Proctor Cemetery
Proctor, Comanche County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The land on which this cemetery is located was once part of a farm owned by the pioneer Larkin Gyger family. The first person interred here was W.B. Long (1817-1875), a Methodist minister and neighbor of the Gyger family. As the small town of Proctor began to grow with the arrival of the railroad in the 1890s, this gradually became a community graveyard. Fifty-seven of the graves are from the nineteenth century. Also buried here are nine veterans of the Civil War. A cemetery association, organized in 1940, maintains the historic burial ground. (1988)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Once part of the pioneer Larkin Gyger family's farm, this ground received its first burial in 1875 — Methodist minister W.B. Long, a neighbor of the Gygers. As the railroad brought the town of Proctor to life in the 1890s, the plot grew into a community graveyard; fifty-seven of its graves date to the 1800s, and nine Civil War veterans rest among them.
Why it matters
A country cemetery like Proctor is an open-air archive of frontier settlement, recording the families, ministers, and old soldiers who built rural Comanche County one homestead at a time.
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Related people
- · Larkin Gyger
- · W.B. Long
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Proctor
Proctor, TX
Old Proctor, named for A. W. Proctor who gave land for its first school, moved to this spot in 1890 when construction of the Fort Worth and Rio Grande Railroad halted here. In the next two decades the shipping point blossomed into a bustling center with a newspaper, hotels, churches, lodges, a high school, a celebrated baseball team, and a brass band. Two hand-dug wells in the middle of Main Street watered residents, livestock, and passing wagon trains—one still preserved as a landmark.
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Hanson Cemetery grew from a settlers' pact: tradition holds that hunting companions William Hanson and M. Walton agreed the first to die would be buried beneath the oaks along Sowell Creek, and the cemetery would bear his name. Hanson's worn marker dates his death to 1870 or 1871, and the burial of his wife formally began the graveyard that served the scattered community of Roch. By the time the Walton family deeded land for it in 1925, more than fifty people already rested there, and later generations added a veterans memorial in 1998.
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