DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, some places leave you a courthouse, maybe a main street, a steeple poking up above the treeline. Buckner left you a cemetery.
That's it. That's all that remains of what was once — and I want you to sit with this — the first county seat of Collin County. Just a patch of ground holding the people who made this place, and the quiet that follows them.
Let me back up and tell you how we got here. It starts, as so many Texas stories do, with a land grant and a man willing to bet his life on it. John McGarrah was a member of the Peters Colony, and he arrived in this area in 1843.
He wasn't just passing through. McGarrah founded a trading post near this very site, and before long a settlement had taken root around it — Fort Buckner, they called it, and it would grow into the first county seat of Collin County. A real going concern.
Then — well, the marker doesn't say exactly what happened to Buckner's fortunes, and I won't pretend otherwise. What we know is what's left. Some years after McGarrah made his mark, a man named David William O'Brien came to Collin County with his family.
That was 1857. O'Brien — born in 1808, died in 1885 — eventually acquired the portion of McGarrah's land that included this cemetery site. And so the ground that had been McGarrah's passed into O'Brien hands, which is why you'll find this place called O'Brien Cemetery just as often as Buckner Cemetery, depending on who you ask and how long their family's been here.
The oldest documented burial belongs to Franklin O'Brien, born 1851, gone by 1870 — nineteen years old. There may be earlier graves, the marker acknowledges that, unmarked and unrecorded, their stories swallowed by time. But Franklin is the oldest name we can put a date to.
And he was not alone for long. Many early pioneers of Collin County came to rest in this ground, including — and here the story takes a somber turn — victims of a smallpox epidemic in the 1870s. Whole families, neighbors, people who had survived the hard work of building something from nothing, taken by an illness that moved through communities like a cold wind through a gap in the wall.
You bury that many people in that short a stretch of time, a cemetery stops being a place you visit and starts being a place that holds the shape of what a community lost. There's one more name the marker offers, and it comes by way of local tradition rather than any written record. According to that tradition, a Kiowa Indian named Spotted Tail also lies here, in an unmarked grave.
The marker doesn't elaborate, and neither will I — but I'll note that a community cemetery making room for Spotted Tail says something, even if we can't say exactly what. Fort Buckner is gone now. The county seat moved on.
The trading post, the settlement, the ambitions that came with that Peters Colony land grant in 1843 — all of it dissolved into history. But the cemetery held on. It's the only physical remnant of the Buckner community, the marker says, and that's no small thing.
Sometimes the most honest record a place leaves behind is its dead.
What the marker says
The land surrounding this historic cemetery was part of a grant obtained by John McGarrah, a member of the Peters Colony who arrived in this area in 1843. McGarrah founded a trading post near this site, and soon the Fort Buckner settlement was established. It would later become the first county seat of Collin County. David William O'Brien (1808-1885) came to Collin County with his family in 1857. He eventually acquired the part of the McGarrah land which included this site. The Buckner Cemetery, which was established on the O'Brien land, has also been referred to as O'Brien Cemetery over the years. Although there may be earlier unmarked graves, the oldest documented burial is that of Franklin O'Brien (1851-1870). Many early pioneers of Collin County are interred here, including victims of a smallpox epidemic in the 1870s. According to local tradition, a Kiowa Indian named Spotted Tail also lies here in an unmarked grave. The only physical remnant of the Buckner community, this cemetery serves as a reminder of the early history of Collin County. (1988) [Historic Texas Cemetery medallion added 2001]