Oliver Loving

Loving was buried twice. The Handbook of Texas says he died of gangrene at Fort Sumner on September 25, 1867, and was buried there temporarily while Goodnight drove the herd on to Colorado. Goodnight then had the body exhumed and carried home, keeping his promise that Loving would rest in Texas. The Handbook says stories differ about who traveled with it. Loving was reburied in Weatherford's Greenwood Cemetery on March 4, 1868, with Masonic honors. Bose Ikard, who had worked for Loving in 1866, was later buried in the same cemetery.

What the plaque says

Oliver Loving Founder of three major cattle trails, Oliver Loving came from Kentucky to Texas in 1845 and to Parker County about 1855. During the Civil War (1861-65), he supplied beef to Confederate forces. With Charles Goodnight as partner on a drive to New Mexico, Loving scouted ahead of the cattle, was badly wounded by Indians, lay five days without food before his rescue, and died of gangrene on September 25, 1867. His dying wish was fulfilled when his son Joseph joined Goodnight to bring the body 600 miles by wagon for burial in this county. Recorded, 1977.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chandor Gardens — 1.1 mi
  A portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.
• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 15 mi
  A Cross Timbers park on the old Camp Wolters grounds, built around a 1922 water-supply lake for a spa town, with Penitentiary Hollow's rock climbing and a 20-mile trailway.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 22 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.
• Acton State Historic Site — 23 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.

More markers nearby

• Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham — steps away
• Samuel Joseph Redgate — steps away
• Bose Ikard — steps away
• Fred Rider Cotten — 0.2 mi