Mitchell Bend Cemetery

The plaque says Nelson Cooney Mitchell was convicted of murder. The Hood County Historical Society writes that he was indicted as an accomplice after a fight with the Truitt family left a Truitt boy dead, and that at 79 he was hanged on October 1, 1875, the county's only legal public hanging. Another account says two died; none names them. In 1886 James M. Truitt, a jailer who had helped carry out that sentence, was shot in front of his home in a neighboring county by a relative of the hanged man, the Officer Down Memorial Page reports.

What the plaque says

Mitchell Bend Cemetery The Mitchell Bend of the Brazos River and this area of Hood County are named for an early settler, Nelson Cooney Mitchell. He was convicted of a murder arising out of a feud with the Truett family in 1874 and was hanged one year later. Mitchell is buried in this cemetery, as are many other pioneer settlers and their descendants. The earliest marked grave is that of one-year-old James Earnest, who died in November 1872. According to local tradition, however, some of the unmarked graves may date to before the Civil War. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Acton State Historic Site — 8.5 mi
  The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.
• Dinosaur Valley State Park — 8.5 mi
  Theropod and sauropod trackways of about 113 million years ago in the bed of the Paluxy River, a National Natural Landmark where R. T. Bird found the first distinct sauropod tracks in 1937.
• Cleburne State Park — 9.6 mi
  A 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps park on the old Chisholm Trail crossing country, with a spring-fed lake, a hand-carved three-tiered spillway and a CCC bridge in Johnson County.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 10 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.

More markers nearby

• George's Creek Baptist Church — 3.9 mi
• Somervell County — 6.8 mi
• Post Oak Community — 7.0 mi
• Comanche Peak — 7.0 mi