Authon Cemetery

Duane's take

The way I tell it, this comes straight from the official marker for Authon Cemetery in Parker County; so here's the story as it stands. Now, out here in Parker County, there's a stretch of old ground that's been holdin' people's stories since before most of Texas knew what it was goin' to be. The Authon Cemetery.

Named for the nearby Authon Community, and sitting right along the old Fort Worth-Fort Belknap Military Road (that alone tells you this was no quiet corner of the frontier). The land first served as a family cemetery, belonging to a Kentucky native named Isom Cranfill, born in 1831, who lived until 1902. He put down roots out here, raised a family, and this ground became his family's own.

But the earliest grave here (the very first) belongs not to a man who'd lived a long life, but to a boy of fifteen. Linn Boyd Cranfill. He died in 1871, killed in an Indian attack near the family home, just three-quarters of a mile south of where you're standing right now.

Fifteen years old. That is where this cemetery begins. Not with a patriarch at the end of a long life, but with a young boy, and a grief no family should have to carry.

In time, Isom Cranfill and those who came after him deeded the cemetery and the land adjoining it to the Authon Church of Christ. And right here, on this very site, that congregation built a sanctuary and worshiped; all the way from whenever they first gathered until sometime in the 1920s, when that chapter closed. But the ground itself never closed.

Authon Cemetery is still in use today, a public burial ground holding the graves of many pioneer settlers of this area. Generations of people who came out along that old military road, who built something here, who lost something here, and who stayed. There's a weight to a place that starts with a fifteen-year-old boy.

Everything built on top of that (the church, the community, the settlers laid to rest across the years) all of it resting on that first, hard beginning.

What the marker says

Named for the nearby Authon Community, located on the Fort Worth-Fort Belknap Military Road, this site first served as a cemetery for the family of Kentucky native Isom Cranfill (1831-1902). The earliest burial here was that of his 15-year-old son, Linn Boyd Cranfill (d. 1871), who was killed in an Indian attack near the family home (.75 mile south). The cemetery and adjoining land were later deeded to the Authon Church of Christ, who worshiped in a sanctuary at this site until the 1920s. Still in use, the public burial ground contains the graves of many pioneer area settlers. (1981)