Roby Cemetery

🏛️The era

For much of the nineteenth century, the rolling plains of what became Fisher County lay beyond the edge of Anglo-American settlement. Comanche and other Plains peoples had long used this country, and great herds of bison grazed across it. By the late 1870s the bison had been nearly wiped out by commercial hunters and the Plains tribes forced onto reservations, and the region opened to ranchers and farmers.

Settlers began arriving in the late nineteenth century. They were mostly ranching and farming families willing to take on a hard, dry country far from established towns. Organizing a county was a crucial step: it brought courts, records, schools, and roads, and it made a frontier district into a community with a legal existence.

Fisher County was organized in 1885, and the town of Roby was established the same year. The cemetery predates both. The first recorded burial, in 1884, is a reminder that people were already living and dying here before the institutions of government arrived.

👥People & events

The oldest grave marker in Roby Cemetery belongs to Mable W. Deming, and it is dated 1884. Hers is a quiet but powerful place in local history: her burial helped decide where the town's cemetery would be. When brothers D. C. and M. L. Roby bought more than 4,000 acres in 1885, they set aside the ground containing her grave as a public burial ground.

The Roby brothers did far more than lay out a town. They had a townsite platted and donated land for schools, churches, and a park, the building blocks of a real community. They also made an unusual promise: in the cemetery's original seven acres, no fee would be charged for a grave site. On a frontier where many families had little cash, that promise meant anyone could be laid to rest with dignity.

The cemetery became the county's principal burial ground, and its graves record the people who built Fisher County. They include pioneer settlers and veterans of the Civil War. They also include "Aunt" Abbie Alborn, a formerly enslaved woman who came to the area from Tennessee in 1886. Her presence is a reminder that Black Texans were part of the frontier story too.

Stewardship of the cemetery changed hands over time. In the late 1950s the county deeded the land to the city of Roby, and in 1975 the newly chartered Roby Cemetery Association took over the deed. Later purchases expanded the grounds from seven acres to twenty-one.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Roby Cemetery tells a story that repeated across the American West in the late nineteenth century. Once the Plains peoples had been pushed out and the bison destroyed, settlers moved in quickly, founding towns, organizing counties, and setting aside land for the institutions of community life. A cemetery was often among the first of those institutions, because death did not wait for towns to be finished.

The people buried here reflect a wider national history. Civil War veterans who moved west after the war carried that conflict's memory into new places. Abbie Alborn's journey from Tennessee to West Texas is a reminder that formerly enslaved people also moved west after emancipation to seek new lives, even though their stories are often missing from frontier histories.

The Roby brothers' promise of free burial space shows how frontier town builders tried to create communities, not just sell land. Their gifts of schools, churches, a park, and a burial ground show how many American towns were deliberately planned around shared civic space from the start.

🧭If you visit

The cemetery lies about a quarter mile east of this marker. As you walk among the graves, look for the oldest stones, and think about the families who arrived in this open country when the town was still just a plan on paper.

This is a place for quiet reflection. Old frontier cemeteries often show a mix of carved stones, simple markers, and family plots, and each is a clue to the lives of the people who settled Fisher County. Please treat the graves with care and respect.

Roby is a small West Texas town in wide, open country, and a visit here fits naturally into a road trip across the Rolling Plains. Take time to notice the landscape itself: the big sky and long horizons that greeted the first settlers are still the heart of this place.