DUANE
Duane's take
Here's what the official marker has to say, and I'll tell it to you straight — with maybe a little of the West Texas wind behind it. Out in Upton County, the Rankin Cemetery has been holdin' its ground since 1915, established not long after the town of Rankin itself got its start. The civic leaders behind it read like a founding roll call: Ira Yates, J.
H. Felps, Tom F. Hickox, and Dr.
J. H. Johnson.
Men who understood that a real town needs a place for the livin' to gather — and a place for the departed to rest. The first person laid to rest in that cemetery was Mary Evelyn Johnson, Dr. Johnson's own niece, buried there in 1916.
There's a quiet weight to that. The men who helped build a town also helped bury one of their own before the decade was even out. Then came the 1920s.
Oil was discovered in Upton and Pecos counties, and the population in the area increased greatly. When the boom came, people poured in — and not all of them made it back out on their own terms. The cemetery filled with more burials as the land filled with more living.
Now here's the detail that tends to make people pause when they're standin' at that gate: Rankin Cemetery is known to contain the unmarked graves of two bank robbers. No names on the stones. No stones at all.
Just ground, and West Texas sky, and whatever story those two carried that nobody saw fit to carve in granite. The marker calls this graveyard a good reflection of the heritage of this area of the state. Founders and oil-field hands, a doctor's niece, and two men whose names the land itself seems to have swallowed.
That's West Texas in a cemetery. And the ground out at Rankin keeps every last one of those secrets equally well.
What the marker says
This cemetery was established in 1915. Soon after the founding of Rankin, by civic leaders Ira Yates, J. H. Felps, Tom F. Hickox, and Dr. J. H. Johnson. Johnson's niece, Mary Evelyn Johnson, was the first to be buried here in 1916. Many burials occurred during the 1920s. When population in the area increased greatly after oil was discovered in Upton and Pecos counties. Rankin Cemetery is known to contain the unmarked graves of two bank robbers. The graveyard is a good reflection of the heritage of this area of the state. 1985