Sand Springs Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm going to give it the telling it deserves. You're rolling through Wood County now, and there's a burial ground out here with a story that goes all the way back to before the Civil War. Let me walk you through it.

The place is called Sand Springs Cemetery today, but it didn't start out that way. It started out as the Big Spring Cemetery, and it first served the pioneer settlers of the surrounding rural community, folks who were putting down roots in country that didn't yet have much of anything to offer except hard work and open sky. The ground was formally set aside for burials in 1860, when a man named Matthew Cartwright, a prominent landowner from San Augustine County, conveyed seven acres at this site to the Big Spring Baptist Church.

Seven acres. He signed it over, and just like that, the community had a place to lay its dead. The grounds were later enlarged through additional donations and purchases of land, because a community that keeps growin' needs more room for the ones it keeps losing.

Now, many of the earliest gravesites here are unmarked. That's a word that carries weight. Unmarked.

These are people whose names are no longer readable by stone or wood or any marker at all, but they are there, and the official marker tells us they include individuals associated with the church, the community school, which closed in 1913, and the Sand Springs Masonic Lodge No. 365, organized in 1873 and disbanded in 1892. Organizations that rose and fell, all while this ground kept doing what it was always meant to do. Among the oldest marked graves is that of Thomas Ship, born 1796, died 1863, a pioneer settler who served as an early trustee of the cemetery operation.

He helped steward this place, and then this place received him. That's the kind of symmetry that doesn't need any embellishment. Then came 1927.

The Big Spring Baptist Church had disbanded two years earlier, and a trustee of that church, a man named John Harris, deeded the burial ground to the Big Spring Cemetery Association. A church dissolves, but it makes sure the land is cared for before it goes. Sometime after that, the association and the cemetery were both renamed.

Big Spring became Sand Springs, and that's the name it carries to this day. By the time this story was set down in stone, the burial ground contained over a thousand graves and was still in use, still the site of an annual June homecoming, still serving as a reminder of the area's rich heritage. More than a thousand people in that ground, most of them with no fanfare, no monument, just this place.

And every June, the living come back to remember. That's not nothing. That's everything.

What the marker says

Originally known as the Big Spring Cemetery, this burial ground first served pioneer settlers of the surrounding rural community. It was formally set aside for burials in 1860 when Matthew Cartwright, a prominent landowner from San Augustine County, conveyed seven acres at this site to the Big Spring Baptist Church. The grounds were later enlarged through additional donations and purchases of land. Although many of the earliest gravesites here are unmarked, they include those of individuals associated with the church, the community school, which closed in 1913, and the San Springs Masonic Lodge No. 365, which was organized in 1873 and disbanded in 1892. Among the oldest marked graves is that of pioneer settler Thomas Ship (1796-1863), who served as an early trustee of the cemetery operation. In 1927 the burial ground was deeded to the Big Spring Cemetery Association by John Harris, a trustee of the church, which had disbanded two years earlier. Sometime later the association and cemetery were renamed Sand Springs. Still used, the burial ground contained over 1000 graves. The site of an annual June homecoming, it now serves as a reminder of the area's rich heritage. (1982)