Winterfield Cemetery

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna pass it along to you. Way back in 1879, a man named July G. Garner and his wife Martha Howard Garner purchased a farm out in Gregg County.

Now, nobody sets out to start a cemetery. That is never the plan. But life has a way of writing its own chapters, and November of 1887 brought two of them at once, hard ones.

The Garners lost their nephew, Joel S. Bright, and their niece, Jessie L. Webb, both of them gone in the same month.

So the Garners set aside a piece of that land, quietly, as family land will sometimes be set aside, and they laid those two young people to rest there. That was the beginning. What started as a family cemetery, carved out of grief on a working farm, did not stay small.

The years moved through, and so did the people of that community, and one by one the graves numbered up, ten and then a hundred and then more, until the site held more than five hundred graves. Farmers are buried there. City officials and county officials.

Church leaders. Folks who built the community from the ground up and then became part of the ground itself. For a good while, in the early nineteen hundreds, family members kept the place up themselves, tending it the way you tend something you love.

Then in 1971, the Winterfield Cemetery Association stepped in and took over that maintenance, and the site continues to serve the community to this day. Five hundred souls and counting, all of it grown from one farm, one family, and two deaths in November of 1887. That is a place with some weight to it.

What the marker says

This cemetery began on the farm purchased in 1879 by July G. and Martha Howard Garner. Land was set aside for a family cemetery upon the deaths of the Garners' nephew, Joel S. Bright, and niece, Jessie L. Webb, in November 1887. This family cemetery eventually became a community graveyard with more than 500 graves. Among those buried here were farmers, city and county officials, and church leaders. Site maintenance, completed in the early 1900s by family members, was succeeded in 1971 by the Winterfield Cemetery Association. The site continues to serve the community.