Spring Garden Community

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it: and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out in Tarrant County, there's a story about a place that almost nobody remembers anymore. A place called Spring Garden.

And the thing is, it didn't start here in Texas at all; it started with a man carrying a name from somewhere else entirely. Samuel Cecil Holiday Witten was the first permanent settler to this area. He came in 1854, out of Spring Garden, Missouri, and he brought that name with him when he put down roots.

Now that's a man who knew where he came from. For years, it was just him and the land. But by 1865, Witten had a partner in Milton Moore, and together those two built a schoolhouse right here.

They named it for Witten's Missouri home: Spring Garden. And that building wasn't just a schoolhouse. It pulled extra duty as a chapel and a meeting hall, the way frontier buildings had to, doing three jobs at once and complaining about none of them.

For a while, Spring Garden was somethin'. Churches took root here. A Grange came together.

A Justice of the Peace Court sat and dispensed what passed for order on the Texas frontier. This was a community with real bones. But here's where the story turns.

The 1870s were not kind to Spring Garden. Fire came through. And nearby, Bedford was growing, pulling people, pulling energy, pulling the future right out from under this little settlement.

One by one, the reasons to stay got harder to name. Spring Garden declined. That's the word the marker uses (declined).

Not in a day, not in a single dramatic moment, but steadily, the way a campfire goes down when nobody tends it. Today, only the pioneer burial ground remains to mark where all of it stood. The schoolhouse, the chapel, the meeting hall, the Grange, the court; gone.

But those who were laid to rest here are still here, keeping the location of Spring Garden on the map, even if it's the quietest kind of map there is. Some towns leave buildings. Spring Garden left its people.

What the marker says

The first permanet settler to this area was Samuel Cecil Holiday Witten of Spring Garden, Missouri, who came here in 1854. In 1865, with Milton Moore, he built a schoolhouse here which was named for his Missouri home. The building also served as a Chapel and Meeting Hall. Once the site of churches, a Grange, and a Justice of the Peace Court, Spring Garden declined in the 1870s because fire and the nearby development of Bedford. Only the pioneer burial ground at this site marks the location of the early settlement.