Pioneer Graveyard

Duane's take

The way the official marker tells it, here's what Duane's got for you. Out here in Reeves County, before Pecos had much of anything else to call its own, it had this. A graveyard.

The earliest landmark the town could claim, and it started, as so many hard things do, with hard work and harder luck. The year was 1881, and the Texas and Pacific Railroad was pushing its way through this unforgiving stretch of West Texas. The men doing that work faced genuine hazard every day, and some of them didn't make it through.

Their burials started this ground. That's where it begins. Not with founding fathers or civic ceremony, just men lost in the hazardous work of building something that would outlast them.

From that beginning, the graveyard served the settlers of the Pecos Valley for over thirty years. Generation by generation, the valley's people brought their dead here. The first markers were modest things, cut from native red stone or shaped from wood, the kind of markers ordinary people put up when they don't have much but they want to remember anyway.

And West Texas, being West Texas, had other plans. Sandstorms came through. Floods came through.

The years came through. Those first markers, the red stone ones and the wooden ones both, have now been lost or effaced. The names they carried, gone with them.

What remains is the ground itself, and the knowledge of what it meant to hold this valley together when holding on was the whole of the job.

What the marker says

Earliest Pecos landmark. Started with burial of men in hazardous work of building Texas & Pacific Railroad, 1881. Used over 30 years by settlers in the Pecos Valley. First markers, of native red stone or wood, have now been lost or effaced in sandstorms and floods. (1966)