Bogata Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. William Humphries first came through this part of Red River County somewhere between 1818 and the mid-1820s, a pioneer in a land that was still finding its edges. He left, as pioneers sometimes do, but 1836 brought him back, and this time he stayed for good.

He put down roots, filed his headright, and settled in alongside a neighbor named Isaac Wilson who had done the same. Two men, two pieces of ground, side by side. Nobody could have known yet what that shared boundary line would come to mean.

Then 1840 arrived, and it brought grief. William Humphries lost his nine-year-old daughter. He buried her close to the line between his headright and Wilson's.

Just there, right at that edge where two neighbors' land touched. Not long after, a relative of the Wilson family died, and that burial was placed a hundred feet away. Two graves, quiet and apart, in open country.

Then the neighbors started coming. Not to visit, but to bury their own. One family, then another, laying their dead in the same ground, because that is what neighbors do when there is nowhere else and someone has already shown the way.

And here is something worth noting: the lots were always free. Always. Nobody paid to rest here.

That held, year after year, family after family. By 1878, the families formalized what the land had already become, deeding four and a half acres, fifty-three hundredths to be precise, for the cemetery. Around 1902 a pavilion went up.

More land was added over time. By 1976, Bogata Cemetery stretched across eleven and six-tenths acres and held over twelve hundred graves, all of it kept under the care of the Bogata Cemetery Association. It started with one little girl and a property line.

It grew into a community's whole memory.

What the marker says

William Humphries (1805-1880), an 1818 to mid-1820s pioneer in this area, returned in 1836 to settle permanently. In 1840 his 9-year-old daughter died and was buried near the line between his headright and that of Isaac Wilson. When a Wilson relative died, that burial was placed 100 feet away. Later, neighbors also buried their dead here. Lots were always free. The families deeded 4.53 acres for the cemetery in 1878. The pavilion was built about 1902; land has been added. In 1976 this historic site has over 1,200 graves on 11.60 acres, under care of Bogata Cemetery Association.