Thursday, September 26, 2024
In the history of Texas, several cemeteries have become noted due to their uniqueness. Of many, two cemeteries are observed as “different.” One of which is the “Grave in the Road Cemetery,” where a lone grave is marked in the middle of the street in an almond-shaped median where Hollie Tatnell was buried in an early day African-American cemetery. When a new road was being built, the cemetery was moved - with the exception of Tatnell - her family refused to have her disinterred, so she remains today in her final resting place in the middle of the road.
Another unusual cemetery in Texas is located in Llano County and is known as the “Baby Head Cemetery,” which is all that remains of a wild west settlement with possibly the worst name. Sometime in the 1850s, a group of American Indians kidnapped a young white girl and, attempting to scare off the settlers, killed the girl and placed her head on a spike at the foot of a mountain, which would later be called Baby Head Mountain.
Coryell County has its own cemetery with mysterious origins and is now known simply as the “Playground Cemetery” - located in Evant on school property amidst the playground. Scattered among the playground equipment are graves of some of the founding fathers of Langford Cove, now known as Evant.
Surely, it once had a name, but that has been lost to time. In the past, some residents referred to it as the Baptist Cemetery, but that could not have been, since its oldest remaining tombstone shows the burial as being in 1881, which predates the 1885 building of the first church.
The first known marked grave is that of John Alexander who died in 1881. There may have been earlier graves prior to that date, but they remain unmarked.
Old-timers recalled what must have been 150 to 200 graves stretching from the Evant Baptist Church to where the school now stands. Evidence remains of approximately nine graves, which are marked with tombstones and are located within the playground where children now frolic among the graves of their forefathers. Some of the graves are surrounded by iron fences, while others remain unmarked and lost to time.
Former Evant ISD student Bernadine Connor Marriott remembers her childhood and playing on the playground in the late 1950s. “There were headstones, but I don’t remember how many. We played house under the trees. We just played as kids and chased each other around, not thinking it was a cemetery,” she said.
When asked if the teachers ever warned the children about not playing amidst the graves, Marriott replied, “We were never told not to go out there and play. We were pretty good kids.”
In 2019, Ronnie Smith stated, “I’m sure many of those who attended the Evant School, as I did, recall playing around the old graves, as the cemetery was on school property and used as a playground for the school.”
Marriott stated that the school she attended in the 1950s was closer to the main road. When the new school was built, it was next to the cemetery, which separated the Baptist Church from the school by the cemetery.
Some local residents fear that the new school may have been built over part of the cemetery that did not have marked graves.
It has been written that some of the gravestones are on the school side of the driveway in the playground while some are in the grass on the church side – some of which may have been located under a paved driveway between the church and the school.
In the 1979 article from the Evant News, it was stated that, “Inside the fence to which the Alexander plot lays, hidden in a tangle of bushes, is the grave of Bertha Sawyers. She was eleven years old when death sought her out in the spring of 1892, of an age to run and play with those who have romped about her so many times since that long ago day of sadness.”
