Pioneer Stone Burial Cairns (at Mount Gilead Cemetery)

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker at Mount Gilead Cemetery has to say, and it's something worth slowing down for. Scattered throughout many of the pioneer cemeteries in Texas, if you know where to look, you'll find something unusual waiting for you among the old headstones. Stone structures (burial cairns, they're called) built by the early settlers to memorialize their dead.

Not hidden away underground, mind you. Primarily surface structures, stacked from native stone, sitting right out in the open where the wind and the years can find them. Now, they don't all look the same.

The cairns vary in design and workmanship, which tells you something about the hands that built them: different people, different times, different ideas of how a thing ought to look when it matters. But here's what ties them together: their use is representative of traditional burial customs that were prevalent in the South during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Folks carried these traditions with them, the way you carry something precious when you're movin' to a new place and you're not sure what you'll find there.

As for their specific purpose and origin, well, those are subject to theory. The marker doesn't pretend otherwise, and I won't either. What it does say, plain and certain, is that cairns like these are outstanding examples of pioneer lore and tradition.

So next time you're passin' through a cemetery out here and you see a pile of native stone that looks just a little too deliberate to be accidental, you stop. Somebody put that there for a reason. And they meant for it to last.

What the marker says

Scattered throughout many of the pioneer cemeteries in Texas are unusual stone structurers, or burial cairns, built by the early settlers to memorialize their dead. Primarily surface structures of native stone, the cairns vary in design and workmanship. Their use, however, is representative of traditional burial customs prevalent in the South during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although their specific purpose and origin are subject to theory, cairns such as these are outstanding examples of pioneer lore and tradition.