Thurber Cemetery, Thurber, Texas. 2018
Near the abandoned power plant at the Thurber Ghost Town, you’ll find a Historical Marker next to a farm gate. This is the location of the cemetery for once bustling Thurber. Photos from top to bottom:
1. Rock road leading from the gate up the hillside to the hilltop cemetery.
2. Reaching the top of the hill, you come into an open meadow containing the 9 acre cemetery. The cemetery originally had three sections, with three separate entrances. There was a Black section, a White Protestant section, and a White Catholic section. Thurber had a large immigrant community and was very ethnically diverse.
It is estimated that around 1000 bodies are buried in this cemetery, however approximately 700 of those are unknown and/or unmarked today. Ravages of time, wildfires, and vandalism have destroyed many of the wood, stone, and homemade grave markers. Once families moved away when the town died there was no one to tend the graves.
3. This is the “Black Section”. Recent efforts to restore the cemetery have used ground penetrating radar of other tools to locate bodies and gravesites. Unknown/unmarked graves are occasionally marked now using plastic crosses.
4. A large number of graves in the Thurber Cemetery are for children. About half are like this one, in that the child died before age 2. In one family plot, the marker indicates that the parents lost 3 children in a two week period.
5. Sandstone marker that is broken and eroded to the point that only the date “1908″ is legible.
6. A large number of graves are marked only with a pile of native sandstone. You have to be careful when walking through the tall grass that you don’t trip over the stones. The piles are everywhere.
