Turnersville Cemetery
Gatesville, Coryell County, Texas
Marker Inscription
TURNERSVILLE CEMETERY THIS BURIAL GROUND SERVED RESIDENTS OF THE RURAL COMMUNITY OF TURNERSVILLE (ORIGINALLY BUCHANAN SPRINGS). SETTLED BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR, TURNERSVILLE BOASTED A COTTON GIN, STORES, A SCHOOL, AND THREE CHURCHES BY THE 1880s. THE INTERRED HERE INCLUDE MANY OF THESE PAST RESIDENTS, WITH RANCHERS, FARMERS, MERCHANTS, PHYSICIANS, TEACHERS, MINISTERS, AND MILITARY VETERANS AMONG THEM. CEMETERY FEATURES INCLUDE INTERIOR FENCING, CURBING, AND GRAVE SLABS. A CEMETERY ASSOCIATION FORMED BY 1900, BUT DISBANDED IN THE 1930s. THE TURNERSVILLE CEMETERY ASSOCIATION REORGANIZED IN 1953, AND STILL CONTINUES TO CARE FOR THE BURIAL GROUND. TODAY, THE CEMETERY IS ONE OF THE FEW REMAINING VESTIGES OF THE TURNERSVILLE COMMUNITY. HISTORIC TEXAS CEMETERY – 2010
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This burial ground served Turnersville—first called Buchanan Springs—a Coryell County community settled before the Civil War that by the 1880s boasted a cotton gin, stores, a school, and three churches. Ranchers, farmers, merchants, physicians, teachers, ministers, and military veterans lie among its curbed plots and grave slabs. A cemetery association formed by 1900, lapsed in the 1930s, and reorganized in 1953 to keep tending the site.
Why it matters
Turnersville Cemetery is one of the last remnants of a self-sufficient frontier Texas settlement, preserving the memory of the pioneers who cleared and farmed the land.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Turnersville grew up in the rolling farmland of Coryell County in Central Texas, a community whose roots reach back before the Civil War. It began under a different name — Buchanan Springs — a reminder that the earliest settlers often named a place for its water, the single most important thing a frontier family needed. A dependable spring meant you could stay, farm, and raise a family, and around such places small communities gathered.
By the 1880s, Turnersville had matured into the kind of self-sufficient rural settlement that dotted post-Civil War Texas. It boasted a cotton gin, stores, a school, and three churches — a striking sign of a community that had moved well beyond bare survival. A cotton gin meant the town was tied into the cash economy of the cotton South; three churches meant a population large and settled enough to sustain competing congregations, each with its own flock.
This was Central Texas in the era of westward expansion and agricultural growth, when cotton was king and farm communities were the backbone of the state. Turnersville had everything a nineteenth-century rural Texan needed within a short wagon ride — and for a time, that was enough to make it thrive.
People & events
The true story of Turnersville is not the tale of a single famous figure but the collective portrait of an entire working community, and that is exactly what makes its cemetery so valuable. Buried here are the people who made a frontier town function: ranchers and farmers who worked the land, merchants who ran the stores, physicians who tended the sick, teachers who taught in the school, ministers who filled those three churches, and military veterans who had served in the nation's conflicts.
Read as a group, these graves reconstruct the anatomy of a self-contained settlement. Every role a town needed to sustain itself is represented in the ground here. That completeness is its own kind of history — a census of the living community, preserved in stone.
The cemetery also carries the story of who cared for it, which is a history in miniature of the community's own fortunes. A cemetery association formed by 1900, during the town's confident years, but disbanded in the 1930s — a decade when the Great Depression and the long decline of small farm towns hollowed out countless rural communities. Then, in 1953, the Turnersville Cemetery Association reorganized, and it still tends the burial ground today. That revival is a story of descendants and neighbors refusing to let the place be forgotten.
Its place in the American story
Turnersville embodies the rise and fade of the self-sufficient American farm town — a settlement type that once defined vast stretches of the country and has now largely vanished. In an age before automobiles and highways collapsed distance, a community needed to provide nearly everything locally: goods, education, worship, medicine. Turnersville did exactly that, and its cemetery preserves the whole cross-section of people who made it possible.
The life cycle of its cemetery association mirrors the national story of rural America across the twentieth century. Formed in a hopeful year, dissolved during the hardest decade of the century, and then deliberately revived a generation later, it traces the same arc that thousands of small communities followed as they thrived, emptied out, and were then remembered by those who came after.
That later generations chose to reorganize and keep caring for the graves speaks to something deeply American: the impulse to preserve the memory of the ordinary people who built a place, even long after the place itself has faded. A cotton gin, three churches, and a school are gone, but the names endure because people decided they should.
If you visit
At Turnersville Cemetery, let the layout and the stonework tell you the story. Look for the interior fencing and curbing that outline family plots — the low borders that families built to claim and tend their own ground. These details reveal how a community organized itself in death much as it did in life, family by family.
Notice the grave slabs and the range of markers, which quietly record the passage of generations and the varying means of the ranchers, farmers, and merchants who lie here. Because the cemetery is one of the few remaining vestiges of the Turnersville community, walking its rows is very nearly the only way left to meet the people who once made this a bustling little town with its stores, gin, and churches.
This is a peaceful, unhurried stop on a drive through the Central Texas countryside around Gatesville. Come without a checklist and simply read the names. Knowing that a volunteer association has cared for this ground since 1953 adds something to the visit — you are standing in a place that a community chose, twice, to remember. Give it the same attention, and the vanished town of Turnersville comes briefly back to life.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Site of Clifton Mill
Clifton, TX
R.G. Grant built a water-powered wooden mill on the Bosque River here in 1857, and during the Civil War the building served as a commissary and storehouse for the Confederate Army. Under later owner William Kemp, a new stone mill supplied flour and cornmeal hauled by ox cart to frontier settlements and forts across West Texas, and former governor and U.S. senator Richard Coke once held an interest in it. Rebuilt with a distinctive mansard roof and cupola, the mill later became an electric power plant before it was demolished in 1915.
Ruth Cemetery
Coryell County, TX
When the U.S. Army abandoned Fort Gates in 1853, its soldiers and neighboring families spread out into small settlements for mutual protection, and one became Ruth. Along the Gatesville-to-Killeen road it gathered a cotton gin, stores, a blacksmith, a post office, and a one-room schoolhouse that doubled as a church for four denominations. Today the community is gone, swallowed by the Fort Hood live-fire area, and its cemetery—open to the public just once a year—is all that remains.
Deyerle-Fall House
McGregor, TX
William Deyerle, a banker, rancher, and miller who came to Central Texas from Virginia, hired master stonemason Henry Wissman to build this limestone home, completed in 1892. Wissman quarried and hauled every stone himself, laying them to his own design beneath a hipped roof trimmed with arched windows and a bracketed cornice. After a family tragedy claimed Deyerle's widow and her second husband in 1926, the house passed to her sister and stayed in the Fall family until 1975.
John and Mary Colwick House
Clifton, TX
John Colwick came to Texas in 1859 with his parents in the party of Norwegian colonizer Cleng Peerson, part of a wave of Scandinavian immigrants who settled the Bosque County hills. After marrying Mary Jenson in 1879, the couple lived in a small house on this site until 1889, when builder J. H. Nordahl raised this farmhouse for them using materials from the older dwelling. Its unusual proportions echo traditional Norwegian forms, softened by Eastlake brackets on the porch.