DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker at Mt. Hope Cemetery sets down for the record. Now, it takes a certain kind of man to put a hundred acres of good Texas land on the table just to get a church and a cemetery started.
That man was James H. Bowman — a veteran of the Texas War for Independence from Mexico — and that's exactly what he did. He offered those hundred acres to a Reverend W.
D. Lewis, with one condition: come to the Mt. Hope community and establish a Methodist church and a cemetery.
The Reverend agreed, and just like that, in 1875, a congregation was born. The land had a purpose. The community had a church.
And the ground had a calling. Then, in November of that year, the cemetery received its first. A woman named Margaret — Ruby — Hicks became the first person to be buried there.
The congregation was barely breathing, and already the cemetery was keeping its solemn vigil. Now, churches and railroads have a complicated relationship in Texas. The railroad arrived in 1886, and when it did, the congregation picked up and moved to the nearby town of Wells.
You can't really blame them — railroads bring life, commerce, connection. But here's the thing about a cemetery: it doesn't move. The graves stayed.
The ground held its people. And Mt. Hope Cemetery continued to matter — to Wells, to the Mt.
Hope community, to Cherokee County entire. Today, more than eighteen hundred people from Wells, Mt. Hope, and communities all across Cherokee County are interred there.
Among them, more than two hundred military veterans, including eight Confederate soldiers. Eighteen hundred souls. That is not just a cemetery.
That is, as the marker says, a chronicle — a full, unhurried chronicle of Cherokee County history, written not in ink, but in stone.
What the marker says
James H. Bowman, a veteran of the Texas War for Independence from Mexico, offered 100 acres of land to the Rev. W. D. Lewis to come to the Mt. Hope community and establish a Methodist church and cemetery. The Rev. Mr. Lewis agreed, and the congregation began in 1875. In November of that year Margaret (Ruby) Hicks was the first person to be buried in the adjacent cemetery. Though the church congregation moved to nearby Wells after the arrival of the railroad in 1886, the cemetery continued to be a place of importance to the Mt. Hope and Wells communities. Among the more than 1800 people of Wells, Mt. Hope and other Cherokee County communities interred here, there are more than 200 military veterans, including eight Confederate soldiers. The cemetery is a chronicle of the history of Cherokee County. (2000)