Center Cemetery
Twitty, Wheeler County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1906, D. M. Pollard bought the south half of section 30, block A-7 of the H&GN survey and lived in a dugout. Near his homesite, the center school opened in 1909. The school also hosted church services, and the Center Cemetery was dedicated on the adjoining property to the west. The oldest marked grave, for B. F. Matthews, dates from March 1909. A survey recorded 34 marked graves with 13 marked unknown. There are indications of additional unmarked graves. Elisha Powell (Civil War) and Alvin David Fellingham (World War II) are two known military veterans interred here. Descendants of D. M. Pollard still own land around the cemetery, which reflects hardships faced by settlers of the Texas Panhandle. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2011
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1906, D. M. Pollard bought Panhandle land and lived in a dugout, and near his home the Center School opened in 1909, doubling as a place of worship. The Center Cemetery was dedicated just to the west, its oldest marked grave dating to March 1909, with 34 marked graves and signs of many unmarked ones. Among those interred are a Civil War veteran and a World War II veteran, and Pollard's descendants still own the surrounding land.
Why it matters
This small burial ground reflects the isolation and hardship faced by the pioneers who settled the wind-swept Texas Panhandle in the early 20th century.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Texas Panhandle in the early 1900s was one of the last corners of the American frontier to be settled. This is high, flat, wind-scoured country, where the horizon runs unbroken in every direction and weather arrives with nothing to slow it down. When D. M. Pollard bought his half-section of land in 1906, he was staking a claim in a land that offered space in abundance and comfort almost not at all.
His first home was a dugout, a shelter carved partly into the earth. That single detail tells you nearly everything about life here. Timber was scarce, money scarcer, and the ground itself became the building material of necessity. Families lived close to the soil in the most literal sense, sheltering below the reach of the relentless wind.
This was the Progressive era back east, a time of growing cities and new machinery, but on the Panhandle the older rhythms of pioneer survival still held. Neighbors were few and far between, and the institutions most communities take for granted, a school, a church, a burial ground, had to be built from scratch by the settlers themselves.
People & events
Everything here radiates out from one homestead. Near Pollard's dugout, the Center School opened in 1909, and like so many frontier schoolhouses it did double duty, serving as a place of worship as well as learning. On the adjoining property to the west, the community set aside ground for a cemetery.
The cemetery's story can be read in its stones. The oldest marked grave belongs to B. F. Matthews and dates to March 1909, the very year the school opened. A survey counted 34 marked graves, 13 of them for people whose names are lost, and there are signs of still more graves that were never marked at all. Each of those blanks is a life the frontier claimed without leaving a record.
Among the known dead are two military veterans whose lives bracketed generations of American conflict: Elisha Powell, who served in the Civil War, and Alvin David Fellingham, who served in World War II. And the Pollard family never really left. Their descendants still own the land around the cemetery, a thread of continuity stretching back to that first dugout.
Its place in the American story
Center Cemetery is a small, honest monument to the very end of the westward expansion that shaped the nation. The Panhandle was among the final regions to be broken to the plow, and the hardships written into this ground, the dugout home, the unmarked graves, the schoolhouse that had to serve as a church, are the authentic texture of that closing chapter.
The presence of a Civil War veteran and a World War II veteran in the same modest plot quietly links this remote spot to the whole span of American history. People who had lived through the nation's defining struggles came to rest here, on land their neighbors had claimed only a generation or two before.
That the cemetery earned recognition as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2011 reflects a larger truth: the places where ordinary settlers buried their dead are as much a part of the national story as any battlefield or capital. They record not the famous, but the resolve of the families who made the emptiest country livable.
If you visit
Come to a place like this ready for quiet. Center Cemetery is not a grand destination but a small, exposed burial ground on the Panhandle plains, and its power lies in that plainness. The wind you feel is the same force these settlers reckoned with every single day.
Walk the rows slowly and read the stones. Look for the oldest marked grave from 1909, and let the blanks speak too, the unnamed markers and the ground where graves went unmarked entirely. Each one stands for a person whose story survives only as a name, or not even that.
Think of the whole landscape as the exhibit. The school that once stood nearby, the dugout homesite, the family that still holds this land, all of it fits together into a picture of frontier endurance. If you are traveling the wide, lonely roads of the eastern Panhandle, a stop here is a chance to feel the real scale of what it took to settle this country's last open spaces.
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
- · D. M. Pollard
Themes & tags
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