Shannon Cemetery

The general store at the spring was built by Rachel D. Ivie in 1878. The Handbook of Texas says the settlement took the name Shannon in honor of a pioneer family that had come from the Shannon Valley in Ireland. By 1910 the school enrolled eighty-two students with two teachers. Shannon kept about 112 people for some three decades, while its businesses dropped from three in 1936 to two by the mid-1950s. It had eighty residents in 1966-67 and twenty-three by the late 1970s, the figure still reported in 2000.

What the plaque says

Established near a flourishing spring of water and a general store in 1878, the settlement around this site was known as Stampede Springs. The first burial in this cemetery was that of Mary W. Gibson (1824-1879). Trustees of the Stampede Springs School community purchased five acres including this site for a school, church and grayeyard in 1880. A post office opened in 1893, and the town was renamed Shannon, either by the U. S. Postal Service or by local settlers. In 1907 another acre was donated to the cemetery. The population of Shannon was 112 in the mid-1920s. A cemetery association was established in 1949. In 1990 the population was 23. There were 311 graves in the cemetery at the end of the 20th century, with 104 family names represented. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Richardson State Park and Historic Site — 18 mi
  The northernmost post of the Texas frontier line, outside Jacksboro, where a stone hospital and six other buildings stand from 1867 and a later Guard unit became the Lost Battalion.
• Lake Arrowhead State Park — 22 mi
  A prairie park on the north shore of the Wichita Falls water-supply lake, which drowned the town of Halsell in 1965-66, with mesquite campsites, a lighted pier and more than 200 bird species.
• Royal Theater — 23 mi
  Archer City's movie house, burned in 1965, given a false front for The Last Picture Show and brought back by the town in the 1990s as a working stage on Main Street.
• Clay County 1890 Jail Museum — 24 mi
  Henrietta's 1890 stone jail a block from the domed courthouse, now the county museum, with its original cells, a gallows that was never used and the sheriff's family quarters.

More markers nearby

• Bridwell Park — 11 mi
• Lost Valley — 12 mi
• St. Mary's Catholic Church Windthorst — 13 mi
• Community of Jermyn — 16 mi