DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about Frontier Red Hill Cemetery, out in Van Zandt County. Now settle in, because this one starts the way so many Texas stories do, with loss, and with land, and with a family that had no way of knowing what they were beginning. The first grave in this cemetery belongs to Elizabeth Carolina Piles.
She was nineteen years old when she died, on May 4, 1856. Her father John Piles owned this land, and so this is where they laid her down. Two days later, two days, her sister Melissa was gone as well.
Two sisters, the same patch of earth, within the span of a long weekend. John Piles himself, born in 1802, died in 1857, and he was buried here too, on his own land, among his daughters. That is how a cemetery begins.
Not with a plan, not with a deed, not with a committee. With grief. The land held them, and then it kept holding.
Over the years, 188 graves came to fill this ground. Among them rest six men who wore Confederate gray: Samuel W. Murphy, David Tumlinson, Robert S.
Boykin, Thomas Piles, F. M. Shirey, and Robert Beam.
In 1886, four acres were formally set aside for the cemetery. Then, more than three-quarters of a century later, in 1963, four more acres were donated, doubling the ground. Today the Frontier Red Hill Cemetery Association maintains the site.
One young woman, gone too soon in the spring of 1856, started all of it. The land remembered her, and kept on remembering.
What the marker says
The first grave here was that of 19-year-old Elizabeth Carolina Piles, who died May 4, 1856. Buried nearby are her sister Melissa, who died two days later, and her father John Piles (1802-57), on whose land the cemetery was located. Included among the 188 graves here are those of six Confederate veterans-- Samuel W. Murphy, David Tumlinson, Robert S. Boykin, Thomas Piles, F. M. Shirey, and Robert Beam. Four acres of land were first set aside for the cemetery in 1886, and four more acres were donated in 1963. The Frontier Red Hill Cemetery Association now maintains the site. (1975)