Bear Creek Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker at Bear Creek Cemetery tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, some places earn their permanence quietly. No famous battles, no grand proclamations; just a piece of ground that people kept coming back to, decade after decade, because it mattered.

Bear Creek Cemetery is one of those places. It all starts with a church. The Bear Creek Missionary Baptist Church, organized in 1853, out here in eastern Tarrant County.

The congregation needed a home, and right alongside that church, a cemetery took shape. That's how it goes in the early days of Texas settlement: the living build something, and they make sure there's a place nearby for those who won't be with them much longer. The earliest marked grave belongs to someone who barely had the chance to see this world at all.

Hiram Jackson Farris, infant son of G.W. and Mary Farris, died in 1858. Just a small stone, a small name, holding down the oldest corner of the record. You think about G.W. and Mary, laying that child in the ground on the Texas frontier, and the weight of it doesn't need any embellishing.

Now, the man who made sure this ground would always be there, that's Isham Crowley. Born in 1798, died in 1878. He came to Texas as a member of Peters Colony, which tells you something right there about the kind of early-arrival, deep-roots Texan he was.

In 1876, Crowley donated the burial ground and deeded it over to the church trustees. Put it in writing. Made it official.

That's a man who understood that the living move on, but the dead need somewhere steady. And move on the living did. The congregation eventually pulled up and headed to Dallas County, where they reorganized under a new name: Western Heights Missionary Baptist Church.

The church left, but the cemetery stayed. It's still in use today. Generations of eastern Tarrant County pioneers are buried there, their names pressed into stone, rooted in ground that Isham Crowley thought worth preserving.

Some stories end with a flourish. This one ends the way the best ones do: with a gate that's still open.

What the marker says

This cemetery was developed adjacent to the site of the Bear Creek Missionary Baptist Church, which was organized in 1853. The earliest marked grave is that of Hiram Jackson Farris (d. 1858), the infant son of G.W. and Mary Farris. Isham Crowley (1798-1878), who came to Texas as a member of Peters Colony, donated the burial ground and deeded it to church trustees in 1876. The congregation later moved to Dallas County and was renamed Western Heights Missionary Baptist Church. Still in use, Bear Creek Cemetery is the burial site of many eastern Tarrant County pioneers. (1980)