Starkey Cemetery
Nocona, Montague County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Drawn to fertile lands of north Texas, settlers began arriving in this area in significant numbers after 1850. Montague County was established in 1858 and the area began to grow. B. L. Starkey and his sons Columbus and Napoleon came from Ellis County with their families about the time of the Civil War. According to oral history, Starkey Cemetery began in the 1860s. A newly-arrived pioneer family named Wells was settling in for the winter when their small daughter died. The family asked Columbus Starkey, their closest neighbor, for permission to bury the child on the Starkey family land. Another of the Wells children died that same year and was also interred here. The property soon became a community cemetery. B. L., Columbus and Napoleon Starkey organized a Methodist church on this site in the 1870s. By 1875, those interred here included members of the Mounts, Lemons and Flatt families. The first of the Starkeys to be interred on this site were twins Helen and Ellen, daughters of Napoleon and M. C. Starkey, who died and were buried in 1886. The Starkey community school, attended by students from surrounding areas, was funded by the Starkey family. Matilda Ellen McKinney Sloss, born in 1850, came to the area as a young girl. In a 1940 interview with another church member, "Grandmother Sloss" related much of the oral history that is known about this area in the 19th century. Starkey church and cemetery remain active as a place of worship and burial ground as well as a chronicle of the area's pioneer settlers. (1999)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
As settlers poured into north Texas after 1850, B. L. Starkey and his sons arrived from Ellis County around the Civil War. The cemetery began in the 1860s when a newly arrived Wells family, having lost a daughter over the winter, asked their nearest neighbor for a place to bury her. The Starkeys organized a Methodist church here in the 1870s and funded a community school; "Grandmother Sloss," born in 1850, later preserved much of the area's oral history.
Why it matters
The church, school, and cemetery together chronicle how one pioneer family anchored a north Texas community, its memory kept alive through settlers' own recollections.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
North Texas opened to settlement in earnest in the years after 1850, when families drawn by reports of fertile land began arriving in significant numbers. This was raw frontier country: the county itself was not organized until 1858, and the people who came were staking their futures on unbroken prairie far from established towns.
The era of the Civil War and the decades that followed were a time of building from nothing. There were no ready-made churches, schools, or burial grounds; a community had to make its own, usually around a single hardy family willing to share what little permanence they had established. Distances were vast, winters were hard, and the death of a child was a grief that frontier families knew far too well.
Into this landscape came a family from Ellis County, farther south, arriving around the time of the war with grown sons and their own families in tow. They were exactly the kind of anchor a new settlement needed — people with land, with roots, and with a willingness to let their homestead become the gathering place for everyone around them.
People & events
According to the oral history preserved on this site, the cemetery began in the 1860s with an act of neighborly kindness. A newly arrived pioneer family was settling in for the winter when their small daughter died. Having no burial ground of their own and no established church nearby, they turned to their closest neighbor — one of the settler sons — and asked permission to bury the child on the family's land. He agreed. That same year, a second child from the family died and was laid to rest beside the first, and what had begun as a private sorrow quietly became a community burying ground.
The founding family did more than offer a grave. In the 1870s the father and his two sons organized a Methodist church on this site, giving the scattered settlers a place to worship together. By the middle of that decade, members of several other pioneer families had been buried here, a sign of how quickly the grounds had become the heart of the community. The first of the founding family's own to be interred here were infant twin daughters who died in 1886.
Much of what we know comes down to us through one remarkable voice. A woman born in 1850, who had come to the area as a young girl, sat for an interview with a fellow church member in 1940 and passed along the stories of the nineteenth century as she remembered them. Without "Grandmother Sloss," as she was known, the earliest chapters of this place might have been lost entirely.
Its place in the American story
This small burying ground tells a story that repeated itself thousands of times across the American frontier: the church, the school, and the cemetery as the three institutions that turned a scatter of homesteads into a community. Again and again, a single family with land to spare became the founders — offering the ground for the dead, organizing the worship of the living, and paying for the education of the young.
The way this cemetery began is itself deeply American. A stranger's child dies; a neighbor opens his land; a private grief becomes a shared and permanent thing. That pattern — community forged not by government or grand design but by people helping one another through loss — was the connective tissue of frontier settlement everywhere.
And there is the matter of memory. So much of frontier history was never written down; it survived only in the recollections of those who lived it. The 1940 interview that preserved this community's early story is a reminder of how fragile that history is, and how much we owe to the ordinary people who took the trouble to remember and record it before it slipped away.
If you visit
A country cemetery like this one asks you to read slowly. The dates on the stones are the raw material of the story the marker tells — look for the burials of the 1870s and 1880s that mark the community's earliest years, and let the clustering of family names show you how a settlement was knit together.
That this remains an active place of worship and burial is part of its power. This is not a preserved relic behind a fence but a living continuation of what was begun more than a century and a half ago. The same ground that received a pioneer family's daughter one hard winter still serves the people of the area today.
If you're traveling through the ranch and farm country of north Texas, this is a stop for the quietly curious rather than the crowd-seeker. Stand among the older graves, think of the oral history that only just survived, and you'll feel how thin the thread is that connects us to the people who first broke this land.
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
- · B. L. Starkey
- · Columbus Starkey
- · Napoleon Starkey
- · Matilda Ellen McKinney Sloss
Themes & tags
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