The Denny Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best by every word. About a mile north of where you're rolling right now, there's a piece of ground that's been holding the Denny family for well over a century. Let me set the scene.

Alfred W. Denny came to Texas in 1853. He put down his first roots over in Clarksville, then picked up and moved to Weatherford in 1860.

That's two fresh starts before the country itself started coming apart at the seams. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Denny didn't sit it out. He served in a Ranger unit stationed at Stephenville, the kind of outfit tasked with guarding Texas' western frontier through all four years of that conflict, right up to 1865.

You think about what that stretch of duty looked like, out on the edge of everything, and it gives you a sense of the man. Two years after the war, in 1867, Denny bought himself 320 acres. That purchase included the very ground where he would eventually be laid to rest.

He died in 1877, and he went into the earth he had bought with his own money. There are seventeen known gravesites in the Denny Cemetery, family members all. Among them, his wife Mary Elizabeth.

And among them, an infant grandson, Walter Calloway Baldwin, killed by a horse in 1879. That detail doesn't get easier with distance. A child.

A horse. 1879. The cemetery fell into the way that old things do when the living move on, but in 1982 the burial ground was restored. Seventeen souls remembered again.

Alfred Denny came to Texas in 1853 and put down roots that, it turns out, nobody could pull up.

What the marker says

(1 mile north) Alfred W. Denny (d. 1877) came to Texas in 1853, settling first in Clarksville, and then moving to Weatherford in 1860. During the Civil War (1861-65) Denny served in a Ranger unit stationed at Stephenville that guarded Texas' western frontier. In 1867 he bought 320 acres, which included the site where he was later interred. There are 17 known gravesites of family members in the Denny Cemetery, including Denny's wife Mary Elizabeth and infant grandson Walter Calloway Baldwin, who was killed by a horse in 1879. The burial ground was restored in 1982. (1983)