Turnersville Cemetery volunteers to place veterans’ flags, clean tabernacle for homecoming

The Turnersville Cemetery Association is asking neighbors to help carry two spring traditions forward in one of Coryell County’s oldest burial grounds. Volunteers will place flags on veterans’ graves Saturday, May 16, then return to clean the tabernacle before the 69th homecoming on Sunday, May 24.

The workday is part remembrance, part maintenance, and part community reunion. The public is invited to help with both efforts, keeping alive a custom that links Memorial Day season, local military service and family history in a cemetery that serves the old rural community of Turnersville, once known as Buchanan Springs.

Turnersville sits on Farm Road 182 about 12 miles northeast of Gatesville, and its history reaches back before the Civil War. By the 1880s, the community had a cotton gin, stores, a school and three churches, signs of a settlement that once stood much larger than the handful of visible landmarks that remain today. The cemetery is one of those landmarks, and the association says it is still caring for a place that has stood for roughly 150 years.

That history helps explain why the cemetery matters to so many families. Burials there include ranchers, farmers, merchants, physicians, teachers, ministers and military veterans, making the grounds a kind of open-air record of who built the community and who stayed rooted there generation after generation. The cemetery association itself has deep local ties, too. A cemetery group was formed by 1900, disbanded during the 1930s and reorganized in 1953, then continued the work of stewardship ever since. Its mission is to operate, maintain, improve, repair and beautify the historic cemetery.

Physical details on the grounds show how active that stewardship remains. A county historical marker notes interior fencing, curbing and grave slabs. A current cemetery listing describes the property as partially enclosed by a brick fence and notes a flagpole, historical marker and pavilion, with the grounds kept well maintained. The cemetery also participates in Wreaths Across America, with a Dec. 13, 2025 placement listed on its page, extending veteran remembrance beyond the spring flagging tradition.

The larger preservation effort in Texas gives the work added weight. The Texas Historical Commission created its Historic Texas Cemetery program in 1998 to help protect burial grounds by recording boundaries in county deed records, and every Texas county has at least one cemetery designated through the program. In Turnersville, that abstract policy meets a familiar local habit: people showing up, handling the work and keeping the names, service and stories of an old community visible for the next generation.