Riverside Cemetery

Iredell had to be built twice in one year. The Handbook of Texas says Ward Keeler and Ranse Walker settled the vicinity in the late 1850s and that the name honors Keeler's son Ire. A post office opened in 1870. In 1880 the settlement moved from near the Walker homestead to the south bank of the Bosque River beside the Texas Central Railroad station. Later that year a flood destroyed it, and residents rebuilt on higher ground. A population estimated at thirty in 1884 had grown to 600 by 1892.

What the plaque says

Riverside Cemetery According to local oral tradition, land for this cemetery and the adjacent church was donated by the family of Ward Keeler, a New York native who came to Bosque County about 1870 and founded the town of Iredell. The oldest documented grave here is that of James W. P. Ware, who died in November 1870. The primary burial ground for Iredell citizens for generations, Riverside Cemetery contains more than one thousand interments, both marked and unmarked. Its varied styles of gravestones stand as a reminder of the community's pioneer heritage. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Meridian State Park — 12 mi
  A 505-acre park in Bosque County where World War I veterans of a Civilian Conservation Corps company dammed Bee Creek in 1933-34 for a 72-acre lake and cut stone buildings around it.
• Dinosaur Valley State Park — 18 mi
  Theropod and sauropod trackways of about 113 million years ago in the bed of the Paluxy River, a National Natural Landmark where R. T. Bird found the first distinct sauropod tracks in 1937.
• Bosque Museum — 22 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Hamilton County Courthouse — 24 mi
  A limestone courthouse of 1886-87 on the Hamilton square, built after the county's 1878 courthouse burned, enlarged in the early 1930s and rededicated in 2012 after restoration.

More markers nearby

• Old Hico — 8.5 mi
• Captain J. J. Cureton, C.S.A. — 8.7 mi
• James Buckner "Buck" Barry, C.S.A. — 8.7 mi
• The Rev. Henry Hurley — 9.6 mi