Grange Hall Cemetery

Duane's take

The official marker for Grange Hall Cemetery in Johnson County tells it this way, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out in Johnson County, there's a place called Nolands River, an early community that put down roots in the late 1850s, when Texas was still figuring out what it wanted to be. It wasn't a big town.

Didn't need to be. It had people, and people find ways to build things together. By 1874, the farmers around Nolands River had done exactly that.

They organized a local club of the Grange, a farmers' fraternal organization, and they didn't stop there. They raised up a two-story meeting hall, called it Grange Hall, and packed it full of purpose. That one building housed a local school, a church, and a Masonic lodge all under the same roof.

Two stories. Four callings. That's a building that was working for a living.

Then came the land. In 1878, W.P. and S.M. Kizziar donated a piece of ground to the Masonic lodge, set aside for use as a cemetery.

Grange Hall Cemetery, they called it, and people came to rest there in numbers that tell you something about the life that was lived in that community. Of the hundreds of marked graves in that cemetery, more than half date from before 1900. Think on that.

More than half the stories in that ground were written before the century turned. And some of those stories; well, nobody knows them anymore. Several of the earliest burials are marked by nothing but rocks, or posts cut from Bois D'Arc wood.

No names. Just the quiet insistence of someone saying: this person mattered, and we wanted you to know they were here. Now, communities like Nolands River don't always get the ending they deserve.

In the 1880s, a railroad town called Rio Vista was established nearby, and Grange Hall began to decline. Railroads had a way of doing that; pulling the future down the tracks with them and leaving the old places to the wind and the memory-keepers. But here's what didn't decline.

The Menefee family reunion has been held at or near Grange Hall Cemetery every single year since 1891. Every year. Through droughts and wars and everything else this state has thrown at a calendar.

Some people carry a place forward not with buildings, but with the simple stubborn act of showing up. Grange Hall may have faded. But that ground (those marked graves, those unnamed rocks, those Bois D'Arc posts standing sentinel) that ground has had somebody coming back to it for well over a hundred years running.

And that's not nothing. That's about as close to forever as anything gets out here.

What the marker says

Nolands River was an early Johnson County community, established in the late 1850s. A local club of the Grange, a farmers' fraternal organization, organized her in 1874, and built a two-story meeting hall called "Grange Hall" that also housed a local school, church and Masonic lodge. In 1878, W.P. and S.M. Kizziar donated land to the Masonic lodge for use as a cemetery. Of the hundreds of marked graves in Grange Hall Cemetery, more than half date from before 1900. Several early unknown burials are marked by rocks or Bois D' Arc posts. The Menefee family reunion has been held here or nearby annually since 1891. Grange Hall declined after the nearby railroad town of Rio Vista was established in the 1880s. Historic Texas Cemetery – 2006