Claude Cemetery

Two women who shaped early Claude are buried here. Phebe Kerrick Warner, club founder, newspaper writer and member of the first Texas State Park Board, died at her home on May 14, 1935, and was laid beside her husband, the town physician, who had died the year before. Laura V. Hamner, the ranch historian and longtime Amarillo journalist, died while visiting a relative in Alabama on September 20, 1968, and was buried with her parents here. Both women's papers are held by the research center of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon.

What the plaque says

Claude Cemetery (Established 1890) Dan Cavanagh settled here in 1885 and bought this land in 1888. In 1890 he gave a grave site for railroad worker Neal DeBerry. Settler C.C. Bates was buried in 1890, and early burials from the Fort Worth & Denver Railroad right-of-way were later moved here. James and Harriet Grimes deeded the cemetery land to the public in 1905. A cemetery association was organized in 1912, and perpetual care began in 1936 with a $10,000 gift from Jim Hill. Also interred here are veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam. (1973, 1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Gem Theatre — 1.9 mi
  Claude's small-town movie house of 1915, restored by the Armstrong County Museum and remembered for the scene in Hud where Homer and Lonnie Bannon sing along to Clementine.
• Charles and Mary Ann Goodnight Ranch State Historic Site — 13 mi
  The two-story house the Goodnights moved into on December 27, 1887, after leaving the JA, with a porch that looks over bison descended from the calves Mary Ann saved.
• Carson County Square House Museum — 15 mi
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.
• Lighthouse Trail — 20 mi
  The park's most walked trail, 2.8 miles each way across the canyon floor to the Lighthouse, a hoodoo of Triassic sandstone balanced on a pedestal of softer red shale.

More markers nearby

• Claude Monroe Ayers — steps away
• Charles H. Roan — steps away
• Early Sheriffs of Armstrong County, 1890-1926 — 1.9 mi
• Armstrong County Jail — 1.9 mi