Wiley College Cemetery

This ground is what remains of Wiley's first campus. The Handbook of Texas says the college began south of Marshall, where the Wiley College Cemetery lies, and moved to a 70-acre tract downtown in 1880. Wikipedia likewise puts the former campus in south Marshall near what remains of the cemetery. For the college's first twenty years the president, faculty and staff were all white; Isaiah B. Scott became its first Black president in 1893, and Matthew Dogan followed him in 1896. Dogan then served 46 years, until his retirement in 1942.

What the plaque says

Wiley College Cemetery The Freedmen's Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, North, an organization devoted to the education of former slaves and their descendants, established Wiley College in Marshall in March 1873. The school was named for Bishop Isaac W. Wiley, a charter member of the society, and was originally located about three miles south of the town square. The college moved to its present location in 1877. A four-acre plot of the college property was set aside as a burial ground for the Black community, and has been known through the years as both Wiley College Cemetery and Wiley University Cemetery. The earliest documented graves here are those of Oscar Laurin Coffin (March 11 - May 15, 1894) and his mother, Minnie May Coffin (d. June 17, 1894). Other members of the community buried here include the Rev. Matthew Dogan (1863-1947), president of Wiley College from 1896 to 1942; respected schoolteacher Effie Mitchell; educators Henry and Gertrude H. Mason; and veterans of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. The cemetery also contains a large number of unmarked graves. The Wiley College Cemetery Club, organized in 1959, maintains the historic graveyard. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Starr Family Home State Historic Site — 1.5 mi
  Maplecroft, the 1871 Greek Revival house Frank Starr built in Marshall, with Ruth Starr Blake's glass and china, an 1880s kitchen restored in 2019 and a retirement home built for a formerly enslaved person.
• Harrison County Historical Museum — 1.7 mi
  Galleries in Marshall's 1901 courthouse that run from the Caddo to the present, with Wiley College, Lady Bird Johnson's inaugural gown and a military gallery across the square in Memorial City Hall.
• Texas and Pacific Railway Depot and Museum — 2.2 mi
  The only surviving building of the Texas and Pacific shops at Marshall, a 1912 Mission Revival depot saved from demolition in the 1990s, still an Amtrak stop, with a railway museum and a Mikado locomotive.
• Caddo Lake National Wildlife Refuge — 16 mi
  Wetlands and woods on part of a former ammunition plant, now a refuge for wood ducks, prothonotary warblers and alligator snapping turtles, with four easy trails and a free visitor center on a Ramsar lake.

More markers nearby

• H. B. Pemberton — 0.9 mi
• Home of Last Texas Confederate Governor Pendleton Murrah — 1.0 mi
• James Leonard Farmer, Sr. — 1.0 mi
• Melvin B. Tolson — 1.1 mi