Brown (Okay Community) Cemetery
Killeen, Bell County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Elisha Ivy, for whom Ivy Mountain Road was named, established a home and store in this vicinity in the 1860s. In the 1870s, a community known as Liberty Hill developed northwest of his property. In 1896, when the rural settlement applied for a post office, its name was changed to Okay. Area residents supported churches, a school and businesses, and Samuel Marion and Mary Elizabeth (Evans) Brown set aside land for a community burial ground, formally deeding it in 1907. As military installations in the area grew, the community of Okay was displaced and ceased to exist in the early 1940s. In 1953, the U.S. Government decided to extend the runway at Gray Air Force Base, where the Brown (Okay Community) Cemetery was located, approximately 1,600 feet southwest of this site. The Army Corps of Engineers moved 70 graves, 30 of which were for unidentified individuals, to this location and aligned the burials similarly to original positions. The earliest marked grave dates to 1882 and is that of infant David Davis. Today, the cemetery is a reminder of the Okay community and the families who lived there. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2004
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Okay community grew up around Elisha Ivy's home and store in the 1860s, complete with churches, a school, and a burial ground the Brown family deeded in 1907. But as military installations expanded in the early 1940s, the community was displaced and ceased to exist. In 1953, when the government extended a runway at Gray Air Force Base, the Army Corps of Engineers relocated 70 graves—30 of them unidentified—to this site, carefully realigning the burials as they had originally lain.
Why it matters
The Brown Cemetery is a poignant record of the many rural communities erased by the mid-20th-century expansion of America's military bases, their dead literally moved to make way.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Elisha Ivy
- · Samuel Marion Brown
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Mayberry Park Cemetery
Killeen, TX
This small graveyard dates to the late nineteenth century, though only one headstone — that of James Moses Cowan, who died in 1888 — remains legible among an estimated dozen to twenty burials. Other graves are marked with plain fieldstones or nothing at all, and local tradition places members of the pioneer O.M. Hood family here. The land was folded into Fort Hood in 1942, and the site took the name Mayberry Park Cemetery only in the mid-twentieth century.
Maxdale Cemetery
Killeen vicinity, TX
One of the oldest cemeteries in Bell County, this burial ground began in the 1860s serving the rural community of Pleasant Grove. When Frank N. McBryde, Sr. — who donated the land — secured a post office in 1883, the settlement took the name Maxdale. Its earliest documented grave is that of a young woman who died in 1867, and among those laid to rest here are pioneer settlers and veterans reaching from the Civil War through Korea.
Joseph Dennis Lands
Killeen vicinity, TX
Joseph Dennis and his wife Isa left Arkansas for Texas in 1840, and when Bell County was organized a decade later he chaired the committee that chose Nolan Springs—today's Belton—as the county seat. He became the county's first treasurer, ran a grist mill and lumber yard, and assembled tracts of land including this acreage, long known as Elmore Ranch. The property has stayed in his family's hands ever since.
First Baptist Church of Killeen
Killeen, TX
Founded in 1873 as the Baptist Church of Christ at Palo Alto, this fellowship followed its people to the new railroad town of Killeen in 1883 and was renamed under its first pastor, the Rev. Thomas H. Bacon. Its greatest surge came in 1942, when the building of nearby Fort Hood flooded the area with newcomers and swelled the congregation. Over the years the church helped spin off several other area congregations through its mission work.