Johnson County cemeteries provide folklore

By Matt Smith/msmith@trcle.com

Editor’s note: This is part 2 of a series of stories about unusual stories of people buried in Johnson County cemeteries. The final installment will appear Sunday.

Johnson County cemeteries hold enough stories that a book could, probably should, be written about them. The details of many are well documented while others rely partially or whole cloth on folklore.

Several stories involve graves filled with unknown occupants. One man, buried in Myers Cemetery in Alvarado, started out a stranger but was later identified by family members who managed to backtrack his journey.

“In 1875, near the present town of Egan, a man in a wagon was attempting to cross Quil Miller Creek at night after a heavy rain,” Alvarado resident Dorothy Schwartz wrote in a history of Myers Cemetery. “The water was swift and deep, and the wagon overturned, pinning the driver underneath.”

The man and his horses drowned, Schwartz said.

Although residents had no idea who the man was, they did the only decent thing and buried him in Myers Cemetery.

“Several months later, after he had not returned home, his family came looking for him,” Schwartz said. “While talking with the local men, they decided this was indeed their relative who had drowned and been buried in the Myers Cemetery.”

The man, John A. Mullen, turned out to be a prosperous farmer living near Canton. He had taken a load of hogs to Fort Worth to sell and was returning home with a wagon load of supplies when he arrived at Quil Miller Creek that dark, stormy night.

“There was only one road at that time in that direction, and it took him by the Myers farm,” said Leroy Lanfear, vice president of the Johnson County Cemetery Association. “That one road came back from Fort Worth to Buchanan [former Johnson County seat], and then it went off toward the Myers’ settlement. The family backtracked, looking for him, and that’s where they found him. Probably six, eight months after the fact.”

Years later, when Lanfear was a child living near Alvarado, his mother, Bertha Lanfear, told him the story and took him to Myers Cemetery to see the grave of John Mullen, his great grandfather.

Robbers buried wrong

Johnson County experienced much unrest during the reconstruction period after the Civil War, Schwartz said.

Benjamin Bickerstaff and Josiah Thompson, two former Confederate soldiers, seeking a career change and became outlaws, committing numerous crimes in Louisiana, Texas and the Johnson County area.

A story local historian Jack Carlton remembers differently. Bickerstaff and others, according to Carlton, had been accused of holding up a United States supply wagon near Sulphur Springs.

The men alledgedly stole the mules and set fire to the wagons and their contents.

Bickerstaff hightailed it to Alvarado to hide out at the invitation of an old friend, Robert Moore, who owned a general store in town.

Bickerstaff, according to whichever version you want to believe, either already knew or soon fell in with “local Alvarado scoundrel” Thompson who, the legend goes, ran a saddle and tack shop up front while peddling bootlegged booze out back.

The smart move for both would have been to maintain a low profile.

Instead they ran amok harassing recently freed slaves, terrorizing the town square by firing six shooters into the air, and other egregious breeches of etiquette. Alvarado folks were not amused.

Bickerstaff and Thompson’s April 5, 1869, plans to ride into town, buy flour and burn the square to the ground proved the last straw.

Anticipating their arrival, residents positioned themselves on rooftops and other strategic locations.

They welcomed Bickerstaff and Thompson with a greeting akin to the closing sequences of “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Wild Bunch.”

Thompson died instantly.

Bickerstaff received at least 26 wounds, Schwartz said, but lingered about 40 minutes, long enough to request water, whiskey and morphine.

“Their bodies were left on the street where they fell until the next morning,” Schwartz said.

Christian burial calls for a east-facing placement based on the belief that Jesus, on the judgement day, will return from the east.

Bickerstaff and Thompson so put out the good people of Alvarado that they made a point of burying them north and south instead. Or so the story goes.

The town afforded the delinquent duo some modicum of dignity years later by placing headstones on their graves in honor of their military service. Pointed headstones.

“That, I’ve been told, is what Confederate soldiers wanted so no Yankee would ever sit on their grave,” said Johnson County Sheriff’s Office deputy Jim Sloan.

Sloan supervises the inmate work crew used to maintain cemeteries, including Balch Cemetery, tended to by the Johnson County Cemetery Association.

Bears in Johnson County

Adjacent to Balch, separated by a fence, lies Senterwood Cemetery, the former cemetery for black residents.

Residents established the cemetery in 1856 after a black bear killed a slave girl, according to the cemeteries historical marker.

“She was hanging clothes on trees,” said Doris Lanfear. “There were no fences so she hung the clothes on trees. And the story is a bear attacked her, and her family heard her screaming, and they found her dead later some distance away. It’s just hard to imagine now that there used to be bears in Johnson County.”

The girl’s name and age appears lost to history now. To ensure she’s not forgotten, the Balch-Senterwood Cemetery Association, in 1997, installed a gravestone for her.

The fence separating both cemeteries remains but has been partially dismantled.

“Leroy [Lanfear] cut a section of the fence so he could go through with the lawn mower,” Doris Lanfear said. “And he said, ‘After all these years, I don’t think they should be separated.’ He just laid it back and attached it to the fence and, to my knowledge, it’s never been put back.”