Vittitoe Cemetery

Vittitoe Cemetery began as a family plot and became a public ground by a deed dated April 25, 1885, naming Quincy Vittitoe, D. J. Lollad and James Bray as trustees. It holds sixteen Confederate veterans and two Union veterans. A transcription on the county genealogy site records one Black burial by name, a woman called Mammie and described there as a former slave who stayed with the family; the source gives no fuller name. Expansions came in 1924, 1960 and 1978, and a perpetual care trust chartered in 1978 pays for year-round upkeep.

What the plaque says

Vittitoe Cemetery This graveyard was begun as a family burial plot by Samuel and Ellen Vittitoe, who settled on land surrounding this site in 1852. Their son, Frank, probably was the first to be buried here sometime before the outbreak of the Civil War, although his headstone is undated. The Vittitoes made it known to the residents of Kentucky Town (1 mi. N) that their plot was open for burials outside the family, but the cemetery was not used as a public burial ground until it was legally established as such in 1885. More than 700 graves have been recorded in the Vittitoe Cemetery. Most of them bear tombstones with legible inscriptions, but others are marked only by stakes or pieces of stone or rock. Included among those buried here are early settlers such as Andrew Thomas, who brought his family to the area in 1837; numerous Civil War veterans; the Rev. Isaac Teague, pastor of the Kentucky Town Baptist Church during the early 1900s; and Benjamin Earnest, who helped establish a general store soon after settling in Kentucky Town in 1859. Vittitoe Cemetery, which is cared for by the Vittitoe Cemetery Association, is an important reminder of the early history of this part of Grayson County. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 13 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site — 17 mi
  The small frame house beside the Katy tracks in Denison where Dwight Eisenhower was born in 1890, bought by townspeople in 1946 and given to Texas in 1958.
• Eisenhower State Park — 23 mi
  A bluff-top park on Lake Texoma opened in 1958 on land leased from the Corps of Engineers, in the Red River country of Fort Johnson, Colbert's Ferry and the Butterfield stages.
• Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge — 24 mi
  A 1946 refuge on the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma, laid over land bought for Denison Dam and the site of the vanished railroad town of Hagerman, now a winter stop for geese.

More markers nearby

• Kentucky Town — 0.7 mi
• Whitewright — 2.1 mi
• First Methodist Church of Whitewright — 2.4 mi
• Whitewright Masonic Lodge No. 167 — 2.5 mi