Belle Plaine Cemetery

The town that first used this burial ground declined quickly once the railroad passed it by. Some townspeople followed the tracks to Baird, and when Baird took the county seat in 1883, Belle Plain's newspaper moved too. The stone jail was taken apart and rebuilt in the new county seat. The hard winter of 1884-85 and the drought of 1886-87 hurt the region further, and Belle Plain College closed in 1892. By 1897, the Handbook of Texas says, only four families and one small store remained. The post office held on until October 1909.

What the plaque says

Residents of the short-lived community of Belle Plaine were burying their dead at this site as early as 1878. Although the presence of unmarked graves suggests earlier possible usage, the oldest marked grave, that of sixteen-year-old Virgil Hill, dates to that year. Belle Plaine residents informally established a community cemetery here on vacant land. The graveyard was located within a larger tract of land that was owned by the state until 1861 and later by several railroad companies. Its last private owner, the Texas & Pacific Railway Company, purchased the tract that included this graveyard in 1879 when it anticipated routing its railroad through Belle Plaine. However, in 1883 the route was changed to pass through nearby Baird. In response, the railway company deeded the cemetery property to Callahan County the following year. Though the community of Belle Plaine had declined by 1909, burials have continued to take place. Those interred here include area pioneers, their descendants, and veterans. The historic burial ground remains an important cultural resource in this area. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Texas! — 23 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 24 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 26 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 30 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.

More markers nearby

• William Jeff Maltby — steps away
• Site of Belle Plain College — 1.7 mi
• Belle Plain — 1.7 mi
• Admiral Baptist Church — 4.6 mi