Black Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker says, out on the road near Shackelford County. Now, most cemeteries get a name from a family, or a church, or the land itself. This one is simply called Black Cemetery.

And there's a plainness to that name that deserves a moment of quiet before we go any further. This is a pioneer burial ground. It holds more than a dozen graves of African Americans — men and women who worked this hard stretch of Texas, who raised cattle, farmed land, kept house, and rode alongside cowboys in an era that rarely wrote their names down.

Most of those names, buried here, are still unknown. That's not a small thing. That's the whole weight of the place.

The land itself was part of the Veals addition to the town of Fort Griffin. A man named Milton Sutton bought the property at public auction in April of 1882. Before that transaction, and after it, people were laid to rest here in ground that the wider world mostly looked past.

Two of the graves do have visible markers, and the stories attached to those names are worth stopping on. The first is Elijah Earls, who died in 1880. The Fort Griffin Echo — the local paper — described him as a, quote, tonsorial artist.

That was the fancy way of saying barber. A man of craft, of community, of daily conversation. Gone by 1880, remembered in stone.

The second marker belongs to Marriah McKay Williams, and her dates alone will stop you cold: 1781 to 1891. She came to Fort Davis, over in Stephens County, before the Civil War — and she came as a free black woman. She lived through a stretch of American history that is almost impossible to hold in the mind all at once.

And she is here. The Echo also reported a third burial — James Lowe, laid to rest in this cemetery in June of 1880. One line in a newspaper.

His name, at least, made it through. When Fort Griffin disbanded, the story didn't end for the Black community that had grown up around it. Many of those African Americans stayed.

They homesteaded. They became ranchers and farmers, cowboys and domestics. They put roots into Shackelford County soil at a time when that took something extra.

And here, in this quiet burial ground — more than a dozen graves, most of them nameless to us now — their lives are remembered. Not because history handed them an easy place in the record. But because the ground itself held on.

What the marker says

This pioneer burial ground contains more than a dozen graves of African Americans. The land was part of the Veals addition to the town of Fort Griffin. Milton Sutton bought the property at public auction in April 1882. Two visible markers are for Elijah Earls (d. 1880), who the Fort Griffin Echo reported as a “tonsorial artist,” or barber, and Marriah McKay Williams (1781-1891), who came to Fort Davis (Stephens co.) Before the Civil War as a free black. The Echo also reported the June 1880 burial of James Lowe in this cemetery. Most of the other burials are unknown. When Fort Griffin disbanded, many African Americans stayed nearby and homesteaded. Here, their lives as ranchers, farmers, cowboys and domestics are remembered.