Pleasant Grove Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how Duane tells it too. Way out in Upshur County, there's a stretch of ground called Pleasant Grove Cemetery, and the story starts before the cemetery even had a name. Back in the 1850s, pioneer families were rolling into this corner of East Texas, most of them coming up from the southern United States, looking to put down roots and build something.

They called their community Lafayette, and they built it the way people built things then: slowly, with their hands, and with no guarantee it would last. It lasted. Now, in any cemetery, the first burial is a thing that settles heavy on you when you think about it.

The first recorded burial at Pleasant Grove was in 1860, and it was a child. One year old. Thomas J.

Harrison, son of Abram and Harriet Harrison, who had come all the way from Georgia to make a life here. That's the name the record holds first. One year old.

Then the ground kept. Ten years after that first burial, a man named J. M.

Brison set aside the land, formally, for church and cemetery purposes. That was 1870, and it gave the place its footing. But here's the detail that'll stick with you on a long stretch of highway.

In the 1890s, iron ore was being mined commercially right here in this area, and some of the people who cared for this cemetery took that iron ore, that raw dark stuff pulled out of the East Texas earth, and used it to mark the grave sites of the earliest settlers. The land itself, in a manner of speaking, became the memorial. The cemetery is still maintained today, by an association that got itself organized in 1973.

Some places, you pass through. Pleasant Grove Cemetery is one you carry with you a little ways down the road.

What the marker says

Many of the pioneer families who settled in this area and established the Lafayette community in the 1850s immigrated from the southern United States. The 1860 burial of one-year-old Thomas J. Harrison, son of Georgia immigrants Abram and Harriet Harrison, is the first recorded in the cemetery. Land for church and cemetery purposes was set aside by J. M. Brison in 1870. Iron ore, mined commercially here in the 1890s, was used to mark several grave sites of the area's earliest settlers. The cemetery is maintained by an association organized in 1973. (1994)