Inside the effort to save the story of Denton County’s oldest Black cemetery

In the late 1890s, on a 1.5-acre patch of land in northern Denton County, formerly enslaved Black residents of Pilot Point laid their dead to rest in a cemetery they had helped consecrate as part of St. John’s Church. More than a century later, that burial ground — the oldest known African American cemetery in Denton County — sits hidden behind a wall of overgrown trees, landlocked by adjacent properties and largely erased from the public landscape it once anchored.

The cemetery and the community that built it have a story worth recovering, residents told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. More than 400 people are believed to be buried at St. John’s. Only 56 have been confirmed by name.

A church, a school and a community born of emancipation

Following emancipation, formerly enslaved Black people in the area established St. John’s Church and a school on the Bonner plantation — the largest plantation documented in Denton County records. The cemetery grew out of that congregation. The oldest tombstone identified by the St. John’s Cemetery Association dates to 1892. The last deed filed with Denton County for the cemetery plot records an 1891 purchase by the church’s trustees: John Burton, Abram Lyles and Joseph Meadows.

For decades into the early 20th century, the cemetery remained in the trustees’ care. The church and its school were the institutional center of a freedmen’s community whose presence in Denton County records was steady — until it wasn’t.

Jessica Luther Rummel, lead researcher for the cemetery association, has been reconstructing that arc from newspapers, Census data and burial records. She found a consistent rise in burials through the 1910s, followed by a sudden dip in the 1920s that mirrors a rapid decline in Denton County’s African American population.

Rummel found clippings describing the Ku Klux Klan terrorizing, kidnapping and warning African Americans in the region. In December 1922, two Black men were abducted from the Pilot Point jail after being accused of stealing horses. An African American newspaper based in Minneapolis, The Appeal, later published an anonymous plea describing how racial violence in Pilot Point and surrounding areas had grown so severe that “scores of men, women and children had already left the vicinity.”

“This is about correcting the wrongs of history,” Rummel said. “This is about recognizing the kinds of sacrifices that these individuals made. This is about putting a spotlight on racist injustice that is occurring right now.”

How a 1918 deed swallowed a cemetery

The physical erasure of St. John’s traces in part to a single transaction. In 1918, a neighboring property sale recorded inaccurate boundaries that improperly absorbed the cemetery into an adjacent parcel — the first of decades of land transfers that gradually left the burial ground isolated and inaccessible.

By the time the boundary issues were partially corrected in the 1960s, both the cemetery and the surrounding Black community had been largely erased from public memory. The site was rediscovered in the late 1990s, then forgotten again until scholars and advocates pushed for its preservation years later, the association says.

Under Texas law, the cemetery is exempt from property tax because it is a burial site and not operated for profit. Rummel argues that the rightful owners are the descendants of the 1891 trustees’ purchase. Texas Health and Safety Code Section 711.041 also guarantees the public legal and reasonable access to a cemetery surrounded by private property, though routes and hours are determined by the surrounding property owners.

The graves themselves

Willie Hudspeth, 80, had not set foot on the grounds for nearly two years when neighboring property owners allowed him onto the site on a Saturday morning in May. He walked gingerly through overgrown grass and fallen leaves, past headstones discolored and cracked after decades of neglect. On many, the names, birth years and death years are illegible. Some graves are unmarked, identified only by stones laid on the ground.

“What bothers me is you’re walking on people,” Hudspeth said.

He first learned of St. John’s in 2015, when a stranger approached him outside the Denton County Courthouse, where he was protesting a Confederate statue. He drove out to Pilot Point, found the cemetery and began organizing volunteer cleanups with property owner Kim Thomas, who had recently bought the surrounding land with her husband. In 2016, John White joined the effort. His ancestors, John D. White and Sam Allen, are buried at St. John’s.

Among the dead Hudspeth has helped identify is at least one World War I veteran — and possibly more. The records that might confirm others have been lost by the same long neglect that eroded the cemetery’s boundaries.

UNT students, the Historical Commission and a fight for recognition

In the spring of 2018, undergraduate and graduate students from the University of North Texas joined with the Denton County Office of History & Culture and other institutions on the St. John’s Community Project. The project researched the history of St. John’s Baptist Church and St. John’s Cemetery, “the people who are buried there, and the social, religious, geographic, and economic networks to which they were connected,” according to its website.

That academic foundation helped formalize an effort years in the making. In May 2023 — seven years after the Denton County Commissioners Court first approved making the application — the county applied for a Historic Texas Cemetery designation through the Texas Historical Commission. The designation was approved in December 2023. The cemetery association says it learned of the designation only after submitting a public records request.

According to county figures, Denton County spent more than $115,000 on outside labor for the cemetery between July 2016 and March 2024 to clear and maintain the site, with an estimated 144 visits for mowing, cutting tree limbs and removing dead trees. The county also obtained a $5,000 quote from geophysical services company Gehrig Inc. for a ground radar survey of part of the cemetery, but funds were not available. In 2024, commissioners discontinued maintenance, citing a policy of not providing “cemetery landscaping or other services to any cemetery not owned by the county.”

Access has also tightened. In 2020, an adjacent property owner who had allowed visitors in sold his land, cutting off the route from Highway 455. John White died in 2021.

The association, formed in June 2025, is now seeking a permanent easement through two neighboring properties — one owned by the Thomases, the other by the Stinchcombs family. Attorney Richard Gladden, who represents the association, says both have signaled openness to negotiating reasonable access without litigation.

Reading the names

In May, when descendants and association members returned to the cemetery for the first time in two years, Rummel read aloud the names of the 56 confirmed dead. She laid a flower on the ground for each. Some markers offered full names. Others offered only a birth year, a death year or the words “unknown identity.”

Mary Jackson came with relatives from Pilot Point — descendants of the Allens, Wares and Finches.

“I like coming out here because there’s a lot of history,” Jackson said. “I like walking down, looking at the grave and knowing that they were here.”