DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the marker at Heflin Cemetery tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out in Brown County, a man named William W. Heflin and his wife Pency — born a Williams before she took that name — settled themselves down on a piece of Texas ground in 1875.
Fresh land, open sky, the kind of place you come to when you mean to stay. And they stayed. But the land had a way of collecting stories right from the start.
The very next year — 1876 — local tradition holds that the first soul to be buried here wasn't a weathered rancher or a worn-down pioneer. It was a child. A family was camped on the Heflins' property, and that child ate wild berries.
And died. Now the marker doesn't give that child a name, and maybe that silence is its own kind of weight. The earliest marked grave, though, belongs to a Robert Bonine, also in 1876 — so that ground was already speaking before the year was out.
For decades, neighbors brought their dead to this place. Pioneer settlers who had broken this same hard ground. Their children and their children's children.
Veterans who had served in wars stretching all the way from the Civil War to World War II — men and women who had seen the full terrible arc of American conflict and come home to this quiet corner of Brown County when it was over. The Heflins' generosity was real and lasting. Four acres they gave for burial purposes — and a deed confirming that donation was executed in 1928, long after the ground had already made its own argument for what this place was.
In 1976, an association was established to maintain the cemetery, and it carries on that work to this day. One child, no name, wild berries, 1876. That's where it began.
And the land just kept receiving.
What the marker says
William W. and Pency (Williams) Heflin settled here in 1875. According to local tradition the first burial was that of a child who died in 1876 from eating wild berries as his family camped on the Heflin's property. The earliest marked grave is that of Robert Bonine in 1876. A deed confirming the Heflins' donation of 4 acres for burial purposes was executed in 1928. Among the burials are many of the area's pioneer settlers and their descendants and veterans of wars ranging from the Civil War to World War II. The cemetery is maintained by an association established in 1976. (1995)