Pickwick-McAdams Cemetery

Pickwick's name came from a book. Residents first chose Westerville, but another post office already had it, so Edd Costello, who was reading Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, suggested Pickwick. The post office started in the blacksmith shop in 1903. The town grew a gin, store, school, church and sawmill, then lost its cotton to the boll weevil in 1915. In 1939 the Brazos district bought all of Pickwick for the coming lake. The store and post office moved about two miles east, the school became LuKingdom, and both closed in 1946.

What the plaque says

Pickwick-McAdams Cemetery Tennessee native Capt. William Carroll McAdams (1825-1906) came to Texas in the 1840s, served as a Texas Ranger, and fought in the Mexican war (1846-1848). McAdams and his wife Ann (Alexander) acquired this land in 1854 and began cattle raising. The cemetery opened after the death of Mrs. McAdams. The first marked grave is that of Mary M. Couger in 1889. McAdams Cemetery served the Pickwick Community (now under the lake). In 1940 graves were moved here from Carter Bend Cemetery which was on the proposed Possum Kingdom Lake site. (1979)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Post Office Museum and Art Center — 17 mi
  Graham's 1936 Art Moderne post office, with a New Deal mural by Alexandre Hogue inside, now the free museum of Young County in the town where the Texas cattle raisers first organized.
• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 24 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 Belknap — 25 mi
  The 1851 northern anchor of the first Texas frontier forts, on the Brazos below Newcastle, a Butterfield stop and the post beside the Brazos Reservation until its people were driven out in 1859.
• Fort Richardson State Park and Historic Site — 28 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.

More markers nearby

• Morris Sheppard Dam and Possum Kingdom Lake — 2.1 mi
• George Webb Slaughter — 8.9 mi
• Palo Pinto County — 12 mi
• Brad Cemetery — 12 mi