DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Sometime in 1861, a man named Benjamin Patton Ayres — born around 1801 — and his wife Emily, born around 1811 and née Cozart, bought themselves a 320-acre farm out here in Tarrant County. Now, Benjamin was no stranger to this part of Texas.
He had served as the second Tarrant County clerk, and he'd helped organize the Fort Worth First Christian Church. A man with roots, in other words. Deep ones.
So when he and Emily acquired that farm, they did something that people of that era understood without much explaining — they set aside two acres on a hillside and called it a family cemetery. Two acres out of 320, saved not for crops or cattle, but for the ones who wouldn't be coming back. Benjamin himself, born around 1801, died around 1862 — just a year after that land changed hands.
He was the first buried there. Emily followed around 1863. The fenced family plot holds the Ayres name, but the story doesn't stop at that fence line.
Outside it, an unknown number of graves lie unmarked — victims, the marker tells us, of spring fevers and Trinity River floods. Those are the graves that don't carry names we can read anymore. Their fieldstones are gone.
Every last one. But the Ayres Cemetery remains, sitting on that hillside, a symbol of the people who came early to this place, put down roots, and left behind more than they took. Sometimes two acres says more than 318 ever could.
What the marker says
In 1861 Benjamin Patton Ayres (ca. 1801-62) and his wife, Emily (Cozart) (ca. 1811-63), bought a 320-acre farm and set aside two acres on this hillside as a family cemetery. Ayres, who had served as the second Tarrant County clerk and who helped organize the Fort Worth First Christian Church, was the first buried here. An unknown number of graves, which lie outside the fenced family plot, include victims of spring fevers and Trinity River floods. None of their fieldstones have survived, but the Ayres Cemetery remains as a symbol of the area's early settlers. (1984)