John Parker Pennington (1840-1904), born in Fannin County, Texas, during the Republic of Texas period, lived as a young man in Arizona Territory, where as a member of one of the first families to settle there he survived several deadly encounters with the region’s Native Americans. He participated in the Civil War and moved his family to Texas in 1867. The first recorded burial in the family cemetery was that of Pennington’s sister, Margaret (Mag) Dennision, in 1872. John Pennington, his two wives, Emily J. McAllister (d.1880) and Isabelle Purcell (d.1916), and their descendants are interred there.