DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. This is Head of Elm Cemetery, sitting in Montague County in the town of Saint Jo — a place that used to go by a different name altogether: Head of Elm. Now that older name, you'll want to hold onto it, because it matters to everything that follows.
There are three graveyards established in Saint Jo, and this one is the oldest of the three. That alone ought to tell you something about how far back the roots go here. Local tradition — and in Texas, local tradition tends to carry real weight — claims that area settlers Enoch Willett, his daughter Mary, James Box, Aaron Anderson, and James Harris were killed in Indian raids nearby and buried here in the 1860s.
Five people. A father and his daughter among them. That is a hard thing to say plainly, and it deserves to be said plainly.
Now, here is where the story gets that particular kind of complicated that old cemeteries tend to produce. The first burial that anyone actually recorded is not one of those five. It is an infant — Charlie Wyatt — laid to rest in 1874.
So tradition reaches back into the 1860s, but the written record only starts at 1874. What lies between those two points is the kind of silence that a hillside keeps better than any ledger. Early residents of this area left accounts suggesting this cemetery was once much larger than what the remaining gravestones would have you believe.
The ground holds more than the stones announce. Early pioneers of this area, and their descendants after them, are buried on this hillside in Saint Jo, in the place that was once called Head of Elm. Some of them have markers.
Some of them, it seems, do not. But they are there.
What the marker says
This cemetery is the oldest of three graveyards established in Saint Jo (formerly called Head of Elm). Local tradition claims that area settlers Enoch Willett, his daughter Mary, James Box, Aaron Anderson, and James Harris were killed in Indian raids nearby and buried here in the 1860s. The first recorded burial, however, is that of infant Charlie Wyatt in 1874. Accounts by early residents of this area indicate Head of Elm Cemetery was at one time much larger than the few remaining gravestones suggest. Buried on this hillside are early pioneers of the area and their descendants. (1994)