Whitney Memorial Park

Whitney Dam moved the dead and also changed the living town. The Handbook of Texas says the project was authorized in 1944, work began in 1946, Highway 22 was relocated across the dam and opened in 1951, and the power plant was running by 1953. The lake covered 15,800 acres of farmland. During construction the Blue Chip Ice Company built a thirty-ton plant in 1946, and in summer its ice went into the concrete mix. The Lake Whitney Association formed in 1951, and tourists, then permanent residents, eventually steadied the economy.

What the plaque says

Whitney Memorial Park The construction of Whitney Dam caused the creation of this cemetery in 1950 for the reinterment of 1260 graves from six historic cemeteries in Hill and Bosque counties. Before Lake Whitney inundated several pioneer cemeteries, all of the gravesites and monuments were moved here and placed on nearly 24 acres purchased for the Brazos Valley graves. The Captain Wilson Cemetery was originally located about six miles southwest of Whitney and named for Civil War veteran and politician J. M. C. Wilson. The earliest documented burial was from 1857. The Walling Bend Cemetery, dating from 1863, was named for Jesse Walling, who served in the Texas legislature. The two Schuler place cemeteries were located on the Bosque County side of Lake Whitney, and contained 14 graves, many of the Basye Family. The cemetery that served the Towash community was located about five miles west of Whitney. The earliest known burial was that of A. J. and J. J. Dyer in 1864. Their descendants included a member of the Texas Legislature, the first chief justice of Hill County and owners of a flour and grist mill. The Degraffenreid graveyard, located about three miles west of Whitney, was the largest of the six cemeteries moved with 685 graves. (1996)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hill County Courthouse — 12 mi
  Wesley C. Dodson's limestone Second Empire courthouse of 1890 on the Hillsboro square, gutted by fire on New Year's Day 1993 and rededicated in 1999 after a rebuilding that two Willie Nelson concerts helped pay for.
• Bosque Museum — 20 mi
  A Clifton museum holding what it calls the largest repository of Norwegian artifacts in the South and Southwest, with Bosque County finds some 10,000 years old and a log cabin built by the Olson family.
• Meridian State Park — 23 mi
  A 505-acre park in Bosque County where World War I veterans of a Civilian Conservation Corps company dammed Bee Creek in 1933-34 for a 72-acre lake and cut stone buildings around it.
• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 25 mi
  A bone bed on the Bosque River where a nursery herd of at least 19 Columbian mammoths was trapped and drowned by floodwater 65,000 to 72,000 years ago, left in place under a dig shelter.

More markers nearby

• Whitney — 0.7 mi
• Boesch House — 0.8 mi
• Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church — 0.8 mi
• Towash — 3.6 mi