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.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Plainview Cemetery sits in the western reaches of Denton County, and its story begins in the late 1870s — the Reconstruction and Gilded Age decades when North Texas was filling in with farm families looking for good land and a fresh start. The frontier had moved on, the railroads were reaching outward, and the blackland and prairie country of Denton County was being turned under the plow.
Communities in this era grew in a predictable and very human order. First came the families and their fields; then the recognition that the children needed a school; then a place to worship; and, inevitably, a place to bury the dead. Plainview followed that sequence almost exactly, and reading its history is like watching a small settlement assemble itself from the ground up.
These were farming people, and their world was intensely local — bounded by the reach of a wagon, the neighbors within visiting distance, the one-room school and the church that anchored the week. Places like Plainview were once scattered thickly across rural Texas, each convinced, reasonably, that it would endure.
People & events
The community took shape around 1878 when the families of Gideon Kimbrough and his kinsman William Kimbrough arrived from Tennessee and put down roots. As their numbers grew, so did their needs. A one-room school building went up, and by 1894 it was doing double duty as the meeting place for a Baptist Sunday school — the schoolhouse and the church often being the same four walls in a young settlement.
In 1896 the Plainview Baptist Church formally organized and built on land donated by a local man, C. R. Moreman. Two years later the congregation bought an adjoining plot from the estate of James B. Walker, who had died that same year — and in one of those quiet ironies the land keeps, Walker himself became the first person laid to rest in the ground his estate had sold. At least five area residents were buried there before the century turned.
Then came a harder chapter. In the early 1900s burials rose sharply as a national influenza epidemic reached even this rural corner. The headstones that survive — marble and cement, carved with scripture, Masonic emblems, Woodmen insignia, and military markers — read like a directory of the community: its teachers, its preachers, its veterans, and the founding families whose descendants lie beside them.
Its place in the American story
Plainview's arc — settlement, school, church, cemetery, and eventual fading — is one of the most common yet least monumental stories in American history. Across the rural United States, tens of thousands of small farming communities rose in the decades after the Civil War and then thinned out over the twentieth century as agriculture mechanized, families consolidated, and people drifted toward towns and cities. Most left behind exactly what Plainview did: a church and a graveyard.
The cemetery's spike in burials during the influenza epidemic ties this quiet spot to a catastrophe that touched the whole country and much of the world. No community was too small or too remote to be reached by it, and rural cemeteries everywhere carry that same cluster of early-1900s dates.
The headstones' symbols — Masonic squares, the tree-stump markers of the Woodmen fraternal order, the government-issued military stones — connect this prairie burial ground to the great web of fraternal lodges, churches, and veterans' networks that knit ordinary Americans together in the age before mass media and the automobile.
If you visit
Come to Plainview expecting quiet. The marker calls the church and the cemetery the only remnants of a once-flourishing community, so what you find will be a graveyard, a house of worship, and a great deal of open North Texas sky — and that emptiness is precisely the point.
Walk the rows slowly and let the stones tell you who these people were. Look for the different materials and emblems the inscription describes — the scripture verses, the fraternal symbols, the military headstones — and notice how many surnames repeat across generations. A cluster of early-1900s dates will mark the epidemic years; reading them in one place makes an abstract national tragedy suddenly personal.
It makes a thoughtful stop on a back-roads drive through western Denton County. Treat it with the respect a working cemetery deserves, keep to the paths, and take nothing but the sense of a whole world that once filled these fields and now rests in this single, well-kept acre.
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
- · Gideon Kimbrough
- · William Kimbrough
Themes & tags
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