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This area of Denton County was known as Holford's Prairie in the mid-19th century, named for brothers John and James Halford (Holford), pioneer settlers who obtained 640 acres of land as members of the Peters Colony. Basdeal W. Lewis platted the town of Lewisville in 1853. Thomas Morgan (1814-1887) and Elizabeth A. (1815-1883) Smith purchased 318 acres of land here in 1859. They sold two and one-half acres of their farmland to the Lewisville Masonic Lodge in 1881 for the establishment of a community cemetery. The site had been used as a burial ground since 1862, when the Smiths' 20-year-old son, James J. Smith, died and was buried on the family farm. His is the earliest marked grave in the Smith Cemetery. Among the pioneer Denton County family names that can be seen on gravestones here are Herod, Sherrill, Clayton, Skillern, Cobb, Jenkins, Temple, Bourland, Hamilton, Fenlaw, Oliver and Fox. John Moore (1834-1922) and Ann Eliza (1849-1923) Fox had the sad task of burying six children here between 1863 and 1882, a testament to the often harsh conditions of pioneer life. Local oral history records suggest that some of the unmarked graves in the Smith Cemetery are those of former slaves of the Julius Kane Fox family. The Smith Cemetery Association, organized in 1950 to maintain the historic graveyard, purchased the site from the Masonic lodge in 1972. Currently containing more than 400 marked graves and an unknown number of unmarked ones, the cemetery remains in use by the community and by descendants of the pioneer families interred here. (2001) |
