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The history of this small community cemetery dates to the 1850s, before Denton was selected as county seat. The site contains graves of early pioneers of the Lewisville-Flower Mound area. Settlers included Nehemiah Wade Boyd (1823-1856), his wife Susan McCombs Boyd (1824-1917), their six children, family matriarch Mary Nowlin McCombs (1803-1867), and members of Nowlin, Sigler and Rivers families who arrived in 1855 from Tennessee. Nehemiah Boyd died suddenly of pneumonia after being chilled by a blue norther while building a log cabin for his family, and was buried on land donated by his brother-in-law, John Mathis McCombs. Susan Boyd later gave birth to their seventh child and first Texan, George Taylor Boyd (1856-1933). Although Nehemiah Boyd's burial was long believed to be the first, archeological evidence suggests as many as 100 individuals may have been buried here and that the site was a community cemetery in use between the 1850s and 1890s. Typically graves were marked with native sandstone or brick. Boyd descendants formed the McCombs Cemetery Association in 1990 to protect the burial site from encroaching development. (1997) |
