Cee Vee Cemetery
Paducah, Cottle County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Cee Vee community dates to 1926, with earlier ties to cattlemen Clairborne Varner and Charles Goodnight, who grazed herds in the area using the C V brand. As ranchland gave way to family farms, the community that developed here soon boasted a cotton gin, stores, churches and a school. Tradition holds the first grave at this prairie cemetery was that of a cowboy buried near the C V ranch house. The earliest marked grave is for Eugene Ballard, who died in 1931, the year W.J. Tyson donated land for the cemetery. In the 1950s, the Cee Vee Home Demonstration Club named the site Haven of Rest Cemetery. Citizens donated funds for a fence, and over the years burial sites have remained free. Graves include those of veterans of U.S. military service dating to World Wars I and II. Curbed plots enclose the burials of family members whose names reflect the early history of the area. Maintained by an association, Cee Vee Cemetery (Haven of Rest Cemetery) serves as an important link to the early history of this part of Cottle County. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2004
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Cee Vee community grew up around 1926 on land once grazed by cattlemen Clairborne Varner and Charles Goodnight, whose "C V" brand gave the place its name. As open range gave way to family farms, Cee Vee gained a cotton gin, stores, churches, and a school, while its prairie cemetery — tradition says it began with a cowboy buried near the old ranch house — took in the community's dead, including veterans of both World Wars. Renamed Haven of Rest by a local club in the 1950s, the burial ground is still tended by an association as a link to the area's ranching past.
Why it matters
Cee Vee captures the great Texas transition from cattle range to cotton farm, with the legendary Charles Goodnight's brand still echoing in the name of the community's resting place.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The high plains of Cottle County sit in the rolling country south of the Texas Panhandle, and by the time the Cee Vee community took shape in 1926 the region was living through one of the great turns in American land use. For a generation this had been cattle country — vast, unfenced grass where herds ranged under a single brand. That world was already giving way when the community's story begins.
The early twentieth century, the era historians call the Progressive and Modern age, brought barbed wire, railroads, and a rising tide of families looking for land they could plow rather than merely graze. Across West Texas the open range was being carved into quarter-sections and sold to farmers.
Cee Vee is a small, precise example of that shift. Where cattlemen had once turned herds loose on the prairie, a settled community rose with the ordinary institutions of farm life — a cotton gin to process the crop, stores to supply the households, churches, and a school for the children. The cemetery on this prairie is where that community recorded its own passing.
People & events
The community's very name carries its origin. Cattlemen Clairborne Varner and Charles Goodnight grazed herds here under the "C V" brand, and the sound of those two letters — Cee Vee — became the name of the place that grew up on the old range.
Tradition holds that the first person laid to rest at this prairie burial ground was a cowboy buried near the old C V ranch house — a fitting beginning for a graveyard rooted in ranching. The earliest grave that still bears a marker belongs to Eugene Ballard, who died in 1931. That same year W.J. Tyson donated the land for the cemetery, giving the community a permanent and formal resting place.
Over the decades the burial ground gathered the ordinary and the honored alike: families whose curbed plots still enclose kin whose names trace the area's earliest days, and veterans who served in both World Wars. In the 1950s the Cee Vee Home Demonstration Club — one of the rural women's clubs that did so much civic work across mid-century Texas — gave the site the gentler name Haven of Rest. Citizens raised money for a fence, and, notably, burial here has always been free.
Its place in the American story
Cee Vee tells in miniature a story that unfolded across the whole American West: the transition from the open-range cattle kingdom to the settled world of the family farm. The cowboy buried near the ranch house and the cotton gin that later served the community stand at the two ends of that change.
The brand that gave the place its name links it to one of the most storied figures of the frontier cattle era, whose herds moved across this country in the days before the fences went up. When a legendary rancher's brand survives as the name of a farming community's cemetery, you can read the whole arc of the region's history in a single word.
The cemetery also reflects a distinctly American, and distinctly rural, tradition of self-organized community care — land donated by a neighbor, a fence paid for by subscription, graves kept free, and upkeep carried on by a volunteer association. It is a small monument to how ordinary people built and maintained the institutions of their own communities.
If you visit
This is a quiet prairie cemetery, and the quiet is part of what it has to offer. Standing here, you are surrounded by the same big-sky grassland that once carried grazing herds, and the setting alone tells you why cattle came before crops.
Look closely at the older sections. The curbed plots — burials enclosed by low stone or concrete borders — gather families together, and the surnames on them are the names of the people who first settled this corner of Cottle County. Among the graves you'll find those of veterans of the World Wars, small flags and service markers set against the open horizon.
Cee Vee makes a rewarding stop for anyone tracing the ranching-to-farming story across West Texas. It rewards slow walking and a little imagination: picture the cotton gin, the stores, the school, and the church that once stood in this now-spare landscape, and the cemetery becomes the last visible chapter of a whole vanished community.
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
- · Charles Goodnight
- · Clairborne Varner
- · Eugene Ballard
- · W.J. Tyson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
CV Ranch and Cee Vee Community
Paducah, TX
The CV cattle brand dates to 1850, and the herd it marked passed through the hands of famed cattlemen — including Charles Goodnight — before reaching Cottle County. Established in the 1880s across 47,000 acres, the CV Ranch was later broken up and sold as small farms in the late 1920s, giving rise to the community of Cee Vee with its stores, churches, school, and cotton gin. Drought, the Depression, and World War II thinned the population until only a handful of families remained by the 1990s.
Gober-Barron-Williford House
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Built in 1896 when many townspeople still lived in dugouts, this ornate late-Victorian house belonged to Joe L. Gober, the first sheriff of newly settled Cottle County. Its lumber and fine gingerbread trim had to be hauled by wagon from the railheads at Childress and Quanah, years before Paducah gained its own rail line in 1909.
The Gray and The Blue
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Around 1885, Civil War veterans of both the Gray and the Blue drifted into western Texas to tame the wilderness, grazing cattle on drought-parched grass and living in dugouts. Old adversaries refought the war verbally on the courthouse square yet built Cottle County together in peace—some 85 percent of early pioneers had worn Confederate gray, though Union men like Prussian immigrant William Frederick Liedtke, a former Nebraska state auditor, settled here too as respected officials. By the 1890s the uniform that mattered was a cowman's regalia, worn by Americans looking forward rather than back.
Cottle County Courthouse
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Cottle County was created in 1876 and named for George Washington Cottle, who died at the Alamo, though settlers did not organize it until 1892, choosing a central townsite they named Paducah after one settler's Kentucky home. After two earlier courthouses, the county broke ground in 1929 on a striking four-story Art Deco building by the firm of Voelcker and Dixon. Its stepped masses, carved eagles, and figures of justice and liberty have drawn comparisons to an Egyptian temple.