Wolf Valley Cemetery
May, Brown County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This cemetery originally served pioneer settlers of the Wolf Valley community, which began about 1875. The earliest grave is that of S. T. Tollette, who was buried here May 11, 1882. Also buried that same month were James Lyon and R. P. Ramsey. The cemetery was formally set aside in 1902 when trustees A. E. Bailey, A. W. Hardy and J. W. Spence bought the original tract from the D. M. Davidson family. The site was enlarged through later additions of land. A church building was constructed here in 1887 for use by Baptist, Methodist and Cumberland Presbyterian congregations as well as the local schools. Brush arbors were used for summer revivals. The building and grounds were the spiritual and educational hub of the community. The structure burned, but was rebuilt through donated funds and labor. Graves here include those of pioneer settlers, early community leaders, military veterans and two state legislators, H. P. Taylor and W. R. Chambers. The site contains over three hundred marked graves and two unmarked gravesites. An annual homecoming and Memorial Day service is conducted here each May. Maintenance of the historic burial ground is funded through various donations. (1983)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Wolf Valley Cemetery grew alongside the pioneer community that took shape here around 1875, with its earliest recorded burial in 1882. Formally set aside in 1902, the grounds also held a shared church building — used by Baptist, Methodist, and Cumberland Presbyterian congregations and the local schools — that burned and was rebuilt by community labor. More than three hundred graves, including those of early leaders, veterans, and two state legislators, record generations of settler life.
Why it matters
Community cemeteries like Wolf Valley are open-air archives of frontier settlement, showing how faith, schooling, and civic life clustered around a single hard-won gathering place.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · S. T. Tollette
- · H. P. Taylor
- · W. R. Chambers
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Amity Cemetery
Comanche vicinity, TX
When a boy died on the Comanche County frontier in 1878 with no cemetery nearby, his family's farmland became a community burial ground and gathering place, complete with a brush arbor for funerals and camp meetings. That summer local Baptists organized a congregation they named Amity—friendship—and the site grew into a graveyard of nearly 400 souls, still marked each June by a singing and homecoming begun in 1897.
The May Community
May, TX
The land around May began as part of an 1827 Mexican grant to empresario John Cameron and drew its first pioneer families in the 1870s, who quickly organized Baptist and Methodist churches and a one-room school. Nathan L. May opened a trading post in 1879 and became the first postmaster, and by 1907 the village had a blacksmith, general store, newspaper, and bank. Its early growth peaked in 1911 when the railroad arrived.
May United Methodist Church
May, TX
Methodism reached this corner of Brown County with circuit-riding preachers in the 1860s, holding services in private homes before Mt. Zion Methodist Church was organized in 1882. The May Methodist Church formally took shape in 1886, gathering in a schoolhouse until members built their own one-room church in 1894 and later a brick sanctuary with stained glass. Fire destroyed that building in 2000, but the congregation's century-plus of service through depression, drought, and war endured.
First United Methodist Church of Rising Star
Rising Star, TX
When schoolteacher James Irby gathered a handful of worshipers in a log building east of town in 1879, Rising Star was barely a settlement. The little Methodist congregation moved several times before Lucy Anderson donated ground for a frame church in 1888, and the 1920 oil boom finally swelled its ranks enough to build the brick sanctuary completed in 1926. Across more than a century it became a seedbed for ministers and missionaries.