DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm passing it straight along to you. Nine acres. Just slightly more than nine acres of Erath County ground holding something that most towns never manage to hold together even in life — a whole multi-ethnic community, buried side by side, and yet not quite side by side.
The Thurber Cemetery is all of that at once. The graveyard was divided into three sections, each with its own separate entrance. Catholic over here.
Protestant over there. African American in its own corner. That's the Thurber community in a nutshell — one place, many worlds, the divisions drawn in the very dirt people were laid into.
More than a thousand graves spread across those nine acres, which sounds like a lot until you hear the next number, and then it hits different. Almost seven hundred of those burials are unmarked. No name, no date, no stone to say who was here.
Seven hundred souls, and the ground keeps their secrets. The oldest tombstone belongs to Eva Chapman — an infant. The year was 1890.
That tiny stone, the oldest one standing, already tells you something about what this cemetery is bracing you for. More than half the total graves — more than half — are those of infants and children. Let that settle for a second.
You walk those nine acres and the majority of what's beneath your feet is someone who barely got started. And the marker doesn't leave you wondering why. Scarlet fever.
Typhoid fever. Diphtheria. Whooping cough.
Epidemic diseases, one after another, rolling through a community and taking the youngest first, the way they always did. That's what nine acres of ground can hold — a town's full grief, its divisions, its hundreds of unnamed, and at the very front of it all, a baby girl named Eva Chapman, 1890, standing as the oldest witness to everything that came after.
What the marker says
Encompassing slightly more than nine acres, the Thurber Cemetery documents the multi-ethnic Thurber community. The graveyard was divided into three sections with separate entrances: Catholic, Protestant, and African American. There are more than 1,000 graves here, including almost 700 unmarked burials. The oldest tombstone is that of Eva Chapman, an infant who died in 1890. More than half the total graves are those of infants and children, a reflection of such epidemic diseases as scarlet fever, typhoid fever, diphtheria, and whooping cough. (1995)