Tolbert, Texas cemetery

There's a small cemetery between Vernon and Chillicothe. It's on the south side of the road across the tracks just east of the railroad overpass. It's an old cemetery. My grandfather is buried there. Many of the graves are infants who died the year back in the early 1900's. It must have been an epidemic of some sort. I've never been able to find out for sure. I don't think the town was ever much more than a small grocery store and gas station.

We have a simular cemetery near Venus with a lot of infants with very close dates of passing around the same time frame.

http://www.interment.net/data/us/tx/johnson/center_league.htm


If I recall, I did a bit of research and there was a pretty bad influenza outbreak here around the turn of the century that accounted for a lot of the infant deaths.
That might be that case there as well, being in a rural area and medical care was probably not as readily available as it might have been had they been closer to a bigger town.

Welcome to the forum too..

The Influenza Pandemic of 1918

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. Known as "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe" the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster.

The physicians of the time were helpless against this powerful agent of influenza. In 1918 children would skip rope to the rhyme.

I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.

I know I am way late on this comment, in reguards to your inqury of Tolbert, Texas and the cemetary. My great grandparents and great uncle are also buried there, having all died when my grandfather was a little boy. (Horace Grady and Hettie West and baby). Anyway, it is my understanding from my grandfather that Tolbert was actually a happening railroad town. He tells me that when he was a boy, it was county seat. As for what happened, he has told me two different versions. 1) a tornado came through and tore most of the town down a Post Office and general store survived but not much else. 2) the county seat moved and the town pretty much went with it. Hope that this helps with your inquiries.