Roscoe Cemetery

The Handbook of Texas says the name Vista honored an official of the Texas and Pacific, which built through in 1881, and that Roscoe replaced it when residents applied for a post office in 1892. Growth came in 1894, when the flagstop of Katula, where cattle were penned for shipment, flooded and its switch line was moved half a mile to Roscoe. The town incorporated in 1907. The weekly Roscoe Times has been published since 1906, after a short-lived Enterprise in 1893. Roscoe had 1,166 people and fifty businesses in 1940 and 1,378 people in 2000.

What the plaque says

One of first settlers in Roscoe (when it was called Vista) was rancher-wheat grower W. J. Turner, who purchased cemetery site for burial of his brother-in-law, Joe Clecker, about 1887. Next interments: infants Frank E. Spires, 1892; Ethel Lena Turner, 1894. Other early graves are unidentified. (1972)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• National WASP WWII Museum — 3.5 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.
• Pioneer Museum — 7.1 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.
• Heart of West Texas Museum — 20 mi
  Colorado City's museum in a restored downtown house, from a mammoth dug up at Lake Champion in 2001 to an Ice Age bison and the wartime telegrams sent to a local family.
• Lake Colorado City State Park — 26 mi
  A mesquite-plains park on a lake built in 1949 to cool a power plant, southwest of Colorado City, where controlled burns are bringing back the grassland and 300 bird species pass through.

More markers nearby

• Roscoe, Snyder & Pacific Railway — 1.2 mi
• Women Airforce Service Pilots — 3.0 mi
• W.A.S.P. Training Base: Avenger Field — 3.1 mi
• Sweetwater Cemetery — 5.9 mi