Center Point Cemetery

🏛️The era

Montague County sits in North Texas along the Red River, and in the years after the Civil War it was frontier country. Settlers who came to farm and ranch here faced a hard life, with long distances to markets, uncertain weather, and, in the earlier years, conflict with the Comanche and Kiowa peoples, whose homelands and hunting grounds lay across this region.

By the 1870s and 1880s the county was filling in. Small rural communities grew up around churches, schools and burial grounds, often on the same piece of land. A single hilltop could serve as a place to worship on Sunday, to learn during the week, and to bury loved ones.

Across the nation, it was an era of westward settlement and of a country rebuilding after civil war. Veterans of that war, from both sides, moved west in large numbers to start over. Many of them spent their final years, and are buried, in quiet country cemeteries like this one.

👥People & events

The cemetery was first known as Fairview Graveyard, a name that suggests the view from its hilltop. The marker says burials began in the late 1800s, and the same hill was home to a Baptist church and a school. It was the kind of place where the whole community gathered, for worship, for lessons, for celebrations and for grief.

The Armstrong and Dean families deeded the land for the cemetery in 1893. But burials here came earlier. The oldest marked grave belongs to Xanthippa Rountree, a three-year-old who died in 1875. Her unusual name echoes Xanthippe, the wife of the Greek philosopher Socrates, and is a small reminder of how families of the era sometimes reached for classical names.

The marker is careful to note that her grave may not truly be the first. Many graves here are unmarked, and some tombstones have worn past reading, so older burials may lie beneath the grass with no names left to tell. That uncertainty is honest, and it is common in pioneer cemeteries where families could not always afford carved stones.

Pioneer settlers, young children and Civil War veterans rest here. The church building itself was torn down in 1954, but the cemetery remains, and the marker was placed in 1996.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Country cemeteries like Center Point are some of the most direct records of how ordinary Americans settled the West. Their stones, and their silences, document families who came with little, built communities from scratch and often lost children to illnesses that are now easily prevented. A three-year-old's grave as the earliest marked burial tells that story without needing a single extra word.

The presence of Civil War veterans links this hilltop to the largest conflict in American history. After the war, many former soldiers looked west for land and a fresh start, and North Texas drew many of them. Their graves scattered across rural cemeteries show how the war's generation shaped the frontier.

The pattern of church, school and graveyard on one site was once common across rural America. Many such communities faded as roads, consolidation and towns drew people away, and often the cemetery is the last piece left. Center Point preserves that pattern even after the church and school are gone.

🧭If you visit

Center Point Cemetery is a place for quiet reflection. As you walk the hilltop, try to imagine it as it once was, with a church and a schoolhouse standing alongside the graves and families arriving by wagon on a Sunday morning. The church came down in 1954, but the setting still carries the feel of a gathering place.

Look closely at the stones. Some will be clear, some worn smooth, and some spots may have no marker at all. Look for small graves, which tell the hard truth of frontier childhood, and for any veterans' markers. Please walk gently, stay on paths where they exist, and treat the graves with care.

The cemetery fits well into a drive through Montague County and the Saint Jo area, where rolling hills and ranch land still echo the frontier past. It is a good stop for anyone tracing pioneer family roots, or simply for travelers who want to slow down and remember the people who settled this corner of Texas.