Proffitt Cemetery

The Handbook of Texas dates the Proffitts' ranching along the Brazos River and Elm Creek northwest of Fort Belknap to 1862. After the Civil War John Proffitt donated land for a church that also served as a school and Masonic lodge. A post office opened in January 1880 with J. G. Armstrong as postmaster, and Proffitt started a freighting business and built a store in 1894. The post office moved to Newcastle in 1925, but one business and fifty people remained through the 1940s. By the 1980s maps showed a church, a community center and this cemetery.

What the plaque says

Members of the Robert Smith Proffitt family came to this area about 1862 and established homes. A son, John Proffitt (1846-1925), amassed large land-holdings and built a gin and other businesses. The developing community was named Proffitt. At its height it boasted homes, a post office, school, retail businesses, a Methodist church, and Baptist church. On July 17, 1867, three young men were killed in an Indian raid near this site. They were buried in a common grave on John Proffitt's land about one mile south of town. Theirs was the first burial in the community graveyard which became know as the Proffitt Cemetery. The cemetery contains both marked and unmarked graves of area pioneers. The numerous interments of infants and children illustrate the often harsh conditions of frontier life. The largest number of burials occurred in the years between 1910 and 1920, and include many victims of the World War I-era influenza epidemic. Also buried here are veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Maintained by a cemetery association, this historic graveyard stands as memorial to Young County pioneers. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Belknap — 7.6 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.
• 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.
• Fort Griffin State Historic Site — 27 mi
  The ruins of an 1867 cavalry post on a plateau above the Clear Fork of the Brazos, judged unfit for habitation and used nine more years, now home to the official state longhorn herd.

More markers nearby

• Indian Raid on Elm Creek, CSA — 0.5 mi
• Joseph Alfred Woolfolk — 5.7 mi
• Two Miles Southwest to Fort Belknap — 7.3 mi
• Tonkawa Scouts, C.S.A. — 7.5 mi