Merriman Cemetery

Merriman's moment as county seat was short. In early 1874 the headquarters of Flannagan's Ranch, also called Merriman, was named the seat of the newly organized county. Through the efforts of Charles U. Connellee and other promoters, an election in 1875 moved the seat to the new town of Eastland, and Merriman lost its prospects for growth. The Handbook of Texas says that even the oil boom of 1917 to 1925 did not revive it. The 1983 county highway map showed a church, a cemetery and one business, and from 1980 through 2000 the population was estimated at fourteen.

What the plaque says

According to local tradition this site was established as a community graveyard about 1873, the year Eastland County was organized and one year prior to the community of Merriman's selection as county seat. Although there are many unmarked gravestones in the cemetery, the earliest recorded burial is that of Orthosias Scarborough (d. 1879). The first legal record of the Merriman Cemetery occurred in a deed executed by the Taylor Charcoal Company conveying two acres for use as a public burial ground to trustee M.V. Brewer in 1891. Oil discovered in 1917 on land owned by John H. McCleskey (buried here in 1918) started an oil boom that ultimately threatened the sanctity of the Merriman Cemetery. Oil spectulators reportedly offered members of the Merriman Baptist Church a large sum of money to lease the cemetery grounds for drilling. The congregation, although its association with the cemetery is uncertain, turned the offer down. Josie Fox Duncan (d. 1940) deeded 75 acres to trustees of the cemetery in 1938 to provide an income for its perpetual care. The cemetery contains graves of early settlers, veterans of conflicts from the Civil War to Korea, and victims of a 1916-17 influenza epidemic. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 7.2 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 17 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.

More markers nearby

• Site of J.H. McCleskey No. 1, Discovery Well of the Ranger Oil Boom — 1.9 mi
• First Oil Well Drilled in Eastland County — 3.3 mi
• Roaring Ranger — 3.3 mi
• Eastland — 7.2 mi