Forrester Cemetery
Wellman, Terry County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Longtime residents recall the burial of a woman, probably Mrs. W. C. Lusk, on this site in 1922 or 1923. Other burials occurred here as well, in what was then an open field on J. A. Forrester's farm. Forrester and his wife Nealie sold a two-acre plot, which became known as Forrester Cemetery, to the Union Independent School District in 1925. The first recorded burial was that of Edna Mae Edwards, an infant who was born and died on April 23, 1926. The many unmarked and children's graves reflect the harsh conditions of farm life in the early part of the century. The last recorded burial was that of Melvin Hill in 1961. The cemetery is all that remains of the community. (1998)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On the flat, wind-swept farmland of Terry County, a woman's burial around 1922 in an open field on J. A. Forrester's farm began a small community cemetery. Deeded to the local school district in 1925, it received its first recorded burial the next year—an infant born and died on the same April day. The many unmarked and children's graves speak plainly to the harshness of early farm life on the South Plains, and the cemetery is now all that remains of the vanished community.
Why it matters
This modest burial ground testifies to the fragile, hard-won existence of the pioneer farm families who settled the arid Texas plains.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This cemetery sits on the flat, wind-scoured farmland of the South Plains, country that came late to settlement and offered its newcomers few comforts. In the early decades of the twentieth century, families arrived here to break sod and plant crops on land where water was scarce, shade was scarcer, and the horizon ran unbroken in every direction.
Terry County was young then, and the community around the Forrester farm was the kind of small, hopeful settlement that dotted the plains—clusters of farm families bound together by proximity, church, and school more than by any formal town. Their lives were governed by weather and harvest, and their margins for hardship were thin.
The first burials here, in what was still an open field around 1922 or 1923, speak to that isolation. When death came, people were laid to rest close to home, in the ground they were working, because that was what the country allowed.
People & events
Longtime residents remembered the earliest burial as that of a woman—probably Mrs. W. C. Lusk—laid to rest in an open field on J. A. Forrester's farm. Others followed, and in 1925 Forrester and his wife, Nealie, formalized what had grown up informally, selling a two-acre plot to the local Union Independent School District. From that quiet transaction, Forrester Cemetery took its name and its permanence.
The first officially recorded burial, in 1926, is one of the most poignant a visitor can encounter: Edna Mae Edwards, an infant who was born and died on the same April day. Around her lie many unmarked graves and many graves of children—a silent record of how fragile life could be on a hard-worked farm before modern medicine reached these distances.
Burials continued for decades, the last recorded one in 1961. By then the community that had gathered here was fading, its families moving on or dying out, until the cemetery itself became the last thing left standing for it.
Its place in the American story
The great American story of the early twentieth century includes millions of ordinary families who pushed onto marginal land, betting their labor against drought, distance, and hardship. Most of them left no monuments, no famous names, no headlines—only fields plowed and children raised and, sometimes, a small burial ground like this one.
Ghost communities are woven through the map of the American West. Towns and settlements rose where a railroad, a school, or simple hope brought people together, and many quietly vanished when the reasons for gathering disappeared. A cemetery that outlives its community is one of the most honest artifacts of that pattern.
Here the unmarked and children's graves carry a national truth in a local place: that the settlement of the plains was not only an epic of expansion but an intimate story of loss. This ground remembers people the wider record forgot.
If you visit
Come expecting quiet. The setting is the point—open sky, level land, and the same steady wind that shaped the lives of everyone buried here. Let the emptiness around the cemetery register, because that emptiness is what remains of the community.
Walk slowly and read what stones there are, but pay just as much attention to the spaces between them. The unmarked graves and the small graves of children are not gaps in the story; they are the story, testifying to how demanding life was for the farm families of the early plains.
This is a place to visit with a light footprint and a reflective mind rather than a checklist. If you're crossing this part of Texas, a stop here offers something a busier attraction can't: a plain, unvarnished encounter with the people who settled the land and the price they sometimes paid for it.
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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Related people
- · J. A. Forrester
- · Nealie Forrester
- · Edna Mae Edwards
Themes & tags
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