Markley Cemetery Decoration Day

Markley began as Plum Grove, the name its founders used in 1888, the year a post office called Manlee opened there with Steve Munderbeck as postmaster. A few years later the name changed to honor Gen. A. C. Markley, whom the Handbook of Texas describes as a commander of western military posts who settled in Young County. Oil discovered in 1926 brought a boom, which faded as production slowed. The community counted fifty people in 1940, thirty-one in 1980 and 1990, and fifty again in 2000. Its post office had closed by the late 1960s.

What the plaque says

Markley Cemetery Decoration Day Cemetery was begun in 1881, with interment of M. C. Norfleet, adjacent to the old Plum Grove School. By 1890, the burial ground had fallen to neglect. A group of men from the surrounding rural community, including J. C. Calvin, J. W. Cox, R. E. Currie, S. G. Dean, Nelson Owen, M. A. Stewart, Andy and Ike Tinney, J. M. Wallace, and W. M. Watson, organized an annual "Graveyard Working Day", to be held on the first Saturday in May. In the early years, people came by wagon and horseback, some camping overnight. After the cleaning work had been completed bouquets of wildflowers were replaced on the graves. About 1900, the settlement was named "Markley", in honor of A. C. Markley, an area landowner who had served in the frontier army during the Indian wars. In 1925, the observation was changed to the first Sunday in May. Although a perpetual care program has been initiated, decoration ceremonies have persisted as an annual social event, preserving a heritage of community cohesiveness and participation. Among the grave decorated each year are those of thirteen Confederate veterans of the Civil War: John F. Bussey, J. C. Butler, Jessie Byrd, R. E. Currie, George J. Lucas, J. D. Mankins, J. L. McDaniel, J. L. Norfleet, Nelson Owen, J.C. Stanley, James Stinnett, Cates Thompson, and David White. (1975)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Royal Theater — 19 mi
  Archer City's movie house, burned in 1965, given a false front for The Last Picture Show and brought back by the town in the 1990s as a working stage on Main Street.
• Old Post Office Museum and Art Center — 20 mi
  Graham's 1936 Art Moderne post office, with a New Deal mural by Alexandre Hogue inside, now the free museum of Young County in the town where the Texas cattle raisers first organized.
• Fort Richardson State Park and Historic Site — 20 mi
  The northernmost post of the Texas frontier line, outside Jacksboro, where a stone hospital and six other buildings stand from 1867 and a later Guard unit became the Lost Battalion.
• Fort Belknap — 23 mi
  The 1851 northern anchor of the first Texas frontier forts, on the Brazos below Newcastle, a Butterfield stop and the post beside the Brazos Reservation until its people were driven out in 1859.

More markers nearby

• The Stone Houses — 4.5 mi
• Hawkins Chapel — 5.9 mi
• Townsite of Old Farmer — 6.5 mi
• Town of Antelope — 6.8 mi