravesite. Land surrounding Kirkpatrick's grave was part of the plantation of Confederate veteran Major Henry Pannill. Pannill's son Joseph died in October 1867 and was buried near Kirkpatrick's gravesite. The following year Pannill deeded some of his land around the burial sites to trustees of the Kirkpatrick Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Within the next decade the community of Telico grew up around the church building and cemetery. After the turn of the century, however, people began abandoning the village for the conveniences of the railroad town of Ennis (6 mi. W), and the cemetery fell into a period of neglect. Telico Cemetery serves as a reminder of the hardships faced by area pioneers. Of the more than 300 known graves, 45 date before 1882 and almost half are of children under the age of ten. Since 1937 the Telico Cemetery Association has cared for the grounds. (1983)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Petroleum Industry Park — 19 mi
  The pipes and drilling tower mark where a city water well struck oil on June 9, 1894, the start of the first Texas field to produce oil and gas in important quantities.
• Ellis County Courthouse — 20 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.
• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 28 mi
  A free museum at Terrell's airport where about 2,200 RAF cadets learned to fly between 1941 and 1945, with logbooks, uniforms, letters and original training aircraft.
• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 32 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.

More markers nearby

• Sokol Karel Havlicek Borovsky — 5.3 mi
• Alma — 6.1 mi
• Bristol School — 7.3 mi
• Rosser Depot of the Texas Midland Railroad — 7.3 mi