Gruver Cemetery
Gruver, Hansford County, Texas
Marker Inscription
GRUVER CEMETERY IN 1907, JOSEPH HEZKIAH GRUVER (1863-1962), HIS WIFE, ADDIE REED GRUVER, AND THEIR SON, LAWRENCE, MOVED FROM MISSOURI AND SETTLED IN THIS AREA. A POST OFFICE WAS ESTABLISHED IN 1927 AND SOON BUSINESSES FOLLOWED. IN 1929, AT THE REQUEST OF CLARENCE WINDER, MR. J.B. DULIN DONATED TEN ACRES OF LAND TO BE KNOWN AS GRUVER MEMORIAL PARK, NOW GRUVER CEMETERY. ADDITIONAL ACREAGE WAS ADDED BY CECIL AND MARGARET RALSTON IN 1970. ON MARCH 9, 1929, WILLIE A. WINDER, CLARENCE’S MOTHER, BECAME THE FIRST PERSON BURIED IN THE CEMETERY. THE LANDSCAPE OF THE CEMETERY IS TRADITIONAL WITH JUNIPER TREES SURROUNDING GRANITE AND MARBLE HEADSTONES THAT DOCUMENT THE HISTORY OF THE GRUVER AREA.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1907, Joseph Hezkiah Gruver moved his family from Missouri to settle this stretch of the Texas Panhandle, and the town that grew around them took his name. A post office arrived in 1927 and businesses followed; two years later J.B. Dulin donated ten acres for what became Gruver Cemetery. The first burial, in March 1929, was Willie A. Winder, and the granite and marble headstones beneath the junipers now chronicle the community's history.
Why it matters
The cemetery records the settlement of the high plains Panhandle in the early twentieth century, one of the last frontiers of American farm settlement.
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Related people
- · Joseph Hezkiah Gruver
- · Willie A. Winder
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Old Farwell
Gruver, TX
Established in 1886, Old Farwell was meant to be the seat of Hansford County but lost the election to a rival town that has itself since vanished. It took its name from John V. Farwell and his family, Chicago department-store magnates who received three million acres, the vast XIT Ranch spread across ten Panhandle counties, as payment for building the Texas State Capitol. All that survives here are stones from the casing of a 200-foot well, dug by hand to bring water to a town now gone.
Hansford Cemetery
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This was the first burial ground set aside in Hansford County, its earliest grave that of Mrs. Alfie P. Magee, wife of the first sheriff, in 1890. Among those interred are the Cator brothers, founders of the Zulu Stockade, and the Wright brothers, early ranchers of the Texas Panhandle. It served as the county's only official cemetery until 1928 and remains in use today.
Site of Cator Buffalo Camp
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Brothers James and Bob Cator established this camp in 1872 while hunting buffalo on the Texas Panhandle plains. Over the next few years the site grew into a trading post known as Zulu, a small outpost of commerce in a raw and open country. It stands as a marker of the brief, intense era of the commercial buffalo hunt.
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In 1873 the English-born hunters Jim and Bob Cator wintered a buffalo camp on the plains above the Canadian River, in what became the first permanent settlement of the Texas Panhandle. By 1875 it had grown into a two-room trading post stocked with groceries and ammunition—the first north of the Canadian—wryly named Zulu for the African warriors then in the news. As a depot on the Fort Dodge–Fort Bascom military road it served hunters, soldiers, and freighters until it was finally abandoned in 1912.