Toliver Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, as best as Duane can carry it to you. Out here in Comanche County, there's a quiet patch of ground called Toliver Cemetery. And quiet as it is now, the stories buried in that soil go back to a time when this whole stretch of Texas was about as raw and unsettled as the edge of the known world.

This is a burial place of pioneers. Real ones. Not the storybook kind, but the kind who showed up before the roads, before the county lines, before most of the rules.

And among them, resting in the east center plot, lies a man named James H. Neel. Now here's a thing worth sittin' with for a moment.

James H. Neel was one of the first seven men to bring their families here. Not just himself, mind you.

Families. Women and children and everything that means, hauled out to land that hadn't been organized into a county yet. That happened in 1852.

Comanche County itself wouldn't be organized for another four years after that. Seven men. Families in tow. 1852.

You do the math on what kind of nerve that takes. And Neel didn't just arrive and disappear into the frontier. His home stood a quarter-mile east of where he'd eventually be laid to rest.

He put down roots. He became postmaster of Resley's Creek Village, a position he held from September 17, 1858, all the way to November 5, 1866. That's the kind of man a community leans on.

So next time you pass through Comanche County, remember that under this Texas sky, there's a cemetery that holds the east center plot of a man who was here before the county even had a name. James H. Neel.

One of seven. Postmaster. Pioneer.

The kind of person a place is built on.

What the marker says

Burial place of pioneers, including James H. Neel (east center plot), one of first seven men to bring families here (1852), four years before county was organized. His home was a quarter-mile east. He was postmaster, Resley's Creek Village, Sept. 17, 1858 to Nov. 5, 1866. (1967)