Fore Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll pass it along just the same. Picture the rolling country of Williamson County, and a man named Wiley Fore making his way up from Alabama in 1883, family in tow, looking for a place to put down roots. He wasn't exactly arriving to empty country.

The Baker community had already been started, two years before Fore showed up, by his own nephew, Robert Baker, and Robert's family. So there was already something here to come home to, in a way. Wiley didn't waste much time getting to work.

Soon after his arrival, he organized the Bethel Cumberland Presbyterian Church and the local chapter of the Grange. The man had a gift for gathering people together, it seems. Then, in 1884, he did something that would outlast just about everything else he ever built.

He donated a one-acre plot of land to serve as a free community cemetery. Free. Open to the community.

They called it the Fore Graveyard. The first burials, in that same year of 1884, were of two children of the De Luna family. Two children.

That's how a cemetery begins, sometimes, not with ceremony and speeches, but with grief that a community has to hold together. The graveyard kept on doing what graveyards do, quietly, across the decades, until the 1950s, when the Fore Cemetery Association was formed to make sure the place was properly maintained. Wiley Fore came from Alabama with his family, helped build a community, and gave that community a place to remember its own.

Some gifts are like that. They just keep going.

What the marker says

Wiley Fore and his family came to this area from Alabama in 1883. The Baker community had been started two years earlier by Fore's nephew, Robert Baker, and his family. Soon after his arrival Fore organized the Bethel Cumberland Presbyterian Church and the local chapter of the Grange. In 1884 he donated a one-acre plot of land for use as a free community cemetery, known as the Fore Graveyard. The first burials were of two children of the De Luna family in 1884. The Fore Cemetery Association was formed in the 1950s to maintain the graveyard. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986