Plemons Cemetery

Plemons was a small river-crossing town with a lively side. The Handbook of Texas says it was known for its string band and its five-day teacher institutes, and that church services were held in the school or courthouse, since no church building was ever put up. Billy Dixon, who ran a boarding house there for three years, said town life was worse than jail could have been. On March 18, 1932, the bootlegger Shine Popejoy held up the town bank. The post office closed in June 1952.

What the plaque says

The town of Plemons was settled about 1898 when James A. Whittenburg, an area rancher, built a dugout house in a hill overlooking a bend in the Canadian River about seven miles northeast of this site. The town was named for Barney Plemons, son of Amarillo judge and State Legislator William Buford Plemons, and when Hutchinson County was organized in Spring 1901, Plemons was chosen county seat. E. E. Akers contracted to build a brick courthouse in that year. According to local oral history accounts, Mrs. E. E. Akers was the first to be interred in the Plemons Cemetery, probably in 1902. Plemons experienced slow growth as a river crossing town. By 1905 a wagon yard, barbershop, doctor's office, drugstore and mercantile store formed a business base for about fifteen families. Former buffalo hunter, scout and Hutchinson County's first Sheriff William (Billy) Dixon and his family operated a hotel for three years. The Amarillo branch of the Rock Island Line was completed through the area in 1926, stopping in Stinnett instead of Plemons. Voters chose Stinnett as the new county seat and Plemons gradually declined. The new county oil boom kept the town going for another two decades. The last burial in the Plemons Cemetery, which includes 66 graves, was that of Charles Ray Sessions, interred in 1953. In 1987 cemetery preservation efforts by local Boy Scouts uncovered a sandstone grave marker reading "Mrs. E. E. A.," lending significant credence to the oral history accounts that Mrs. Akers was the first to be interred on this site. The Plemons Cemetery serves as a chronicle of early Hutchinson County history. (1999)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hutchinson County Museum — 5.2 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.
• Lake Meredith National Recreation Area — 12 mi
  A Canadian River reservoir in 200-foot breaks, built to water the Panhandle's cities, that fell to a record 26 feet deep in 2013 and still rises and falls with the drought.
• Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument — 20 mi
  Hand-dug pits on a mesa above the Canadian River where people quarried banded flint for thousands of years and traded it across the Plains, seen on a ranger-led climb.
• White Deer Land Museum — 29 mi
  The 1916 Pampa office of the land company that sold a foreclosed British ranch to wheat farmers, with an annex holding one of the Panhandle's largest Red River War collections.

More markers nearby

• Bents Creek — steps away
• Fifteen miles to the Site of the Battle of Adobe Walls — steps away
• Gulf Dial #1 Oil Well — 3.4 mi
• Twentieth Century Club — 5.2 mi