Mount Zion Cemetery

Frankell, one of the two communities this cemetery serves, was a child of the Ranger oil boom of 1916. It became a station on the Wichita Falls and Southern Railway in 1920 and took its name from Frank Kell, the line's president. From 1920 to 1935 it held about 250 people, most of them oilfield workers. In 1936 it had two schools and a church, and by 1940 a post office, a store and fifty residents. The Handbook of Texas notes that the 1984 county highway map still named Frankell but showed no buildings at its site.

What the plaque says

In 1879 this land was owned by Ezekel J. and Louisa J. McCleskey. According to McCleskey Family tradition M.M. McCluskey, a relative of Ezekel and Louisa from Georgia, died while visiting in 1879 and was the first person buried here. Eventually her grave site, near a church/school building, became a community cemetery named Veale for a local pioneer family. It was legally set aside as the Mount Zion Cemetery by the McCleskeys in 1907. The cemetery, enlarged over the years and maintained by an association formed in 1979, continues to serve the Frankell and LaCasa communities. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 15 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 — 21 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

• Wayland School — 7.2 mi
• Roaring Ranger — 8.5 mi
• First Oil Well Drilled in Eastland County — 8.5 mi
• Site of J.H. McCleskey No. 1, Discovery Well of the Ranger Oil Boom — 9.7 mi