DUANE
Duane's take
Here's what the official marker has to say, and I'll tell it the way it deserves to be told. Out here in Scurry County, there's a patch of ground with a long memory and a short list of names — the Old Snyder Graveyard. It started as state land, plain and simple, no different from the miles of Texas stretching out around it.
But sometime in the 1880s, the living started making decisions for the dead, and common usage did what paperwork sometimes can't — it turned that ground into a cemetery. No deed, no declaration. Just a community deciding, quietly, that this was the place.
Now, legend — and the marker is careful to call it legend — says the first soul laid to rest here was an Indian. That's where the story begins, or at least where it fades into the kind of past nobody can fully see anymore. After that first burial came others, and not all of them came with names attached.
Early-day transients, people passing through this wide-open country, were often buried in unmarked graves. No headstone, no record, just the earth closing over them and the years doing the rest. By 1902, the tract was closed to further burials.
That was the end of it as a working cemetery. Then came the moving — many of the bodies were moved elsewhere over time, carried off to other resting places, leaving the ground quieter still. And so here's where the count lands, as of 1969: only fourteen graves are now identified.
Fourteen, out of however many souls this land once held. A whole history of names and wanderers and one legendary first burial, and in the end, fourteen stones left standing to say someone was here. That's a heavy kind of silence for a piece of ground to carry.
What the marker says
Formerly state land until common usage established it as a cemetery in 1880's. Legend says first burial was an Indian. Early-day transients were often buried in unmarked graves. Tract closed to further burials, 1902. Many bodies have been moved elsewhere. Only 14 graves are now identified. (1969)