DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out in Mitchell County, on a stretch of Texas land that knows the meaning of wide open, there's a cemetery with a beginning that stops you cold. It started not with a town's planning committee, not with a church board, not with any grand civic gesture — it started with a baby.
April 1898. R.F. and Addie Hargrove, farmers working their land, lost an infant son. And when you bury your child somewhere, that somewhere becomes sacred ground.
The Hargroves knew it. So they gave two and a half acres — the land surrounding their son's grave — to the Spade Community. Not just for a cemetery.
For a school, too. Both purposes, one gift. That's the kind of thing that tells you who a people are.
The schoolhouse that went up on that property was called Liberty School, and it worked hard for its keep. Funerals were held there. Grange meetings.
Church services. Community events. Whatever the community needed, Liberty School provided.
Oral history puts the building in the northeast corner of the cemetery property — and there's something quietly powerful about that, a schoolhouse standing watch in the corner of a graveyard, tending to both the living and the dead. Now, the community of Spade itself — it sits right up against the southern boundary of the Ellwood-Renderbrook Spade Ranch, and that ranch is the name the whole community carries. From 1902 until 1912, Spade had its own U.S.
Post Office. It had a cotton gin, a store, a blacksmith shop. It was a working, breathing settlement on the Texas plains.
And through all of it — the good years and the hard ones — this cemetery has been the only burial ground Spade has ever had. Since 1898. Not a second one.
Just this one. The Hargrove family members are here. Victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic are here — that shadow that fell across so much of the world and didn't spare this corner of Mitchell County either.
Veterans of the Civil War are buried in this ground. Veterans of World War II are here, including a member of the Women's Army Corps. All of them, brought back to the two and a half acres that R.F. and Addie Hargrove gave away in grief and in love.
That's the whole story right there — a family's worst day became the community's common ground, and it has held them ever since.
What the marker says
This cemetery began as a family graveyard on the farm of R.F. (1868-1927) and Addie (1872-1956) Hargrove, when their infant son died in April 1898. The Hargroves gave 2.5 acres of land surrounding their son's grave to the Spade Community for cemetery and school purposes. The community schoolhouse, originally called Liberty School, was used for numerous purposes, including funerals, grange meetings, church services, and community events. According to available oral history, the school building was located in the northeast corner of the cemetery property. The Ellwood-Renderbrook Spade Ranch, from which the community takes its name, adjoins the rural settlement on its southern boundary. From 1902 until 1912 a U.S. Post Office served the community; other businesses in the area included a cotton gin, a store, and a blacksmith shop. Since 1898 this graveyard has served as the sole burial ground for the farming and ranching community of Spade. Among the interments here are Hargrove family members; victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic; and veterans of the Civil War and World War II, including a member of the Women's Army Corps. (1992)