Shiloh

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Out in DeWitt County, there's a place called Shiloh, or at least there was. It began as a small farming community, right around 1847, when a handful of families put down roots in that stretch of Texas soil.

The McBrides, the Hamiltons, the McFarlands, the Odoms, the Andersons, the Woods family. Names that carried weight, names that meant somebody was stayin'. Then came 1851, and a man named John Keith Rankin helped organize a Methodist Episcopal Church for those folks.

And the congregation didn't stop there. The very next year, 1852, the members went ahead and erected a building to hold that church. A place to gather, to mark the seasons, to be a community in the fullest sense of the word.

By 1856, Shiloh had a school too. Shiloh School, serving the people of that community right on through until the early part of the twentieth century. Generations of children.

Decades of lessons. All of it rooted in that same patch of DeWitt County ground. But here's where the story takes on some weight.

In 1857, a man named Montraville Woods was buried there. He was the son of Zadock Woods, a Texas patriot, and his was the first burial in what became the Shiloh Cemetery. Now it's called Woods Cemetery.

And here's the thing about Woods Cemetery. It's all that remains of Shiloh. The church, the school, the families who built something out of nothing in 1847, all of it gone now except for that ground where the dead are kept.

Sometimes a community's last word is its cemetery, and Shiloh said plenty.

What the marker says

The small farming community of Shiloh began about 1847 with settlement by the McBride, Hamilton, McFarland, Odom, Anderson, and Woods families. In 1851 John Keith Rankin helped organize a Methodist Episcopal Church, whose members erected a building in 1852. Shiloh School, established in 1856, served the community until the early part of the 20th century. The first burial in the Shiloh Cemetery was that of Montraville Woods, son of Texas patriot Zadock Woods, in 1857. Woods Cemetery, as it is now called, is all that remains of the Shiloh community.