Buffalo Gap Cemetery

A county genealogy inventory of the graves here lists about two dozen Confederate veterans, some born in the 1820s and several who lived into the 1930s, among them Stephen J. Neal, who died in 1931, and T. T. Tune, who died in 1932. They lie beside the families of a town that lost its county seat to Abilene in 1883 and then settled at a few hundred people. Buffalo Gap's Old Settlers Picnic, a well-attended annual event by the 1920s, was one way the town kept those first families in view.

What the plaque says

Buffalo Gap Cemetery Oldest public cemetery in Taylor County; used by residents of Buffalo Gap even before the earliest known headstones were erected, about 1877. In the older section of the ten-acre plot are 146 graves, many of Civil War veterans and pioneer citizens of Taylor County. Tract is still in use. (1968)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 2.0 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.
• Abilene State Park — 3.2 mi
  A pecan-shaded park on Elm Creek in the Callahan Divide south of Abilene, with red sandstone CCC buildings, a summer pool, a bird blind and yurts under the trees.
• Frontier Texas! — 15 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.
• Z. I. Hale Museum and Rock Hotel — 22 mi
  A free museum in a Winters optometrist's office, a 1909 railroad hotel and a 1927 implement dealership, with Rogers Hornsby's hometown memorabilia and a 1912 horse-drawn cotton picker.

More markers nearby

• Buffalo Gap College — 1.8 mi
• Town of Buffalo Gap — 1.8 mi
• Vicinity of Indian Fight — 1.8 mi
• The Ernie Wilson Museum — 2.0 mi