Counts Cemetery

Duane's take

The way I tell it, I'm drawing straight from the official marker record on this one. So here's what the stone says about Counts Cemetery, out in Runnels County. The earliest known interment was that of a child.

A child named Mary Louisa Hale, laid to rest on November 30, 1880. That's where the story of this ground begins, quiet and solemn, with a child and a November date and a community that had not yet made this place official. Then, in January of 1884, two men named Andy and Christian Fannin sold four acres.

Not to one buyer, mind you. To a whole roster of neighbors: M. C.

Bright, J. M. Carter, R.

F. Counts, John A. Chambers, J.

M. Givens, D. W. and William Hale, Alf A.

Hanscomb, J. T. Hardegree, P.

Hawkins, F. B. Massengale, Jesse Rogers, and C.

C. Simmons. Thirteen names, near as you can count them, all buying together into four acres of ground to serve as a public cemetery for the rural community of Content.

Content. That's the name of the community, and there's a whole kind of poetry in it that the marker doesn't bother explaining, so neither will I. Now, R.

F. Counts was on that original list of buyers back in 1884, and then in 1889 he bought the surrounding property. The plot carries his name, Counts Cemetery, named for that same R.

F. Counts. The land kept growing.

In the 1930s, a man named Sidney Bright donated an additional four acres, doubling what the original thirteen neighbors had put together. And buried here, the marker tells us, is an unknown number of Confederate veterans of the Civil War. Unknown.

The marker is honest about that. Not a count, not a list, just the weight of that word: unknown. So the ground holds a child from 1880, a community's handshake deal from 1884, and soldiers whose exact number nobody alive can say for certain.

Out in Content, that's what the land keeps.

What the marker says

Earliest known interment was that of a child, Mary Louisa Hale, on November 30, 1880. In January, 1884, Andy and Christian Fannin sold 4 acres to M. C. Bright, J. M. Carter, R. F. Counts, John A. Chambers, J. M. Givens, D. W. and William Hale, Alf A. Hanscomb, J. T. Hardegree, P. Hawkins, F. B. Massengale, Jesse Rogers, and C. C. Simmons as a public cemetery for the rural community of "Content". The plot was named for R. F. Counts, who bought the surrounding property in 1889. An additional 4 acres were donated by Sidney Bright in the 1930s. An unknown number of Confederate veterans of the Civil War are buried here.