a great whisperer

an even better listener

 

Located high on the mountain overlooking Madrid, the cemetery reflects the town's history.  Madrid started as a mining town, became a ghost town and then was "discovered."  Its mining shacks became residences for artists and others.  The cemetery has traditional gravestones from the 1920s but newer markers are more individual.  No one is quite sure of when Endious Self was born (1927 - 37?) but know he died in 2012.  The site is ringed with Corona beer bottles and a metal cowboy hat wreathed in barb wire shades Endious' resting place.

 

Madrid, New Mexico

9.16.2017



boots and hats totem pole

 

I've seen lots of different tributes at gravesites but this was a first.  The only marker is the metal one from the funeral home with name and dates.  I am assuming that "Jo" was female because the boots seem to be of the feminine persuasion.  Someone has been adding to the tributes since the burial in 2001.  I wonder about Jo.  Was she a rancher, a cowgirl or are the tributes indicative of those left behind?  What did she do in her 78 years of life?  Boots and cowboy hats are iconic symbols of the western way of life. Jo appears to be the only Honeycutt in the Grassland Cemetery. One goes TO Grassland, not necessary through the town.  It is located at FM 212 and 1313 in Lynn County.  The community was founded in 1888 and population reached 200 in 1940.  At one time there was a school, three churches, a post office and café plus two gins and ag businesses.  The students were bussed to Tahoka and the decline began. Today there appear to be about a dozen occupied residences, one working gin, one ag business and the Church of the Nazarene (founded 1920 but in "new" building). No closed school or abandoned churches and a few dilapidated buildings.   (By the way, there is no grass in the Grassland Cemetery.)  

Grassland Cemetery
Grassland, Texas
2.20.2015

bury me on the lone prairie

 

Some leave floral tributes but these young cowboys are honored with ropes.  Each June since about 1904 family members gather at Red Mud Cemetery for the annual cleaning.  The ropes appear recently and reverently placed.  Until 1990s there was also a tabernacle for "dinner on the grounds." In early times there were a number of large elm trees that provided shade. It was a real work morning, hoeing and repairing graves. A huge lunch followed, spread on makeshift tables. After lunch there would be a variety of entertainment; group singing, quartets, duets, and solos The elms trees are gone and a pole arbor replaces the building.  The first burial here, originally known as Tap Cemetery, was a homesteader who was shot over a horse in April 1886.  His wife died of tuberculosis a few months later and was buried beside on the home place..  Located about 11 miles southwest of Spur, one approaches the cemetery across a cattle guard and a few miles along a red dust road.  Good thing the weather was dry, or the road probably would have be "red mud" just like the so-named Little Red Mud Creek nearby.

 

Red Mud Cemetery

Dickens County, Texas

8.16.2014