Oak Branch Cemetery

Duane's take

The way the official marker tells it, here's the story of Oak Branch Cemetery: and I'll let the facts speak for themselves, because they've got plenty to say. Now, it takes a certain kind of man to look out at twenty acres of good ranch land and say, I'm giving this away. But that's exactly what William M.

Claunch did, back in 1875. Claunch had been on this earth since 1815, which means by the time he signed over that land, he'd seen sixty years of hard-won living. And what did he give those twenty acres to?

A Methodist Church, a campground, and a cemetery. The whole spectrum, you might say; a place to gather, a place to rest under the stars, and a place to rest for good. The cemetery took root, as cemeteries do.

But the oldest grave out there doesn't belong to some weathered old pioneer who'd fought his way across the frontier. It belongs to a little girl. Susaner Bynum, one year old, daughter of M.C. and L.E.

Bynum, died in 1881. Six years after Claunch laid that land down for the living and the dead alike, the first to be recorded in that ground was a child who barely had time to know the Texas sky. That'll settle a room, and it ought to.

The stones from the 1880s tell the rest of the story in surnames. Bynum. Hollingsworth.

Williams. Gilbreth. Martin.

Claunch. Blakely. These were the early settlers of Oak, a community that once thrived just one mile to the north.

Once-thriving. That phrase does a lot of work, doesn't it. A whole town's rise and quiet fade, written into two words on a historical marker.

Old William Claunch himself passed in 1888, his name eventually joining the others carved into that same ground he'd given away thirteen years before. The cemetery hasn't been forgotten, though. Since 1927, the Oak Branch Cemetery Association has kept it.

Mowed it, tended it, honored it. Nearly a century of looking after names that time might otherwise have swallowed whole. Twenty acres.

One man's generosity. And a little girl named Susaner, first to sleep beneath it all.

What the marker says

In 1875 area pioneer William M. Claunch (1815-1888) donated twenty acres of his ranch land for a Methodist Church, church campground, and cemetery. The oldest grave in the burial ground is that of Susaner Bynum, the one-year-old daughter of M.C. and L.E. Bynum, who died in 1881. Many of the gravestones date from the 1880s and bear the family names of Bynum, Hollingsworth, Williams, Gilbreth, Martin, Claunch, and Blakely -- all early settlers in the once-thriving community of Oak (1 mi. N). Since 1927 the historic graveyard has been maintained by the Oak Branch cemetery association.