DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Out here in Dallas County, there's a piece of ground that's been holding stories since 1853. That's when Cochran Chapel Cemetery got its start, and the way it started, well, it didn't start with celebration.
It started with grief. Two burials, back to back. Sarah Jane Cochran, an infant daughter, and William M.
Cochran, her father and the husband of a woman named Nancy Jane Hughes Cochran. Two souls laid into Dallas County soil, and a cemetery born out of that sorrow. You have to wonder what Nancy Jane carried in those days.
A lost child and a lost husband, and the ground still new under her feet in a place her family had only just found their way to. Because that's the other part of this story. Nancy Jane's family, the Hughes family out of Tennessee, had been making their way to Dallas County in the 1840s and the 1850s.
Not just one or two of them. Four of Nancy Jane's sisters, and their husbands, each one of them pulling up roots and pointing toward Texas. There was Thomas C. and Sarah Williams.
Obadiah and Serena Knight. George and Amanda Record. And John B. and Margaret Bachman.
Four sisters, four families, all counted now among the Dallas County pioneers buried in this very ground. That's a lot of Tennessee in one Texas cemetery. And it all traces back to that hard beginning in 1853, when Nancy Jane Cochran stood over two fresh graves and this place became what it is.
Some legacies are built in triumph. This one was built in loss, and it held a community together anyway.
What the marker says
This cemetery began in 1853 with the burials of Sarah Jane and William M. Cochran, the infant daughter and husband of Nancy Jane Hughes Cochran. Among the many Dallas County pioneers buried here are four of Nancy Jane's sisters and their husbands who came from Tennessee in the 1840s and 1850s: Thomas C. and Sarah Williams, Obadiah and Serena Knight, George and Amanda Record, and John B. and Margaret Bachman.