Grange Hall Cemetery

Duane's take

The way I tell it, I'm workin' straight from the official marker on this one. Here's the story of Grange Hall Cemetery. Out in Navarro County, there's a quiet patch of ground that goes by the name Grange Hall Cemetery.

It was established to serve the small farming community of Cryer Creek, and the marker tells us it most likely got that name from the active farmers' organization known as The Grange. Now that word, most likely, is doing a little honest work there. Nobody's making a guarantee, just a reasonable piece of country logic.

What the record does make clear is this: people were being laid to rest on that site as early as 1872. Five years before Navarro County pioneer Samuel Wilson came along and donated the land for a Methodist Church and churchyard. Think about that for a moment.

The ground was already holding its dead before the deed was ever signed. Some communities build a church and then fill the cemetery. This one, it seems, filled the cemetery first.

And who came to rest there? Civil War veterans, for one. Men who had survived something enormous, who made their way to this corner of Texas and eventually found their final acre here.

Pioneer families of the area, too, the kind of people who staked a claim on a place before it had much to offer except hard work and open sky. And then there are the members of the Mississippi colony, a group who traveled together from Meridian, Mississippi, all the way to Navarro County in 1870. They came as a community, they built a life in a new place, and when their time came, they were laid to rest together in this ground.

Grange Hall Cemetery. A piece of Cryer Creek that was receiving the departed before the church even had its land. Some places earn their keeping quiet like that.

What the marker says

Established to serve the small farming community of Cryer Creek, Grange Hall Cemetery most likely derived its name from the active farmers' organization known as The Grange. The site was used for a burial ground as early as 1872, five years before Navarro County pioneer Samuel Wilson donated the land for a Methodist Church and churchyard. Those buried here include a number of Civil War veterans, area pioneer families, and members of the Mississippi colony who moved here from Meridian, Miss. in 1870.