DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, as best as Duane can carry the tale. Back in 1875, a pioneer settler by the name of Joseph Wren looked out at five acres of Parker County land and made a decision that would outlast him by more than a century. He donated that ground (right here at this site) for use as a community cemetery.
Now, that same year, a congregation that had been meetin' in a log building two miles to the northeast packed up and made their way here too. The church found its new home on Wren's donated land, and a community started putting down roots in earnest. But every place needs a name, and it was a woman named Mattie Brookshire who supplied it.
She suggested the name New Hope. Two words that carry a whole lot of weight when you're carving something out of the Texas frontier. The very next year, 1876, that weight got heavier.
The first soul interred in the new cemetery was an infant girl, Mary Sudduth. She didn't get long in this world. That kind of beginning has a way of reminding you what a cemetery really is, and what a community really owes each other.
In time, a schoolhouse went up on land that's now folded into the burial grounds themselves; a place where children learned their letters, used right on through until the 1920s. Lives beginning where lives had ended. And every May, people still gather here for an annual homecoming.
Not because anybody told them to. Just because some places (and some names) hold on.
What the marker says
Pioneer settler Joseph Wren donated five acres of land at this site in 1875 for use as a community cemetery. The church, which had been meeting in a log building (2 miles northeast), moved here later that same year. The name "New Hope" was suggested by Mattie Brookshire. The first interment in the cemetery was that of an infant girl, Mary Sudduth, who died in 1876. A schoolhouse, used until the 1920s, was located on land now included in the burial grounds. An annual homecoming is held here each May. (1981)