Newburg Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out in Comanche County, the story starts before most folks had even picked a name for the place. Pioneer settlers rolled into this part of the county in the mid-1850s, and they put down roots near the South Leon River.

That river gave the little town its first name, a simple nod to the water that made life possible out here on the Texas frontier. For a while, that was enough. A town, a name, a river.

But the land needed more than a name to hold people together. It needed consecrated ground. In 1872, a man named P.W.

Brewer set aside land for a cemetery and a church. Now that's a particular kind of faith, isn't it, planning for the living and the dead in the same gesture. The burials began, some of them without markers, without names carved in stone, just the quiet presence of people who came before and left without a trace we can read today.

But the oldest documented grave belongs to Rosie E. McCurdy, who died in 1875. Her name survived.

Then, sometime in the 1880s, the town changed its name to Newburg, and the cemetery followed right along, the way a shadow follows a person, quiet and faithful. Under that new name, the ground kept receiving its people. Local pioneers, and veterans, men who had stood in conflicts dating all the way back to the Mexican War, they rest here now, side by side with the settlers who simply came, worked the land, and stayed forever.

A cemetery association still tends the place today, keeping the grass and the memory from going to ruin. Out here in Comanche County, the ground remembers what the years try to forget.

What the marker says

Pioneer settlers of this area of Comanche County arrived in the mid-1850s and established a town named for the nearby South Leon River. P.W. Brewer set aside land for a cemetery and church in 1872. Although earlier unmarked burials exist here, the oldest documented grave is that of Rosie E. McCurdy, who died in 1875. After the town name was changed to Newburg in the 1880s, the cemetery also was renamed. Local pioneers and veterans of conflicts dating back to the Mexican War are buried here. A cemetery association maintains the historic graveyard. (1994)