Plainview Cemetery
Krum, Denton County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Located in western Denton County, Plainview Cemetery served as a burial ground for early settlers in the area. The Plainview community began around 1878 when the families of Gideon Kimbrough (1833-1923) and William Kimbrough (1824-1912) and their families arrived from Bellville, Tennessee. As the community grew, the need for a school was recognized and a one-room school building was erected. In 1894, a Baptist Sunday school began to meet in the building. The Plainview Baptist Church formed in 1896 and built a church on land donated by C.R. Moreman. In 1898, a plot of land adjoining the church was purchased from the estate of James B. Walker (1848-1898) to be used as a cemetery. Mr. Walker was the first burial in the cemetery. It became the only cemetery for the Plainview community. At least five people from the area were buried in the cemetery prior to 1900. A large increase in burials took place in the early 1900s because of a national influenza epidemic. The cemetery has a variety of marble and cement headstones marked with biblical scripture, masonic markings, woodmen seals and military headstones. Many founding families of the community have gravesites in the cemetery as well as generations of their descendants. Maintained by the Plainview Cemetery Association, the graves provide a record of the settlers of the area, including teachers, preachers and veterans. The Plainview Baptist Church and the cemetery are the only remnants of this once flourishing farming community.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Plainview Cemetery grew out of a farming community in western Denton County founded around 1878 by the Kimbrough families, newly arrived from Tennessee. A one-room school gave way to a Baptist Sunday school and, in 1896, a church; two years later a neighboring plot became the cemetery, its first burial the very man whose estate sold the land. Burials spiked in the early 1900s during a national influenza epidemic, and today the graveyard and church are the last remnants of a once-thriving farm community.
Why it matters
Places like Plainview preserve the memory of small farming communities that flourished and vanished as North Texas's rural landscape shifted.
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Related people
- · Gideon Kimbrough
- · William Kimbrough
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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Darius Gregg came to Texas from Tennessee in 1827 and fought in the war for independence before amassing some 20,000 acres across this part of North Texas in the early 1850s. A surveyor and Houston realtor, he summered on the land his son later ranched through the 1870s and '80s. The ranch drew a colorful cast—among its hands was the notorious outlaw Sam Bass, and among its summer guests a member of the Swift meatpacking family—and a portion remains in Gregg descendants' hands to this day.
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City of Krum
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Krum grew from an 1876 pioneer settlement known as the Jackson community into a proper town in 1886, when the Gulf, Colorado, and Santa Fe Railway bought land and named the station for railroad official Charles K. Krum. Stores, churches, and a post office quickly followed, but it was the region's rich soil that made Krum famous, drawing renown as one of the largest inland grain markets of the early 1900s. Local wheat even won the grand prize for 'Rainbow Flour' at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.
Bolivar Cemetery
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