Eureka Cemetery
Blanket vicinity, Brown County, Texas
Marker Inscription
According to local tradition the settlers who established the town of Blanket (2 miles east) about 1870 named it for a Native American blanket they found on the banks of a nearby creek. The earliest marked grave in this cemetery, which served the rural community of Blanket, is that of Luperda Cox who died in 1876. The cemetery contains many of the area's earliest settlers and their descendants, including several teachers of the former Eureka School which was located just across the road from this site. The cemetery remains active and continues to serve the area. (1995)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Local tradition holds that the settlers who founded nearby Blanket around 1870 named the town for a Native American blanket found on a creek bank. This cemetery served that rural community, its earliest marked grave belonging to Luperda Cox, who died in 1876. Among those buried here are many of the area's first settlers and several teachers from the vanished Eureka School that once stood across the road.
Why it matters
Eureka Cemetery preserves the memory of a frontier farming community, from its founding families to the country teachers who educated its children.
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Related people
- · Luperda Cox
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Blanket
Blanket, TX
Local tradition says Blanket Creek got its name in 1852, when surveyors found a band of Tonkawa hunters drying their rain-soaked blankets on the sumac bushes. Permanent settlement followed in the 1870s around a general store and post office, and Blanket became a stop on the Brownwood-to-Fort Worth stagecoach line before the Fort Worth and Rio Grande Railway arrived in 1891 and prompted a whole new townsite. Sustained by cotton gins and a doctor who served for more than sixty years, the town incorporated in 1912 and has endured droughts and downturns ever since.
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.
Heflin Cemetery
Brownwood vicinity, TX
William W. and Pency Heflin settled here in 1875, and local tradition holds that the first burial was a child who died in 1876 after eating wild berries while his family camped on the property. The earliest marked grave, that of Robert Bonine, also dates to 1876, and a deed confirming the Heflins' donation of four acres was recorded in 1928. Among those resting here are many of the area's pioneer settlers and veterans of wars from the Civil War through World War II.
Jenkins Springs Cemetery
Brownwood, TX
Richardson Jenkins, one of Brown County's earliest pioneers, settled a farm northeast of Brownwood whose spring took his name and later served the local school and church. The county's earliest known graves here belong to four army surveyors ambushed and killed nearby, and Jenkins himself, who died in 1867, has the first marked grave; veterans from the Civil War through Vietnam also rest in the cemetery.