Fairmont Cemetery
Follett, Lipscomb County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This burial ground serves citizens near the northern tip of Texas at a site closer to capitals of six other states than it is to Austin. In 1901, area settlers established Ivanhoe, OK., eight miles to the north. That town moved two miles in 1909 to a site on the Beaver Valley and Northwestern Railway, changing its name to South Ivanhoe and leaving behind only the Methodist church building. Eight years later, citizens moved again, this time across the state line to a spot on the North Texas and Santa Fe Railway built from Shattuck, OK. to Spearman, TX. Beginning in December 1917, all the buildings of South Ivanhoe, including a hotel and bank, were put on skids and dragged to the new townsite. The settlement, named for railroad engineer Horace Follett, got its post office in 1918. Dr. Charles and Ora White owned land in South Ivanhoe and at this site, deeding land for Fairmont Cemetery in 1910, even before the establishment of Follett. The first burial was the reinterment of Myra Jones, a mother of six, who was killed by lightning in 1904 and originally buried at the Gigger Ranch. Her widowed husband, Michael "Uncle Mac" Jones, was the cemetery's first caretaker. In the 1920s, Frederick Harhausen and his two sons hauled more than 200 cedar trees from near Vici, OK. (40 mi. SE), planting them on the perimeter and in a circle in the center of the cemetery. The outlining trees remain among the cemetery's more distinctive landscape features. Those buried here include the children of Mexican railroad workers who died during the influenza epidemic of 1918. More than one hundred military veterans, three of whom were killed in action in World War II, are also interred here. The Fairmont Cemetery Association, founded in 1909, cares for the cemetery. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2006
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
At the far northern tip of Texas—closer to six other state capitals than to Austin—Fairmont Cemetery outlasted the towns that made it. Settlers founded Ivanhoe in Oklahoma in 1901, moved it to the railroad as South Ivanhoe, then in 1917 dragged its buildings on skids across the state line to a new Santa Fe stop named Follett. The cemetery, deeded in 1910, holds its first burial the reinterred body of a mother of six killed by lightning, alongside the children of Mexican railroad workers lost to the 1918 influenza epidemic and more than a hundred military veterans.
Why it matters
Fairmont preserves the human cost of the great plains land rush—towns built on wheels, immigrant labor, epidemic disease—at the very edge of Texas.
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Related people
- · Horace Follett
- · Myra Jones
- · Michael "Uncle Mac" Jones
Related events
- · 1918 influenza epidemic
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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