Fairy Cemetery

Fairy shrank slowly enough that its graveyard outgrew it. By the Handbook, the town had a cotton gin from 1900 to about 1936 and the schools, churches and stores that served the ranches and farms around it. In 1947 it still had a post office, three churches and three businesses. The post office closed in 1957, and in 1967 the school district was folded into the Hamilton schools. The Handbook counted only a few dozen residents in 1980.

What the plaque says

Fairy Cemetery First called Gap for its geographic setting between two hills, this sparsely settled community became known as Martin's Gap in the 1860s after a man named Jim Martin reportedly was killed by Indians while traveling through the area. When local citizens applied for a United States Post Office in 1884, the name Fairy was chosen in honor of Fairy Fort Phelps (1865-1938), the petite daughter of pioneer settlers Battle and Sallie Fort. Fairy and her father taught area children in a school in their home for many years, and the Fort family donated land to several area churches. Although the earliest known burial occurred here about 1880, deed records show that this graveyard was not officially set aside as a community burial ground until 1890. Among those interred here are numerous pioneer settlers, dozens of victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic, at least one Texas Ranger, and veterans of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. Encompassing three sections, the cemetery contains many distinctive handmade gravestones and other types of grave markers. Maintained by a local association of descendants, the cemetery is a reflection of the area's pioneer heritage. Recorded--1970

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hamilton County Courthouse — 13 mi
  A limestone courthouse of 1886-87 on the Hamilton square, built after the county's 1878 courthouse burned, enlarged in the early 1930s and rededicated in 2012 after restoration.
• Meridian State Park — 17 mi
  A 505-acre park in Bosque County where World War I veterans of a Civilian Conservation Corps company dammed Bee Creek in 1933-34 for a 72-acre lake and cut stone buildings around it.
• Bosque Museum — 24 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Dublin Bottling Works — 26 mi
  The Erath County plant that bottled Dr Pepper with cane sugar from 1891 until a 2012 settlement ended its Dr Pepper license, and that still makes its own sodas the same way.

More markers nearby

• Martin's Gap — 0.2 mi
• Old Hico — 7.0 mi
• Olin Baptist Church — 7.4 mi
• Hamilton County, C.S.A. — 8.0 mi