White Rose Cemetery

The cemetery began with William Wills, and so did the town's name. The Handbook of Texas says Wills arrived about 1846 and built a double log cabin, now considered the oldest house in the territory. In July 1856 he bought 320 acres from the state on the Dallas-Shreveport Road, built corrals, kept supplies and offered the cabin as a resting place for travelers. He was a tax assessor, and the name came from his family and a timberline jutting onto the prairie near his home. The Business and Professional Women's Club has kept the cabin.

What the plaque says

White Rose Cemetery The town of Wills Point was established in the early 1870s on the Texas and Pacific Railroad. It was named for the log cabin/trading post established at a nearby site on the Dallas-Shreveport Road by early settler William Wills. This cemetery began with the burial of Wills on family land in 1864. Wills' widow, Mary Ann (Phillips), set aside eight acres here in a grid pattern and sold lots for community burials. Although the graveyard was known as the Wills Point Cemetery in 1874, the White Rose Cemetery Association was formed that year to maintain the grounds. In 1886 Mary Wills retained the family burial plot and deeded the remainder of the eight-acre graveyard to the Wills Point Cemetery. The White Rose Cemetery Association fenced the grounds and erected a gate with a connecting archway at the graveyard's west entrance in 1901. In 1909 the association obtained a state charter and officially renamed the graveyard White Rose Cemetery. The cemetery was enlarged over the years and by 1964 covered about 45 acres. Among the cemetery's approximately 31,500 burials are many of the area's pioneer settlers and their descendants and veterans of conflicts ranging from the Civil War to the Vietnam War. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845-1995 Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845-1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 16 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.
• Purtis Creek State Park — 24 mi
  A 1,582-acre park straddling the Henderson and Van Zandt county line, built around a 355-acre lake with no-wake fishing, borrowed tackle, a 4.1-mile hike-and-bike trail and a nature path.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 31 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.

More markers nearby

• County Seat War — 0.3 mi
• Dallas-Shreveport Road — 0.3 mi
• First Christian Church of Wills Point — 0.9 mi
• Elbert Gray — 1.3 mi