Aurora Cemetery

The legend has a paper trail. According to the Handbook of Texas, a cotton buyer named S. E. Haydon wrote the April 19, 1897 Dallas Morning News story of an airship crash outside Aurora, and the Handbook calls it fiction, probably meant to draw notice to a fading town. It did not work. Aurora was incorporated in 1882 and had two hotels and two schools by the mid-1880s, but spotted fever from late 1888 emptied it, and when the railroad dropped its plan to come through, most of the rest moved to Rhome. Highway 114 arrived in 1939.

What the plaque says

Aurora Cemetery The oldest known graves here, dating from as early as the 1860's, are those of the Randall and Rowlett families. Finis Dudley Beauchamp (1825-1893), a Confederate veteran from Mississippi, donated the 3-acre site to the newly formed Aurora Lodge No. 479, A.F. & A.M., in 1877. For many years, this community burial ground was known as Masonic Cemetery. Beauchamp, his wife Caroline (1829-1915), and others in their family are buried here. An epidemic which struck the village in 1891 added hundreds of graves to the plot. Called "spotted fever" by the settlers, the disease is now though to have been a form of meningitis. Located in Aurora Cemetery is the gravestone of the infant Nellie Burris (1891-1893) with its often-quoted epitaph: "As I was so soon done, I don't know why I was begun." This site is also well known because of the legend that a spaceship crashed nearby in 1897 and the pilot, killed in the crash, was buried here. Struck by epidemic and crop failure and bypassed by the railroad, the original town of Aurora almost disappeared, but the cemetery remains in use with over 800 graves. Veterans of the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts are interred here. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wise County Courthouse — 13 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's granite Romanesque courthouse of 1895-96 in Decatur, built after fire destroyed the Second Empire courthouse and set off a fight over the county seat.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 20 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 22 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• Tarrant County Courthouse — 23 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.

More markers nearby

• United Methodist Church of Rhome — 1.6 mi
• First National Bank in Rhome — 1.7 mi
• Site of First Post Office in Wise County, Odessa — 3.8 mi
• Keeter Cemetery — 6.4 mi