Woodlawn Cemetery

Before it was Woodlawn it was Rock Rest. Joy Gough says the area took that name from a school and a Cumberland Presbyterian church, and that part of the cemetery was once the church's burial ground. The lower Bonham Road, also called Woodlawn Road, ran past. The Noyes family once owned the land and called it Noyes Cemetery, but the deeds say Woodlawn. Gough found only one Noyes buried there, Anne Belle, whose concrete-covered grave has her name scratched into it. Dripping Springs Creek wraps two sides. The cemetery is on private farmland with no public route.

What the plaque says

Woodlawn Cemetery This cemetery, located along the historic lower Bonham Road on the site of the Old Rock Rest Church and School, was first used during the 1870s. The two and one-half acre plot was deeded to cemetery trustees George A. Wilson, William W. Wallace, and T.C. Boone in 1882. Woodlawn Cemetery is the burial place for many Collin county pioneers. Jimmie Geigas, the first soldier from McKinney killed in World War I, also is buried here. With most of the graves dating before 1900, Woodlawn remains a significant example of a pioneer cemetery. (1984) Incise on back: Given in memory of Mary Klapper Benton, daughter of Philip and Mary Klapper, by her great nieces Lois Head and Birdie Moorhead.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary — 5.4 mi
  A 289-acre sanctuary in McKinney that Bessie Heard founded at the age of 80, with five habitats, a 50-acre wetland and 6.5 miles of trails.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 22 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.
• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 32 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.

More markers nearby

• Site of Wilmeth-McKinney Homestead — 1.8 mi
• McKinney — 1.9 mi
• Ambush at McKinney — 2.0 mi
• Old Settlers Park — 2.7 mi