Spade Community Cemetery

🏛️The era

At the end of the nineteenth century, the plains of West Texas were in the middle of a dramatic transformation. Great cattle ranches had spread across the region in the decades after the Civil War, and the arrival of the railroads opened markets and brought new settlers. Mitchell County, with Colorado City as its hub, was part of this changing landscape.

Around the edges of the big ranches, farming families began to settle, often growing cotton and raising livestock on smaller holdings. These farm communities were tiny, sometimes just a school, a store, a gin and a handful of homes, but they gave rural people a place to gather, learn, trade and bury their dead.

The era also brought national events into the most remote places. The 1918 influenza pandemic reached small towns as surely as big cities, and two world wars drew young people from farms like these into military service. The story of the Spade community touches all of these currents.

👥People & events

This cemetery began with a family's grief. In April 1898, R.F. and Addie Hargrove lost their infant son and buried him on their farm. From that single small grave, a community burial ground grew.

The Hargroves then gave 2.5 acres surrounding their son's grave to the Spade community, both for the cemetery and for a school. The schoolhouse, first called Liberty School, became the community's all-purpose gathering place, hosting funerals, grange meetings, church services and community events. Local oral history places the building in the northeast corner of the cemetery grounds.

The community took its name from the neighboring Ellwood-Renderbrook Spade Ranch, which lies along the settlement's southern edge. For a decade, from 1902 to 1912, Spade had its own post office, and residents could also find a cotton gin, a store and a blacksmith shop nearby.

Since 1898, this has been the only burial ground for Spade's farming and ranching families. Resting here are members of the Hargrove family, victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic, and veterans of the Civil War and World War II, among them a woman who served in the Women's Army Corps.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Small cemeteries like this one hold national history at a human scale. The 1918 influenza pandemic is remembered as one of the deadliest events in modern history, and graves in a rural West Texas cemetery are a reminder that it reached every corner of the country.

The veterans buried here span an extraordinary arc. Civil War veterans who moved west after the war often settled on the Texas frontier, while World War II drew a new generation off the farms. The presence of a Women's Army Corps member is especially notable: the WAC opened military service to women in large numbers during World War II, and her grave marks part of that larger change in American life.

The Spade community also illustrates a pattern found across the Great Plains, small farming settlements growing up beside giant ranches, sharing the land and the economy. Many of these communities later faded as farms consolidated and people moved to towns, leaving cemeteries as their most lasting monuments.

🧭If you visit

This is a quiet rural cemetery, so come prepared for open country, wide skies and the steady West Texas wind. Look for the oldest section and the Hargrove family graves, which mark where the whole story began.

Keep in mind the marker's note that the old schoolhouse once stood in the northeast corner. Nothing may remain of it now, but standing there helps you imagine the funerals, meetings and Sunday services that once brought the community together on this ground.

Walk respectfully, watch for uneven ground, and do not disturb grave decorations. The cemetery makes a thoughtful stop on a drive through Mitchell County and the Colorado City area, where the story of ranching and farming on the Texas plains is all around you.