Asbury Cemetery
Edom, Van Zandt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The first recorded burial on this site was that of Asbury Lowery (1836-1855). The new burial ground was named in his memory. In 1863, Prairie Flower (1858-1863), the young daughter of celebrated Comanche Indian captive Cynthia Ann Parker and Comanche Chief Peta Nocona, was interred here when she died while living with relatives of her mother. In 1965 her remains were removed to the post cemetery at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to be re-interred near the graves of her mother and brother, Chief Quanah Parker, during ceremonies attended by both Comanche and Anglo descendants. A Texas Ranger named Adren Anglin (1796-1865) also was buried here in the early years of the graveyard. H. W. and H. L. Walker donated two acres including the existing Asbury Chapel and Cemetery to trustees of the Methodist Episcopal church, South, in 1879. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, family members and descendants of the deceased observed a cemetery memorial day by coming together to clean the grounds and share food and fellowship. Eventually, Asbury Chapel merged with the Edom Methodist Church. The first cemetery board of directors was organized in 1945 while John W. Miller (1884-1975) was caretaker. Maintained by an association, the cemetery contains almost 400 recorded and marked burials and approximately 30 unmarked graves. Among the unmarked graves is believed to be that of pioneer Van Zandt County settler Esable Lindsey and six of her children. The Asbury Cemetery continues to be a chronicle of the pioneers of Van Zandt County. (1998)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Asbury Cemetery took its name from Asbury Lowery, whose 1855 burial opened the ground. Its most poignant grave belonged to Prairie Flower, the small daughter of Comanche captive Cynthia Ann Parker and Chief Peta Nocona, buried here in 1863 while living among her mother's Anglo kin; in 1965 her remains were moved to Fort Sill to rest near her mother and her brother, Chief Quanah Parker. Deeded to the Methodist church in 1879, the cemetery gathered Texas Rangers, pioneers, and Van Zandt County families across generations of memorial-day gatherings.
Why it matters
The grave of Cynthia Ann Parker's daughter binds this quiet Texas cemetery to one of the most wrenching family stories of the frontier, where captivity, culture, and reunion collided across the Comanche and Anglo worlds.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Asbury Cemetery sits in the piney, rolling country of Van Zandt County in East Texas, and its story spans the raw pioneer decades of the mid-nineteenth century. When the first burials took place here in the 1850s, this was still a young and thinly settled frontier, where families cleared land, raised churches, and laid their dead to rest in ground that would grow, grave by grave, into a community's collective memory.
Those years bracketed enormous upheaval. The cemetery's earliest recorded burial falls in the era of the young Texas, and its most famous grave dates to 1863, in the middle of the Civil War. Beyond the war itself, this was also the age of the long, painful contest between settlers and the Comanche and other Native peoples of the Southern Plains — a conflict whose most heartbreaking personal story reaches, improbably, into this quiet East Texas graveyard.
Against that turbulent backdrop, Asbury also embodies something steadier: the slow institution-building of rural America. A burial ground became a chapel, the chapel was deeded to a church, and generations of families returned year after year to tend the graves. The result is a place where the violence of the frontier and the patient continuity of community life rest side by side in the same soil.
People & events
The ground takes its name from Asbury Lowery, a young man whose burial in 1855 opened the cemetery and gave it its identity. But its most poignant grave belonged to a child. In 1863, Prairie Flower — the little daughter of Cynthia Ann Parker and the Comanche chief Peta Nocona — was buried here after she died while living among her mother's Anglo relatives. She had been born into the Comanche world and ended her short life far from it.
Her story did not end with that burial. In 1965, her remains were removed to the post cemetery at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to be reinterred near her mother and her brother, Chief Quanah Parker, in ceremonies attended by both Comanche and Anglo descendants — a reunion in death of a family the frontier had torn apart in life. A Texas Ranger, Adren Anglin, was also buried in the graveyard's early years, another figure of that hard era resting in the same ground.
The cemetery's later life is the story of a community caring for its own. In 1879 the Walker family donated two acres, including the Asbury Chapel, to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Families gathered on cemetery memorial days to clean the grounds and share food and fellowship; a board of directors formed in 1945 under caretaker John W. Miller. Today the grounds hold nearly 400 recorded burials and some thirty unmarked graves — among them, it is believed, the pioneer settler Esable Lindsey and six of her children.
Its place in the American story
The grave of Prairie Flower ties this modest cemetery to one of the most wrenching family sagas of the American frontier. Her mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, was among the most famous captives of the nineteenth century, and her brother, Quanah Parker, became a towering figure in the history of the Comanche people. That a small East Texas graveyard once held the child who linked those two worlds gives it a reach far beyond its size.
The 1965 reinterment carries its own meaning. To move a child's remains so that she might rest near her mother and brother — in a ceremony shared by both Comanche and Anglo descendants — was an act of reconciliation and remembrance, a acknowledgment that this was one family, divided by a brutal history and gathered again generations later. It stands as a small but genuine gesture across the deepest divide of the frontier era.
More broadly, Asbury is a fine example of how ordinary Americans built and sustained community. The progression from a single grave to a named cemetery, a donated chapel, a church affiliation, annual memorial gatherings, and finally an organized caretaking association is the quiet machinery by which scattered settlers became a people with shared roots. Multiplied across thousands of such places, this is how rural America remembered itself.
If you visit
Walk the grounds slowly and let the numbers sink in: nearly 400 marked graves and around thirty without stones, each an individual life from the county's pioneer past. Somewhere among the unmarked lie, by tradition, an early settler and six of her children — a reminder that a cemetery records not only names carved in stone but losses too great or too poor to mark.
Seek out the story of Prairie Flower, remembering that her remains no longer rest here; they were carried to Fort Sill in 1965 to lie near her mother and her brother. What remains at Asbury is the memory of the child and the astonishing family history she represents. Standing where her small grave once was, you are standing at the meeting point of the Comanche and Anglo worlds.
The chapel and the well-kept grounds show the fruit of generations of care, from the memorial-day gatherings of old to the association that maintains the place today. For a traveler through East Texas, this is a peaceful, human-scaled stop — a country cemetery that turns out to hold a national story. Read the stones, note the ones that aren't there, and let the quiet do its work.
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
- · Cynthia Ann Parker
- · Prairie Flower
- · Peta Nocona
- · Quanah Parker
- · Adren Anglin
Themes & tags
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