Wilson Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker at Wilson Cemetery has to say, and I want you to sit with this one a moment before we move on. Out here in Tarrant County, there's a cemetery that holds exactly three graves. Three.

That's the whole of it. And the story of how they came to be there goes back to 1872, when this stretch of Texas was still frontier country, still figuring out what it was going to be. Charles N.

Wilson was the first to bring someone here. His wife, Ophelia E. West Wilson, born in 1853, died in 1872, along with their newborn daughter, both of them lost to complications during childbirth.

Charles buried them on this ground, and just like that, a cemetery existed where there hadn't been one before. Not long after, a family named Bowlin, James W. and Mattie C. Bowlin, found themselves in the same terrible position that frontier families knew all too well.

They had lost their infant son, and a public graveyard was not readily accessible to their home. So they brought their boy here, to the Wilson ground, and laid him to rest in what became the third grave in this cemetery. That grave, the Bowlin infant's, remains unmarked to this day.

Three graves. Two families. All of them bound together by grief and by the hard geography of 19th century Tarrant County, where the nearest public burying ground might as well have been the far side of the moon.

The marker calls this cemetery an important reminder of the ways of life back then, and I think that's exactly right. Not the grand ways, not the storied ones. The quiet, devastating, human ones.

The kind where a man buries his wife and his child on his own land because that's what there is to do, and then a neighbor comes and does the same. Three graves, and they've been telling that story since 1872.

What the marker says

This pioneer cemetery dates to 1872, when Charles N. Wilson buried his wife and infant child here. Ophelia E. West Wilson (1853-1872) and her newborn daughter died as a result of complications during childbirth. Third grave in the cemetery, that of the Bowlin infant, is unmarked. James W. and Mattie C. Bowlin buried their son here, since a public graveyard was not readily accessible to their home. The Wilson Cemetery contains only these three graves, but it is an important reminder of the ways of life in 19th century Tarrant County. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986