Oswald Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm passing it right along to you. Out on five acres of the old I. M.

Armstrong survey in Bosque County, there's a piece of ground that has been holding the dead longer than most folks around here can reckon. The Oswald Cemetery. And the story of how it came to be what it is today stretches back further than its name.

Way back to the early 1860s, when this land saw its first marked graves. Three children. All of them belonging to W.

B. and E. H. Moore.

You think about that for a second. The very oldest marked resting places here are those of children. That's the kind of beginning that puts a weight on a place.

The original owner of the land was Captain Allen S. Anderson, a frontier scout. When he died, in 1864, they laid him right here, in ground that was then known as the Clifton Graveyard.

A scout who ranged who knows how far across this country, and in the end the land he owned was where he stayed. His daughter, Flora Kemp, eventually deeded the property for use as a graveyard. That was 1877.

And then in 1885, a man named M. J. Oswald purchased the land, and from that point forward it carried a new name.

Oswald Cemetery. Now here is the part that deserves to be said plainly and with some respect. Burial in this cemetery has been free to people of all races.

In a time and a place where that was not always the case, this ground made no such distinctions. Among the pioneers laid to rest here are early settlers of old town Clifton and several Civil War veterans. The Oswald family, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, still owns the land surrounding the cemetery.

Generation after generation, they've kept it. Captain Anderson, three children of the Moore family, settlers, veterans, neighbors of every background, all of them held in those five acres. Some places earn their names.

This one earned something more.

What the marker says

This cemetery, located on five acres out of the l. M. Armstrong survey, was already in use as a burial ground when the earliest original marked graves, those of three children of W. B. and E. H. Moore, were dug in the early 1860s. The original owner of the land was Captain Allen S. Anderson, a frontier scout who was interred here in 1864 when the site was known as Clifton Graveyard. His daughter, Flora Kemp, deeded it for use as a graveyard in 1877. M. J. Oswald purchased the land in 1885 and it became known as Oswald Cemetery. Burial in the cemetery has been free to people of all races. Among the pioneers interred here are early settlers of old town Clifton and several Civil War veterans. The Oswald family continues to own the land surrounding the cemetery at the dawn of the 21st century. (2000)