Elizabeth Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out in Denton County, there was once a place called Elizabeth town, a real, live, thriving community that grew up sometime between 1860 and 1862. Businesses, churches, a school, a Masonic lodge; the whole picture of a town finding its legs and standing tall on the Texas prairie.

And for a while, it did just that. It stood tall. Now, family tradition holds that a man named William Perry Harmonson (born in 1836, died in 1907) donated the land for a community graveyard.

An acre and a half set aside, the story goes, upon the death of his mother Anna, who lived from 1796 all the way to 1867. Seventy-one years on this earth, and when she left it, that ground was consecrated for the whole community to share. That's the kind of thing a town does when it believes it's going to last.

And for a while, Elizabeth town had every reason to believe exactly that. Then came 1881. Now, you want to talk about the quiet kind of catastrophe: not a fire, not a flood, not a battle, just a railroad.

The Texas and Pacific Railroad came through, and it did not come through Elizabeth town. It went around. Bypassed it.

And that, right there, was the beginning of the end. Towns in that era lived and died by the railroad, and Elizabeth town began to decline from that moment on. The businesses thinned out.

The families drifted elsewhere. The school, the lodge, the churches; all of it, eventually, gone. All of it, that is, except one thing.

In 1949, former school lands were used to enlarge that cemetery, bumped it up from a acre and a half to two full acres. And it's still in use today. Nearly four hundred graves resting there in Denton County.

Almost four hundred souls who called Elizabeth town home. The town itself? Gone.

The graveyard is all that remains of the once thriving village, which, when you think about it, is about as Texas an ending as there is.

What the marker says

Elizabeth town, settled between 1860 and 1862, became a trade center with businesses, churches, a school and a Masonic lodge. Family tradition says William Perry Harmonson (1836-1907) donated land for the 1.5-acre community graveyard upon the death of his mother Anna (1796-1867). The town began to decline in 1881 after being bypassed by the Texas and Pacific Railroad. In 1949 former school lands were used to enlarge the cemetery to two acres. Still in use, this burial ground contains almost 400 graves and is all that remains of the once thriving village. (1978)