Fairmont Cemetery

This burial ground serves citizens near the northern tip of Texas at a site closer to capitals of six other states than it is to Austin. In 1901, area settlers established Ivanhoe, OK., eight miles to the north. That town moved two miles in 1909 to a site on the Beaver Valley and Northwestern Railway, changing its name to South Ivanhoe and leaving behind only the Methodist church building. Eight years later, citizens moved again, this time across the state line to a spot on the North Texas and Santa Fe Railway built from Shattuck, OK. to Spearman, TX. Beginning in December 1917, all the buildings of South Ivanhoe, including a hotel and bank, were put on skids and dragged to the new townsite. The settlement, named for railroad engineer Horace Follett, got its post office in 1918.

Dr. Charles and Ora White owned land in South Ivanhoe and at this site, deeding land for Fairmont Cemetery in 1910, even before the establishment of Follett. The first burial was the reinterment of Myra Jones, a mother of six, who was killed by lightning in 1904 and originally buried at the Gigger Ranch. Her widowed husband, Michael "Uncle Mac" Jones, was the cemetery's first caretaker. In the 1920s, Frederick Harhausen and his two sons hauled more than 200 cedar trees from near Vici, OK. (40 mi. SE), planting them on the perimeter and in a circle in the center of the cemetery. The outlining trees remain among the cemetery's more distinctive landscape features.

Those buried here include the children of Mexican railroad workers who died during the influenza epidemic of 1918. More than one hundred military veterans, three of whom were killed in action in World War II, are also interred here. The Fairmont Cemetery Association, founded in 1909, cares for the cemetery.

Historic Texas Cemetery - 2006