Union Cemetery, Old

Gough was the main settlement this graveyard served, and the railroad passed it by. Gough opened a school in 1882 and a post office in 1888, and by 1890 it had fifty residents, three physicians and a Hollon and Bailey mill and gin. The Handbook thinks the name came from a minister, Lycurgus Gough, or from the owner of the first store. When the line went through Klondike instead, the farm communities around it began to decline. The post office closed in 1902, and by 1964 only the cemetery remained on the old site.

What the plaque says

Union Cemetery, Old (0.75 mi. S) This graveyard served the farm and ranch communities of Gough, Yowell, and Antioch. The earliest recorded burial is that of W. H. Henderson in 1859. The cemetery contains more than 90 marked graves mostly arranged in family plots. Buried here are many of the area's earliest settlers and their descendants and at least three veterans of the Civil War: T. J. Hollon, Hiram G. Wynn, and T. J. Craig. The last recorded burial was that of Georgia Missouri Hollon in 1946. A cemetery association was established in 1947 to maintain and improve the grounds. (1994)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Cooper Lake State Park — 7.9 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.
• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 22 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 25 mi
  Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 26 mi
  The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.

More markers nearby

• Pioneer Smith Brothers — 2.4 mi
• Old Klondike Cemetery — 2.7 mi
• Abel Morgan — 2.8 mi
• Texas Livery Stable — 6.8 mi