Hicks Cemetery
Jacksboro, Jack County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Settlers in the 1880s established a community here known as Hicks (also spelled Hix), named for a pioneer family. Cooper School served the area beginning in 1885, with J.F. Middlebrooks, P. Paxton and J.H. Gregory as first trustees. George Washington and Levicia (Morton) Jamison bought land from the William Ratliff Survey at this site in 1889 and buried their infant daughter Anna here in September 1893. The surrounding land developed as a burial ground for the original settler families of the Hicks community. The Cooper School was on adjacent land until closing in 1941. Today, shaded by cedar and live oak trees, the cemetery contains more than 40 marked graves and several that are unmarked. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2006
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Settlers in the 1880s founded a community here called Hicks, named for a pioneer family, served by the Cooper School beginning in 1885. In 1889 George Washington and Levicia Jamison bought land at this site and buried their infant daughter Anna here in 1893, and the surrounding ground grew into a burial place for the area's founding families. Shaded by cedar and live oak, the cemetery today holds more than forty marked graves and several unmarked ones.
Why it matters
Small rural cemeteries like this one are often all that remain of the pioneer communities that once dotted the North Texas frontier.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the 1880s the North Texas frontier was opening in earnest. Jack County, out where the rolling prairie meets the cross timbers, had been hard country in the decades before, but as the era of open conflict receded, settler families moved in to farm, ranch, and build small communities from scratch.
These were the ordinary pioneers of the late nineteenth century, and their needs were simple and immediate: land to work, a school for the children, and eventually a place to bury their dead. A community in that era often took shape around exactly those institutions, clustering near a family homestead and taking its name from one of the first families to arrive.
That is the story of the little settlement that grew up here, known as Hicks — or sometimes Hix — after a pioneer family. It was one of countless such communities that once dotted the North Texas map, each a small world of neighbors, chores, and shared hardship on land that was still being tamed.
People & events
The community's institutions came first. Cooper School began serving the area in 1885, with J.F. Middlebrooks, P. Paxton and J.H. Gregory as its first trustees — the kind of local men who took responsibility for seeing that the children of a frontier settlement would learn to read and cipher.
The cemetery itself is tied to the Jamison family. In 1889 George Washington Jamison and his wife Levicia, whose maiden name was Morton, bought land here from the William Ratliff Survey. Their arrival would soon be marked by sorrow: in September 1893 they buried their infant daughter, Anna, in this ground. That small grave is among the cemetery's earliest, a reminder of how fragile life was on the frontier, and how often it was the youngest who were lost first.
From that beginning the surrounding land grew into a burial place for the original settler families of the Hicks community. The Cooper School stood on adjacent land until it finally closed in 1941, its long run mirroring the life of the community it served. Today the cemetery holds more than forty marked graves and several more that time has left unmarked.
Its place in the American story
The settlement of the American West was not only the work of famous names and dramatic events. It was mostly the work of families like the Jamisons — people who bought a piece of ground, raised a school, worked the land, and buried their children in the soil they hoped to make home. Their story is the quiet foundation beneath the louder legends of the frontier.
Cemeteries like this one are among the most honest records we have of that experience. The dates on the stones trace the arc of a community's life, and a grave like little Anna Jamison's speaks plainly to the cost of settling a hard land. Where the town itself has faded, the burial ground endures.
That is why a place this modest carries real weight. Across rural America, small cemeteries are often the only surviving trace of communities that once had schools, families, and futures. They preserve, better than any textbook, the truth that the frontier was settled one family and one homestead at a time.
If you visit
Come expecting stillness, and let the setting work on you. Shaded by cedar and live oak, the cemetery has a sheltered, timeworn feel, and the trees themselves are part of the experience — a canopy that has watched over these graves for generations.
Walk slowly among the more than forty marked stones, and don't overlook the unmarked ones; they hold people too, whose names the years have taken. If you can find the early graves from the 1880s and 1890s, you'll be standing at the very beginning of this community's story — including the resting place of the Jamisons' infant daughter, buried here in 1893.
This is a stop for travelers who like the back roads and the small, human-scaled corners of Texas history rather than the marquee attractions. Set against the open country that the Hicks families once farmed, it makes a contemplative pause on a North Texas road trip — a chance to remember a whole community from the quiet ground that outlasted 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
- · George Washington Jamison
- · Levicia Morton Jamison
Themes & tags
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