Altoga Cemetery

Altoga's name began as a motto. The Handbook of Texas says Dock Owensby wanted the community to have one and suggested all together. By 1910 the village had seven stores, a public school, two cotton gins and a popular brass band. A post office ran from 1889 until 1900 and reopened in 1915, and mail was discontinued again in 1937, when four businesses remained. The cemetery is the part of the old village that stayed put.

What the plaque says

Altoga Cemetery This cemetery has served the Altoga area since 1881, including what was once the Johnson community to the south and the Ardath community to the west. The earliest recorded burials are those of three-year-old Ida Leomy Parker in July 1881 and Elizabeth Humbard Mantooth in November 1881. William Mantooth donated one and one-third acres of land for the cemetery in 1894. Another two and one-third acres were later added to the site. A tabernacle to be used for funerals was erected in August 1914. It was built by local men with funds raised by the Woodmen of the World with events such as ice cream socials and pie suppers. The tabernacle is still used each May for observance of Decoration Day. The cemetery contains more than 720 graves, including about 40 unmarked graves. Buried here are early settlers to the area, their families, and veterans of the Civil War (both Confederate and Union soldiers), World War I, World War II, and the Korean conflict. The Altoga Cemetery Association, formed in 1971, maintains the grounds through a perpetual care trust. The graveyard continues to serve the area as it has for more than a century. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary — 9.6 mi
  A 289-acre sanctuary in McKinney that Bessie Heard founded at the age of 80, with five habitats, a 50-acre wetland and 6.5 miles of trails.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 22 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 24 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.
• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 27 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.

More markers nearby

• Verona Methodist Church — 3.0 mi
• Stony Point Church and Cemetery — 3.2 mi
• Pleasant Grove Cemetery — 3.9 mi
• Site of World War II Prisoner of War Camp — 4.5 mi