Santo East Cemetery

Before Santo there was Grand Ranch. According to the Handbook of Texas, J. D. T. Bearden founded the settlement between 1850 and 1860, and around 1865 a makeshift fort nearby gave families protection against Indians. About 1870 the community moved a mile east to Sunday Creek and was renamed Calgando, which had a mill and a gin. When the Texas and Pacific was built in 1880, the community moved again to the railroad. The cemetery stayed behind with the graves of the old town, which is why Santo has an East cemetery at all.

What the plaque says

Santo East Cemetery The town of Calgando was established in the 1870s near this site on Sunday Creek. Soon after, land was donated for this cemetery. The oldest marked grave bears the date 1875, though older unmarked graves exist, according to local tradition. By 1880 Calgando was a local trade center, but when the new Texas & Pacific Railroad line passed one mile west that year, the town of Santo was established and Calgando businesses moved there. The cemetery remained, later called "Santo East." Many gravestones document an influenza epidemic in 1918. (1986)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 17 mi
  A Cross Timbers park on the old Camp Wolters grounds, built around a 1922 water-supply lake for a spa town, with Penitentiary Hollow's rock climbing and a 20-mile trailway.
• Chandor Gardens — 25 mi
  A portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 27 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.

More markers nearby

• First Baptist Church of Santo — 1.2 mi
• William Whipple Johnson — 8.1 mi
• Old County Jail — 12 mi
• Courthouses of Palo Pinto County — 12 mi