Graham Point Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm going to tell it to you. Somewhere out in Hunt County, there's a piece of ground that's been holding onto people's stories since before the Civil War, and the marker at Graham Point Cemetery does its best to help us remember. Let me walk you through it.

The cemetery takes its name from Daniel Boone Graham and his family, settlers who put down roots in this area in the mid-1800s. The cemetery was established right there on Graham's land, and it went on to serve two communities, Graham Point and Union Valley, for more than a hundred years. A hundred years.

Let that settle for a moment. One of the earliest graves belongs to Resina Graham, dated 1860. Now here's a detail that'll stick with you.

Many of the earliest graves were marked not with stone, not with iron, but with bois d'arc posts. Hard wood, tough wood, the kind of wood this part of Texas is known for. And yet, those posts either burned or were removed over time.

Which means some of the people laid to rest in that ground, we've simply lost track of. The names gone with the markers. The ones we do know about include several pioneer families and their descendants.

Hurst, Lindsey, McCasland, Partin, and Williams. Early settlers, all of them, buried alongside one another as neighbors tend to be in a place like this. The last recorded burial in that cemetery happened in 1991.

So this ground served the living and received the dead from 1860 all the way to 1991. Daniel Boone Graham picked a piece of land, and it turned out that land would carry the weight of a whole community's gone years. That's not nothing.

That's everything.

What the marker says

Named for Daniel Boone Graham and his family who settled in this area in the mid-1800s, this cemetery, established on Graham's land, served the Graham Point and Union Valley communities for more than 100 years. One of the earliest graves was that of Resina Graham in 1860. Many early graves were marked with bois d'arc posts that either burned or were removed. Several pioneer families and their descendants are buried here, including early settlers named Hurst, Lindsey, McCasland, Partin, and Williams. The last recorded burial occurred here in 1991.