Peaster Cemetery

🏛️The era

Parker County lies west of Fort Worth, on what was still frontier territory in the years after the Civil War. When Henry H. Peaster bought his 160 acres here in 1870, settlers were pushing steadily westward into this part of Texas, drawn by open land for farming and ranching.

The 1880s brought a new phase. Across Texas, small communities were organizing, laying out town lots, building churches and schools, and setting aside ground for the dead. A village often began exactly as Peaster did, with a landowner deciding to sell lots and invite neighbors to build around him.

A community cemetery was one of the surest signs that a place meant to last. By the time Peaster formally donated land for this burial ground in 1893, the village bearing his name had become a real community with roots in the soil.

👥People & events

Henry H. Peaster was a South Carolina native who came west and bought land here in 1870. In the late 1880s he began selling town lots, and the village that grew up took his name. His gift of two acres for a cemetery in 1893 gave the community a permanent place to honor its own.

Burials here actually predate that formal donation. The earliest recorded grave belongs to Mary D. Hunt, buried in 1886, a reminder that families were already laying loved ones to rest on this ground before any deed made it official.

Over the generations the cemetery filled with the settlers who built the community and their descendants, along with veterans of the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Each of those groups tells a part of the town's story, from the generation that came west after one war to the young men who left for wars overseas.

The town's most famous resident rests here too: John Alexander Fox. The marker credits him with creating the “Buster Brown” character for the Buster Brown Shoe Company's advertising campaign. Most histories of American comics credit cartoonist Richard F. Outcault with first drawing Buster Brown as a newspaper comic strip in the early 1900s, before the character became the face of the shoe brand, so the character's full origins are more tangled than a single name can capture. What the marker makes clear is that Peaster remembers Fox as the artist behind one of the best-known advertising figures of the twentieth century.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Cemeteries like this one are the quiet archives of westward settlement. The names on these stones trace how ordinary families from older states moved into Texas after the Civil War and turned open land into farms, towns, and communities.

The veterans buried here connect a small Parker County village to the nation's great conflicts. From the Civil War through World War II, the country's wars reached into even the smallest towns, and the graves here carry that shared national story.

Then there is Buster Brown. The mischievous boy with the pageboy haircut and his dog became one of the most recognizable characters in American advertising, helping sell children's shoes for generations. The link between a rural Texas cemetery and a nationally famous brand mascot is a delightful reminder of how the modern world of mass advertising was shaped by people from all over the country, including small-town Texas.

🧭If you visit

This is still an active cemetery, so visit quietly and with respect for families who may be tending graves. Walking the rows is a good way to read the town's history, as older stones give way to newer ones across more than a century.

Look for the veterans' graves, which are often marked with distinctive government headstones or flags, and see if you can find the resting place of John Alexander Fox. Finding a link to Buster Brown in a small-town Texas cemetery is one of those surprises that makes marker hunting fun.

Peaster is an easy side trip from Weatherford and the western edge of the Fort Worth area. Pair it with a drive through the rolling Parker County countryside, and you will get a feel for the land that drew Henry Peaster and his neighbors here after the Civil War.