Whitehead Cemetery
Mingus, Erath County, Texas
Marker Inscription
WHITEHEAD CEMETERY THE WHITEHEAD CEMETERY IS A SIGNIFICANT REMINDER OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY THAT OCCUPIED THE THURBER TOWNSITE IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY. WHEN THE TEXAS AND PACIFIC COAL AND OIL COMPANY RELOCATED ITS OFFICES TO FORT WORTH IN 1933, SEVERAL FAMILIES REMAINED IN THEIR COMPANY-OWNED HOMES. ALBERT WHITEHEAD AND FELLOW BLACK RESIDENTS ESTABLISHED THIS PLOT SOUTH OF THE FORMER TOWN SQUARE FOR FRIENDS AND RELATIVES AS A CONVENIENT ALTERNATIVE TO THE THURBER CEMETERY. THE FIRST DOCUMENTED BURIAL IS THAT OF SARAH GRANT IN 1943. TARLETON STATE UNIVERSITY MAINTAINS THE CEMETERY AS PART OF THE W.K. GORDON CENTER FOR INDUSTRIAL HISTORY OF TEXAS GROUNDS. HISTORIC TEXAS CEMETERY – 2010
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The Whitehead Cemetery recalls the African American community that lived in the company town of Thurber in the early 20th century. When the Texas and Pacific Coal and Oil Company moved its offices to Fort Worth in 1933, several Black families stayed on in their company-owned homes. Albert Whitehead and fellow residents established this burial plot south of the old town square as a convenient alternative to the Thurber Cemetery, with the first documented burial—Sarah Grant—in 1943. Tarleton State University now maintains it as part of its industrial-history center grounds.
Why it matters
The cemetery preserves the story of Black workers in one of Texas's great coal and oil company towns, a community easily erased when the industry that built the town moved on.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Whitehead Cemetery sits in the North Central Texas country of Erath County, on ground shadowed by one of the state's most remarkable vanished places: the coal town of Thurber. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as America's railroads and factories ran on coal, this stretch of Texas turned out to be sitting on it — and a company town rose to dig it out. By the early 20th century, when this cemetery's community took shape, Thurber was a bustling, company-owned town where the mines, the homes, the stores, and the payroll all belonged to a single corporation.
Thurber drew workers from many backgrounds, and among them were African American families who lived, labored, and raised children in the orbit of the coal operation. This was the Progressive and early modern era — a time of industrial boom, of company towns across the American landscape, and of the rigid segregation that shaped where Black residents could live, work, and be buried.
The town's fortunes were tied entirely to industry, and industry moves. When the company that owned Thurber shifted its business, the town it had built began to empty. That fragile dependence — a whole community resting on one company's decisions — is the essential backdrop to everything this cemetery preserves.
People & events
The turning point in this story came in 1933, when the Texas and Pacific Coal and Oil Company relocated its offices to Fort Worth. In a company town, that kind of move is an earthquake: the jobs, the reason the place existed, follow the company out the door. Yet not everyone left. Several families stayed on in their company-owned homes, unwilling or unable to abandon the community they had made.
Among those who remained, Albert Whitehead and his fellow Black residents did something quietly determined. They established this burial plot south of the old town square — a convenient alternative to the Thurber Cemetery — so that friends and relatives could be laid to rest close to home. It was an act of continuity in a place that was otherwise winding down, a way of saying that this community's dead deserved a ground of their own even as the town around them faded.
The first documented burial came in 1943 — Sarah Grant — a full decade after the company's offices had gone. That single date carries a whole history: the people of this community outlasted the industry that had brought them here. Today Tarleton State University maintains the cemetery as part of the grounds of its W.K. Gordon Center for Industrial History of Texas, folding this small plot into the larger memory of Thurber itself.
Its place in the American story
America is dotted with the ghosts of company towns — places built, owned, and eventually abandoned by the industries that raised them. Thurber was one of Texas's most striking examples, and Whitehead Cemetery preserves the part of that story most easily lost: the African American workers whose labor helped power the coal era but whose lives were rarely recorded on their own terms.
When an industry leaves a company town, the physical place can vanish with astonishing speed — homes hauled away, streets returned to pasture. What tends to survive is the cemetery, because a burial ground is not something a community lets disappear. That is exactly why this plot matters nationally: it is durable proof that a Black community existed here, chose to remain, and cared for its own across the years.
There is a larger American lesson in that 1943 burial arriving a decade after the offices left. It shows that a community is not the same thing as the company that employed it. People make homes, form bonds, and honor their dead by a logic deeper than any corporate ledger — and this cemetery is the record they left behind.
If you visit
Whitehead Cemetery lies in open Erath County country near the site of old Thurber, and part of what you'll feel here is the strange quiet of a place that was once anything but quiet. Where a working town's community once gathered, there is now grassland and sky, and a modest plot of graves that asks to be read carefully.
Because the cemetery is maintained as part of the W.K. Gordon Center for Industrial History of Texas, a visit here pairs naturally with learning the larger story of Thurber's coal and brick industry — the boom, the company ownership, and the long afterlife of a town that essentially disappeared. Approach the two together and the cemetery stops being a lonely field and becomes the human heart of an industrial epic.
At the graves themselves, look for the dignity in their persistence. This is the resting place that a community chose to create for itself when the company that built their world had already moved on. If you're traveling the back roads of North Central Texas in search of the state's industrial past, let this be the stop that reminds you those mines and brickyards were worked by real families — and that some of them stayed to the end.
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
- · Albert Whitehead
- · Sarah Grant
Themes & tags
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