DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm going to tell it to you. Way back around 1840, a man named Colonel Thomas S. McFarland looked out at a piece of ground in what is now Newton County and decided it would serve as a family cemetery.
That's according to McFarland family tradition, and family tradition has a way of holding onto things tighter than any courthouse record. Now, Thomas wasn't just any settler staking out land. He and his father William McFarland both held prominent military and political positions in the Republic of Texas.
That's the kind of family that leaves a mark on a place, and apparently, they intended this place to keep a mark on them. The earliest recorded burial at the site was Fabrina McFarland, in 1890. Half a century after Thomas first set this ground apart, the family was still coming home to it.
But something shifted in the years just before that. In 1889, Thomas's son, R. E.
McFarland, conveyed the property containing the graveyard to a man named Thomas S. Wilson. A new family, a new name on the deed, but the same quiet ground.
And sure enough, the first Wilson family member buried here was E. V. Wilson, in 1891.
Two years after the land changed hands, the Wilson family had already joined the McFarlands in the earth beneath it. Today, the cemetery is maintained by descendants of the very persons buried there. The McFarlands and the Wilsons, bound together by a piece of Newton County ground that Colonel Thomas S.
McFarland picked out somewhere around 1840, and that the living still tend to this day.
What the marker says
According to McFarland family tradition, Colonel Thomas S. McFarland established this site as a family cemetery about 1840. Thomas and his father William McFarland held prominent military and political positions in the Republic of Texas. The earliest recorded burial here was that of Fabrina McFarland in 1890. Property containing this graveyard was conveyed by R. E. McFarland, Thomas' son, to Thomas S. Wilson in 1889. The first Wilson family member buried here was E. V. Wilson in 1891. The cemetery is maintained by descendants of persons buried here.