Peaster Cemetery

Peaster wore two other names first. H. H. Peaster, a Georgia native according to the Handbook of Texas, bought 160 acres in the 1870s, and the community near his house was first called Freemont. In 1885 it became Peasterville. Postal service began in the 1880s. By the mid-1890s the town had more than 100 residents, three churches, a steam gin, a gristmill, a school and about six businesses. It topped 300 in the mid-1920s, fell below 100 after the Great Depression and reached 102 in 2000.

What the plaque says

Peaster Cemetery South Carolina native Henry H. Peaster purchased 160 acres here in 1870. The village of Peaster began with Henry Peaster's sale of town lots here in the late 1880s. The earliest recorded burial is that of Mary D. Hunt in 1886. In 1893 Peaster donated two acres here for cemetery purposes. Still active, the cemetery contains the graves of early area settlers and their descendants; veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II; and Peaster's most famous citizen, John Alexander Fox, who created the "Buster Brown" character for the Buster Brown Shoe Company's advertising campaign. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845-1995.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chandor Gardens — 8.9 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 — 12 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.
• Fort Richardson State Park and Historic Site — 29 mi
  The northernmost post of the Texas frontier line, outside Jacksboro, where a stone hospital and six other buildings stand from 1867 and a later Guard unit became the Lost Battalion.
• Wise County Courthouse — 29 mi
  J. Riely Gordon's granite Romanesque courthouse of 1895-96 in Decatur, built after fire destroyed the Second Empire courthouse and set off a fight over the county seat.

More markers nearby

• Authon Cemetery — 5.2 mi
• Poolville — 6.9 mi
• Bose Ikard — 8.6 mi
• Oliver Loving — 8.7 mi