Ritter Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the marker tells it, and here's how I'll tell it to you. Now, I know what you're thinkin'. You're rollin' through Denton County, and you want a story with some meat on its bones.

Well, sometimes the most powerful stories are the ones that speak in silences. This is one of those. Ritter Cemetery.

Established around 1860. That's it. That's what we know.

Around 1860, somebody made a decision. Somebody chose this ground, said this is the place, and they laid someone to rest here. Who was it?

The marker doesn't say. What brought them here? The marker doesn't say that either.

But here's what gets me every time I pass a cemetery this old: 1860 is right on the edge of everything. The world was about to change in ways nobody standing at that graveside could have fully imagined. And through all of it, this patch of Denton County ground just kept bein' what it was.

A resting place. A piece of somebody's story that mattered enough to mark, enough to remember, enough that folks went through the trouble of designating it a Historic Texas Cemetery. The Ritter Cemetery.

Old enough to have seen nearly everything this state has been through. That, friend, is its own kind of tall tale.

What the marker says

Established ca. 1860. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2001