DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say, right here in Trinity County. Now, pull up a chair and listen close, because this one's about a place that's almost entirely gone — almost. The Boontown Cemetery.
That's what's left. That's the whole of it, the last standing piece of a community that once had a name, a founder, and a future. Just one cemetery, holding the memory of everything else.
Sit with that a moment. There's a whole settlement underneath that silence. Whitney Alston Boone founded the community of Boontown around the time of the Civil War.
That's the kind of man who puts his name on a place and means it. And when he passed, they laid him right there in the ground he helped build something on — interred in the very cemetery that serves the community he founded. That's a certain kind of full circle, isn't it.
The burial ground itself was established in the 1880s, on property granted to Edward Thomas — and the folks who knew him apparently called him Buck — Smith. Buck Smith. The land was his, and the community made it sacred.
The earliest marked graves date to 1887, though the marker is honest enough to allow that there may be earlier burials out there, unmarked, unrecorded, patient in the earth. Among those resting here are early community pioneers and veterans of military conflicts — people who built something in the pines of Trinity County and then gave their lives, in one way or another, to something larger. Now, fast forward to 1963.
Southland Paper Mill deeded an acre of land to the property. The mill didn't take from Boontown — it gave something back to it, adding ground to the only piece of that settlement still standing. And today — right now — descendants of the deceased continue to care for this place.
They keep the grass back and the memory alive. Because the town is gone. The buildings, the roads, the daily life of Boontown — all of it dissolved into time.
What remains is this cemetery, the only remaining vestige of the historic Boontown settlement. One acre of kept ground in Trinity County, doing the work that all the rest of the place no longer can. That's not a ghost story.
That's a love story.
What the marker says
This burial ground was established in the 1880s on property granted to Edward Thomas "Buck" Smith. The cemetery served the Boontown community, which Whitney Alston Boone founded around the Civil War; Boone is among those interred. The earliest marked graves date to 1887, though there may be earlier unmarked burials. Others buried here include early community pioneers and veterans of military conflicts. Southland Paper Mill deeded an acre of land to the property in 1963. Today, descendants of the deceased continue to care for the cemetery, which is the only remaining vestige of the historic Boontown settlement.