Elm Grove Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, most cemeteries get their start because a town needs one. This one got its start because a man gave away the ground he was going to lie in, and then did exactly that.

The Roland family came out of Alabama, pioneers through and through, and they put down roots here in Collin County in the 1830s. That is early. Texas was not yet a state.

Texas was barely a republic. And getting here cost the family something it could not get back. A man named John Roland served in the Texas Revolution and was killed in it.

In recognition of that military service, the Republic of Texas awarded a land grant, and the recipients were the people John left behind: his mother, Martha Roland Arrington, and his two brothers, Sherrod and Ezekial. Now, Ezekial Roland was himself a veteran of the Texas Revolution. Born in 1824, he came through that fight, married a woman named Mahala Pace, and eventually looked out at that land grant, land soaked in his family's sacrifice, and made a decision.

He and Mahala set aside a portion of it for use as a public cemetery. Open to the community. A gift.

Here is where the story gets quiet and heavy. The first person buried in Elm Grove Cemetery was Ezekial Roland himself. He died in 1859, at the age of thirty-five.

The man who donated the ground became the first to rest in it. And the ground kept receiving. Elm Grove also served the earliest residents of a community called Seven Points, later known as Westminster.

The town took hold in the 1860s and grew into something, an early Methodist school called Westminster College operated there until the early 1900s, and a Baptist academy came along after. Communities like that need a place to bury their teachers, their deacons, their farmers, their children. Elm Grove was that place.

Over a hundred years of burials. More than fifteen hundred known graves. Another two hundred and fifty where the names have been lost to time, the unidentified, the unmarked, the ones history did not hold onto tightly enough.

And here is the thing: the cemetery is still in use. Pioneers, community leaders, residents of the surrounding rural land, they are all out there together, on ground that a thirty-five-year-old man decided belonged to everyone. Ezekial Roland did not live long.

But the thing he gave away has outlasted just about everything else.

What the marker says

Members of the pioneer Roland family, natives of Alabama, settled here in the 1830s. Land at this site was part of a Republic of Texas land grant awarded to family members in recognition of the military service of John Roland, who was killed during the Texas Revolution. Receiving the property were his mother, Martha Roland Arrington, and two brothers Sherrod and Ezekial Roland. A veteran of the Texas Revolution, Ezekial (b. 1824) and his wife Mahala (Pace) set aside this part of the land grant for use as a public cemetery. The first burial here was that of the donor, Ezekial Roland, who died at the age of 35, in 1859. The pioneer Elm Grove Cemetery also served the earliest residents of the Seven Points community, later known as Westminster. Established in the 1860s, the town was the site of an early Methodist school, Westminster College, which operated here until the early 1900s, and a later Baptist academy. Still in use, Elm Grove Cemetery contains over 1500 known graves and 250 unidentified gravesites. For over 100 years it was served as the burial site of pioneers, community leaders, and residents of the surrounding rural area. ** (11981)***