Shields Cemetery
Coleman, Coleman County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The first community in this vicinity began as a Baptist church settlement founded in 1900. The vast ranch land of the area was divided into lots beginning about 1905. Early settlers called the community "Double Gates" because there were two gates on the road between the nearby towns of Coleman and Brady. A watering hole near the road also attracted travelers. L. L. Shield built a general store and post office, and the community was named for him. The infant son of J. T. and L. A. (Dillingham) Gilbreath died in June 1908 and became the first person to be interred on land set aside for a Shield community cemetery. One acre of land including the grave was donated to County Judge T. J. White, trustee, in December of that year. The cemetery gradually took on the name Shields. The earliest graves here are a testimony to the difficulty of pioneer life: almost half the 37 people interred during the first ten years of the cemetery's operation were children younger than three years of age, two more were teenagers and four were under the age of twenty-five. Only one person more than fifty years of age was buried during this period: Susan Winkler McGinnis Godwin died in 1913 at age eighty-two. Veterans of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War are interred here. Six graves in the northwest corner of the cemetery are believed to be those of Catholic Mexican Americans. The Shield community thrived for a time, and many of its most influential citizens are interred on this site. Though the community declined after World War II, Shields Cemetery remains as a chronicle of its people. (1999) Incising on base: In memory of Susan Winkler McGinnis Godwin
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This burial ground served the community that grew up around a Baptist church settlement founded in 1900, a place first nicknamed Double Gates for the two gates travelers passed between Coleman and Brady. The earliest graves tell the hard arithmetic of pioneer life: of the 37 people buried in the cemetery's first decade, nearly half were children under three. The town of Shields thrived for a time before declining after World War II, leaving the cemetery as its chronicle.
Why it matters
A frontier cemetery is often the fullest surviving record of a vanished rural community, and its rows of children's graves testify to the frailty of settler life in early-twentieth-century Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the ranch country of west-central Texas was in the middle of a quiet revolution. The open range that had defined the region for a generation was being fenced, surveyed, and broken into lots for families who wanted a piece of ground to farm and call their own. This corner of Coleman County sat in that in-between world — no longer the frontier of the great cattle drives, not yet the settled farm country it hoped to become.
Into that landscape came the small settlement that would eventually give this cemetery its name. A Baptist church gathering took root here in 1900, and around 1905 the surrounding ranch land was divided into lots that people could buy. Travelers already knew the spot: a watering hole beside the road drew them in, and two gates on the route between the towns of Coleman and Brady gave the place its first, homely nickname — "Double Gates."
This was the Progressive era nationally, a time of railroads, reform, and optimism about what ordinary communities could build for themselves. Out here, far from the cities, that optimism met hard country and thin margins. A general store and a post office were the marks of a real town, and when L. L. Shield built both, the community took his name and began to believe in its own future.
People & events
Every settlement needs a first grief, and here it arrived in June 1908, when the infant son of J. T. and L. A. Gilbreath died. His small burial was the first on the land set aside for the community's cemetery. That December, one acre including the grave was formally donated to County Judge T. J. White, acting as trustee, and the burial ground had its beginning in law as well as in sorrow. Though the merchant's name was Shield, the cemetery gradually drifted into the plural — Shields — the way place-names so often soften on the tongue.
The earliest graves are a plain and painful record of pioneer life. Of the thirty-seven people laid to rest here in the cemetery's first decade, almost half were children younger than three. Two more were teenagers, and four others had not yet reached twenty-five. Only a single person over fifty was buried in those years: Susan Winkler McGinnis Godwin, who died in 1913 at the age of eighty-two — meaning she had been born back around 1831, and had lived nearly the whole span of the American nineteenth century before her rest here.
The cemetery holds a fuller cross-section of the community and its country's wars than a first glance suggests. Veterans of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War lie in this ground. In the northwest corner, six graves are believed to be those of Catholic Mexican American residents — a reminder that even a small Texas settlement was rarely as uniform as its founders' names might imply.
Its place in the American story
A frontier cemetery is often the truest surviving document a vanished town leaves behind. Stores burn, post offices close, wooden houses collapse back into the prairie — but names cut into stone endure, and they tell a story no county history quite matches. Shields is one of thousands of such places across rural America, each a small archive of the people who tried to make a community where there had been only range.
The arithmetic of those first graves speaks to something that shaped every early settlement: the sheer frailty of life before modern medicine. Nearly half the earliest burials being children under three was not unusual for the time; it was the ordinary, wrenching cost of settling a place far from doctors and hospitals. To walk among these markers is to understand, in a way no statistic on a page can convey, what it meant to raise a family on the early-twentieth-century frontier.
The community's later fate is just as American. Shields thrived for a time, then declined after World War II, as the automobile, better roads, and the pull of larger towns hollowed out countless small rural settlements at once. The town faded, but the cemetery remained — which is exactly why so much of what we know about vanished places now rests, quite literally, in their burial grounds.
If you visit
Come here for the quiet more than the spectacle. This is rural Coleman County, out along the old road that once ran between Coleman and Brady, and the setting still carries the openness that first drew settlers to a watering hole and a pair of gates. Give yourself time to simply stand and take in the space; a place like this rewards slowness.
Walk the earliest rows and read the dates. You will notice how many of the small stones belong to children, and how few of the people here reached old age — the hard truth the inscription records, made personal in front of you. Look for the resting place of Susan Winkler McGinnis Godwin, whose long life stands out among these early graves; her memory is marked in the stone itself. In the northwest corner, six graves set a little apart remember residents whose story is part of the community's fuller history.
This is the kind of stop that turns a drive across west-central Texas into something more thoughtful. It asks nothing of you but attention, and it fits naturally into a day spent exploring the small towns and back roads of the region — a chance to meet, name by name, the ordinary families who once believed a town would rise here.
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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Themes & tags
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