DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, some stories get told in granite and limestone, two acres at a time. That's the case out here in Lamar County, where Mt.
Pleasant Cemetery holds four hundred and forty-nine marked graves on a piece of ground the trustees of Mt. Pleasant Church purchased for exactly one dollar — one single dollar — from the McGill Community School, back in 1895. One dollar.
Some ground is worth more than any sum you could name, and some transactions are just the paperwork catching up to what people already know. Because here's the thing: many of those burials already pre-dated that purchase. The land had been doing this work before the deed was ever signed.
And the earliest marked grave belongs to a child — four-year-old Sammie Bryan, who died in 1874. That small stone is the oldest voice in the conversation, and it sets the tone for everything that follows. Two acres.
Four hundred and forty-nine marked graves. You start to understand that this ground is not just a resting place — it is a record. A ledger of Lamar County life, written in the names and dates of the farming community of Deport and the land around it.
The stones tell you the hard years without any editorializing. There are victims of a tornado in 1908. There are victims of the influenza epidemic of 1918.
The earth took people fast in those years, and the cemetery received them. Veterans of the nation's wars are here too — men and women who left this farming community and went out into the wider, louder world, and came back to rest in the quiet of these two acres. And woven through it all, generation after generation of families who worked the land, built the community, and shaped what Deport became.
Two acres can hold a long time. Mt. Pleasant Cemetery has been doing exactly that.
What the marker says
The trustees of the Mt. Pleasant Church purchased this property from the McGill Community School for one dollar in 1895. Many burials here pre-date that purchase but the earliest marked grave is that of 4-year-old Sammie Bryan who died in 1874. There are 449 marked graves within the cemetery's two acres. The history of the area is reflected on these stones, from the victims of a tornado in 1908 and the influenza epidemic of 1918 to the veterans of our nation's wars and several generations of families who contributed to the development of the farming community of Deport and its environs. Historic Texas Cemetery-2000