Mount Olivet Cemetery

🏛️The era

When Flavious and Johnnie McPeak arrived from Tennessee in 1894, Fort Worth was a booming young city. It had grown out of the cattle-drive and railroad era and liked to call itself the place "where the West begins." By the early 1900s the city was expanding fast. Railroads, livestock and meatpacking drew new residents from across the South and the nation.

Cities growing that fast needed new kinds of institutions, cemeteries among them. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many American cities adopted planned, park-like cemeteries. These had landscaped grounds, winding drives and sculpture, laid out as places of beauty for the living as well as resting places for the dead. Perpetual care was another new idea, meaning a fund was set aside to maintain the grounds forever. It reassured families that their loved ones' graves would never be neglected.

Then, in 1918, a world war and a worldwide influenza pandemic arrived together. The flu struck communities across the country with terrible speed, and Fort Worth was no exception. Its toll is written plainly in this cemetery.

👥People & events

Mount Olivet's founders were a Tennessee couple who made Fort Worth their home. Flavious G. McPeak and Johnnie Clara Lester McPeak came to the city in 1894. The next year Mrs. McPeak bought the land on which the cemetery now stands, and the family built a two-story home there in 1896. They raised ten children. When they decided to found a cemetery on the property in 1907, they moved to a home on Lake Street.

Flavious McPeak was a respected local businessman. His inspiration came from back home: he had visited the Mount Olivet Cemetery in Nashville, Tennessee, and admired its design so much that many of its features were borrowed for the Fort Worth cemetery. Even the name came with him. The new cemetery would eventually cover almost 130 acres.

The first marked burial took place on April 11, 1907, when Zenas Ewin Kerr was laid to rest. That makes his the oldest marked grave in the cemetery. A mausoleum went up in 1909, though it served only as a temporary receiving vault. It was finally torn down when a new mausoleum was built in 1983.

The cemetery's most sobering chapter came in 1918. Of the flu epidemic's many victims in Fort Worth, 594 were buried here, which is a stark count of how hard the pandemic hit the city. The McPeaks themselves now rest here too, along with members of their family and many of Tarrant County's pioneers, among the more than 47,000 people buried on these grounds.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Mount Olivet reflects a national change in how Americans cared for their dead. The idea of the landscaped, planned cemetery spread across the country, carried from older Eastern and Southern cities to the new towns of the West. Here it traveled directly, from Nashville to Fort Worth, in the memory of one admiring visitor. As the first perpetual-care cemetery in Tarrant County, Mount Olivet also helped introduce a more modern, permanent approach to keeping burial grounds.

The 594 influenza victims buried here tie this cemetery to one of the deadliest events in American history. The 1918 pandemic killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions more around the world. It often struck young adults in the prime of life. Many communities lost more people to the flu than to the war that was ending at the same time. A single cemetery holding nearly six hundred victims makes that vast tragedy feel close and personal.

Finally, Mount Olivet shows how Texas cities were built by migrants from elsewhere. The McPeaks came from Tennessee, and so did their idea of what a cemetery should be. Their story, and the stories of thousands of others buried here, is part of the larger American movement westward in the decades after the Civil War.

🧭If you visit

Mount Olivet is a large cemetery, nearly 130 acres, so give yourself time and expect to do some walking or slow driving. The real pleasure is in the details. Look for the free-standing sculptures and relief carvings scattered across the grounds, which reflect the park-like design the McPeaks admired in Nashville.

If you're interested in the 1918 pandemic, look for clusters of burials dated that autumn and winter. Even without a guide, a row of headstones sharing the same grim months can be deeply affecting. You may also want to look for the McPeak family graves and for the oldest marked grave, that of Zenas Ewin Kerr from 1907.

This is an active cemetery, so be quiet and respectful, especially around funerals or family visits. It pairs well with a day exploring Fort Worth's historic districts. Seeing where the city's people rest adds depth to seeing where they lived and worked.