Old Kit Cemetery
Irving, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Settlers came to this area near the Elm and west forks of the Trinity River in the mid-1800s. Isaac Henry “Ike” Story built a grocery store in what became the community of Gorbit (also known by similar spellings). Ike Story was the postmaster for “Gorbet” from 1888 until 1894, when the name was changed to Kit; Ike remained postmaster. In 1904, the Kit post office closed and moved to Irving. Ike Story is among the pioneers buried at Old Kit Cemetery. This community burial ground began in 1896, when a family passing through stopped to care for their sick child. When the child died, they asked landowner David Chadwell Britain if they could bury their child in the grove of trees where they had camped. Britain donated land for a community cemetery. The child’s gravesite and the name of the family are now unknown. Britain also deeded one acre adjoining the cemetery to New Providence Baptist Church, stipulating that the land was to be used continuously for church purposes. Several congregations have occupied the site. Early in the cemetery’s development, members of Kit and surrounding communities chose their own plots, stepping off plots rather than making precise measurements. Many early settlers are interred here, including Aunt Kit King, attributed by some sources to be the namesake for the Kit community. Many veterans with service dating from the Civil War to present are buried here, as well as early French, German and Belgian settlers. Old Kit Cemetery, Inc., formed in 1947 and incorporated in 1949, continues to care for the cemetery. Burials are now restricted to direct descendants of early settlers. The cemetery continues as a final resting place and a chronicle of a rural community now incorporated into Irving.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Near the forks of the Trinity River, mid-1800s settlers built the little community of Gorbit, later renamed Kit, complete with a store, a post office, and the merchant-postmaster Ike Story. The cemetery began in 1896 when a family passing through buried their sick child in a grove on David Britain's land, and Britain donated the ground for a community burial place and an adjoining church lot. Early settlers stepped off their own plots by eye, and today Civil War–era veterans, immigrant French, German, and Belgian families, and pioneers like Aunt Kit King rest here as Irving has grown up around them.
Why it matters
Old Kit Cemetery preserves the memory of a vanished rural crossroads community, a reminder of how many small frontier settlements were absorbed by the spreading cities of modern Texas.
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Related people
- · Isaac Henry Story
- · David Chadwell Britain
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Kit Community
Irving, TX
John W. and Jestine Gorbit farmed here by 1850, and a settlement called Gorbit grew up around them as a stop on a pre–Civil War postal route. After Ike Story opened a store and post office in 1889, confusion with a similarly named town led to the settlement being renamed Kit in 1894, and residents added a cemetery and schools. When the railroad town of Irving was founded nearby in 1903, Kit's businesses, churches, and post office drifted to the new townsite, and by the 1940s the community had faded into the growing metropolis.
Union Bower Community
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Drawn by fertile land along the Elm Fork of the Trinity River, settlers reached this area by the mid-19th century, and after William and Virginia Smith arrived in 1879 the families here built what became the Union Bower Community. They hauled cotton, corn, and produce to Dallas markets, organized a Sunday school in 1885 that grew into a Methodist church, and established schools and a community cemetery. When Irving was founded on the railroad in 1903, Union Bower's rural population declined, and by the time Irving annexed it in 1956 little of its farming character remained.
Horton Cemetery
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Enoch and Martha Horton came from Virginia with their ten children as members of the Peters Colony, settling this North Texas land in 1844. Their son James set aside a family cemetery here around 1848, and the couple are believed to lie in unmarked graves among the earliest burials. James and his sister Sarah Horton Cockrell ran one of the area's first grist mills, and James gave land for a school and a railroad — the kind of civic seeding that built the community around them.
Sowers Community
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By 1856 Edmund and Freelove Sowers, newcomers from Illinois, had settled this corner of Dallas County, where neighbors farmed, hunted, and cut timber and Ed worked as a blacksmith. His general store, post office, and schoolhouse in the 1870s and '80s drew physicians and families until a small crossroads community — famous for its Fourth of July picnics and ballgames — took shape. Sustained by dairy and poultry, Sowers survived until Irving annexed it in the 1950s, leaving only its cemetery behind.