Hillcrest Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. You're rolling through Kaufman County now, and this stretch of Texas has been keeping its stories quiet for a long, long time; some of them longer than the town itself. That's the thing about Hillcrest Cemetery.

The earliest marked grave out there belongs to M. Elizabeth Collins, who was born in 1813 and died in 1867, and here's the part that'll stop you mid-sip of your coffee: that grave predates the very settlement of Forney. The town hadn't even arrived yet, and Elizabeth Collins was already resting in that ground.

The land has a way of holding people before the people even know they belong to it. Fast-forward to 1880, and Forney is a railroad town now, growin' the way railroad towns do (fast and loud and a little full of itself), and the community looked at that burial ground and made it official. Platted it.

Set it aside formally as a public cemetery. Later on, they enlarged it by adding adjoining land, because that's what a growing town eventually needs more of. Now, maintaining a cemetery is serious work, and somebody along the way had what you might charitably call a creative idea.

They let sheep graze on the grounds. A brief experiment, the marker calls it, and brother, the word "brief" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. We can only imagine how that chapter ended.

Hillcrest holds pioneer settlers who carved a life out of this county before it was easy to do so, prominent community leaders who shaped what Forney became, and five known veterans of the Civil War; men who lived through one of the hardest chapters in American history and found their final rest here in Kaufman County soil. From 1867 to the railroad boom to the sheep that shall not be named, Hillcrest Cemetery has been quietly outlasting everything around it. And it's still out there.

What the marker says

The grave of M. Elizabeth Collins (1813-1867), the earliest marked in this burial ground, predates the settlement of Forney. In 1880 the site was platted and formally set aside as a public cemetery for the growing railroad town. It was later enlarged through additions of adjoining land. Early efforts to provide maintenance for the cemetery included a brief experiment which allowed sheep to graze on the grounds. Burials in Hillcrest Cemetery include those of pioneer area settlers, prominent community leaders, and five known veterans of the Civil War.