Riverside Cemetery
Wichita Falls, Wichita County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This municipal burial ground dates back to the early days of settlement in Wichita Falls. The area was sparsely settled before tracks of the Fort Worth aand Denver City Railroad reached here in September 182. Citizens received a state charter for the Wichita Falls Cemetery Association in April 1885. The following ear, R.E. Montgomery, trustee of the Panhandle Townsite Company, sold a plat of land for two dollars in the city's Bellevue Addition to be used as a cemetery. Joseph Kemp was president of the cemetery association, who sold the property to the city of Wichita Falls in 1892 for one dollar. The name Riverside indicating the graveyard's location near the Wichita River, became the official name around this time. African American citizens organized the "Riverside Colored Burial Association," and in 190 the city sold the association a half-acre on Riverside's northwest corner. Hundreds of burials took place in that section, although today few grave markers remain. Improvement to Riverside over the years included a chapel, iron fencing and gates, landscaping and street paving. Significant individuals buried here include Minnie Mae Kemp Adickes (1874-1931), the city's first female realtor, and also a contractor for hundreds of homes; James V. Allred (1899-1959), Attorney General and Governor of Texas and federal judge; Joseph H. Barwise (1829-1927), pioneer settler, county judge and community leader known as "The Father of Wichita Falls"; Frank Kell (1859-1941), businessman, banker and entrepreneur; Joseph Kemp (1861-1930), developer of area railroads, oil fields and irrigation; and many other important citizens. The cemetery features prominent statuary, mausoleums, and carved monuments. Historic Texas Cemetery – 2007
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Riverside Cemetery dates to the earliest days of Wichita Falls, chartered as a cemetery association in 1885 soon after the Fort Worth and Denver City Railroad reached the young town. Named for its site near the Wichita River, it passed to city ownership in 1892, and Black residents organized the "Riverside Colored Burial Association," purchasing a half-acre where hundreds were laid to rest. Among those interred are Texas governor James V. Allred, "Father of Wichita Falls" Joseph H. Barwise, and the city's first female realtor, Minnie Mae Kemp Adickes.
Why it matters
The cemetery maps the growth of a North Texas railroad city and preserves, in its segregated sections, the parallel histories of its white and African American founders.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Wichita Falls began as a speck on the North Texas prairie, in the country where the rolling plains give way to the Red River basin. For most of the nineteenth century this was sparsely settled land, more familiar to cattle and to the weather than to town-builders. What changed everything here, as it did across the West, was the railroad. When tracks of the Fort Worth and Denver City line pushed north into the area in the early 1880s, they turned an isolated river crossing into a place with a future.
A town that expects to grow must, almost immediately, decide where to bury its dead. In April 1885, only a few years after the rails arrived, citizens secured a state charter for the Wichita Falls Cemetery Association — a civic act as telling as building a church or a courthouse. It was a community declaring that it intended to stay.
The decades this ground spans, the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth, were the boom years of the American interior: railroads, then land companies, then banks, oil, and irrigation, each drawing new arrivals and new money. A cemetery laid out in those years quietly records that whole arc of settlement, prosperity, and civic ambition.
People & events
The early history of this burial ground reads like a roll call of the men who built the town. Land for it was sold out of a townsite company's holdings for a token sum, and Joseph Kemp — a developer whose name is tied to the area's railroads, oil fields, and irrigation works — served as president of the cemetery association before the property passed to the city of Wichita Falls in 1892 for a single dollar. Around that time the ground took the name Riverside, for its place near the Wichita River.
The people finally laid to rest here trace the shape of the young city. Joseph H. Barwise, a pioneer settler, county judge, and community leader, was remembered as "The Father of Wichita Falls." Frank Kell built a career in business and banking. Minnie Mae Kemp Adickes made her own mark as the city's first female realtor and a builder of hundreds of homes — a striking role for a woman of her generation. And James V. Allred, born at the close of the nineteenth century, rose from this community to become Attorney General and Governor of Texas and, later, a federal judge.
The cemetery also holds a second, quieter history. African American citizens organized the "Riverside Colored Burial Association" and acquired a half-acre at the ground's northwest corner. Hundreds of burials took place in that section, though few grave markers survive there today — a silence that speaks as loudly as any monument.
Its place in the American story
Riverside is, in miniature, the story of how the American West was actually settled: not by lone pioneers but by railroads, land companies, and the townsmen who followed the tracks and turned raw acreage into cities. The men buried here — the developers, bankers, judges, and builders — are the type who repeated their work in a thousand new towns across the plains in the decades after the Civil War.
It is also a map of the color line as it ran through those same towns. A separate burial association and a separate half-acre were the ordinary arrangement of a segregated era, and the near-absence of surviving markers in the Black section mirrors a national pattern in which the graves of African American communities were too often left unrecorded, unmaintained, and at risk of being forgotten.
That one governor of Texas rose from a grave here, while hundreds of his fellow citizens rest a few dozen yards away beneath vanished markers, captures the double truth of American local history — enormous opportunity and enduring inequality, sharing the same ground.
If you visit
Come for the way a cemetery can tell a town's whole biography in stone. Riverside carries the visible confidence of a prospering city: prominent statuary, mausoleums, carved monuments, and the iron fencing, gates, and paved lanes that a growing community added over the years to dignify its dead.
Walk toward the northwest corner and look for what is not there. This is where the Riverside Colored Burial Association's half-acre lies, where hundreds were buried but few markers remain. Standing in that quieter ground alongside the grand monuments elsewhere gives you the fuller, more honest measure of the place.
It makes a natural stop for anyone tracing the history of North Texas and its railroad towns. Give yourself time to read names and dates — the developers and the governor, the first woman to sell real estate here, the judge they called the town's father — and let the cemetery introduce you to the city that grew up around it.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · James V. Allred
- · Joseph H. Barwise
- · Joseph Kemp
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Felix L. Lindsey
Wichita Falls, TX
Born in Kentucky in 1847 to a mulatto mother and a full-blood Creek father, Felix Lindsey carried food to Union troops as a boy during the Civil War before joining the U.S. Army in 1882 with the 10th Cavalry "Buffalo Soldiers" at Fort Davis. His unit pursued Geronimo across Arizona in 1885, where he was wounded three times before a leg injury ended his career in 1893. He then settled in Wichita Falls, married, raised nine children and ran a cleaning business until his death in 1939 at age 92.
First Baptist Church of Wichita Falls
Wichita Falls, TX
Founded in 1883 with just eight charter members meeting in a log schoolhouse, this Baptist congregation grew alongside the young North Texas town of Wichita Falls. The classically styled sanctuary seen today—the congregation's third home—was begun in 1919 and finished two years later, a permanent statement of a frontier church that had put down deep roots. It was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1982.
First County Officials
Wichita Falls, TX
The first Anglo-American settlers reached Wichita County in 1856, but frontier conflict with Native peoples—for whom the county was named—delayed its formal organization until 1882. That year residents finally seated a full slate of officials, from Judge James S. Akers and Attorney Robert E. Huff down to the inspector of hides and animals. The roster captures the moment a raw frontier district became a functioning county.
Joseph Hudson Barwise
Wichita Falls, TX
An Ohio native, Joseph Hudson Barwise brought his family to Wichita County in 1880 and became one of its guiding figures. He earned the nickname "Father of Wichita Falls" by donating land to lure the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway through the area, ensuring the young town's growth. A three-term county judge and tireless booster, Barwise helped shape the community before his burial in Riverside Cemetery.