Buchanan Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Alexander Buchanan was born in 1796, and by the time 1844 rolled around, he had a wife named Delilah, eleven children, and what sounds like a powerful conviction that Illinois was not where this family was meant to be. So they packed up and moved to the Republic of Texas.

All thirteen of them. Now, that is not a small undertaking under any circumstances, but you have to appreciate the scale of it. Eleven children.

One wagon train's worth of Buchanans, headed south and west toward something new. They settled on a 320-acre farm right here at this site, in January of 1846. January.

The ground barely thawed, the fields not yet broken, and the Buchanans were just getting started. Or so it must have seemed. Alexander Buchanan died that same year.

The same year he finally put down roots in the soil he had traveled so far to reach. He was buried right there on his farm, and that burial ground became what we now know as the Buchanan Cemetery. Delilah, born in 1806, did not leave.

She stayed on that farm, worked it, lived on it, until her own death in 1870, and was buried right next to her husband. There is something quietly remarkable about that. The children, those eleven souls who made the long move from Illinois as kids, many of them put down roots of their own in Fannin County.

They became business leaders, civic leaders, people who shaped this corner of Texas. And a number of them, along with their descendants, are interred in that same family graveyard where Alexander was the first to rest. A man who arrived in January and was gone before the year was out, but whose name is still on the land, and whose family filled up a county.

What the marker says

Alexander Buchanan (1796-1846), his wife Delilah (1806-1870), and their eleven children moved to the Republic of texas from Illinois in 1844. They settled on a 320-acre farm at this site in January 1846. Alexander Buchanan died that same year and was buried on his farm in what became the Buchanan Cemetery. Delilah Buchanan continued to live on the farm until her death and was buried next to her husband. Some of their children and descendants, many of whom became Fannin County business and civic leaders, also are interred in the family graveyard.