Union Cemetery

The cemetery serves Durango, a town of several beginnings. The Handbook of Texas says Robertson's colony settlers called the place West Falls, and a post office of that name ran from 1871 to 1883. By local lore a drunken cowboy just back from Mexico insisted he was in Durango, and the name changed. The mid-1880s brought a church, a school, three stores and about 200 people, and J. T. Hedrick's weekly Enterprise. The railroad passed five miles east in the early 1890s. A tornado in 1892 killed several residents. The school joined Lott's district in 1949.

What the plaque says

Union Cemetery Four acres of land were donated for Union Cemetery by early settlers Joseph Marcus Jackson and his wife Eleanor Thompson Jackson. Named Union Cemetery because it serves all of the communities around Durango, the earliest recorded burial was that of infant Mary Braswell in 1836. Among the more than 800 burials are many of the area's pioneer settlers and their descendants, and veterans from the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. The cemetery is maintained by an association established in 1977, and continues to serve this area of Falls County. (1996)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum — 16 mi
  The Santa Fe depot of 1911 in a railroad town that began in 1880 as a construction camp, now a museum with locomotives and cars parked beside the active rail yard.
• Armstrong Browning Library — 23 mi
  A three-story Italian Renaissance library on the Baylor campus built to hold A. J. Armstrong's Browning collection, dedicated in December 1951 and now, by its own account, the world's largest of Browning material.
• Mother Neff State Park — 23 mi
  A Leon River park that grew from six acres Isabella Neff left the state in her 1921 will, where Civilian Conservation Corps Company 817 built a stone tower, a pavilion and roads in the 1930s.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 23 mi
  The 1906 bottling plant of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, built where Dr Pepper outgrew a Waco drugstore soda fountain, now the Dr Pepper Museum.

More markers nearby

• Lott — 4.5 mi
• Blevins Community and School — 5.8 mi
• Mooreville Cemetery — 6.4 mi
• Westphalia Little School — 6.5 mi