Roby Cemetery

The Handbook of Texas follows the town this cemetery serves into the twentieth century. In 1915 the 4.4-mile Roby and Northern Railway was built to North Roby, a station on the Texas Central, and Roby incorporated that year; the short line was abandoned in 1942. Roby grew to 801 people in 1930 and peaked as a trade center in 1950, with sixty businesses and 1,040 residents. Short of water from its start, it finally piped it from Oak Creek Lake at Blackwell in 1953. It had 784 people in 1970 and 673 in 2000.

What the plaque says

(1/4 mile east) Settlers began arriving in this area in the late 19th century. The oldest grave marker in the Roby Cemetery, that of Mable W. Deming, bears the date 1884, one year prior to the organization of Fisher County and the establishment of the town of Roby. Brothers D. C. and M. L. Roby purchased over 4,000 acres of land in 1885. They had a townsite platted; donated sites for schools, churches, and a park; and designated the land containing Mable Deming's grave as a public cemetery. The original cemetery plot consisted of seven acres, and the brothers stipulated that no fee was to be levied for grave sites in that section. The Roby Cemetery served as the principal burial ground for citizens of Fisher County. In the late 1950s the county deeded the cemetery lands to the city of Roby. In 1975 the Roby Cemetery Association was chartered and accepted the deed to the cemetery property from the city. Later land acquisitions increased the graveyard's size to twenty-one acres. Those interred in the Roby Cemetery include pioneer settlers of Fisher County, veterans of the Civil War, and one former slave, "Aunt" Abbie Alborn, who came to this area from Tennessee in 1886. The graveyard serves as a reminder of the area's early history. (1988)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Pioneer Museum — 20 mi
  Nolan County's settlement story in a dozen rooms of Judge R. A. Ragland's 1906 house in Sweetwater, a town that started as a dugout store for buffalo hunters and a post office called Blue Goose.
• National WASP WWII Museum — 22 mi
  Hangar 1 at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, where the women of the WASP trained to fly every aircraft in the Army's arsenal in World War II, then waited thirty-three years to be called veterans.

More markers nearby

• Organization of Fisher County — 1.2 mi
• Fisher County — 1.2 mi
• Roby — 1.2 mi
• Royston Townsite — 5.9 mi