Mount Calm Cemetery
Mount Calm, Limestone County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Settlers began arriving in this part of Limestone County in the 1850s. Soon Mount Calm community developed with a Masonic Lodge, stores, post office, school, and churches. James Samuel Kimmel, a pioneer settler, donated land for this cemetery, and the first marked grave is dated 1870. In 1881, when the Texas & St. Louis Railway bypassed the village, residents moved north to the railroad line and began New Mount Calm in Hill County. The cemetery, which has been enlarged and is still in use, is all that remains of the earlier settlement. 1984
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Settlers reached this corner of Limestone County in the 1850s, and the Mount Calm community soon gathered around a Masonic lodge, stores, a post office, school, and churches. Pioneer James Samuel Kimmel gave the land for this cemetery, where the first marked grave dates to 1870. When the railroad bypassed the village in 1881, residents packed up and moved north to found New Mount Calm along the tracks, leaving the cemetery as the settlement's only lasting remnant.
Why it matters
The cemetery is a quiet monument to the many Texas towns that lived or died by the railroad, abandoned wholesale when the tracks passed them by.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · James Samuel Kimmel
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Birome
Birome, TX
Founded in 1910 as one of five International and Great Northern Railway stops in southern Hill County, Birome grew up as a shipping point for the surrounding farms. Its unusual name honors Bickham and Jerome Cartwright, descendants of the settler Matthew Cartwright, whose 1856 land patent had taken in the future townsite. The little community shows how the railroad, more than anything, decided where Texas towns would rise.
Former Site of Liberty Hill Settlement
Dawson, TX
Liberty Hill grew up in the 1840s as an Anglo-American farming community, taking firmer root when Samuel and Prudence Wright arrived from Tennessee in 1849 and drew in pioneer neighbors. By 1860 several founding families had organized a Cumberland Presbyterian church, and Wright later donated land for a cemetery and a public school. When the railroad towns of Dawson and Hubbard rose as Cotton Belt shipping points, they drained away Liberty Hill's population until its school and church closed and the fields returned to grazing.
Armour Cemetery
Coolidge, TX
Established in 1878 on land deeded by community founder James Armour—a Georgia-born Civil War veteran—this cemetery served the settlement that grew into the town of Sandy Creek, later called Armour. By 1884 the community had churches, a school, and gristmills, but it declined swiftly after 1903 when the railroad founded nearby Coolidge and businesses moved away. Divided into distinct sections, including a Norwegian and a Catholic "Mexican" cemetery, it is the last remaining trace of the vanished community.
United Methodist Church of Coolidge
Coolidge, TX
This Methodist congregation began in the thinly settled Armour community in 1873, its handful of charter members raising a one-room frame church with a spire and belfry the following year. When the Trinity & Brazos Valley Railroad bypassed Armour, the congregation simply moved its building to the new town of Coolidge in 1904, and in 1922 replaced it with the present edifice. The story traces how rail lines redrew the map of rural Texas, drawing settlement to the tracks.