Amity Cemetery

Duane's take

The way I tell it, I'm drawing straight from the official marker for Amity Cemetery in Comanche County. Now settle in, because this one starts, as so many frontier stories do, with a death that changed everything around it. February of 1878.

A fourteen-year-old boy named Charles Farley died. His parents buried him near their farmhouse, because out here on the frontier, there simply was no cemetery. There was nowhere else to put him.

Just the land, the grief, and the knowledge that this place was now consecrated whether anyone had planned it or not. Three months passed. Then Fannie Nichols, born in 1875, died in 1878, and was buried nearby.

Two children, two graves, and a community suddenly confronted with something it had been avoiding. The Farleys made a decision. They donated an acre of land as a community graveyard.

One acre, given over. Just like that. The neighbors, being the kind of people who show up, built a brush arbor right next to it.

A simple thing, open-sided, branches and sky, but it served as the place where people gathered for funerals and for general company alike. Then the summer of 1878 arrived, and the Baptists organized a church right there in that same orbit of grief and neighborliness. They named it Amity.

Friendship. Before either the Baptists or the Methodists had buildings of their own, they held their services in that brush arbor, or over at Amity School, a mile to the northwest. The land itself was the church.

Now here is where the story adds a complication, as good stories tend to do. William H. Lindley, born 1840, died 1913, bought land south of the Farley farm in 1885.

When new surveys were done, those surveys placed the cemetery on Lindley's land. His land, legally. A lesser man might have made that interesting in the wrong direction.

Lindley deeded the burial ground to the public. No argument. No leverage.

He just gave it. And later his son-in-law, a man named George Brown, gave an additional acre on top of that, to be used if needed. The brush arbor eventually gave way to something sturdier.

A large tabernacle with permanent fixtures went up in its place and served for funerals for years upon years. Then a storm came, sometime in 1938 or 1939, and damaged that tabernacle severely. The gathering place, the one that had replaced the one before it, was gone.

But the cemetery held. Free-will donations have maintained it since 1951. And there is one more thing worth mentioning, something that has outlasted storms and surveys and the slow passage of generations.

In 1897, Amity Baptist Church started what they called a First Sunday in June Singing. It became an annual memorial day and homecoming, and it was still going in 1978, which is also when this marker was placed, and when the cemetery held nearly four hundred graves. Four hundred lives, all of it begun because a fourteen-year-old boy died in February on the frontier, and his parents chose to share the ground where they laid him.

That is Amity. That is friendship.

What the marker says

When 14-year-old Charles Farley died in Feb. 1878, his parents buried him near their farmhouse, as this frontier locality had no cemetery at the time. Three months later Fannie Nichols (1875-78) died and was buried nearby. The Farleys then donated an acre of land as a community graveyard. The neighbors built an adjacent brush arbor for funerals and general gatherings. In the summer of 1878, Baptists organized a church, naming it Amity (friendship). Before erecting their own buildings, Baptists and Methodists held services in the brush arbor or at Amity School (1 mi. NW). William H. Lindley (1840-1913) bought land south of the Farley Farm in 1885. When new surveys placed the cemetery on his land, Lindley deeded the burial ground to the public. Later his son-in-law, George Brown, gave an additional acre to be used if needed. A large tabernacle with permanent fixtures replaced the brush arbor and was used for funerals until 1938 or 1939, when it was severely damaged by a storm. Free-will donations have maintained the cemetery since 1951. A "First Sunday in June Singing" which Amity Baptist Church originated in 1897 now serves as an annual memorial day and homecoming. By 1978 Amity Cemetery has nearly 400 graves. (1978)