ZION HILL CEMETERY

Rusk Co. Cemeteries of TX

Photo by MGIPDA@wmconnect.com

TRANSCRIBED BY Mary Frank Dunn

Submitted by Gloria B. Mayfield, Rusk Co. Coordinator

May 1999

Submitted by Gloria B. Mayfield

Zion Hill Cemetery is located across the road from the Zion Hill Missionary Baptist Church. (Organized August 1868) It is approximately eleven miles southeast of Henderson, between Farm Road 840 and the old Nacogdoches Highway. It is on the John Ferguson Headright.

The first person known to have been buried there was Dr. John Ferguson, who died December 28 1853, according to Probate Records in the Rusk Co. Courthouse. His grave is unmarked and lost. His son, Augustus Ferguson doinated the land for the oldest part of the cemetery. At one time crepe myrtle bushes marked the Ferguson graves. Several graves of Ferguson slaves are also said to be buried here near the west fence line.

The oldest death date on a marked grave is 1878. The earliest birth date is that of Frances Rowell, died 1884, aged 88 (born 1796).

Misses Alice and Zonie Harkness identified several of these unmarked graves of their ancestors. At one time the Phillip Griffith family kept paupers for the Co., and some of these people are also said to be buried here in unmarked graves.

In the oldest section of the cemetery, There is said to be about eight unmarked graves of Negro Slaves belonging to Dr. John Ferguson, original owner of the land. There are about five unmarked graves of members of the Ferguson family. Dr. John Ferguson and his wife, Elizabeth Holley Ferguson and Augustus Gerguson and his wife Velona Turner Ferguson, and a son of Augustus and Wife. A marker was placed for Augustus Ferguson in 1968 as follows:

 Zion Hill Church at Minden  has their annual picnic on Father's Day  and they sing Sacred Harp, "all day singing with dinner on the ground." 

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