Duren Cemetery
Mullin, Mills County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1876, Philip David Duren bought 390.5 acres here and built a log home. He later brought his family, including newborn daughter Willie Lee, from Houston county to their new home. Willie Lee died in Sep. 1878 and was the first burial here. In 1893, Duren deeded the surrounding five acres “for school purposes;” Duren school operated until 1947 and Pompey Mountain Church still serves the area. In 1912, Duren reaffirmed public use of the site in a new deed which stipulated free burial plots and a church open to different denominations. Historic cemetery features include metal and stone gates, curbing, interior fencing, and limestone, marble and granite gravestones. Duren cemetery now numbers several hundred burials.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Philip David Duren bought 390 acres here in 1876 and raised a log home, bringing his family from Houston County. His infant daughter Willie Lee, buried in 1878, was the first laid to rest in what became the community cemetery. Duren deeded land for a school that ran until 1947 and, in 1912, guaranteed free burial plots and a church open to all denominations; Pompey Mountain Church still serves the area.
Why it matters
The site shows how a single settler family seeded the institutions — home, school, church, and cemetery — that bound together a Central Texas farming community.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Philip David Duren
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Chesser Valley Community
Mullin, TX
Chesser Valley took its name from John Dan Chesser, a Missouri native who came to Texas in 1854 and, after serving in the Texas State Troops during the Civil War, homesteaded 160 acres here with his wife Elizabeth. Their expanding log home doubled as church, hospital, and travelers' hotel, and the valley became a gathering place for camp meetings where families came by wagon to worship under a brush tabernacle. A one-teacher school opened in 1868, but after the Chesser house burned in 1926 the little community all but vanished.
Mount Olive Primitive Baptist Church and Cemetery
Goldthwaite, TX
Organized in 1899 with nineteen charter members in the tiny community of North Bennett, this Primitive Baptist congregation bought fifteen acres for a meetinghouse and cemetery and, like many rural Texas churches, doubled its building as a schoolhouse shared among denominations. The community thinned during World War II and the congregation dwindled, but its cemetery still holds early settlers and military veterans and continues to serve the surrounding countryside.
Antioch Cemetery
Blanket, TX
Antioch Cemetery grew out of a late-19th-century farming community in Brown County, on land the Grazier family deeded to the county in 1880 for schooling and burials. A combined church-and-school building nearby made the site a hub of frontier community life before the district eventually folded into the Blanket schools. Its earliest marked graves date to 1881, and among those interred are Civil War veterans and other pioneers who built the settlement.
Big Eye Cemetery
Comanche, TX
In 1869, Mississippi transplant George William Montgomery bought 480 acres in Comanche County, where he built a log building that served at once as church, school, and gathering place — a school known as "Big Eye," where Montgomery taught, preached, and practiced medicine. The nearby Big Eye Cemetery was established in 1872 and holds five marked graves, a row of unknown crypts, and roughly sixty unmarked burials, including one Civil War veteran. The last known burial came in 1894, and the cemetery is now all that remains of the vanished community.