White Hall Cemetery

Duane's take

The official marker for White Hall Cemetery tells it this way, and I'm just the one passin' it along. Out here in McLennan County, cemeteries have a way of outlasting everything else. Towns rise up, put on their Sunday best, and then quietly fade back into the land.

White Hall did exactly that. The farms spread, the community grew, and then, as these things go, it dwindled. But the cemetery stayed.

It is, the marker tells us, the last vestige of the once growing agricultural community of White Hall. The first graves were marked in 1877, sitting north of where the White Hall Baptist Church once stood. And the land they rest on was deeded by a man worth knowing a little about.

Captain Burl Jones Kendrick, born in 1824, gone in 1912. A Civil War veteran who held 320 acres in the area. That is a man who put down roots and meant it.

Now, Captain Kendrick had already given that ground for those first graves. But in 1899, he came back to the table. He deeded an additional one point one acres to the trustees of the White Hall Graveyard.

The price agreed upon for that land: one dollar. One dollar for an acre and a tenth of ground to hold the community's dead. Some transactions say more than the numbers in them.

Pioneers of the White Hall community are buried here, in what the marker names as the first Baptist cemetery in the area. The town is gone. The church is gone.

But the people are still there, in the ground that Captain Kendrick gave, and the cemetery keeps the name of White Hall alive, which may have been the whole point all along.

What the marker says

White Hall Cemetery is the last vestige of the once growing agricultural community of White Hall. The first graves, marked in 1877, are located north of the White Hall Baptist Church site on land deeded by Capt. Burl Jones Kendrick (1824-1912). A Civil War veteran who owned 320 acres in the area. In 1899, Capt. Kendrick deeded an additional 1.1 acres to the trustees of the White Hall Graveyard for the price of one dollar. Pioneers of the White Hall community are buried at this, the first Baptist cemetery in the area.