Proctor Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Somewhere in Comanche County, there's a piece of ground that's been keeping secrets since before most of Texas knew what a railroad whistle sounded like. The land itself was once part of a farm belonging to the Larkin Gyger family, pioneers who put down roots here and held on.

And it was on that Gyger family land that this story quietly began. The first person laid to rest in what would become Proctor Cemetery was W.B. Long, a Methodist minister and a neighbor of the Gygers.

He was born in 1817, and he died in 1875, and when he went into that ground, nobody called it a community graveyard yet. It was just a place where a neighbor was buried. But these things have a way of growing.

In the 1890s, the railroad arrived, and the small town of Proctor began to grow right along with it. And as the town grew, so did the cemetery. Grave by grave, family by family, this patch of earth became something that belonged to everybody.

Fifty-seven of the graves here are from the nineteenth century. Think about that for a moment. Fifty-seven people who knew this land before the twentieth century ever showed its face.

Nine of those buried here were veterans of the Civil War, men who had lived through something that remade the entire country and then came to rest in this quiet corner of Comanche County. By 1940, a cemetery association was organized to make sure none of it gets forgotten. They maintain it still.

What started as one minister's resting place on a pioneer family's farm became a whole community's sacred ground. That's not nothing. That's everything.

What the marker says

The land on which this cemetery is located was once part of a farm owned by the pioneer Larkin Gyger family. The first person interred here was W.B. Long (1817-1875), a Methodist minister and neighbor of the Gyger family. As the small town of Proctor began to grow with the arrival of the railroad in the 1890s, this gradually became a community graveyard. Fifty-seven of the graves are from the nineteenth century. Also buried here are nine veterans of the Civil War. A cemetery association, organized in 1940, maintains the historic burial ground. (1988)