Van Winkle Cemetery
Princeton, Collin County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This burial ground has served the residents of Climax since the mid-1800s. The Climax community dates to 1851, when Williams Warden, a farmer from Missouri, settled here with his family. The rural community grew and by the 1890s, it had two cotton gins, a grain elevator, a school, a church, a blacksmith shop and a general store. Most residents of the community were farmers who established small, family-owned farms that produced mostly wheat and corn. Climax reached its peak population around 1910, when about 100 residents lived here. Afterwards, the settlement declined, though it continued to serve as a retail point for local farmers into the late 1960s. This cemetery is named for David Van Winkle, who surveyed property lines in the area around Climax; the Texas government compensated him with land, a small portion of which became the Van Winkle Cemetery. The earliest marked grave here is of M.L. Warnburg (d. 1867), an infant. However, there are multiple unmarked graves in the cemetery, and oral tradition states that the earliest interment was of a slave. Other individuals interred here include Abraham Recer (d. 1870), who built and operated a toll bridge that crossed Sister Grove Creek, and W.K. Long (d. 1932), a local business owner. Van Winkle Cemetery also contains graves of military veterans. Features include vertical stones, obelisks and curbing. In 1974, the Van Winkle Cemetery foundation organized to care for the burial ground. Additional property was added in 1976 and 2007. Today, Van Winkle Cemetery continues to serve the residents of the Climax community. Historic Texas Cemetery - 2008
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This burial ground has served the vanished community of Climax since the mid-1800s, when a Missouri farmer named William Warden settled the Blackland Prairie in 1851. At its peak around 1910 Climax held some hundred residents with cotton gins, a school, a church, and a store, but the settlement slowly dwindled to memory. The cemetery honors surveyor David Van Winkle, and among its graves lie a toll-bridge builder, a slave remembered in oral tradition as the earliest burial, and military veterans.
Why it matters
It preserves the full arc of a Texas farming community—its founders, its enslaved and forgotten dead, and its slow disappearance—in a single burial ground.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Blackland Prairie of North Texas, with its deep, dark, fertile soil, drew farming families westward in the middle of the nineteenth century. They came to break the sod and raise crops — here, mostly wheat and corn — on small, family-owned farms. Out of this settlement grew countless little communities, each with its stores, gins, school, and church, and each anchored, sooner or later, by a burial ground.
The community of Climax dates to 1851, in the years when this part of Texas was still being surveyed and claimed. Land itself was the coin of the frontier: the government paid surveyors in acreage, and the boundaries they drew shaped who owned what for generations. A cemetery like this one traces directly back to that world of survey lines and land grants.
This was also the era spanning the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age — decades in which rural Texas communities rose toward a modest peak and then, many of them, began the slow fade that would turn thriving settlements into ghost towns remembered mainly by the names on their gravestones.
People & events
Climax began in 1851 when William Warden, a farmer from Missouri, settled here with his family. Others followed, and by the 1890s the community had grown to include two cotton gins, a grain elevator, a school, a church, a blacksmith shop, and a general store. Around 1910 it reached its peak — roughly a hundred residents — before beginning its long decline, though it lingered as a retail point for local farmers into the late 1960s.
The cemetery carries the name of David Van Winkle, who surveyed property lines around Climax and was compensated by the Texas government with land; a small portion of that grant became this burial ground. The earliest marked grave belongs to an infant, M.L. Warnburg, who died in 1867 — a reminder of how often these old cemeteries open with the loss of a child. But the marked graves tell only part of the story: multiple unmarked graves lie here, and oral tradition holds that the very first person buried was an enslaved person, unnamed in stone but not forgotten in memory.
Among the others resting here is Abraham Recer, who died in 1870 and who had built and operated a toll bridge across Sister Grove Creek — the kind of small, essential infrastructure that made travel and trade possible on the frontier. There is W.K. Long, a local business owner who died in 1932, and there are military veterans among the graves. In 1974 a cemetery foundation organized to care for the grounds, adding land in 1976 and 2007, and the cemetery was recognized as a Historic Texas Cemetery in 2008.
Its place in the American story
Van Winkle Cemetery preserves, in a single fenced acreage, the entire life cycle of an American farming community — its founding, its brief flourishing, and its quiet disappearance. This pattern repeated thousands of times across rural America: a town gathers, peaks, and dissolves as railroads, highways, and cities pull life elsewhere, until the cemetery becomes the community's most permanent institution and its last address.
The cemetery also holds a fuller, more honest cross-section of frontier society than many monuments allow. The surveyor whose work laid out the land, the bridge-builder who eased its travel, the business owner, the veterans, the infant — and, remembered through oral tradition, an enslaved person believed to be the earliest burial of all. That range matters. American history was made not only by the named and marked but by the unnamed and unmarked, and a place that keeps room for both tells the truer story.
The careful preservation of this ground — a foundation organized, land added, official recognition earned — reflects a nationwide movement to protect historic cemeteries as irreplaceable records. When the stores and gins are gone, these grounds remain as the community's archive, written in stone and in memory.
If you visit
Walk Van Winkle Cemetery slowly and read it as a document. The features themselves tell time: upright vertical stones, obelisks reaching upward, and low curbing outlining family plots are the vocabulary of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century burial grounds. Look for the oldest marked stone, the 1867 grave of an infant, and let it remind you how these places so often begin.
Then hold in mind what you cannot see. Among the marked graves lie unmarked ones, including the person whom oral tradition names as the earliest burial here — an enslaved individual remembered without a stone. Standing quietly among the markers, you are also standing among the unrecorded, and part of visiting well is honoring that unseen presence.
Around you, the community of Climax has all but vanished, though it survives in this ground and its story. For a traveler crossing the Blackland Prairie, the cemetery makes a contemplative stop — a place to feel the full arc of a small Texas settlement, from a Missouri farmer's arrival in 1851 to the still-tended graves that outlasted the town itself. Come respectful, tread lightly, and let the names, and the silences between them, speak.
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
- · David Van Winkle
- · William Warden
- · Abraham Recer
Themes & tags
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