Buffalo-Ebony Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Out here in Mills County, there's a cemetery with a story that starts the way a lot of good Texas stories do: with two strangers, a campfire, and a stretch of open land that didn't care much about their plans. According to oral tradition, two sheep herders were camping in this area when they died and were buried right where they'd made camp.

Nobody recorded their names. Nobody left much behind. Just two graves in the Texas soil, and the land remembering them the only way land knows how.

That, the tradition says, is how this cemetery began. Now, the oldest marked grave here belongs to a man named William R. Yankee, an area resident whose stone dates to 1882.

After him came more neighbors, more families, more of the hard and honest lives that built this part of Texas. Then in 1889, Frank and Mary Crowder bought this land. And Mary Crowder did something worth remembering: she later donated the burial site so that the communities of Buffalo and Ebony would have a proper place to lay their own to rest.

Area pioneers and veterans found their way here, people who shaped this corner of Mills County and earned their place in its ground. But the story has one more turn. In the 1940s, three members of the Reynolds family had to be moved.

Their original graves sat on land that became part of Camp Bowie, and so they were brought here, to rest among the community. Two unnamed sheep herders started it. A generous woman named Mary Crowder shaped it.

And generation by generation, Buffalo and Ebony filled it. Some cemeteries just hold the dead. This one holds a whole community's memory.

What the marker says

According to oral tradition, this cemetery originated when two sheep herders camping in the area died and were buried here. The oldest marked grave, that of area resident William R. Yankee, dates to 1882. Frank and Mary Crowder bought this land in 1889 and Mary later donated the burial site for a community cemetery for Buffalo/Ebony residents. Area pioneers and veterans are among those buried in the cemetery. During the 1940s, the graves of three Reynolds family members were moved here after the land containing their original grave sites became part of Camp Bowie.