Hardwired
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A note from Darcy, Bullet, and Pat
The votes are in!
We have agreed to take a hiatus from posting to our blog. We want to concentrate on completing book five in the Darcy McClain and Bullet Thriller Series. Plus, we’ll need the pause to ramp up our stamina for the marathon race we’ll face in Blue Angel.
Blue Angel synopsis:
Darcy’s best friend, Samantha Logan, is lured out of retirement by the CIA for a Special Op. When Sam doesn’t show up in Dallas as planned, Darcy senses that Sam is in trouble and begins to track her whereabouts. Her desperate hunt leads Darcy on a footrace across Europe, always trailing steps behind, until she resorts to help from her canine partner, Bullet.
To complicate matters, the CIA is concerned that Darcy and Bullet will blow Sam’s cover and expose the secret operation, so the Agency deploys field agents to stalk them. As if that weren’t enough, Darcy’s former FBI partner, Dan, is worried that both women might be in grave danger, so he’s shadowing them as well.
Thrown back into the environment in which she was raised, Darcy learns the shocking truth about her childhood. These startling revelations shake her adult world, and will change her life forever.
Texas Cemeteries, Part 2
I followed my GPS’s directions to Lonesome Dove Cemetery, but I really didn’t need it to guide me, as this wasn’t my first visit to the graveyard. During my research on the history of the Cross Timbers region, I had read quite a bit about the Dove community and was therefore familiar with the location.
The 1843 Bird’s Fort Treaty between the Republic of Texas and several Native American tribes opened the area to new immigrants. In the ensuing years, about 35 related families arrived from Platte County, Missouri, and settlers from other parts of the United States migrated to this region to claim land offered by the Peters Colony. They settled along Denton Creek south near present-day Grapevine, and west near what is now Roanoke. In February of 1846, area residents organized the Lonesome Dove Baptist Church. In 1847, members built a long log structure approximately four miles northwest of Grapevine in the Eastern Cross Timbers. The Lonesome Dove School also began about that time, and the Rev. John Allen Freeman served as schoolteacher as well as church pastor for ten years.
In 1849, the state legislature created Tarrant County, with Birdville as the county seat, and the U.S. Army established Fort Worth as a frontier fort. By 1870, the small village of Dove had a general store and a post office operated at the intersection of Dove and Lonesome Dove roads. The community became a farming center for cotton, melon, and dairy production. Included as part of the community were Lonesome Dove Cemetery just north of the church site, the Dove Branch swimming hole, used for recreation as well as baptisms, and Dove School, which was closed in 1919 when Carroll School was built in the newly-named Carroll Common School District.
In 1952, the federal government completed Lake Grapevine, which forced a number of families to relocate from the northern portion of the Dove Community to other parts of Texas. In 1979, the city of Southlake annexed Dove, but evidence of the early community remains.
The Whites Chapel Cemetery is one of the oldest surviving landmarks in modern-day Southlake, Texas. According to local lore this cemetery began around 1851 when a child died on a wagon train that was traveling through the region. The child is buried here in an unmarked grave. The oldest documented death took place in 1872 with the burial of the infant Amy A. Marr.
The cemetery’s earliest readable birth date on a headstone is of Mrs. E. B. Torian. She was born in Halifax County, Virginia, in 1796 and was buried March 27, 1886. Most of the graves in this pioneer cemetery are unmarked, or marked only with fieldstones. Laid to rest here is the former state legislator Elihu Newton (1845-1925), who served in the 20th and 23rd Texas legislatures, as well as veterans of the Civil War. The cemetery is cared for by the White’s Chapel Cemetery Association.
Side note: Notice that there is no apostrophe in the name that graces the entrance to Whites Chapel Cemetery.
Texas Cemeteries, Part 1
Hood Cemetery
I’ve always loved strolling through cemeteries. Why, you might ask? Because history is buried there. Some say my interest is morbid. Not really. There is infinite peace among the dead, and tranquility hangs in the air. Soul-searching time. I plug Russ Hewitt’s guitar music into my ears and let the wandering begin. Tuning everything and everyone out allows me to tap into my inner strength. As time passes, my mind is rejuvenated, and I’ll be ready to tackle another chapter in book five of my Darcy McClain and Bullet Thriller Series.
But for now, my quest over the coming weeks is to visit five cemeteries in the local area: Absalom H. Chivers Cemetery, Hood Cemetery, Lonesome Dove Cemetery, Thomas Easter Cemetery, and White’s Chapel Cemetery. I’ll begin with the three least known to me before doing my research: Chivers, Hood, and Easter. In part two, I’ll visit Lonesome Dove and White’s Chapel.
Immersing myself in my current surroundings, I roam the grounds of the Absalom H. Chivers Cemetery. I had to do some reconnaissance to find the location. The entrance is off a frontage road that skirts a main freeway, but I had to travel about five hundred feet down a dirt road to locate the actual cemetery. The burial grounds are hard to spot through the thick stand of trees, but the graveyard is fenced and there is a Historical Marker confirming that you’ve found the correct cemetery.
The Historical Marker reads: This cemetery was established for the family of Absalom H. Chivers, a prosperous farmer and stockman who came here from Mississippi about 1852. With the help of his five slaves, he operated a farm along Dove Creek until his death in 1856. Chivers’ grave is thought to be the first in this burial ground, located on his original homestead. The land was set aside as a family cemetery in 1889 by his widow Eleanor (Joyce) Chivers (1816-1896), whose grave is believed to be the last placed here. Native sandstone cairns reflect some of the pioneer burial customs.
My next destination was the Hood Cemetery, which is located inside Southlake’s Coventry Manor subdivision. Again, I had to do a bit of searching as I wasn’t familiar with the housing tract. The cemetery, one of Tarrant County’s oldest, is a one-acre site that dates back to 1845, according to Mike Patterson, a longtime area historian. Mr. Patterson assisted the Coventry Manor HOA members in updating the cemetery’s history. The burial grounds were once part of a 640-acre survey patented to Thomas M. Hood when Texas was a republic. (Yes, “patented” is the right term. It refers to the “letters patent” associated with a grant of land that was originally owned by some other nation — probably Mexico, in this case.)
The Historical Marker reads: This cemetery was established on the farm of Peters colonist Thomas M. Hood (ca. 1823-1859), who came to Texas from Missouri about 1845. The earliest marked grave is that of Urias Martin (1795-1855). Among the unmarked graves are those of Hood and his second wife Maryetta (Hall). Other Peters colonists and several Confederate veterans are buried here. In 1871 Thomas Hood’s family formally set aside the one-acre cemetery tract. Handmade native sandstone markers and burial cairns reflect the lifestyles and resourcefulness of early north Texas pioneers.
From the Hood Cemetery I proceeded to the Thomas Easter Cemetery. I had no knowledge of this cemetery until I stumbled upon it while doing research on local graveyards, and was quite puzzled as to where it might be located. The gravesites are in a park alongside one of the main thoroughfares in Southlake and adjacent to a popular strip mall. In fact, one online photo showed an Old Navy store in the background.
Who was Thomas Easter? A Virginia native born about 1823, he migrated to Texas and settled in Tarrant County around 1848. Easter patented a 630-acre tract of land in the northeast corner of the county. A portion of this land was used as a cemetery upon his death in 1862. His wife Charity Easter, born about 1820, was buried here in the early 1880s. Another known burial in the Easter Cemetery is that of early settler Hardin West (b. 1809), who died on March 10, 1881. There are also several unmarked graves.
You may also enjoy reading a previous post about my trip to the Medlin Cemetery in nearby Trophy Club: https://patkrapf.com/texas-the-missouri-colonists/ During your visit, tune into one of my favorite songs by Russ Hewitt, “Luminous,” and do some soul-searching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpklLcRcR0w