Caney 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 Hunt County, there's a piece of ground that holds more than dirt and stone. It holds the quiet arithmetic of a community.

This is the story of Caney Cemetery. Now, it starts with a man named M. J.

Fox, a Confederate veteran, which means he'd already lived through more history than most folks care to. In 1904, Fox took a portion of his family property and transferred it to two Methodist church trustees, a man named C. A.

Wade and a man named G. J. Dean.

The price of that transaction? Fifteen dollars. That's it.

Fifteen dollars for a piece of ground that would anchor a community for generations. But Fox wasn't finished. In that same year, 1904, he and the Amis family donated the land for the adjacent cemetery to the church.

Donated it. No fifteen dollars this time. Just gave it.

And that donated land included something already there, something already sacred. It included the Fox family burial plot, and within it, the grave of Fox's sister, Elizabeth Neusum, who had been buried there back in 1895. Hers is the earliest known grave in Caney Cemetery.

Think about that. By the time Fox was signing over the land, his sister had already been resting in it for nine years. Now, the name, Caney Cemetery, and the church property alongside it, it is believed those names come from nearby Caney Creek.

The creek was there first, as creeks tend to be. Time kept moving, as it does. Decades passed.

And then in 1972, a community resident named Hubert Langley made a bequest, a gift left behind, specifically to provide for the long-term maintenance of the cemetery. He was thinking about what would happen after he was gone. That's a particular kind of thoughtfulness.

By 1997, Caney Cemetery held a hundred and fifty-three graves. Some of them still marked with original bois d'arc markers, that hard, stubborn wood that outlasts almost everything else in a Texas landscape. One hundred and fifty-three graves.

Some with stone, some with bois d'arc, all of them somebody's somebody. The marker says it plainly, and sometimes plain is exactly right: Caney Cemetery remains a record of the community. Not just the dead.

The community. Every fifteen-dollar deed, every donated acre, every carved piece of bois d'arc, every careful bequest. All of it, recorded in the ground.

What the marker says

Confederate veteran M. J. Fox transferred a portion of his family property to Methodist church trustees C. A. Wade and G. J. Dean in 1904 for fifteen dollars. Land for the adjacent cemetery was donated to the church by Fox and the Amis family in the same year. It included the Fox family burial plot and the 1895 grave of Fox's sister Elizabeth Neusum. Hers is the earliest known grave in Caney Cemetery. It is believed that these properties were named for nearby Caney Creek. A bequest from community resident Hubert Langley in 1972 provided for long-term maintenance. There were 153 graves in 1997, some with original bois d'arc markers. The Caney Cemetery remains a record of the community. (1998)