Alexander Dobkins Family Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker records about the Alexander Dobkins Family Cemetery out in Tarrant County. Now, some stories start with a bang, a battle, a flood, a fortune made or lost. This one starts quieter than that.

It starts with a family loading up everything they owned and pointing themselves toward Texas. Alexander Dobkins was born in 1815, his wife Mary in 1818, and in 1852 they left Tennessee behind and made their way here. Pioneer settlers, the marker calls them, and that word 'pioneer' carries more weight than it's sometimes given.

It means you arrived before things were easy. It means you built what wasn't there yet. Alexander carved out a two-hundred-acre farm from this land, and somewhere on that farm he set aside this ground.

His grave is the earliest marked here, the man who staked the place also became the first to rest in it, in 1869. But between 1852 and 1869, Alexander Dobkins was not a man who sat still. He was ordained as a minister at the nearby Bear Creek Baptist Church, and if that wasn't enough to keep a man occupied, during the Civil War he also served as postmaster for the local community of Estill's Station.

Preacher, postmaster, farmer. The kind of man a young community leans on because there's simply no one else to ask. Mary outlived him by eleven years, passing in 1880.

And the cemetery kept growing. Their son William C. Dobkins, born 1841, and here's where the story takes a long, long breath, William lived until 1928.

Eighty-seven years on this earth, and he spent them serving the area as a physician, a businessman, and a civic leader. Father and son, side by side in this ground: one who helped hold a frontier community together during its most uncertain years, and one who watched that same community grow into something his father never got to see. Other graves here hold family members and friends, names the marker doesn't give us, but presences worth noting.

This place began as a two-hundred-acre farm. It became a site of memory. And it's still telling its story to anyone willing to stop and listen.

What the marker says

Pioneer area settlers Alexander Dobkins (1815-1869) and his wife Mary (1818-1880) migrated to Texas from Tennessee in 1852. Ordained as a minister in the nearby Bear Creek Baptist Church, Alexander also served as postmaster for the local community of Estill's Station during the Civil War. His grave is the earliest marked at this site, originally part of his 200-acre farm. Also buried here is his son William C. Dobkins (1841-1928), who served the area as a physician, businessman, and civic leader. Other graves include those of family members and friends. (1981)