This website contains the best available accounting of the graves within the Melissa Cemetery located in Melissa, Texas as of April 2009.  Updates will take place as needed.

The City of Melissa is located 6 miles north of McKinney, the county seat of Collin County.  It can be reached by driving north from McKinney on State Hwy 5 or US Hwy 75.  Melissa Cemetery is located on Melissa Road approximately 1.5 miles west of Melissa between State Hwy 5 and US Hwy 75.

Melissa Cemetery is a recognized State of Texas Historical Cemetery which contains approximately 1146 marked graves and an unknown number of unmarked and lost graves. To date, there are 88 veterans buried in Melissa Cemetery documenting The Mexican American War, Civil War, Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War and the Iraq War.  There are also stones recognizing 14 Masonic Members, 3 Eastern Star Members and 11 Woodsmen of the World.

The oldest graves in the cemetery are those of William M. Sherley (1856) and Lewis Sherley (1867) who may have been originally buried in a family cemetery on the nearby farm of Lewis Sherley,(which later became the St. Paul Cemetery) and relocated west of Shirley creek to this site when the Melissa Cemetery was formerly established in 1889.

Many of Melissa’s first residents came from the Highland Community approximately 2 miles north of the present day Melissa which virtually vanished around 1872 with the coming of the Houston and Texas Central (H&TC) railroad through Collin County.  Some of the cemeteries that served Melissa prior to the 1889 formation of Melissa Cemetery were Highland, Orenduff, Stony Point, Throckmorton, St. Paul and numerous small family cemeteries.