Roscoe Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker at Roscoe Cemetery has to say, straight out of Nolan County. Now settle in, because even a short story can carry a long weight. The place that would one day be called Roscoe wasn't always called that.

Back when this stretch of Texas was still finding itself, folks knew it as Vista. And out there in Vista, one of the first settlers to put down roots was a man named W. J.

Turner, a rancher and wheat grower who understood something most people eventually learn the hard way: that where you plant yourself, sooner or later, you plant your dead. Around 1887, Turner purchased the land that would become the Roscoe Cemetery. He didn't do it for ambition or posterity.

He did it because he had to bury his brother-in-law, a man named Joe Clecker. That was the beginning. After Joe Clecker, the ground waited a few years, the way ground does.

Then in 1892, a child named Frank E. Spires was laid to rest there, an infant who barely had time to draw breath in this world. Two years on, in 1894, another infant followed, Ethel Lena Turner.

Two little lives, gone before they could become stories of their own. And scattered among those early graves are others the marker can only call unidentified. No names.

No dates. Just the quiet fact that they were there, that someone grieved them, and that the ground remembers even when the records don't. W.

J. Turner bought that land to honor one man, and what he really did was give an entire community a place to say goodbye.

What the marker says

One of first settlers in Roscoe (when it was called Vista) was rancher-wheat grower W. J. Turner, who purchased cemetery site for burial of his brother-in-law, Joe Clecker, about 1887. Next interments: infants Frank E. Spires, 1892; Ethel Lena Turner, 1894. Other early graves are unidentified. (1972)