Midfield Cemetery
Midfield, Matagorda County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The community of Midfield developed at a location equidistant from El Campo, Palacios, Bay City and Ganado. In 1904, the community's post office opened, and ten years later, the town was a stop on the Texas & New Orleans Railroad. By that time, Midfield-area residents were using this site as a community burial ground. Iva Nell Hale, born to William and Eva Bennett Hale in 1896, died from appendicitis on July 17, 1913, and was buried here. Her father talked to W.B. Gaumer, land agent and president of the Midfield State Bank, about the need for a community cemetery, and Gaumer formally deeded this site as a graveyard in August 1916. It has remained in community use since then. As Midfield's population waned in the latter part of the 20th century, area residents organized an association to maintain the burial ground. The group held its first organizational meeting in 1980, and it continues to care for the site. Members also maintain records on those buried here -- individuals who in large and small ways contributed to Midfield's history. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2004
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Midfield rose at a crossroads equidistant from four coastal-plain towns, gaining a post office in 1904 and a railroad stop a decade later. When young Iva Nell Hale died of appendicitis in 1913, her grieving father pressed banker W.B. Gaumer to set aside a community graveyard, which Gaumer formally deeded in 1916. As the town dwindled late in the century, residents formed an association to keep the ground and its records.
Why it matters
The cemetery preserves the memory of a small railroad-era farming community and the ordinary people whose lives shaped rural Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Midfield belongs to the Progressive and Modern era, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century decades when railroads and rural post offices stitched the Texas coastal plain into a network of small farming communities. Its very location tells the story: the settlement grew up at a point roughly equidistant from El Campo, Palacios, Bay City, and Ganado — a crossroads community, defined by the towns around it.
A post office arrived in 1904, the surest early sign that a place had become a place. Ten years later, Midfield became a stop on the Texas & New Orleans Railroad, and for a small farming town that meant everything — a way to ship crops out and bring goods and people in.
This was the era when the automobile was still new, when the railroad depot was the town's window on the wider world, and when a community's fortunes rose or fell with the rails and the harvests.
People & events
The cemetery's origin is one of the most human stories a marker can carry. Even before it was formally set aside, area residents were already burying their dead here. Then, in the summer of 1913, grief gave the ground its purpose: Iva Nell Hale, born in 1896 to William and Eva Bennett Hale, died of appendicitis on July 17 and was buried on this site.
Her father, William Hale, turned his sorrow into action. He went to W.B. Gaumer — land agent and president of the Midfield State Bank, a man positioned to make things happen — and pressed the case for a proper community cemetery. In August 1916, Gaumer formally deeded the site as a graveyard, and it has served the community ever since.
Decades later, as Midfield's population thinned in the late twentieth century, the townspeople refused to let the ground go untended. They organized a cemetery association, held their first meeting in 1980, and to this day maintain both the site and careful records of those buried here.
Its place in the American story
Midfield's story is the story of thousands of small American towns born along a rail line and shaped by the people who happened to settle there. The pattern is deeply familiar: a post office, then a railroad stop, then a burial ground — the basic institutions by which a scattering of farms became a community with a name and a memory.
The cemetery also captures a quieter national truth about how public goods often come into being — not by grand decree, but because one grieving parent asked and one well-placed neighbor said yes. A banker's deed in 1916 gave a town a permanent place to honor its dead, and that small civic act outlasted the town's own prosperity.
And the modern chapter — residents banding together in 1980 to preserve a cemetery after the town had faded — reflects a widespread American impulse to keep faith with the past even as economic life moves on. The records those members keep ensure that people who shaped their community 'in large and small ways' are not forgotten.
If you visit
This is a place to slow down and read. As you walk the rows, remember that the association here keeps records on those buried on the site, so nearly every name has a story attached — the ordinary lives that, added together, made a town.
Look for the earlier graves and imagine the community that surrounded them: the depot where the Texas & New Orleans trains stopped, the post office that first put Midfield on the map, the farms spreading out toward El Campo, Palacios, Bay City, and Ganado. The cemetery is the most complete thing that remains of that busy crossroads era.
The feel of the place is quiet and rural, tended by neighbors rather than institutions, and that is exactly the point — this ground is cared for out of loyalty to memory. If you're making a loop through the coastal-plain towns of Matagorda County, a stop here is a chance to pay respects to a community that has outlived its own boom and chosen, again and again, to remember its people.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · W.B. Gaumer
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Deming's Bridge Community
Blessing, TX
A wooden bridge built across the Tres Palacios River in 1857 for landowner Edward A. Deming gave rise to a gathering place for the settlers of western Matagorda County, complete with a Baptist church, post office, and Masonic hall. When the railroad drew people to nearby Blessing around the turn of the century, the community's institutions followed and the old crossing faded. Its cemetery endures, holding the graves of famed cattlemen Abel Head "Shanghai" Pierce and his brother Jonathan Edwards Pierce.
Hotel Blessing
Matagorda County, TX
Built in 1906 by prominent developers Jonathan E. Pierce and his son Abel, Hotel Blessing served both as a family home and as lodging for land-seekers pouring into the Texas coastal plain. The town and hotel took their hopeful name from the settlers' gratitude for the railroads and coastal development transforming the region. It stands as a relic of the great early-1900s Gulf Coast land boom.
Francitas
Francitas, TX
When the railroad reached this corner of Jackson County in 1906, Nebraska promoters John G. Maher and William F. Schwind saw opportunity, founding a land company to sell the new town of Francitas—"Little France." A trainload of Nebraskans stepped off the day before the grand opening on December 10, 1910, into a town already boasting an inn, a canning factory, an artesian well, and a newspaper. Francitas swelled to 450 people within a year before its fortunes later faded.
Buckeye
Markham, TX
In the early 1900s land promoters lured northern families to Texas with promises of warm weather and fertile soil, and Buckeye — named for the founders' native Ohio — was one such planned town. Dr. Ambrose Plotner and John Stoddard bought the old Kuykendall pasture in 1902, laid out a vast irrigation canal, secured a railroad right-of-way, and platted streets named for citrus and figs. Despite a school, a post office, and hopes of an oil strike in the 1930s, the town gradually declined, its post office closing in 1971 with only a few houses left today.