Brownwood, TX
Shane Agan, Greenleaf’s Ground Supervisor, is reporting the City of Early funded road improvement project has begun. What a beautiful sight this is! On behalf of the GCA Staff and Board, I’d like to extend our great appreciation to City of Early officials for their investment in Historic Greenleaf Cemetery.
Steve Harris
GCA President (2017 to present)
If you so desire, your “Thank You” can be sent to:
City of Early
Attn. Tony Aaron and City Council
960 Early Blvd.
Early, TX
76802
Q: As a child, did you ever experience such thoughts while visiting Brownwood’s Historic Greenleaf Cemetery?
All cemetery gates are local!
“WHEN I WAS A BOY IN Raleigh I was afraid of being locked in Oakwood Cemetery overnight. Every Sunday after church, when our blue-tailed white Pontiac cruised through the entrance, I fretted about the sign posted above us: GATES LOCKED AT 6 PM. I never voiced this fear to my parents, but it hovered over me like a threatening storm cloud all afternoon. What if we lose track of the time? That could easily happen as we plucked dandelions from my grandfather’s grave or posed sullenly for Daddy’s never-ending slides, rigid as garden gnomes. Our family plot was on a rise with the other Nice Families, a respectable distance from the gate, so the caretaker, a runny-eyed old man who kept a spittoon in his granite cubbyhole, might overlook us when he left for home. That enormous gate would clang shut, and we would be trapped there all night, eating acorns for survival, drinking dew off the lilies—my brother, my sister, my parents, and me—Cemetery Family Robinson.
This was not your usual ghoulish graveyard terror, since I found the cemetery anything but spooky. I loved its winding lanes and tilting stones, the way its pale-green dells were flecked with pink in the spring. I reveled in its rich hieroglyphics, all those corroding angels and renegade jonquils, the palpable antiquity of the place. This was our family seat, after all, the ground to which I would return someday, permanently planted among my ancestors. So what was so scary about that? Folks in Raleigh might assume it had to do with the way my grandfather had died. But I wouldn’t learn about that until later, when I was well into my teens and the matter of why we came to the cemetery every Sunday would finally be explained. Even then, though, my focus would remain on the writing on the stones, not on what actually lay in the boxes beneath them.” Armistead Maupin
