Black Cemetery
Albany, Shackelford County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This pioneer burial ground contains more than a dozen graves of African Americans. The land was part of the Veals addition to the town of Fort Griffin. Milton Sutton bought the property at public auction in April 1882. Two visible markers are for Elijah Earls (d. 1880), who the Fort Griffin Echo reported as a “tonsorial artist,” or barber, and Marriah McKay Williams (1781-1891), who came to Fort Davis (Stephens co.) Before the Civil War as a free black. The Echo also reported the June 1880 burial of James Lowe in this cemetery. Most of the other burials are unknown. When Fort Griffin disbanded, many African Americans stayed nearby and homesteaded. Here, their lives as ranchers, farmers, cowboys and domestics are remembered.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This pioneer burial ground near old Fort Griffin holds more than a dozen graves of African Americans who lived and worked on the West Texas frontier. Two surviving markers name Elijah Earls, a barber the Fort Griffin Echo called a "tonsorial artist," and Marriah McKay Williams (1781–1891), who came to Texas as a free Black woman before the Civil War. When the fort disbanded, many African Americans stayed to homestead, ranch, and farm the surrounding land.
Why it matters
The cemetery preserves the often-overlooked presence of African Americans—free and freed—on the West Texas frontier, remembering their lives as ranchers, cowboys, and homesteaders.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This small burial ground sits in the country around old Fort Griffin, in Shackelford County — the heart of the West Texas frontier during the rough, unsettled years after the Civil War. In the Reconstruction era and the decades that followed, this was cattle country and army country both: a landscape of ranches, trail drives, buffalo hunters, and a frontier fort that anchored a raucous town beside it.
Into that world came African Americans, free and freed, whose presence on the frontier is too often left out of the story. Some had been free before the war; many more came west in freedom after it, taking up the same hard work as everyone else on this land — herding cattle, farming, cutting hair, keeping homes.
When Fort Griffin was disbanded and its town faded, the wider pattern of the frontier played out here: people who had gathered around the fort stayed on, homesteading the surrounding country. This cemetery is what remains of that African American community's stake in the land.
People & events
More than a dozen graves lie here, most of them now nameless, but the marker preserves the few stories the record kept. The land was part of the Veals addition to the town of Fort Griffin, and Milton Sutton bought the property at public auction in the spring of 1882 — an ordinary transaction that quietly secured a resting place for a community.
Two headstones still speak. One belongs to Elijah Earls, who died in 1880 and whom the local Fort Griffin Echo memorably called a "tonsorial artist" — a barber, a man of a trade, a fixture of the town. The other marks Marriah McKay Williams, whose long life stretched from 1781 to 1891 and who had come to Texas as a free Black woman before the Civil War, carrying more than a century of American history in a single lifespan. The same newspaper recorded the 1880 burial here of a man named James Lowe.
Beyond these few, the names are lost, but the marker refuses to let the people themselves be lost. It remembers them by their work and their lives — as ranchers, farmers, cowboys, and domestics — the ordinary callings that built the frontier.
Its place in the American story
The American West of popular imagination is overwhelmingly white, but the real frontier was not. A substantial share of the cowboys who worked the cattle country were Black men, and African Americans farmed, homesteaded, and plied trades all across the West. A cemetery like this one is quiet, irreplaceable evidence of that fuller truth.
The long life of Marriah McKay Williams, free before the war and buried in freedom near its old fort, and the trade of Elijah Earls, a working barber remembered by name, put faces on a population the wider record often overlooked. When the fort closed and many African Americans chose to stay and homestead, they were doing exactly what settlers of every background did — claiming a future in a hard country.
To preserve this ground is to correct the record. It insists that the story of the frontier includes the people resting here, and that their lives as workers, neighbors, and settlers were part of building the West.
If you visit
This is a pioneer cemetery, not a manicured attraction — a modest burial ground on the West Texas plains near the site of old Fort Griffin. Come expecting quiet, open country and the particular stillness of a place where a whole community's memory is concentrated in a few surviving stones.
Seek out the two legible markers for Elijah Earls and Marriah McKay Williams. Standing before them, remember that most of those buried around you have no stone at all, and let the marker's roll of callings — ranchers, cowboys, farmers, domestics — fill in the silence. It's a powerful exercise in seeing the unseen.
Paired with a visit to the nearby Fort Griffin site, this stop rounds out the frontier's true picture. The fort tells the soldiers' and settlers' familiar tale; this cemetery tells the part usually left out. Give it a few unhurried minutes, and the West you carry away will be more honest and more complete.
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
- · Elijah Earls
- · Marriah McKay Williams
- · Milton Sutton
Themes & tags
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