Thurman Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna pass it along to you. Joseph and Mary Jane Thurman, she went by her maiden name Dusenbury before she married into the Thurman line, came out to this stretch of Edwards County in 1882. Now, that's not a small thing.

Edwards County in 1882 was raw, hard country. You didn't come out here looking for easy. You came out here looking for land, and you made your peace with everything else that came with it.

And plenty came with it. Three years after Joseph and Mary Jane arrived, in 1885, Mary Jane herself became the first person laid to rest in what would grow into the Thurman Family Cemetery. She didn't live to see how many would follow her.

But they came. The grave markers out there tell the story plain as anything: infant deaths, typhoid, the whole catalog of diseases that worked their way through pioneer families like a slow and merciless tide. That's not dramatizin'.

That's just what the stones say. Over the years, twenty-nine gravesites filled in, and the families buried there read like a roll call of the whole surrounding community: Thurman, Self, Ellis, Donaghe, Parham, Maddux, Quigg, Loden, Fulkerson, Wilkerson, Chapman, Lazerine, Wallace, Bolding, and Remley. Names that meant something out here once.

Names connected to land and labor and loss. The last burial took place in 1958, and since then, Thurman family descendants have kept the place up. Tended it.

Remembered it. Sometimes the most dignified thing a family can do is simply refuse to let a place be forgotten; and out there in Edwards County, that's exactly what they've done.

What the marker says

Joseph and Mary Jane (Dusenbury) Thurman came to this part of Edwards county in 1882. In 1885, Mary Jane was the first to be buried in what became the Thurman Family Cemetery. Grave markers record infant deaths and victims of typhoid and other diseases that plagued the pioneers. Members of the Thurman, Self, Ellis, Donaghe, Parham, Maddux, Quigg, Loden, Fulkerson, Wilkerson, Chapman, Lazerine, Wallace, Bolding, and Remley families are buried in the 29 gravesites. Last used in 1958, the cemetery is maintained by Thurman family descendants. (1985)