Newman Community and Cemetery

The Handbook of Texas gives the ranch founder's name as James Franklin Newman and says the community had ten people by 1884. A school opened in 1889, and a Methodist Sunday school began meeting in the schoolhouse in 1899. The post office closed in 1910. At various times Newman had at least three different grocery stores, and in 1940 it had two churches, a school and a cemetery. The school was consolidated with Sylvester's in 1949, and the Handbook says a church and the cemetery were all that remained in the 1980s.

What the plaque says

Jim Newman, one of Fisher County's earliest settlers, established a ranch in this area about 1879. The community that developed near his ranch was named Newman when the county's first post office opened here in 1881. The town consisted of the Old Newman and Union Hall Schools, a post office/grocery store, and the Newman Baptist Church by 1901. The Newman Cemetery was legally set aside in a deed conveying property at this site for cemetery purposes in 1906. The first persons buried here were Miller Phigpen and J. E. W. Scott in 1906. Among the sixteen veterans of various wars buried here is American Civil War veteran R. L. Creswell. The Methodist Episcopal Church built a sanctuary here about 1908. Union Hall and Old Newman schools consolidated in 1913, and in 1924 a new brick schoolhouse was constructed. In 1929 the Methodist Episcopal and Baptist churches erected new sanctuaries. A steady decline in the area's population resulted in the dissolution of the Methodist Church in 1940, the school in the early 1940s and the Baptist Church about 1950. Vestiges of the town's church and school structures and the still active Newman Cemetery are all that remain of the former town of Newman. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Pioneer Museum — 15 mi
  Nolan County's settlement story in a dozen rooms of Judge R. A. Ragland's 1906 house in Sweetwater, a town that started as a dugout store for buffalo hunters and a post office called Blue Goose.
• National WASP WWII Museum — 18 mi
  Hangar 1 at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, where the women of the WASP trained to fly every aircraft in the Army's arsenal in World War II, then waited thirty-three years to be called veterans.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 32 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.

More markers nearby

• Adair-Steadman Site — 5.9 mi
• Palava Cemetery — 7.7 mi
• Fisher County — 13 mi
• Organization of Fisher County — 13 mi