The Cemetery Project: Mount Gilead - Est. 1851
Mt. Gilead Baptist Church was founded in 1850 by fifteen free Americans and two enslaved ones. The first woman to be buried here witnessed the American Revolution with her own eyes, and the last man was laid in the dirt as ABC aired its hit television series How The West Was Won in 1977.
How The West Was Won consists of three seasons, a full-length movie, and a hefty 400-page novelization. That same expanse of history land and life can be felt at Mount Gilead by taking a ten-minute walk.
Walking through Mount Gilead, I first noticed the lines of Confederate headstones and recently placed Confederate flags. Not the more easily recognizable Confederate battle flag, but the stars and bars of the Confederate States of America themselves.
I wonder what makes us cling so strongly to symbols in one sense while taking steps to obscure them in another.
These flags were interspersed amongst numerous American flags, often at the same grave, and led me to reflect upon the cemetery’s name. “Gilead” means hill of testimony and is where Jacob and Laban make a truce in the book of Genesis. Mount Gilead Cemetery is not a military cemetery and most of the veterans buried here likely knew this would be their resting place since they were children. But the flags, the men, and the name all came here to converge at their own pace just the same. A few weeks removed from Memorial Day, a few centuries removed from the war, and a few millennia removed from Gilead first becoming a place of reconciliation.
As I said, Mount Gilead is not a military cemetery. But everyone laid to rest here clearly led a unique life of their own. Some graves lie unmarked, some caged in with rusted fencing or stacked high with stones. One family stood out more than most. 4 nearly identical headstones, each progressively smaller. A careful inspection of the dates shows that this does not indicate seniority, but financial possibility and how drastically a family’s prospects were limited without a man during the turn of the 20th century.
Most contain simple etchings that try to capture the essence of the deceased. Some may find the repetition of “ loving wife and mother” cliche. But I think it’s rather pure. I have no idea how accurate those words may be about the people lying in the ground, but I do think it is an honest distillation of what’s most important to us when racked with grief and paying by the letter.
No one has been buried at Mount Gilead since 1977. However, there is a columbarium for the internment of ashes and the spreading of ashes is still allowed provided certain rules are followed.
The Mt. Gilead Cemetery Association relies on donations for the upkeep of the grounds. donations can be mailed directly to:
Mt. Gilead Cemetery Association
P.O. Box 2111
Keller, TX 76244
