Estacado Cemetery

Paris Cox was born near Asheboro, North Carolina, on October 17, 1846. Drafted by the Confederacy, the young Quaker bought a legal exemption and moved to Westfield, Indiana, where he married Mary C. Ferguson and ran a sawmill until the timber gave out. Before bringing settlers he hired Hank Smith to dig a well and plant thirty acres in 1879; Smith struck water at sixty-five feet. Cox built a sod house while the other families lived in tents. Estacado also offered early schooling: Emma Hunt taught in a dugout from 1882, and Central Plains Academy opened in 1890.

What the plaque says

Estacado Cemetery In 1878 Paris Cox (1846-1888), an Indiana Quaker, visited this area with a group of buffalo hunters. Attracted by the abundance of cheap farm land, he returned to Indiana and began advertising his plans for a Quaker colony here. Although the first colonists who arrived in 1879 were discouraged by a severe winter, other settlers, including those of various religious beliefs, soon moved to the area. The settlement was first called Maryetta in honor of Cox's wife, but in 1886 it was renamed Estacado, part of the Spanish term for the Staked Plains, Llano Estacado. When Crosby County was formally organized in 1886, Estacado was chosen as the first county seat. A courthouse was built two years later. The center of a vast agricultural area, Estacado continued to prosper until the 1890s when the county seat was moved to Emma and many of the early colonists began migrating to other areas. An important reminder of Estacado's pioneers is this community cemetery, the burial site of many early settlers and area leaders, including Paris Cox. Now part of Lubbock County, it serves as a historic record of the individuals who opened the Texas Plains and led in the region's agricultural development. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Silent Wings Museum — 16 mi
  The museum of the American combat glider pilots of World War II, in Lubbock's old airport terminal on the field where most of them earned their wings.
• American Windmill Museum — 18 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.
• Buddy Holly Center — 19 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• Crosby County Pioneer Memorial Museum — 20 mi
  Crosbyton's museum of Blanco Canyon, built in 1958 as a copy of Hank Smith's Rock House, and the place to learn the canyon's 1871 fight between Mackenzie's cavalry and Quanah's Quahadi Comanche.

More markers nearby

• Lorenzo — 5.0 mi
• Farmer Community — 7.2 mi
• Cone Cemetery — 9.4 mi
• Petersburg — 9.8 mi