Historical Marker
First Cemetery in Potter County
Amarillo, Potter County · Texas
Erected 1967
The burials began under British owners. The American Pastoral Company of London bought the LX in 1884 and hired James Wyness, a Scot, as bookkeeper; his wife, who died in childbirth in 1887, was the first buried here. John Arnot had come from Angus, Scotland, in the fall of 1884 at nineteen and stayed on. The company leased some 250 sections of school land, bringing the ranch to about 320,000 acres, and in 1900 moved headquarters to Bonita Creek. In 1910 the land was sold to Joseph T. Sneed, Jr., Lee Bivins and R. B. Masterson.
What the plaque says
First Cemetery in Potter County On the old _X (LX), first ranch in Potter County, established in 1877 by W.H. Bates and D.T. Beals, Boston (Mass.) industrialists. The earliest burials occurred after the LX was sold, 1884, to American Pastoral Land and Cattle Company, a British syndicate. First grave was dug for the LX bookkeeper's wife, Mrs. James Wyness, who died in Tascosa on June 15, 1887; six weeks later the newborn son who survived was laid at her side. The infant son of Mr. and Mrs. Charley Mott died in 1888. Second adult buried here was P.O. ("Bunch") McCrary killed 1890 when his horse fell on him while he was roping a yearling. In 1893 James Bailey, hauling grain from Amarillo, bogged in quicksand in the Canadian; in getting his wagon out, he suffered exposure that brought on a fatal case of pneumonia. A 1902 grave was for James Bell, found dead in a corral with a bridle in his hand. When the syndicate was liquidated, this portion of the ranch was purchased by an early cattleman, R.B. Masterson. John Arnot, one of the original employees of the syndicate, and later a U.S. government cattle brands inspector, maintained the cemetery until 1945. It is now cared for by Mrs. Mary Masterson Fain, a descendant of third owner of the old ranch land. (1967)
Where it stands
35.47629, -101.88419 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 12 miHand-dug pits on a mesa above the Canadian River where people quarried banded flint for thousands of years and traded it across the Plains, seen on a ranger-led climb.
- Route 66 Sixth Street Historic District — 18 miThirteen blocks of Amarillo's streetcar suburb that Route 66 turned into a roadside strip, from the 1922 Nat to Texaco, Phillips and Dutch Mill stations, now shops and bars.
- Helium Centennial Time Columns Monument — 19 miFour sealed time capsules raised in Amarillo in 1968 for helium's centennial, in the city that for years produced almost all the world's commercial helium from the Cliffside field.
- Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 20 miA Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.