Pearce Chapel-Strip Cemetery

The Strip lay between railroad-controlled holdings, a band of public domain a mile and a half wide and fifteen miles long. The Handbook dates its rural school and Pearce Chapel to 1902 and says the community took shape around them by 1904, when a post office opened on April 15; the school closed in 1912. Mail went instead to Abernathy, founded in 1909 when the Santa Fe built from Plainview to Lubbock and promoted by the South Plains Investment Company, which moved many buildings in from Bartonsite, seven miles away.

What the plaque says

Pearce Chapel-Strip Cemetery The only landmark of the Strip Community, named for its location on a 1.5 by 15-mile strip of land opened to homesteaders in the 1890s. William Houston Pearce (1844-1926) moved into the area in 1895 and started a school, called "Round-Top", or "Strip". Small groups began to worship in the schoolhouse, and one congregation formed Pearce Chapel Methodist Church. F. E. Andrews (1857-1898) gave a cemetery tract in 1898, and late that year his was the first grave. Strip Post Office opened in 1904 with Postmaster Jerry W. Turner handling the mail in his home. In 1906, a Union Church was built near the cemetery site, which was purchased by public subscription in 1907, in order to clear the title. In 1910 the Strip Post Office closed after service was made available in Abernathy. The school and church buildings were moved to Lakeview in succeeding years, but this cemetery continues to be used. By 1973 it had 180 graves. War veterans buried here include two Confederate soldiers, James E. Fitzgerald and William Houston Pearce; World War I veterans George W. Fitzgerald, George Harkness, and Leroy Mahagan; World War II veterans Thomas L. Goldston, Harvey Shelby Pittman, and John Fred Sherman. 1974

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Silent Wings Museum — 14 mi
  The museum of the American combat glider pilots of World War II, in Lubbock's old airport terminal on the field where most of them earned their wings.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 17 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.
• American Windmill Museum — 19 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.
• National Ranching Heritage Center — 19 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.

More markers nearby

• Struve Family Businesses — 4.3 mi
• Town of Abernathy — 4.3 mi
• New Deal — 9.4 mi
• Petersburg — 10.0 mi