DUANE
Duane's take
The marker in Mason County tells it this way, and I'm gonna pass it along to you straight. This is Duane, and this is the story the stone remembers. She was born on August 5th, 1826, in Mississippi — Dizenia Peters, a name worth holding onto.
When she was still a young girl, around 1835, her family pulled up stakes and made for Texas, the way families did in those years. Texas had a way of calling people westward, and the Peters family answered. By 1844, Dizenia had married a man named William P.
Smith, and they had a son together, a boy named James. But life on the Texas frontier didn't offer much in the way of guarantees. Smith died, and Dizenia found herself moving forward, the way she always had.
In 1851, she married George W. Todd — born in 1827, a man who would live until 1901 — and together they built something out here. Three daughters came along to fill that life.
Now here's where the story puts down roots in Mason County itself. George W. Todd and members of Dizenia's own family settled this area in the 1850s.
They weren't latecomers — they were among the first Mason County officials. The kind of people a place gets named after, if the place is lucky enough to remember. But the frontier gave, and the frontier took.
Mrs. Todd and a Black servant girl were fatally wounded in an Indian attack near this very site. Two lives, ended violently, close to this ground.
They were buried in adjacent graves — unmarked graves. No stones. No names left in the earth to find.
The marker that stands here now is what memory looks like when it finally decides to show up. Dizenia Peters Todd: August 5th, 1826, to January 1865. The land she helped settle holds her still.
What the marker says
(Aug. 5, 1826 - Jan. 1865) Born in Mississippi, Dizenia Peters moved to Texas with her parents about 1835. She married William P. Smith in 1844 and had a son, James. After Smith's death, she married George W. Todd (1827-1901) in 1851; they had 3 daughters. Todd and members of his wife's family settled this area in the 1850s and were among the first Mason County officials. Mrs. Todd and a Black servant girl were fatally wounded in an Indian attack near this site and buried in adjacent unmarked graves. Recorded - 1975