Reconstruction & Gilded Age

Gibtown Cemetery

Perrin, Jack County, Texas

Marker Inscription

This area was originally called New Hope City but was later renamed Gibtown in honor of Burdett Levi Gibbins, a local merchant. According to oral tradition, the first cemetery burial was that of a stranger. The first marked grave belongs to Mary C. Stults who died in 1876 at the age of 30, leaving behind a husband and six young daughters. The Methodist Church acquired the property in 1881. Burials include pioneer families, veterans, ministers, county officials, doctors and other influential community members. Tombstone detailing reflects fraternal associations including the woodmen of the world and masons. This historic cemetery reflects the history of this once thriving community.

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

Settled as New Hope City and later renamed Gibtown for merchant Burdett Levi Gibbins, this North Texas farming community grew up in the decades after the Civil War. Its cemetery, whose first marked grave belongs to Mary C. Stults (d. 1876), gathered the pioneer families, ministers, doctors, and county officials who built the town. Tombstones bearing Woodmen of the World and Masonic emblems record the fraternal life that bound the settlement together.

Why it matters

Rural cemeteries like Gibtown are the last surviving record of once-thriving frontier communities that faded from the map, preserving the names and social ties of the ordinary Texans who settled the land.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

Gibtown grew up in the generation after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction and Gilded Age decades when settlers pushed steadily into the North Texas cross-timbers and prairies. Jack County was frontier country then — land newly opened to farming families who came looking for a fresh start and a piece of ground they could call their own.

A community in those years began small and hopeful, often with a name to match. This one started as "New Hope City," the kind of aspirational title that settlers gave to a place they meant to make permanent. Around a store, a church, and a school, a scattering of farm families became a town, bound together by shared work, worship, and the ordinary business of helping one another survive.

Death came early and often on the frontier, and so, almost as soon as there was a community, there was a burying ground. A cemetery was among the first institutions any settlement created, because it answered a need that could not wait — and because caring for the dead was one of the deepest expressions of a community's sense of itself.

People & events

The town took its lasting name from Burdett Levi Gibbins, a local merchant, and "Gibtown" honored the kind of man who anchored a frontier settlement: the storekeeper whose counter was the center of trade, news, and daily contact for miles around. That a community would rename itself for its merchant tells you how central such a figure was to frontier life.

Oral tradition holds that the very first burial in the cemetery was that of a stranger — a person whose name has not come down to us, laid to rest by a community that took him in even in death. It is a small, human detail that says a great deal about the code of the frontier, where you did right by whoever fell among you.

The first marked grave belongs to Mary C. Stults, who died in 1876 at the age of thirty, leaving a husband and six young daughters. Behind that single stone lies an entire family's grief and a household suddenly remade. In 1881 the Methodist Church acquired the cemetery grounds, and over the following decades it gathered in the people who built the town — pioneer families, veterans, ministers, county officials, and doctors, the whole cross-section of a working community.

Its place in the American story

Gibtown belongs to one of the quietest but most important categories of American historic site: the rural cemetery that outlived its town. Across the country, thousands of once-thriving settlements have faded from the map, their stores gone, their schools closed, their names half-forgotten — and again and again it is the graveyard that remains as the last standing record of who lived and died there.

These burying grounds preserve more than names and dates. The stones at Gibtown carry the emblems of fraternal orders — the Woodmen of the World and the Masons — and those symbols open a window onto how ordinary Americans organized their social lives. In an age before government safety nets, fraternal lodges offered fellowship, ritual, and crucially, help for widows and orphans; the Woodmen of the World were especially known for the distinctive grave markers they provided their members.

Taken together, the graves record the full anatomy of a frontier community — the merchant it was named for, the mothers who died young, the veterans, the ministers, the doctors, the officials. To read the cemetery is to read the town, and through it to understand the countless small communities whose labor settled rural America and whose memory survives chiefly in the ground they consecrated.

If you visit

Approach Gibtown Cemetery the way you would any historic burying ground — quietly, and with respect for the families who still tend it and the descendants who still visit. This is a place to walk slowly and read carefully, because the stones themselves are the archive.

Look for the oldest markers, and for Mary C. Stults's 1876 grave, the first to be marked here; standing before it, you can feel the weight of a young mother's death and the six daughters she left behind. Then look for the fraternal emblems the marker mentions — the tree-stump and log designs of the Woodmen of the World, and the square and compass of the Masons — and notice how much a community's values are carved right into its stone.

Set against the surrounding North Texas farmland near Perrin, the cemetery reads as a green island of memory in country that has otherwise moved on. It makes a thoughtful stop on a back-roads drive through Jack County, a reminder that the map is full of places that were once full of life. Take nothing, disturb nothing, and let the names do what they were carved to do — keep a vanished town from being entirely forgotten.

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

· Burdett Levi Gibbins
· Mary C. Stults

Themes & tags

Westward ExpansionFrontier HistoryMemorial

Nearby & related markers

Joplin Fairview Cemetery

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This cemetery carries the memory of Joplin, a small Jack County farming community named for settler Johnny Joplin, and of its school, Fairview. The earliest marked grave dates to 1881, and Joplin himself was buried here in 1899. When the local school district consolidated with Jacksboro in 1947, proceeds from selling the school building endowed the cemetery association that still cares for the grounds.

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Samuel G. Evetts

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A Tennessee native, Samuel G. Evetts came to Texas in the 1830s and was wounded at the Siege of Bexar in December 1835, an early clash of the Texas Revolution. He later lived in several counties, earning land grants for his Republic of Texas military service and a state pension in 1870, before moving to Wise County, where he died in 1884. Thrice married and father of eleven, he saw his name spelled variously as Evetts and Evitts over the years.

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Poolville United Methodist Church

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