Crowley Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about Crowley Cemetery, and it starts, like so many Texas stories do, not with the living, but with the dead. Early settlers began moving into the Deer Creek area about 1848. And when folks put down roots in new country, they knew sooner or later they'd need a place to put down something else too.

So a burial ground took shape out there, quiet and patient, waiting on the community growing up around it. The earliest marked grave belongs to Thomas D. Stephenson.

He was eight years old. The years on his stone read 1848 to 1857. His father, I.N.

Stephenson, had come to Tarrant County in the 1850s, and he'd outlive that boy by a long stretch; the marker notes he died in 1883. Some losses you carry the rest of your life, and I.N. Stephenson carried that one a good long while.

For decades, the cemetery served the Deer Creek community under the name Deer Creek Cemetery. Then in 1879, a woman named Sarah J. Dunn (known to folks around there as Sallie) deeded the property for use as a public burial site.

That act of giving made it official ground, shared ground, community ground. And then the railroad came through. The Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad laid its route, and a settlement called Crowley organized itself right along that line.

About 1880, shortly after Crowley got itself together, the old Deer Creek Cemetery quietly got a new name to match the new town. Crowley Cemetery. Same ground, same graves, same quiet purpose.

Just a different name on the sign. From 1848 to 1880, this piece of earth watched a scattered frontier settlement become a real place with a railroad, a name, and a cemetery worth dedicating proper. Thomas D.

Stephenson was there at the beginning of all of it. He still is.

What the marker says

This burial ground originally served the early settlers of the Deer Creek area who began moving here about 1848. The earliest marked grave is that of Thomas D. Stephenson (1848-57), the eight-year-old son of I.N. Stephenson (d. 1883) who came to Tarrant County in the 1850s. The property was deeded for use as a public burial site in 1879 by Sarah J. "Sallie" Dunn. Originallly known as Deer Creek Cemetery, the name was changed about 1880, shortly after the settlement of Crowley was organized along the route of the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad. (1980)