Maple Cemetery
Bailey County, Bailey County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1934, in the midst of drought and the Great Depression, landowner Maple Wilson donated four acres for a cemetery for the small community that bore his name. It was used briefly up until World War II. Today, the identities of only three burials are known: infant Jay T. Sanderson (d. 1934); James Gentry (1885-1936), struck by lightning, leaving a wife and five children; and Minnie Elizabeth Daricek (1897-1935), who died quietly while nursing her eleventh child. Reportedly, three to five infants of Mexcian descent are also interred here. This burial ground is a reminder of the hard times face by Bailey County families in the 1930s.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1934, as drought and the Great Depression gripped the High Plains, landowner Maple Wilson gave four acres for a cemetery to serve the tiny community that bore his name. Only a handful of burials are documented—an infant, a father of five killed by lightning, a mother who died nursing her eleventh child, and several unnamed children of Mexican descent—yet each records the hard reality of Bailey County families in the 1930s.
Why it matters
This quiet burial ground is a stark memorial to the human cost of the Dust Bowl and Depression on the families who tried to hold on to the Texas plains.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Maple Wilson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Virginia City
Maple, TX
In 1908, promoters carved the paper town of Virginia City out of the Texas High Plains and sold it as a coming metropolis, luring buyers with staged tours past shops, a courthouse lot, and a graded railroad bed. Named for the wife of an early landowner, the scheme collapsed when the promised rains never came and a ruinous drought settled over the region from 1909 to 1912. A local cowboy had already quipped that the town's biggest crop was 'suckers,' and within a few years the disappointed settlers moved on, leaving nothing but empty ground.
Enochs Cemetery
Enochs, TX
This cemetery has served the community of Enochs since the early twentieth century, after land speculator and sheep rancher Isaac C. Enochs, Jr. donated ground for a townsite and burial place in 1924. The oldest marked grave is that of Julia M. Brown from 1936, and residents organized a cemetery association in 1947 as their trading community grew on the South Plains. Reorganized in 1986, the association still maintains the grounds as a reminder of the area's pioneers.
Enochs Cemetery
Enochs, TX
Enochs Cemetery was established in 1936 to serve the small farming community of Enochs on the South Plains of Bailey County. Designated a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2006, it preserves the resting place of the area's settlers during the hard years of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Such rural burial grounds are often the enduring heart of communities that time has otherwise scattered.
Pastores of Bailey County
Enochs, TX
From the 1840s through the 1890s, Hispanic sheepherders from New Mexico known as pastores drove great flocks into the grasslands of the Llano Estacado and Bailey County, following La Vista de Vida Agua—the Trail of Living Water—from spring to spring. They borrowed routes first blazed by ciboleros (bison hunters) and Comancheros (traders) who had long done business with the Native peoples of the plains. Their stone corrals, boxed-in springs, and rock shelters still dot the land where the sheep industry endured into the 1930s.