By Frances James (1922 – 2019)
The Perry Cemetery is in Carrollton with an address of 1800 Perry Road. The cemetery was started as a family cemetery in 1896 near the Alexander W. Perry’s home. When Alexander came to Texas in 1844 he was a thirty year old Illinois native with five children. He had married sixteen year old Sarah Huffman in 1840 and they eventually had fourteen children and farmed on the 640 acres of land acquired from Peters Colony in Dallas County. This land was in what became known as Carrollton, Texas. The Perry family had two teams and brought three extra horses and about $30.00 cash to Texas with them from Illinois. The land they settled on was so remote there were only about seven families within a six mile radius of them. There was an abundance of wild life for the family and Alexander kept his gun handy most of the time.
Hard work, good land, and good judgment allowed A. W. Perry to raise a good crop with enough to spare for others every year. His specialty was the stock business, cattle and horses, raising and selling a herd every year. He also raised mules. He sold his original farm, bought another and at one time owned the site of the Town of Carrollton. He donated land for the depot when the Missouri, Kansas and Texas (MKT) Railroad was being constructed to Denison in 1886. He was part owner of the Trinity Mills and sold that. In 1853 he purchased an 800 acre farm and gave a large farm to each of his children who lived in the vicinity.
Perry belonged to the Grange and the Farmer’s Alliance and the family attended the Missionary Baptist Church in which he was a deacon. The Perry’s home was first built around 1857 and it was demolished in 1909 and the materials were reused to build their new larger house. This structure is located at 1509 W. Perry Road and the house and ten acres of land were donated by descendants as a Homestead Museum for the City of Carrollton in 1977.
Perry had also donated a tract of land for the Union Baptist Church in 1884. This property was on land adjacent to the home place. The Church was organized in 1846 and moved several times before it finally built in 1895 on a comer of the Perry property. At some point in time the Texas Historical Marker for the Union Baptist Church was misplaced but has been found and re-erected on the original site adjacent to the Perry Cemetery.
From the beginning of the Carrollton Community most burials were in the Keenan Cemetery that had started in 1846 with the burial of the Keenan baby. Seven members of the Perry family are buried in the Keenan Cemetery in Farmers Branch, but when Sarah Huffman Perry died in 1896, Alexander wanted her buried next to the church and near their home. She became the first person to be buried in what is now the Perry Cemetery.
In 1907 the congregation had a split and members voted to move the Union Baptist building closer to downtown Carrollton thus the entire structure, stained glass windows and all was moved. It was partially dismantled and restored on the comer of Belt Line and Myers Street in Carrollton.
In 1897 A. W. Perry donated more land for the Perry Cemetery and in 1911 the church property, now vacant, was added to the site. Families who had members buried on private property moved them to the Perry Cemetery, the first in the town of Carrollton.
Frances James, “Dallas County History – From the Ground Up, Book II,” 2009.
