Myrtle Cemetery

🏛️The era

In the 1870s, north-central Texas was changing fast. The railroad was pushing across the Blackland Prairie, and new towns grew up around depots almost overnight. Ennis was one of them, a railroad town laid out in the early 1870s among farms that would soon make Ellis County famous for cotton.

A new town needed a place to bury its dead, and in 1875 W.H. Parsons deeded ten acres for exactly that. At the time, Texas was still living in the long shadow of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Families were rebuilding, and newcomers kept arriving by rail with their hopes and their plans.

The name came from something already on the land. A single child's grave, belonging to a little one called Myrtle, lay inside the tract. Instead of moving it or forgetting it, the community named the whole cemetery after her. It is a small, tender choice, and it tells you something about the people who made it.

👥People & events

Walk these grounds and you move through more than a century of Texas history. One of the oldest stories belongs to Frederick H. Ranklin, born in 1795. He was one of the "Old 300," the first families who settled Stephen F. Austin's colony in the 1820s, when Texas was still part of Mexico. He lived long enough to fight in the Texas Revolution and to see Texas become a republic, then a state. He died in 1874, just before this cemetery was formally set aside, which makes his grave a link to the very beginnings of Anglo-American Texas.

Katie Daffan, born in the year Ranklin died, grew into an author whose writing helped shape how Texans of her generation remembered their past. Her grave is a reminder that history is not only made. It is also written down, argued over, and handed on, and in her era women did much of that work.

Then there is Jack Lummus, an Ennis native born in 1915. He was a gifted athlete before the war and briefly played professional football. He joined the Marine Corps and led men as a lieutenant on Iwo Jima in 1945, where he was killed during the fierce fighting on that volcanic island. He was later awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military decoration. His hometown brought him home to rest here.

And underneath all of these lies the quiet first story: a child named Myrtle, whose one grave gave the place its name.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Few places pack the sweep of American history into so small a space. From Austin's colonists to World War II, the graves here span the settlement of Texas, its fight for independence, the rise of its railroad towns, and the global war that pulled small-town Americans across the world.

Iwo Jima was one of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific, and its losses reached into towns like Ennis all over the country. Jack Lummus's grave shows what the national history books can hide: every famous battle was made up of local sons, and many of them came home only to be buried.

Myrtle Cemetery also shows how Americans shape memory. A child's name, a colonist's service, a writer's words and a Marine's sacrifice all sit side by side. Together they say a community is defined as much by whom it chooses to remember as by what it builds.

🧭If you visit

Come quietly, as you would to any cemetery that is still part of a living community. Take time to walk the older sections, where weathered stones and family plots give you a feel for nineteenth-century Ennis. Graves from the 1870s and later sit alongside much more recent burials, so the whole span of the town's life lies within a single stroll.

Look for the markers of the people named on the historical marker, especially Jack Lummus, whose grave draws visitors who want to pay their respects to a Medal of Honor recipient. A moment of silence there is a fitting gesture.

Ennis sits just off the main corridor between Dallas and the heart of Texas, so it is an easy stop on a road trip. Pair the cemetery with a walk through the town's historic downtown and its railroad heritage, and you will see how a prairie depot town grew into a place with stories that reach from Austin's colony all the way to the Pacific.