Springtown Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna give it to you straight with a little Parker County flavor. This is the story of Springtown Cemetery, and friend, this ground has been holding secrets longer than most Texas towns have had names. We're talking before the Civil War, before Springtown itself was even a thought on anybody's map.

The land was patented to a woman named Mary Leonard in 1859, and this cemetery was already there, already doing what cemeteries do, already keeping its quiet count of the years. Now that's the kind of deep-root history that'll make you go still for a moment on a warm afternoon. The site was later conveyed to the Springtown Methodist Church, and for many years that congregation worshiped in a log cabin right next door; Sunday voices rising up right alongside the resting place of the people who came before them.

There's something in that arrangement that just about says everything about how frontier folks understood life and death as neighbors. If you want to put a name and a date to the oldest story the ground is still willing to tell, you look for the gravestone of J.E. Arrington, who died in 1854.

That's the earliest legible marker, the first voice still readable out of all those early years. Then in 1901, two local businessmen, J.A. Kidd and A.J.

Cunningham, donated land to enlarge the original cemetery tract, making sure there'd be room enough for the generations still coming. From Mary Leonard's patent in 1859 to that 1901 donation, this cemetery grew the way a community does, one act of care at a time. And it's still here, still keeping watch over Parker County, still older than the town it outlasted the founding of.

What the marker says

This cemetery first served the area's pioneer settlers. In use before the Civil War and before the founding of Springtown, it was included in land patented to Mary Leonard in 1859. The site was later conveyed to the Springtown Methodist Church, and the congregation worshiped in an adjacent log cabin for many years. The earliest legible gravestone is that of J.E. Arrington, who died in 1854. The original cemetery tract was enlarged in 1901 with a donation of land from local businessmen J.A. Kidd and A.J. Cunningham. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986.