South Prairie Cemetery

The towns that outlasted South Prairie show why it faded. Ivan, named by J. O. Brockman for his son, got a post office in 1898 with Lillian Brockman as first postmaster, reached sixty-one people in 1920 and lost the post office in 1953. Eliasville, across the county line in Young County, grew from Elias DeLong's store of 1878 and a flour mill into an incorporated oil-boom town in 1921, with 400 residents in 1940. Those two drew the families the prairie lost.

What the plaque says

South Prairie Cemetery Founded in 1880, this cemetery was the community burial ground for South Prairie, a settlement which once included homes, a post office, blacksmith shop, mercantile, and school. The community gradually declined in favor of the nearby towns of Ivan and Eliasville. The oldest burial in the cemetery is that of six-month-old Birddie G. Norton. Among the graves here are those of area pioneers and veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Maintained by a cemetery association, the graveyard is the last visible reminder of South Prairie. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Post Office Museum and Art Center — 15 mi
  Graham's 1936 Art Moderne post office, with a New Deal mural by Alexandre Hogue inside, now the free museum of Young County in the town where the Texas cattle raisers first organized.
• Fort Belknap — 17 mi
  The 1851 northern anchor of the first Texas frontier forts, on the Brazos below Newcastle, a Butterfield stop and the post beside the Brazos Reservation until its people were driven out in 1859.

More markers nearby

• Site of Donnell Mill — 4.6 mi
• Sam Bass & Gang in Stephens County — 9.0 mi
• The Tonk Valley Community — 11 mi
• Gooseneck Cemetery — 11 mi