Old Klondike Cemetery

Klondike's name came from a gold rush. The place began as Pleasant Grove and was also called New Prospect, and it became a rail stop when the Texas-Midland arrived in 1895. Joel Jefferson Hunt, whose family gave this ground, asked for a post office in 1897 and named it for the Canadian gold fields. In 1905 the district ran separate schools: 134 White students with three teachers, and forty-nine Black children with one. Cotton shipping carried the town until the Depression, and a school fire in 1945 led to a merger with Shiloh.

What the plaque says

Old Klondike Cemetery John Hunt (1814 - 1853) and Nancy Allard (1813 - 1911) came to Texas from Missouri in 1849. Married in 1850, they gave land for a grave site when a neighbor child, Eliza Armstrong, died in 1852. John Hunt was the second person buried at the site. Joel J. Hunt (1851 - 1933), son of John and Nancy, and his wife, Joan Morgan Looney Hunt (1857 - 1924), formally deeded the land for the cemetery in 1878. The terms of the deed stated that it would be a public burial ground, with no charge for plots. The Klondike Cemetery Association, established in 1960, provides perpetual care for the graveyard. (1987)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cooper Lake State Park — 5.5 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.
• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 24 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 25 mi
  Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 25 mi
  The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.

More markers nearby

• Union Cemetery, Old — 2.7 mi
• Abel Morgan — 3.9 mi
• Pioneer Smith Brothers — 4.0 mi
• Texas Livery Stable — 4.9 mi