Newman Community and Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Newman Community and Cemetery out in Fisher County. Now, some places earn their names through drama or disaster. Newman got its name a quieter way.

A man named Jim Newman, one of Fisher County's earliest settlers, came out to this stretch of Texas and established a ranch somewhere around 1879. That's it. That's the seed.

A ranch. A man. A piece of West Texas land.

But give it a couple of years and watch what grows. By 1881, enough people had gathered near that ranch that they needed a post office, and when that first post office opened, they called the place Newman. Seemed only right.

From that post office, a whole little world kept building itself up. Come 1901, the town had two schools, the Old Newman and the Union Hall. It had a post office and grocery store running together under one roof, the way small towns tend to combine their necessities.

And it had the Newman Baptist Church. That is a community. That is a place people are putting down roots.

Then in 1906, a deed was drawn up setting aside land specifically for cemetery purposes, and the Newman Cemetery came to be. The first two persons buried there were Miller Phigpen and J. E.

W. Scott, both in that same year of 1906. Sixteen veterans of various wars would eventually be laid to rest in that ground.

Among them, an American Civil War veteran by the name of R. L. Creswell.

The Methodist Episcopal Church added a sanctuary around 1908. In 1913, Union Hall and Old Newman schools consolidated into one. By 1924, they built a proper brick schoolhouse.

Then 1929 brought fresh sanctuaries for both the Methodist Episcopal and Baptist congregations. Newman, it seemed, was digging in. But here is where the story turns, and it turns slow and quiet, which is sometimes the saddest way for a town to go.

The population started dropping. Steady, they say. Not a flood, not a fire.

Just people leaving, one by one, season by season, until the weight of a community gets too light to hold its institutions together. The Methodist Church dissolved in 1940. The school followed in the early 1940s.

The Baptist Church went around 1950. The buildings that once held sermons and spelling bees and the whole ordinary life of a Texas town, most of them are gone now. What remains are the vestiges of those church and school structures, and one other thing: the Newman Cemetery, still active.

Still tended. Still receiving. Out of everything Jim Newman's ranch seeded back in 1879, it is the cemetery that endures, which is a thing worth sitting with for a mile or two.

What the marker says

Jim Newman, one of Fisher County's earliest settlers, established a ranch in this area about 1879. The community that developed near his ranch was named Newman when the county's first post office opened here in 1881. The town consisted of the Old Newman and Union Hall Schools, a post office/grocery store, and the Newman Baptist Church by 1901. The Newman Cemetery was legally set aside in a deed conveying property at this site for cemetery purposes in 1906. The first persons buried here were Miller Phigpen and J. E. W. Scott in 1906. Among the sixteen veterans of various wars buried here is American Civil War veteran R. L. Creswell. The Methodist Episcopal Church built a sanctuary here about 1908. Union Hall and Old Newman schools consolidated in 1913, and in 1924 a new brick schoolhouse was constructed. In 1929 the Methodist Episcopal and Baptist churches erected new sanctuaries. A steady decline in the area's population resulted in the dissolution of the Methodist Church in 1940, the school in the early 1940s and the Baptist Church about 1950. Vestiges of the town's church and school structures and the still active Newman Cemetery are all that remain of the former town of Newman. (1993)