Evergreen Cemetery
Gustine, Comanche County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The community of Evergreen began to take shape in the late 1860s. A small strip of land was donated for a community cemetery in 1885 when Mrs. W. F. Hampton was the first recorded person to be interred on this site. A post office was established in 1888 with Samuel Gustine as postmaster, and the town name was officially changed to Gustine. The community grew steadily. Those interred here include prominent members of early Evergreen and surrounding communities such as the Boyd family, landowners, farmers and schoolteachers who operated a cotton gin and blacksmith shop. The Bolton family farmed, hauled freight and mail and operated a barber shop for generations. The Couch and Johnston families hailed from Georgia and Mississippi and were farmers and landowners. The Pettit family of Alabama were bankers, farmers and cattlemen. A road between the Comanche and Gentry Mill communities opened in 1895; Gustine businesses moved to be closer to the main path, but the cemetery remained 3/4 mile to the north. A land donation in 1897 and a purchase of additional acreage in 1918 allowed the cemetery to expand to meet the road. In 1999 there were about 630 burials on 3.284 acres in Evergreen Cemetery. These burials included two Confederate army veterans as well as veterans of World War I and World War II. Though all that remained of the old Evergreen community was a hand-dug well on private property south of the cemetery, the burial ground continued to serve the nearby communities of Pettit, Gustine and Energy. (1999)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The community of Evergreen took shape in the late 1860s, and this burial ground was set aside in 1885 when Mrs. W.F. Hampton became the first person interred here. When a post office opened in 1888 under Samuel Gustine, the town took his name. The cemetery holds generations of farming, freighting, and merchant families—the Boyds, Boltons, Couches, and others—along with Confederate and World War veterans, enduring even after the old Evergreen settlement itself faded away.
Why it matters
It preserves the memory of a Central Texas farming community that has all but vanished, a quiet record of the pioneer families who built rural America.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the years just after the Civil War, the rolling prairies of Central Texas drew families looking for a fresh start and cheap land. The community that took shape here in the late 1860s, first known as Evergreen, belonged to that wave of settlement pushing westward into farming and ranching country. These were not gold-rush boomtowns; they were quieter places built on cotton, cattle, and the slow accumulation of a life on the land.
Comanche County in this era was frontier in the truest sense — a landscape where a community's institutions had to be built from scratch, one by one. A strip of donated land became a cemetery in 1885. A post office followed in 1888, and with it came a new name, Gustine, honoring the postmaster Samuel Gustine. That sequence — burial ground first, then post office, then a settled town identity — captures how rural America organized itself in the Gilded Age.
The families who gathered here came from across the older South — Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama — carrying their skills and their surnames into new soil. They farmed, they ran a cotton gin and a blacksmith shop, they hauled freight and mail, they cut hair and kept the books of a young community. It was ordinary work, and it was exactly the work that turned open prairie into a place with a name.
People & events
Walk this ground and you are among the families who made a settlement out of nothing. Mrs. W. F. Hampton was the first person recorded as buried here, in 1885, and around her the cemetery grew into a register of the community's life. The names on the stones are a directory of rural enterprise.
There are the Boyds, landowners, farmers, and schoolteachers who ran a cotton gin and a blacksmith shop — the kind of family whose businesses were the practical heart of a farming town. There are the Boltons, who farmed and hauled freight and mail and kept a barber shop going for generations, a single family threading through decades of local history. The Couches and Johnstons had come from Georgia and Mississippi to farm and hold land; the Pettits had come from Alabama and became bankers, farmers, and cattlemen. Together they are a cross-section of how a Central Texas community actually functioned.
The most human detail is how the town itself moved and the cemetery stayed. When a new road opened in 1895 between the Comanche and Gentry Mill communities, Gustine's businesses picked up and relocated to be nearer the main path — but the burial ground remained where it had always been, three-quarters of a mile to the north. Later land added in 1897 and 1918 let the cemetery stretch back toward the road, as if the community were slowly reaching to rejoin its dead.
Its place in the American story
Evergreen Cemetery is a small place that tells one of the largest stories in American history: the settling — and the un-settling — of the rural landscape. For every town that grew into a city, countless others rose, flourished modestly, and then quietly emptied out. The old Evergreen community left behind almost nothing but a hand-dug well on private land, yet its cemetery endured, still serving the neighboring communities long after the settlement itself had faded.
The burials gathered here also fold the nation's larger conflicts into a single acre of Texas. Two Confederate veterans lie among those interred, along with veterans of both World Wars — a span from the 1860s to the mid-twentieth century, all resting in the same modest ground. A local cemetery becomes, in that way, a map of American history in miniature.
This is the significance of a vanished town: not that anything world-changing happened here, but that the ordinary lives of farmers, teachers, freighters, and merchants are the real fabric of the country. When we can still read their names, we can still see how America was actually built, family by family, on land that has since gone quiet.
If you visit
A country cemetery like this one is a place to slow down. If you visit, let your eye move across the surnames — Hampton, Boyd, Bolton, Couch, Johnston, Pettit — and remember that each one carried a trade: the gin, the smithy, the barber shop, the freight wagon, the bank ledger. You are reading a community's occupational directory carved in stone.
Look for the range of dates and the veterans among them. The presence of Confederate soldiers alongside men who served in the World Wars tells you this ground held a community across a very long span of American history. There is a particular stillness to a burial place that outlived the town it served, and that stillness is part of what you come here to feel.
Think of it as a quiet anchor for a back-roads drive through Central Texas. Around you the prairie looks much as it did when these families arrived after the Civil War, and the vanished settlement of Evergreen — reduced now to a single old well somewhere to the south — is a reminder of how many such places dot this landscape. Come without a rush, read the names aloud, and you give this pioneer community exactly the remembrance it was meant to have.
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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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Gustine
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Settlers reached this part of Comanche County in the 1870s, some of them working land granted for Republic of Texas military service, and first gathered in a settlement called Evergreen. When a new road opened between Comanche and Hamilton in the 1880s, the whole town simply picked up and moved to sit astride the route, taking the name Gustine after its first postmaster in 1888. The arrival of the Cotton Belt Railway in 1910 brought a boom of gins, businesses, and utilities; when the line closed in the 1930s, State Highway 36 took over its right-of-way and kept the town on the map.
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