Wheeler Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Deep in Polk County, there's a rural graveyard with a beginning that starts the way so many hard Texas stories do. With a family, and a loss, and a piece of ground that had to be set aside.

Jefferson L. Wheeler had come up from Alabama. He and his second wife, Hannah, were making their life out here in the piney woods, and they had a daughter named Vina, born in 1864.

In 1875, Vina died in a hunting accident. She was laid to rest right here, in this quiet piece of earth. Now, the Wheelers could have kept that ground to themselves.

They didn't. Jefferson and Hannah donated an acre, the very acre that held Vina's burial site, to the surrounding community, to be used as what the record calls a neighborhood burying ground. Think about that for a moment.

Grief turned outward. A private sorrow made into a shared place. That acre became a gathering ground for the families all around, and it has never stopped.

The Wheeler Cemetery remains active to this day, maintained by the Wheeler Cemetery Association. And when you walk those grounds, you are walking past the graves of numerous area pioneer families, and veterans, men and women who served in conflicts ranging from the Civil War all the way to the Korean Conflict. Generations of this corner of Polk County, all coming home to the same acre that a mother and father set aside when they lost their girl.

That's the kind of thing that outlasts nearly everything else.

What the marker says

This rural graveyard began when Alabama native Jefferson L. Wheeler and his second wife, Hannah, buried their daughter, Vina (b. 1864), here in 1875. Vina died in a hunting accident. The Wheelers later donated an acre which included Vina's burial site to the surrounding community to be used as a "neighborhood burying ground." The cemetery remains active and is maintained by the Wheeler Cemetery Association. Within this graveyard are the grave sites of numerous area pioneer families and veterans of conflicts ranging from the Civil War to the Korean Conflict.