Pioneer's Rest Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. The place is called Pioneer's Rest Cemetery, and the name carries the full weight of what it holds. It started, not with a grand civic plan, not with a ribbon-cutting or a deed of trust, but with grief.

In the summer of 1850, two children died. Sophie and Willis Arnold, children of Major Ripley A. Arnold, the commander of the troops at Fort Worth.

Two children, one summer, and suddenly there was a need for ground that would receive the dead with some measure of dignity. Major Arnold's friend, a man named Doctor Adolphus Gouhenant, answered that need. He set aside three acres right then and there.

Three acres, carved out of the frontier for the ones who wouldn't be going any further. Now hold that image for a second; a military outpost on the edge of the known world, a grieving father, and a friend who did the quiet, necessary thing. That's 1850.

The years kept coming. By 1871, a cemetery association had been formed, and a man named Baldwin Samuels gave three more adjoining acres, doubling the ground available to the dead. The settlers kept arriving and, as settlers do, eventually they stopped arriving.

Seventy-five Civil War veterans found their final rest here. Seventy-five. And if that number alone doesn't settle something in your chest, consider who else is buried in this ground.

Major Ripley A. Arnold himself, born in 1817, died in 1853, the very man whose grief helped start all of this, he's here too. And alongside him lies General Edward H.

Tarrant, born in 1799, died in 1858, the man for whom Tarrant County was named. The county you might be driving through right now. Pioneer's Rest Cemetery.

Three acres of sorrow that became six, and then a home for the people who built this place before anyone thought to write it down.

What the marker says

This burial ground was started in the summer of 1850 upon the deaths of Sophie and Willis Arnold, children of Major Ripley A. Arnold (1817-1853), commander of the troops at Fort Worth. Arnold's friend, Doctor Adolphus Gouhenant, set aside a three-acre burial site at that time. In 1871, after a cemetery association was begun, Baldwin Samuels gave three adjoining acres. Many early Fort Worth settlers, including 75 Civil War veterans, are buried here. This site also contains the graves of Major Arnold and General Edward H.Tarrant (1799-1858), for whom Tarrant County was named.