Center Point 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 Montague County, there's a hilltop that's been holding stories for a long, long time. The place goes by Center Point Cemetery now, but it started life under a different name entirely.

Fairview Graveyard, they called it, back in the late 1800s when this stretch of Texas was still finding its footing. And that hilltop wasn't just a place for the dead. It was, for a good while, the beating heart of the living.

A Baptist church stood up there. A school too. Folks gathered on that hill for worship, for learning, for the kind of community business that knits a place together.

Then 1954 rolled around, and the church building was torn down. The school is gone. But the cemetery remains.

The land itself was deeded in 1893 by the Armstrong and Dean families, two names worth remembering in this county. Now, the earliest marked grave on that hill belongs to a three-year-old girl named Xanthippa Rountree, buried in 1875. Three years old.

You stop at that name a moment. It's an unusual name for an unusual kind of grief, the kind that reminds you just how hard those early years on the Texas frontier could be. But here's the thing the marker takes care to point out.

There are unmarked graves up there. Illegible tombstones worn smooth by time and weather. And those silent stones and bare patches of earth may well represent burials older even than little Xanthippa's.

Pioneer settlers are buried on that hill. Young children, more than one. And Civil War veterans, men who lived through one of the most defining conflicts this nation ever saw and came to rest at last on a quiet hilltop in Montague County.

Fairview Graveyard. Center Point Cemetery. Different names for the same piece of ground, still keeping its watch, still holding what the land remembers.

What the marker says

First known as Fairview Graveyard, this cemetery began in the late 1800s. This hilltop was also the site of the Baptist church and school, and was a community gathering place. The church building was torn down in 1954. Land for the cemetery was deeded in 1893 by the Armstrong and Dean families. The earliest marked grave is that of three-year-old Xanthippa Rountree in 1875, but many unmarked graves and illegible tombstones may represent older burials. Pioneer settlers, young children, and Civil War veterans are among those buried at this cemetery. (1996)