Pleasant Valley Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna pass it along to you. Now picture 1848: a long way from home for a handful of families rolling out of Illinois and into this stretch of Texas. The Hollands, the Boydstuns, the Lowes, the Grounds; they came together, and they put down roots together.

Jacob and Drusilla Boydstun among them, with everything they owned and everyone they loved packed into that journey. But the land doesn't always greet you gently. That same year they arrived, the Boydstuns lost their son Henry.

And so before they'd hardly had time to call this place home, they had to give a piece of it back. Henry was buried right there on the family farm, right where they'd only just begun to build something. Now here's where the story turns, and it turns quiet and deliberate.

In 1870, Jacob and Drusilla Boydstun made a decision. They deeded three and a half acres surrounding their son's grave site; not just for a cemetery, but for a school and a church as well. They took the place of their grief and they opened it up.

Turned private sorrow into something a whole community could use. The cemetery grew with the community. In 1907, another acre and a half was purchased from A.

T. Baggett, enlarging the grounds to hold whoever came next. And they kept coming: pioneers, their children, their children's children.

Pleasant Valley Cemetery is still active today, still tended by a cemetery association, still holding the stories of this corner of Dallas County. It all started with one family, one loss, and one piece of ground they refused to keep only for themselves. That's a founding worth remembering.

What the marker says

The families of James Holland, Jacob and Drusilla Boydstun, Isaac Lowe, and Robert Ground immigrated from Illinois to this area in 1848. When the Boydstun's son, Henry, died later that year, he was buried at this site on the family farm. In 1870 the Boydstuns deeded 3.5 acres surrounding their son's grave site for cemetery, school, and church purposes. The cemetery was enlarged in 1907 with the purchase of 1.5 acres from A. T. Baggett. The graveyard remains active and is maintained by a cemetery association. Interred here are numerous area pioneers and their descendants. Pleasant Valley CemeteryEstablished 1874Historic Texas Cemetery - 2000