George Washington Gentry

Dublin, TX

On the banks of Cottonwood Creek just outside Dublin lies a cemetery born of a cotton-farming settlement founded in 1854 by Alexander H. and Sarah Holland Dobkins. James C. Bellamy donated land in 1857 for a school and public burial ground, and the graveyard's story is threaded with the dangers of the frontier—two people killed in a Comanche attack were reburied here decades later when railroad work forced the move. Shaded by post oak and pecan, it holds veterans of every war from the Civil War through Vietnam. The cemetery and the Cottonwood Baptist Church are all that remain of the community.

Desdemona vicinity, TX

This burial ground began when pioneer William Mansker set aside part of his land for a school and community cemetery in the mid-19th century, serving Anglo settlers drawn together by the hardships of frontier Texas. Family clusters like the four Bell children who died in 1877, graves marked only by fieldstones, and the interment of veterans of several wars all testify to the precarious lives of those who built the Alameda community.

Comanche, TX

In 1854, when a boy named Martin V. Fleming camped in this grove with his father, he ducked behind this very oak to escape a raiding party riding through the trees. Decades later, as paving crews moved to cut the tree down, the grown "Uncle Mart" faced them off with his gun and saved it. The Fleming Oak still stands as a living witness to Comanche County's frontier days.

Comanche, TX

In May 1861, under a bright moon, raiders swept through Comanche and made off with nearly all the town's horses — one of the boldest such raids in Texas history, foiled from total surprise only by a braying mule that woke the townsfolk. The citizens spent the night molding bullets, and at dawn Captain James Cunningham led seventeen men and boys with hounds in pursuit. The posse overtook the raiders on Brown's Creek some thirty-six miles away in a close, deadly fight.