Stiff Chapel Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about Stiff Chapel Cemetery, up there in Collin County. Pull up a chair, or a steering wheel, and let me take you back a ways. A long ways.

We're talking 1835. That's the year Jesse Stiff packed up his life in Virginia and pointed himself toward Texas. Now, Jesse wasn't thinking small.

When he settled in this area, he wasn't working with a modest little plot; we're talking several thousand acres of land. The man staked his claim in a serious way. Jesse lived and worked that land for decades, and eventually his brother Louis made the same journey, arriving in 1849.

And when you've got two Stiff brothers putting down roots on neighboring homesteads, well, a community tends to grow up around that kind of family gravity. That's exactly what happened: a place folks came to call Stiff Chapel took shape right around those homesteads. But not everything in this story is about land and legacy and community growin' up.

Some of it is about loss. In 1847, before Louis had even arrived, while Jesse was still building something out here, Jesse's son James died while serving as a Texas Ranger. He was buried near his father's house, on that same land Jesse had carved out of the Texas frontier.

That burial ground eventually was deeded formally as the Stiff Chapel Cemetery. Two acres. Most of the graves in that family burial ground date from the 1800s, which tells you something about the weight of time sitting on that place.

Jesse himself lived until 1871, long enough to have seen a community rise up around everything he built, and long enough to have grieved his son for nearly twenty-four years. The cemetery kept receiving the departed for decades after Jesse was gone. And then came 1935.

That year, a woman named Minnie Swaim was laid to rest there; the last burial Stiff Chapel Cemetery would ever hold. After that, silence. Two acres of Collin County soil, holding fast to the stories of everyone who came before.

That's the kind of quiet that earns its keep.

What the marker says

Jesse Stiff (1796-1871) came to Texas from Virginia in 1835 and settled on several thousand acres of land in this area. His brother, Louis, arrived in 1849, and a community known as Stiff Chapel developed around their homesteads. In 1847, Jesse's son, James, died while serving as a Texas Ranger. He was buried near his father's house on land that later was deeded as the Stiff Chapel Cemetery. Most of the graves in the two-acre family burial ground date from the 1800s. The last burial in the Stiff Chapel Cemetery, that of Minnie Swaim, took place in 1935. (1984)