Springlake Cemetery
Springlake, Lamb County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This burial ground served the original residents of Springdale community. The area was opened for settlement in 1908 by the George C. Wright Land Company. It was named for the nearby Springlake Ranch. D. B. Shiftlet donated the first two acres for the cemetery. The first burial took place in 1909. Of the 356 known graves, five are unmarked. The community of Springlake was relocated in 1935, 4.75 miles southeast. The town once had a hotel, supply store, school and post office, but only the cemetery remains at the original site. (1980)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
When the George C. Wright Land Company opened this High Plains country to settlers in 1908, a small community gathered nearby and, in 1909, began burying its dead in ground donated by D. B. Shiftlet. The town of Springlake—once boasting a hotel, store, school, and post office—picked up and moved nearly five miles southeast in 1935, chasing better prospects. Only the cemetery, with its 356 known graves, still marks where the original settlement stood.
Why it matters
A surviving cemetery beside a vanished townsite captures the boom-and-relocation churn of early-twentieth-century Plains settlement, where whole communities could rise, move, and disappear within a generation.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The southern High Plains were among the last stretches of Texas to be broken to the plow. Flat, treeless, and grassed for grazing, this was ranch country well into the early twentieth century, opened to farmers only when land companies began carving big spreads into sellable tracts and advertising them to hopeful settlers.
That is the moment this cemetery belongs to. In 1908 the George C. Wright Land Company opened the surrounding country for settlement, and a community gathered on ground named for the nearby Springlake Ranch. It was the Progressive era, a time of railroads pushing across the Plains, new towns springing up almost overnight, and families betting their futures on land they had often bought sight unseen.
Life on the High Plains was exposed and uncertain. Water, weather, and distance shaped everything, and a new community's first shared institutions were often a school, a store, and a place to bury its dead.
People & events
The settlement took quick shape. D. B. Shiftlet donated the first two acres for a cemetery, and the first burial was made in 1909, only a year after the land opened. That sequence tells you how fast, and how precariously, these Plains communities came into being: the graveyard was among the earliest permanent things the residents made together.
The town itself grew into a real place, with a hotel, a supply store, a school, and a post office, the ordinary anchors of a working community. For a time it was a going concern, the kind of small Plains town that expected to last.
Then, in 1935, the community picked up and moved nearly five miles to the southeast. The marker doesn't tell us why, and it's better not to guess at causes; Plains towns of that era often shifted toward rail lines or better prospects, but each had its own reasons. What is certain is that the buildings went and the cemetery stayed, its graves anchored to the original site.
Its place in the American story
A cemetery beside a townsite that got up and left is one of the clearest emblems of how the settlement of the American Plains actually worked. Elsewhere the country tells its frontier story as steady, one-way growth; out here, whole communities could rise, thrive, and relocate within a single generation.
The boom-and-move churn was national in scope. As land companies sold the Plains and railroads rewrote the map, towns lived and died by their access to markets and transport, and it was often easier to move a town than to save it. The living followed opportunity; the dead, understandably, did not.
Of the 356 known graves here, only five are unmarked, a strikingly complete record for a community that otherwise vanished from its first location. Those graves preserve, better than any foundation stone could, the memory of the people who first believed in this place.
If you visit
What makes this stop memorable is the absence around it. The hotel, the store, the school, and the post office are gone from this ground; the cemetery is what remains, and standing among the stones you're standing where the original town once was.
Look across the open country and you get the feel of the High Plains that shaped these lives: big sky, long horizons, and little shelter. The graves themselves are the town's most honest census. Read the dates and family names and you can begin to picture the community that gathered here after 1908.
It fits naturally into a wider Plains road trip as a quiet counterpoint to the living towns nearby. Come for the stillness, and for the small jolt of realizing that a whole community once planned its future on this exact spot before carrying that future a few miles down the road.
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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Related people
- · D. B. Shiftlet
- · George C. Wright
Themes & tags
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