Palava Cemetery

Palava's rise and fall tracked the county's cotton, which the Handbook of Texas says arrived in the 1880s. High prices in the 1920s drew ever more acreage, and in 1926 more than 48,000 bales were ginned in Fisher County. Falling prices, drought and the boll weevil then cut yields, and in 1930 farmers produced only 17,937 bales. By 1930 more than half the county's farmers worked someone else's land. Palava's own decline began in the 1930s, the Handbook says; by 1940 its post office was gone, and it had 100 people, and twelve in 1980.

What the plaque says

Originally named Center Point, the town of Palava traces its history to early settlement in this area in the late 1870s. It was renamed when the U.S. Government granted a request to establish a post office here in 1900. Stella A. Daniel, member of a pioneer Fisher County family, served as the town's first postmaster. As more settlers arrived in the early 1900s, the town grew into a cotton marketing center. At its peak Palava boasted homes, four churches, a school, and such businesses as a cotton gin, retail stores, blacksmith shop, barber shop, and cafe. Although the oldest documented burials in the Palava Cemetery date to 1893, it is believed there are unmarked graves from as early as 1855. Interments include those of veterans of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. Also buried here is Charles Byrd (d. 1912), who served as a Texas Ranger in the Frontier Battalion in the 1870s. After the Palava School was consolidated with the Sweetwater School District in 1954, the community began to decline. The Palava Cemetery is now the only physical reminder of a once thriving town. It serves as a memorial to the area's pioneers. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Pioneer Museum — 8.1 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 — 11 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.
• Abilene State Park — 35 mi
  A pecan-shaded park on Elm Creek in the Callahan Divide south of Abilene, with red sandstone CCC buildings, a summer pool, a bird blind and yurts under the trees.

More markers nearby

• Herefords in Sweetwater — 7.7 mi
• Newman Community and Cemetery — 7.7 mi
• S.D. Myres — 8.4 mi
• W.A.S.P. (Women's Airforce Service Pilots) Training Base: Avenger Field — 8.4 mi