Garza County

Wilson, TX

This cemetery grew alongside the farming community of Wilson, its land assembled after 1906 by promoter William G. Green and his cousin Lonnie Lumsden, who unlike the absentee Green settled here and spent his life boosting the town. The rows of graves read like a roster of the plains community: pioneer families, a Civil War veteran, World War II soldiers, and a mix of German American and Hispanic surnames that testify to who broke this ground. A cemetery association has cared for the site since 1930.

Crosbyton, TX

This state monument honors Henry Clay Smith — "Uncle Hank" — a German-born pioneer who, with his wife Elizabeth, built the famed Rock House in 1877 and became a byword for frontier hospitality on the Texas Plains. The couple settled at Old Emma above the Cap Rock, an escarpment marking the edge of the high plains, and the State of Texas raised this memorial to them in 1936. They lie buried near the home that made their name.

Lorenzo, TX

In 1878 Paris Cox, an Indiana Quaker, crossed the Llano Estacado with buffalo hunters and saw a place for a colony; he went home to advertise cheap farmland and drew settlers to the high plains. The community—first called Maryetta for his wife, then renamed Estacado—became the first county seat of Crosby County and even built a courthouse before the seat moved away in the 1890s. This cemetery holds Cox and many of the pioneers who first broke the sod of the Staked Plains.

Lorenzo, TX

In 1879 a colony of English Quakers led by Isaac Paris Cox settled the high plains of West Texas, founding a town first called Marietta for Cox's wife Mary. Renamed Estacado when Crosby County was organized in 1886, the idealistic religious colony struggled against the harsh, isolated conditions of the Llano Estacado and had disintegrated by 1893, with remaining families relocating to Galveston County by 1895.