McLarry Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out in Collin County, there's a piece of ground that's been holding stories since 1851. That's when a man named John R.

Jones, who owned this land, buried his infant son here. Just like that, before there was a cemetery, there was a grave. That's how it always starts; not with a plan, but with a loss.

The land passed through time, and somewhere along the way, a woman named Mary Virginia Dunn McLarry and her father, Robert A. McLarry, made a decision that would outlast them both. They donated this site as a public burial ground, not for themselves, not for profit, but for the pioneer settlers of the surrounding Wilmeth settlement.

That's the kind of generosity that doesn't make headlines, but it does make history. Now, the earliest marked graves belong to a brother and a sister, Henry E. and Adella M. Hall, who both died in 1870.

A brother and a sister, side by side. The marker doesn't say more than that, and sometimes that silence is the whole story. And here's a name worth noting: J.B.

Wilmeth. The very community this cemetery served bore his name, and he himself is buried here among the people of that settlement. There's something fitting about that; the man who gave the place its name resting in the ground that place called home.

Today, descendants of those pioneer families still use this site. The ground that started with one father's grief in 1851 is still receiving the people who carry those old names forward. Some places just hold on.

McLarry Cemetery is one of them.

What the marker says

This site was first used as a cemetery in 1851 when property owner John R. Jones buried his infant son here. The land was later donated as a public burial ground for the pioneer settlers of the surrounding Wilmeth settlement by Mary Virginia Dunn McLarry and her father Robert A. McLarry. The earliest marked graves are those of a brother and sister, Henry E. and Adella M. Hall, who died in 1870. Also buried here is J.B. Wilmeth, for whom the community was named. The site is now used by descendants of the pioneer area families. (1981)