Parker Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about Parker Cemetery, out in Houston County. Pull up a chair, because this one starts with a young man on the move and ends, as so many Texas stories do, in the quiet of the earth. Willis Parker came to this part of Texas from North Carolina sometime in the eighteen fifties.

Came out ahead of his family, the way younger men sometimes do, staking out a new corner of the world. His relatives followed him in, one by one, settling in around him. And then, about eighteen fifty-seven, Willis Parker died.

He was here, and then he wasn't. His parents, Ralph R. and Sarah C. Hodge Parker, were left to reckon with that.

What they did was set aside a piece of their own farm, a patch of their land, and made it a resting place. Started it, you might say, with their son. Now here's a thing worth noting.

Willis Parker's grave is believed to be the oldest in that cemetery, but his father's grave carries the earliest tombstone. Eighteen sixty-one, that stone reads. So the ground held a secret before the stone ever told one.

Over the years, the cemetery grew. More than four hundred graves now, marked and unmarked both, most of them Parker family and the families connected to them. Civil War veterans.

World War I veterans. World War II veterans. Generation after generation, coming home to the same piece of ground that Ralph R. and Sarah C. set aside when grief first asked them what to do.

That's Parker Cemetery. It began with a son, and it kept the family close ever after.

What the marker says

Willis Parker arrived in this area from North Carolina in the 1850s. Many of his relatives later joined him in Texas. Upon Willis Parker's death about 1857, his parents Ralph R. and Sarah C. Hodge Parker set aside land on their farm for a cemetery. Although Willis Parker's grave is believed to be the oldest here, his father's grave bears the earliest tombstone (1861). Of the more than four hundred marked and unmarked graves, most are interments of the Parker and related families, including Civil War, World War I and World War II veterans.