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.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · B. L. Starkey
- · Columbus Starkey
- · Napoleon Starkey
- · Matilda Ellen McKinney Sloss
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Lindale Cemetery
Bowie, TX
Named for the Lindale School District, this Montague County burial ground was established in 1880 when the Gibbins family sold a single acre to school trustees for four dollars. The graves gather generations of the farming families — Cooper, Griffin, Thomas and others — who settled the Lindale community, along with veterans of both World Wars. By the close of the century more than 250 graves marked the site.
Valley View Baptist Church
Nocona, TX
A regional Baptist association voted in 1895 to plant a church near Spanish Fort, and Red River Baptist Church was organized that year after a brush-arbor revival at Red River Station. Early worship rotated through local schoolhouses, and by about 1919–1920 the congregation shared the new Valley View Schoolhouse; a pastor who doubled as the school's principal led it in the early 1920s. Renamed Valley View Baptist Church around 1929, it built a lasting record of supporting missionary work, sending many former pastors into the foreign mission field.
Era, The Town of
Era, TX
Settled in the 1870s in a fertile farming belt, the village of Era was platted by merchant J. N. Gist and got its post office in 1881, named for a young girl, Era Hargroves, who had recently died. It soon bustled with a blacksmith, cotton gin, hotel, stores, and three churches, and chartered the Era Institute in 1897 offering classes from primary through college level. Among its notable sons was Robert E. Thomason, later a U.S. congressman and federal judge.
Greenwood
Greenwood, TX
Settlers began arriving in this corner of Wise County as early as the 1850s, with the Greenwood and Hart families remembered among the first. The town that grew here gained a post office in 1877 and at its peak bustled with saloons, groceries, a hotel, a bank, a cotton gin, and its own newspaper, the Greenwood Gazette. It even supported the short-lived Greenwood Male and Female College, and three churches founded between 1872 and 1896 still anchor the area.