Handley Cemetery

Handley was a railroad town. The Handbook of Texas says it grew where the Texas and Pacific came through in 1876, and the post office took the name of Confederate major James Madison Handley. By the mid-1880s it had a church, a school and a half-dozen businesses, and in 1915 it reported 905 residents and forty businesses. The National Register district listing says the Northern Texas Traction Company's interurban, running between Dallas and Fort Worth from 1902, put its power plant and car barns here. Fort Worth annexed the town in 1946.

What the plaque says

Handley Cemetery This burial ground originally served the pioneer settlers of the Handley Community, which developed here soon after the Texas and Pacific Railroad built a line to the area in 1876. The earliest marked grave is that of Jane E. Thomas (1832-1878). A church building, constructed on adjacent land in 1882, was located here for 48 years. Several early residents buried at this site, including Civil War veteran Maj. James M. Handley (d. 1906), for whom the town was named, were later reinterred in the nearby Rose Hill Cemetery. The last burial here was in 1967. (1981)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tarrant County Courthouse — 7.0 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 8.6 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 8.7 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 8.8 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.

More markers nearby

• Site of Fort Worth-Dallas Interurban — steps away
• General Edward H. Tarrant — 1.8 mi
• Meadowbrook Methodist Church — 3.0 mi
• WBAP-TV - Channel 5, First Television Station in Texas — 3.1 mi