Ochiltree Cemetery
Perryton, Ochiltree County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1902, Jim McLarty and J. V. Stump fenced off 90 acres for a cemetery in the town of Ochiltree. Soon afterwards, Jim was thrown from his horse and killed, and at age 21 became the first person buried in the cemetery. In 1927 the county acquired the deed from Mr. J. M. Blasingame; in 1930 a cemetery association was formed. During the Depression of the 1930s an entry gate was built with help from the Works Progress Administration. Veterans of the Civil War and Spanish American wars, as well as World Wars I and II and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, are among the citizens buried here. (1997)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When Jim McLarty and J. V. Stump fenced ninety acres for a cemetery in the town of Ochiltree in 1902, McLarty himself became its first occupant, killed at twenty-one in a fall from his horse. The county took the deed in 1927 and an association formed in 1930, and during the Depression the Works Progress Administration built its entry gate. Its graves hold veterans of every American war from the Civil War through Vietnam.
Why it matters
A single Panhandle cemetery here records both the hazards of frontier life and the reach of national history, from Depression-era public works to a century of military service.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By 1902, the Texas Panhandle was one of the last stretches of the state to fill in. The great open-range ranches were being broken into farms and small towns, and the country around Ochiltree County was still raw grassland where the wind ran unbroken for miles. Settlers arriving in this high, flat corner of Texas were building the basic machinery of community from scratch — a store, a school, a church, and, inevitably, a place to bury their dead.
Ochiltree was a young town then, and like every frontier settlement it learned quickly that a cemetery is not a luxury but a necessity. Life on the plains was hard and often short. Accidents, illness, and the sheer distance from doctors meant that death was a familiar neighbor, and a community's first burying ground was among its earliest permanent institutions.
The decades that followed traced the whole arc of the early twentieth century across this small patch of ground — the settling years, the formalizing of ownership, the lean years of the Depression, and a long century of American wars that pulled young men from even the most remote counties into national service.
People & events
The cemetery began with an act of ordinary planning that turned, almost at once, into tragedy. In 1902, Jim McLarty and J. V. Stump fenced off ninety acres to serve as a burial ground for the town of Ochiltree. It was the kind of practical civic task two neighbors might undertake together, expecting to be remembered, if at all, as founders.
Instead, Jim McLarty became the ground's first occupant. Soon after the fencing was done, he was thrown from his horse and killed. He was twenty-one years old — young enough that his death is a reminder of just how routine such losses were on the plains, where a horse was a daily tool and a fall could end a life in an instant. The man who helped mark out the resting place became the reason to open it.
The cemetery's paper history caught up with its human one over the next generation. In 1927 the county formally acquired the deed from J. M. Blasingame, and in 1930 residents organized a cemetery association to care for the grounds. During the hard years of the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration lent its labor to build an entry gate — a small but telling mark of how even a distant Panhandle burying ground was touched by the New Deal's reach.
Its place in the American story
A country cemetery can hold more American history than its size suggests, and this one does. Among its graves lie veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, both World Wars, and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam — very nearly the full span of the nation's wars from the mid-nineteenth century onward, gathered in a single fenced field on the Texas plains.
That range tells a quiet story about how national events reach even the most out-of-the-way places. A community founded on the far edge of settlement still sent its sons into every major American conflict of a hundred years, and welcomed them home to the same ground when their lives ended.
The WPA gate adds another national thread. The alphabet agencies of the Depression are usually remembered for dams and post offices and grand murals, but their work also showed up in modest, local forms like this one — proof that the federal response to the 1930s crisis extended all the way to a small-town cemetery in the Panhandle.
If you visit
Come for the sense of scale, both of the land and of time. Ochiltree County sits high on the plains near Perryton, and a cemetery here feels open to the sky in a way few burial grounds do — the horizon is long and low, and the wind is nearly always present.
Look for the entry gate and think about the hands that built it during the Depression, then walk the rows and read the service markers. You can trace more than a century of American wars from stone to stone, and somewhere among the earliest graves is the resting place of a young man who helped establish the ground and was buried in it the same year.
If you're threading together the small towns of the northern Panhandle on a road trip, this is a good, contemplative stop — quiet, unhurried, and rich in the kind of local history that rewards a slow walk rather than a quick photo.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Jim McLarty
- · J. V. Stump
Themes & tags
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