Auburn Cemetery

The Handbook of Texas says Auburn's first settlers came in a caravan of 105 covered wagons that left Arkansas in 1852, drawn by the North Fork of Chambers Creek and flat, workable land. Jerry Files opened a general store. By 1900 the town had two gins, a corn mill and four congregations, and McCarver Chapel held a school downstairs and a Masonic lodge upstairs. A racetrack once ran half a mile from the store, and a retired champion short horse named Eureka stood at stud. The post office closed in 1906, and mail went through Maypearl.

What the plaque says

Auburn Cemetery Pioneer settlers used this site for burials as early as 1856. In 1865 it was part of 20.5 acres deeded to the Methodist Church for a school and church by Rezi Jarvis Banks (1817-1889), a Confederate army veteran born in Tennessee. Among the earliest marked graves is that of Banks' wife Minerva (1822-1893). In the late 1800s, Auburn was a thriving farming community with four churches, stores, and a post office. Later the lack of high school facilities and the bypassing of Auburn by the railroad compelled residents to move away. The cemetery is a link with the town's past. (1977)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ellis County Courthouse — 14 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's courthouse of 1897 in Pecos red sandstone and pink granite, with twenty-one carved stone faces and two cornerstones left by a quarrel over its building.
• Hill County Courthouse — 21 mi
  Wesley C. Dodson's limestone Second Empire courthouse of 1890 on the Hillsboro square, gutted by fire on New Year's Day 1993 and rededicated in 1999 after a rebuilding that two Willie Nelson concerts helped pay for.
• Cedar Ridge Preserve — 24 mi
  A 633-acre Audubon Dallas preserve at the western edge of Dallas County, with about nine miles of trails through prairie, woodland and escarpment hills.

More markers nearby

• Ozro Cemetery — 2.4 mi
• Maypearl Cemetery — 3.3 mi
• Town of Grandview — 6.7 mi
• Greathouse Community, Church, and Cemetery — 7.3 mi