Ozro Cemetery

Duane's take

The marker's the one tellin' this story, and I'm just the voice carryin' it down the road. Here's what it says about Ozro Cemetery, out in Ellis County. Back in 1858, two men.

J.P. Gilmore and Richard D. Graves, gave land for a purpose that was equal parts practical and permanent.

Part of that land went to Pleasant Hill Methodist Episcopal Church, south. The other part became a burial ground. Two gifts, one act of generosity, one piece of Texas soil set aside to hold the living and the dead.

The earliest marked graves in that cemetery date from 1870. Whoever came before that, time has kept their names to itself. Then, in 1895, a man named J.H.L.

Jackson donated additional land to the cemetery. By that point, the ground was serving a community called Nation Town, and Nation Town was no sleepy little crossroads. It was a thriving community, with several stores and a school.

A real place, with real people building something. Three years after Jackson's donation, in 1898, the village was renamed Ozro. That's when the post office opened under that name, and a town takes on a new name when it takes on a new post office.

Then came 1902, and with it the International and Great Northern Railroad. The railroad reached the area, and as railroads tend to do, it pulled the gravity of the whole region in a new direction, toward Maypearl. Many residents packed up and moved.

Ozro declined. And here is where the story lands, quiet and a little heavy: of everything that was Nation Town, of everything that became Ozro, the stores, the school, the post office, the people who named it and renamed it and buried their dead in it, only one thing remains. The cemetery.

The only remnant of its past, still holding ground long after everything else let go.

What the marker says

In 1858 J.P. Gilmore and Richard D. Graves gave land for Pleasant Hill Methodist Episcopal Church, south, and for this burial ground. The earliest marked graves date from 1870. J.H.L. Jackson donated additional land in 1895. At that time, the cemetery served Nation Town, a thriving community with several stores and a school. The village was renamed Ozro in 1898, when that post office opened. After the International & Great Northern Railroad reached this area in 1902, many residents moved to Maypearl, and Ozro declined. Today the cemetery is the only remnant of its past.