Bourland Cemetery

The residents who bought this ground in 1899 lived in a town that had come to the railroad. The Handbook of Texas says settlers first gathered at Double Springs, two miles north and east, and began moving in 1879 when rumors spread that the Texas and Pacific would come through. They called the new place Athol until a railway foreman or official named Keller urged the townspeople to name it for him if it became a stop. By 1882 abstracts called it Keller, and the post office took that name in 1888.

What the plaque says

Bourland Cemetery Aurelius Delphus Bourland (1840-1904), a North Carolina native and a veteran of the Civil War, bought land here in 1873. A farmer and Primitive Baptist preacher, he first used this site as a family cemetery. The earliest marked grave is that of his grandson A. Delphus White, who died in 1886. In 1899 Bourland sold 2.5 acres, including the grave sites, to the residents of Keller (1.5 mi SW) for use as a public burial ground. Additional land was given by the families of Bourland in 1947 and A.B. Harmonson (1891-1967) in 1977. The gateway was built by the Works Progress Administration in 1935. (1981)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Worth Stockyards — 12 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.
• Tarrant County Courthouse — 14 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.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 15 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.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 16 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.

More markers nearby

• Jellico — 3.3 mi
• Roanoke — 3.7 mi
• Elizabeth Cemetery — 5.0 mi
• White's Chapel United Methodist Church — 5.4 mi