The Old Graveyard (Pioneer Cemetery)

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, before Terrell was Terrell, before there was a city, before there were streets or storefronts or a name on any map, there was already somebody buried out here. That's where this story starts.

Way back in 1851, a young man named Robert Alexander was laid to rest on land owned by the Irvine family. Robert was the nephew of W. D.

Irvine, and that burial, the very first in what would come to be called the Old Graveyard, or sometimes the Irvine Family Cemetery, happened more than twenty years before the city of Terrell ever came to be. Think on that. The dead were here first.

The Irvine family, pioneer stock, owned this land. And over the years, the graves multiplied; family members, neighbors, descendants. Not just any neighbors, mind you.

These were the people who rolled up their sleeves and built this community from the ground up. Founders, the marker says. A good number of the folks resting in this cemetery were responsible for founding the very town that now surrounds them.

Because that's the thing: what started as land on the edge of a frontier settlement now sits square within the city limits of Terrell. The town grew up and wrapped itself right around this little cemetery, the way water goes around a stone. There are unmarked graves here too.

No names, no dates, just the earth, keeping its own counsel. Whoever they were, they're part of this ground same as anyone else. The last known burial took place in 1956.

More than a century after Robert Alexander was the first to be laid down here, somebody was the last. And in between those two moments, 1851 to 1956, a community was born, took root, and grew tall right alongside this quiet piece of ground. Some places hold history in buildings or battle sites.

This one holds it a few feet down, in the people who came first.

What the marker says

This small historic cemetery, also called the "Irvine Family Cemetery," predates the establishment of Terrell by more than 20 years. The first burial was that of Robert Alexander, nephew of W. D. Irvine, in 1851. Now located within the city limits, the cemetery began on land owned by the pioneer Irvine family. It contains the graves of Irvine family members, their neighbors, and descendants, many of whom were responsible for founding this community. The cemetery also contains several unmarked graves. The last known burial to take place here was in 1956.