Abilene Municipal Cemetery
Abilene, Taylor County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Abilene Municipal Cemetery is composed of five different burial grounds. The oldest documented grave is that of Florence Phillips, who was buried in the Masonic section in 1881 shortly before the establishment of the local Masonic Lodge in 1882. Among the notables buried here are Mary Houston Morrow, Abilene postmistress and daughter of General Sam Houston, and C. W. Merchant, who gave land for the burial ground and helped establish Abilene. The oldest recorded burial in the city cemetery, that of Oliver Bailey, occurred in 1882. Another grave of interest is that of Dr. W. H. Butler, an African American physician. The first deed verifying the establishment of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF) Cemetery was dated August 1906. Several early Abilene businessmen including James Radford and H. O. Wooten are interred here, as is Mrs. Jewel Scarborough, a prominent citizen and active woman suffragist. The city of Abilene purchased the 20-acre Cedar Hill Cemetery in 1920. The Cedar Hill Cemetery Association bought it from the city in 1923. The city took over care of the Masonic and IOOF cemeteries in 1928 and the Cedar Hill Cemetery in 1934. Abilene founder K. K. Legett and railroad legend Morgan Jones, as well as veterans of major American and international wars and conflicts, are interred here. In 1945 the city bought an additional tract of land; the first burial in Cedar Hill Flats was in 1969. More than 26,000 people are believed to be buried in the graveyard. A chronicle of the city's past, Abilene Municipal Cemetery continues to serve the area. (1998)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Abilene Municipal Cemetery grew from five separate burial grounds, the oldest documented grave being that of Florence Phillips, laid to rest in the Masonic section in 1881 as the town was taking shape. Among those interred are Mary Houston Morrow, an Abilene postmistress and daughter of Sam Houston; C.W. Merchant, who donated land and helped found the town; Dr. W.H. Butler, an African American physician; and suffragist Jewel Scarborough. The city gradually took charge of the Masonic, Odd Fellows, and Cedar Hill grounds, which together hold more than 26,000 people.
Why it matters
The cemetery is a stone chronicle of Abilene's founders, railroad builders, and civic pioneers — Black and white, men and women — who built a West Texas city.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early 1880s, Abilene was a brand-new town taking shape on the West Texas plains, its fortunes tied to the railroad and the cattle economy of the frontier. A settlement that young measures its life partly by its dead, and the oldest documented grave here — from 1881 — was dug at almost the same moment the town itself was being organized.
What became the Abilene Municipal Cemetery did not begin as one planned place. It grew from five separate burial grounds — Masonic, Odd Fellows, and others — each reflecting the fraternal orders, churches, and civic groups that structured social life in a Gilded Age town. Only over decades did the city gradually take these grounds under its own care.
That patchwork origin is itself a piece of history. It shows how a frontier community organized itself from the ground up — through lodges and associations and neighborly arrangements — long before a single municipal authority tied everything together.
People & events
The names recorded here read like a cross-section of a young city. Among them is Mary Houston Morrow, an Abilene postmistress and a daughter of General Sam Houston — a direct human link between the great figures of the Texas Republic and this ordinary West Texas town. Nearby lies C. W. Merchant, who gave land for the burial ground and helped establish Abilene itself.
The cemetery holds founders and builders of every stripe: town founder K. K. Legett; the railroad figure Morgan Jones; and early businessmen whose stores and enterprises gave the young community its footing. Their graves trace the commercial spine that let a frontier stop become a lasting city.
Just as telling are the people whose presence widens the story. Dr. W. H. Butler, an African American physician, rests here, as does Jewel Scarborough, remembered as a prominent citizen and active suffragist. Together they are reminders that the city was built by Black and white residents, women and men — not only by the names on the town's founding deeds.
Its place in the American story
A community cemetery like this one is a stone chronicle of how the American West was actually settled — not by legends, but by postmasters, physicians, merchants, and reformers living out their ordinary and extraordinary lives. The presence of a daughter of Sam Houston beside railroad builders and a suffragist compresses the arc from the Texas Republic to the modern civic era into a single ground.
The graves of an African American doctor and a woman active in the suffrage movement point to national struggles playing out at the local level. The long fight for Black professional life and for women's right to vote was not fought only in capitals; it was carried on by individuals in towns like Abilene, and their resting places testify to that.
With more than 26,000 people believed to be buried here, the cemetery is also simply a record of scale — of how many lives it takes to make a city, most of them unremembered by history but essential to it. It is democracy's archive, written in headstones.
If you visit
This is a place to walk slowly and read. The five older grounds, brought together over time, still carry the fingerprints of the lodges and associations that created them, and moving among the sections is like moving through the layers of the town's early social life.
Seek out the range of stories the marker names — a founder, a railroad man, a suffragist, an African American physician, a daughter of Sam Houston who ran the local post office. Holding those names together at once is the best way to feel what the cemetery really is: not a monument to a few great figures, but a portrait of a whole community.
As a stop on a road trip, a historic cemetery offers something a museum can't — the plain, unhurried presence of the people who did the building. Give it a quiet half hour, and the abstract idea of "the settling of West Texas" becomes a field of individual lives you can stand among.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Mary Houston Morrow
- · C. W. Merchant
- · W. H. Butler
- · Jewel Scarborough
- · K. K. Legett
- · Morgan Jones
Themes & tags
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