Morrow Chapel Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll pass it along just the same. You know, some places earn their names quietly through decades of use, through the weight of what the ground has held. Morrow Chapel Cemetery is one of those places.

It started, as these things sometimes do, with loss. The year was 1853, and the Morrow family, early settlers in this part of Kaufman County, buried an infant here. Alexander Morrow.

That was the first interment on this ground, and the land remembered. Nearly forty years passed. Then, in 1892, Alexander's mother, Mary Elizabeth Morrow, who had been born back in 1812, made a decision that would shape everything that came after.

She gave the site and the land adjoining it to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. They built a sanctuary there, and they named it in her honor. Think about that for a moment.

A mother who had buried her child in that ground, and then, decades later, gave the ground itself away as a gift, as a legacy, as something that would outlast her. She passed in 1894, just two years after the giving. The church she'd made possible carried on for a while.

Then, in the early 1920s, it disbanded. But the chapel didn't go quiet; it went to work. The building later housed classes for the Ola School District, so children filled the space where congregation had been.

And the cemetery association? That came together in the 1930s, shaped up under the leadership of Mrs. Henry LaRoe and Mr. and Mrs.

Basil Barton, making sure somebody would always be keeping watch over this ground. From an infant's grave in 1853, to a mother's gift, to a schoolhouse, to a community still tending what was left behind, Morrow Chapel Cemetery has been a lot of things. But it has always been a place people came back to.

What the marker says

This burial ground originally served members of the Morrow family, early area settlers. It was first used in 1853 for the interment of Alexander Morrow, an infant. In 1892 his mother Mary Elizabeth Morrow (1812-94) gave the site and adjoining land to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, who built a sanctuary here named in her honor. The church disbanded in the early 1920s and the chapel later housed classes of the Ola School District. In the 1930s a cemetery association was formed under the leadership of Mrs. Henry LaRoe and Mr. and Mrs. Basil Barton.