Waggoner Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's what the official marker has to say, and I'll do my best to tell it right. Now, some stories start with one person. This one starts with twenty.

The Reverend Henry Fullingim, Georgia native, Methodist circuit rider, and apparently a man with considerable energy in multiple departments of life, packed up his wife Martha and their seventeen children and came to northeast Texas in 1849. Seventeen. You let that number sit for a moment.

Henry worked the land spiritually, ridin' the circuit as a Methodist minister, carryin' the gospel across whatever roads and creek crossings the frontier saw fit to put in his way. But it was the next generation that pushed even further west. Two of the family, Henry and Martha's son Archibald, and their son-in-law John Hale, came to Wise County in 1853, and they weren't followin' a trail somebody else had worn smooth.

They were among the area's very first settlers. John Hale, it turns out, was not a man content to simply arrive. By 1856, he had become the first sheriff of Wise County.

The first. In a place that was still figuring out what it was, somebody had to be the law, and John Hale stepped into that role before the county had much history at all. Now, the cemetery at the center of this story carries a different name entirely: Waggoner Cemetery, named for John T. and Sarah Waggoner, on whose land it was established.

And the first recorded burial there was Martha Fullingim herself, in 1868. The woman who crossed into Texas in 1849 with seventeen children and a circuit-riding preacher for a husband. She was there at the beginning, and she was the first the ground remembered.

In 1885, the Waggoners deeded that property to Wise County; passing the land, and everything resting in it, into the keeping of the community it had quietly served all along. Seventeen children, one sheriff, and a piece of ground that's been holding names since 1868. That's Wise County putting down roots.

What the marker says

Georgia native the Reverend Henry Fullingim, his wife Martha, and their 17 children came to northeast Texas in 1849. Henry Fullingim served the area as a circuit-riding Methodist minister. Their son, Archibald, and their son-in-law, John Hale, came to Wise County in 1853 and were among the area's first settlers. Hale became the first Wise County sheriff in 1856. This cemetery is named for John T. and Sarah Waggoner, on whose land it was established. Martha Fullingim's burial in 1868 is the first recorded here. The Waggoner's deeded the property to Wise County in 1885.