Center City Cemetery
Star, Mills County, Texas
Marker Inscription
(One half-mile southwest) The Center City Cemetery began with the burials in 1874 of Julia M. Bishop and M.E. Hughes, the adult and infant daughters of W.C. and Caroline Hughes, early settlers of this area. Judge L.E. Patterson purchased 2.5 acres containing the Hughes burials in 1905 for use as a community graveyard. Concern for its upkeep prompted the establishment of a cemetery committee in 1951. A $1000 gift to the cemetery in J.M. Dalton's will in 1967 helped establish a maintenance fund. The more than 500 burials recorded here include those of many of this area's earliest settlers. (1993)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Center City Cemetery began in 1874 with the burials of a settler's adult and infant daughters, a poignant marker of how fragile frontier life could be in the ranching country of central Texas. In 1905 a local judge bought the ground to serve as a community graveyard, and by the mid-20th century neighbors had organized a committee and endowed a maintenance fund to keep it up. More than 500 graves here hold many of the area's earliest settlers.
Why it matters
Rural cemeteries like this one are ground-level archives of American settlement, preserving the names and family stories of the ordinary people who built a community out of open country.
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Related people
- · Julia M. Bishop
- · M.E. Hughes
- · W.C. Hughes
- · Caroline Hughes
- · Judge L.E. Patterson
- · J.M. Dalton
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Center City Community
Star, TX
Settled in 1854 by the Jenkins and Morris families, this Mills County community was first called "Hughes Store" for the couple who opened a shop here in the 1870s. Hopeful founders platted a townsite in 1876 and dreamed of the railroad and the county seat, gathering beneath an ancient live oak long held by tradition to mark the geographic center of Texas. Renamed Center City, the town bustled with stores until the railroad passed it by in 1885; its post office lingered only until 1920.
Center City Baptist Church
Star, TX
As settlers pushed into the rolling country of central Texas after the Civil War, a former blacksmith and Texas Revolution veteran, Noah Turner Byars, gathered a congregation here in 1875 and helped knit it into a new association of frontier Baptist churches. Known first for nearby Bennett Creek, it took the Center City name in a 1901 deed, held summer revivals under a brush arbor into the 1940s, and rebuilt after a 1946 windstorm flattened the frame sanctuary. For generations it doubled as a shared community space and a training ground for deacons and ministers who went on to larger pulpits.
Center City United Methodist Church
Star, TX
In the young settlement of Center City—first known as Hughes Store—a circuit-riding preacher brought Methodism to the area in the early 1870s, and charter members organized a church in 1878. The congregation first gathered in the Masonic lodge before building its own home in 1901, then a new building in 1952. Through mission work and youth ministry, it has remained a spiritual anchor of this small central Texas community.
Caradan Cemetery
Goldthwaite vicinity, TX
After the Civil War, families settled the Mills County area first called Lookout, and in 1889 A. F. Smith deeded two acres for a public school. When the infant son of the Nixon family died that year, he was buried on the school land, seeding a cemetery that remained when the school later burned and moved. More than 150 graves include veterans from the Civil War through both World Wars, and the burial ground endures as one of the few remnants of the vanished town of Caradan.