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Starting a thread here as I like to stop by the old Cemeteries every now and then.

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Randy
I'll be the first brave soul to admit I visit the occassional graveyard.

I have some pictures and information at the house I will post when I get there.
Its of a cemetary and whats left of a town about 8 mile north/west of 79 just about 20 miles north of taylor.
 
I use to when I was younger. Not to do damage just to look around. There are some creepy ones out there.. Some of us get together and there is always someone that comes up with the “remember that time in that grave yard” two of the best ones were

1) Forrest was reading a head stone at 3pm in the after noon, real creepy place in the middle of nowhere.. Is about ½ done with it and the coffin collapses and he drops in the ground to his knees..

2) We were parked out side one at about 11pm waiting on a few other guys to go to a party (on his way from work to the party) as we ( 7 or 8 of us) We all had just gotten out of the cars and looked to see 4 or 5 lanterns out in the cemeteries. We jus looked at each other and fig kids were playing hid and seek out there.. a few mins later 30 people came out of the place walking (no one talking or making any noise what so ever.. not even the sound of walking in grass) they walked by us about 20 ft away never looked at us or anything. Walked across the street and went behind an old shack that was there.. We were there another 20 mins and never saw heard form them.. That kinda freaked us out..

Oh I miss the good old days.. lol.. (what the **** were we thinking?)
 
Re: Starting a thread here as I like to stop by the old Cemeteries every now and then.

My younger son did a little local sleuthing a few weeks ago and he and a buddy found this grave at a cemetary in east Ft. Worth:

oswald_0517.jpg


Someone had told us about it ages ago but we never checked it out.


My wife's folks are buried in a small cemetary on FM323 between Overton and Henderson in East Texas. Sometime, we hope to make a trip there, maybe in conjunction with an Edom Pie Run. Name of the cemetary is "Pleasant Hill".
 
East of IH35, generally north of 290, in the Austin area, you'll come across early cemeteries, primarily Lutheran. Very interesting. Many family plots have wrought iron fences around them, are still maintained generations after the Dearly Departed...departed. Of particular note are the many childrens' graves, often "protected" by what appears at first to be wrought iron fencing, but is in fact a wrought iron baby bed.

Another intersting stop is on RR 412, just east of 281, south of Blanco. There's a tiny Catholic chapel on the north side of the road. Walking the cemetery there truly gives you a sense of how hard life was in the early days. The many, many infant graves are emblematic of those times.
 
Re: Starting a thread here as I like to stop by the old Cemeteries every now and then.

I Have a favorite one in the Houston area, but it's a dual sport only ride, pretty sure the Strom's wouldn't make it, it's been abandoned for the better part of 100 years, no roads in or out. I had trouble finding it last time around, it had been 15 years or better since I last visited it. Next time I go I'll snap some pics of it. Just 4-5 marked graves inside a wrought iron fence in the middle of the woods. I wish I had the tech stuff to find all the graves around it. The old graveyard was pre civil war, and many of the family's servants are probably buried in unmarked graves outside the fence.



Jason
 
Re: Starting a thread here as I like to stop by the old Cemeteries every now and then.

:tab When you get into a lot of the little towns, you might notice that the cemeteries can be HUGE relative to the living population. This is especially true in some of the small towns North of Lampasas. Most are still well maintained. Over here in East Texas, there are more of the smaller community church types of cemeteries, maybe a hundred graves or so. Many young children AND mothers. They are usually nestled back in the woods off the beaten path and make for interesting destinations.
 
Tamina Cemetery is an interesting one. If you go to the linked page you can also see the photos from the Wilburton page. This cemetery was very overrun with weeds/grass and I was part of a volunteer group that went in there to clean it all out a couple of years back. I also used my metal detector to find graves that were not marked, of which there are many. Some of the unmarked graves are tucked way back in under the large trees while the more recent graves are closer to the road and the center of the cemetery.

A friend of mine (Rita Wiltz) is quite the activist in Tamina and has lived there all her life. Her grandmother is one of the folks buried in the cemetery as is (I think) her great-grandmother. Her g-grandmother was the mid-wife to Sam Houston's "colored" children.

Many of the older graves are of people that were born into slavery as Tamina is a town created by former slaves. This is not a site that I would visit alone as there are still many people of "ill repute" that live in the area. A group of 3 would be much more safe from a personal standpoint.

There is some great history here and I'd love to spend a few weeks detecting on the different properties. I've found out where one of the former general stores used to be, as well as where the railroad station used to be, but there's no way I'd hang out there by myself doing my detecting. Although it's not likely, if I were to find a slave tag it could be worth in excess of $25,000.

Here's a shot of me helping to clean up the community on a different event. These folks have no water other than wells or what they carry in, no sewage (not all have septic tanks either), and most can't afford any trash service so they just dump into their back yards. The trash you see here is just part of one home's trash pile. Waste Management was kind enough to provide us with half a dozen open-top 40-yd containers but we filled those in a matter of hours.
brian3.jpg
 
Last edited:
Gilk51 said:
My younger son did a little local sleuthing a few weeks ago and he and a buddy found this grave at a cemetary in east Ft. Worth:

oswald_0517.jpg


Someone had told us about it ages ago but we never checked it out.


My wife's folks are buried in a small cemetary on FM323 between Overton and Henderson in East Texas. Sometime, we hope to make a trip there, maybe in conjunction with an Edom Pie Run. Name of the cemetary is "Pleasant Hill".


My Grandfather is burried in the same graveyard. It's an interesting plot. I was told that they had to remove the original headstone, b/c it was being vandalized to often, and replaced it with the one in the picture.
 
Re: Starting a thread here as I like to stop by the old Cemeteries every now and then.

Gilk51 said:
My younger son did a little local sleuthing a few weeks ago and he and a buddy found this grave at a cemetary in east Ft. Worth:

oswald_0517.jpg


Someone had told us about it ages ago but we never checked it out.


My wife's folks are buried in a small cemetary on FM323 between Overton and Henderson in East Texas. Sometime, we hope to make a trip there, maybe in conjunction with an Edom Pie Run. Name of the cemetary is "Pleasant Hill".

My grandma who passed away 1/3/05 is buried there, right next to a Vietnam Vet (I believe that is the correct war) that was 19 when he died.

About the whole topic though, I think going to cemeteries can be an interesting thing, all the old dates and the detailed headstones. Nothing wrong with it! :mrgreen:

Kim
 
Re: Starting a thread here as I like to stop by the old Cemeteries every now and then.

The Texas Historical Commission has a Cemeteries Program.

My cousin is the President of the Palo Pinto Cemetary Association and I have worked with him to try and locate all the graves. If I ever get the sketches done I am going to put it in AutoCAD for him.

I grew up in Crestwood which backs up to Greenwood Cemetery in Fort Worth. We used to go through the cemetery all hours of the day and night.

For a long time the management of Rose Hill would not tell you where Oswald was buried. I remember some DJ from back east (New York I think) bought the gravesite next to Oswald and put a fake headstone on it. After announcing the name on the air, there was a steady stream of folks asking where THAT grave was. If I remember correctly, Rose Hill finally connected the dots.
 
Re: Starting a thread here as I like to stop by the old Cemeteries every now and then.

Teeds said:
I remember some DJ from back east (New York I think) bought the gravesite next to Oswald and put a fake headstone on it. After announcing the name on the air, there was a steady stream of folks asking where THAT grave was. If I remember correctly, Rose Hill finally connected the dots.
That would be this one:
nickbeef_0518.jpg


Here is what they look like:
both_0519.jpg
 
Re: Starting a thread here as I like to stop by the old Cemeteries every now and then.

I haven't made it to any TX cemetaries yet, but here's an interesting one in Mississippi. I found it looking for a nearby geocache.
 

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My true cemetery story from a few years ago, I believe it was 2003.

I was sitting around one day looking at "The Virtual Wall" site on my computer, reading remembrances to guys killed in Vietnam. I did a search, to see how many guys from Dallas were killed, and it listed 261 people. I went thru and read every name, the last name listed from Dallas, was a man by the name of Gary W. Cooper, Sr., since it was the very last name listed, and on a page by it self, it sorta stuck in my mind. A few days later, on a Sunday morning, as Faye and I were eating breakfast, she tells me that she would like to go to the Macedonia Cemetery in Pittsburg, Texas someday, to get some names, and dates off of tomb stones for her genealogy study she is doing on her family. We decided to go that day, so we loaded up her truck, and took off. Within two and one half hours, we were at the cemetery searching for her ancestors. I was mindlessly walking along looking at head stones, when one in particular caught my eye, because it had a young soldiers picture imbedded in it. I could tell by the picture that It was from the Vietnam era. I read the name, it was Gary W. Cooper, Sr. I did my best 58 year old a-ten-hut, and saluted this guy. Anyway, I thought it was really weird how I had seen this guys name on a web site, then the next thing you know I'm standing in front of his grave.
 
huh, forgive me, I'm a foreigner, (Australian), I guess the Oswald is Lee Harvey, but how does Nick Beef relate to that?

Howdy, Face. It is indeed Lee Harvey Oswald - go back up and read posts #10 and 11 - the reason for the "Nick Beef" headstone is for locating the Oswald headstone since it is not in the public list.
 
Back when I was riding dirt, around '80, we went to the Terlingua Enduro. There was a very interesting cemetery next to where they had the sign-in, stayed quite awhile looking there.
 
well, seeing as how my uncle/aunt/cousins/next door neighbors/ manage the gigantic cemetary across the road, AND we cut monuments [tombstones for you civilians :p] ive got a bunch of neat cemetary stories. hide and seek in the wee hours of the morning as a kid makes for some fun telling later on.
 
The Sons of Confederate Veterans is working on a graves registry. We're trying to locate as many Confederate veterans as possible and get them into a searchable database. So it's not unusual at all for me to stop and wander around at those small cemeteries that are scattered along the back roads. Even if there aren't any Confederate veterans there, the cemeteries are almost always interesting places.
 
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