Sipe Springs Cemetery

Sipe Springs rose twice. The Handbook says it was organized in 1873 and had 130 people by 1884, with five general stores, two hotels and two gin-gristmills. After the Texas Central built through in 1911, the town shifted toward the tracks. Oil discovered nearby in 1918 turned it, by some reports, into a tent city of as many as 8,000 within a year. The shallow fields faded; both banks failed by 1921, fire struck in 1922, and the 1924 population was 575. The school district split between Sidney and De Leon in 1952.

What the plaque says

Sipe Springs Cemetery Pioneers settled this area about 1870, after finding water seeping from a spring. There was controversy from the beginning over the correct spelling of the name, which is pronounced "seep." The town soon grew into a milling and ginning center for this region. Upon the death of Pratt Scarlett in 1873, John C. Smith (1828-1907) gave five acres for a cemetery, but the title was not clear. A large stone carved with Scarlett's death date was buried at the foot of his grave. Several burial sites in the old part of the cemetery have plain sandstone markers. In 1890 the area residents built a tabernacle at the burial ground. Enlarged in 1951, it is still used for gatherings such as the annual homecoming in July. An oil boom came to Sipe Springs in the winter of 1918 and the village grew to almost 10,000. The town boasted an opera house and a professional baseball team. About that time Nels and Sarah Crain acquired a clear title to the cemetery tract. Their heirs gave it to the Sipe Springs Cemetery Association. The graveyard is still in use today with about 1150 grave sites including veterans from the Civil War and Spanish-American War; World War I, World War II; and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. (1978)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Rip at the Eastland County Courthouse — 20 mi
  A horned lizard in a glass-topped casket in the 1928 Eastland courthouse, the creature said to have come out alive from the old building's cornerstone after thirty-one years.
• Lake Brownwood State Park — 22 mi
  A CCC park on a reservoir that filled in a single flood before its dam was done, with stone cabins, a hilltop dance pavilion and a grand staircase climbed by dancers arriving by boat.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 22 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.
• Dublin Bottling Works — 27 mi
  The Erath County plant that bottled Dr Pepper with cane sugar from 1891 until a 2012 settlement ended its Dr Pepper license, and that still makes its own sodas the same way.

More markers nearby

• Amity Cemetery — 7.2 mi
• Bibb Community — 8.3 mi
• Old Shinoak Springs — 8.7 mi
• First United Methodist Church of Rising Star — 10 mi