Lindale Cemetery is a rural community burial ground located along the FM 1758 corridor in the Bowie area of Montague County. It holds a Texas Historical Commission Historic Texas Cemetery (HTC) designation, recorded in the THC Atlas under accession number 7337000105 — the same accession tied to the THC marker erected in 1998 (marker id bowie-10 in this site’s inventory). That marker is the primary official record tying this cemetery to the state’s heritage documentation system.
What Is Established
The documented facts about Lindale Cemetery are few but confirmed:
HTC Designation: The Texas Historical Commission has issued an HTC designation for Lindale Cemetery (THC Atlas #7337000105). HTC status confirms that the cemetery was evaluated and approved as a historically significant burial ground under the THC’s cemetery preservation program. HTC designation requires that a cemetery meet minimum criteria for historical significance and physical integrity.
THC Marker erected 1998: The historic marker associated with this cemetery (site id bowie-10) was erected in 1998, making it one of the more recent cemetery markers in the county’s collection. The full marker inscription has not been retrieved from field transcription or secondary sources as of this writing; a field visit is needed to document it verbatim.
Location: FM 1758 corridor, Bowie area: The master inventory of Montague County cemeteries, compiled from MCCPC, THC Atlas, and secondary sources, places Lindale Cemetery along FM 1758, a farm-to-market road in the Bowie area. This corridor runs through the agricultural eastern portion of the county, south and east of Bowie proper.
Name: Lindale Cemetery. Documented under this name in the MCCPC records and the THC Atlas. No alternate names are recorded in the sources reviewed.
The Bowie Cemetery Landscape
Lindale Cemetery exists within the densest cemetery cluster in Montague County. The Bowie area has at least a dozen documented burial grounds, ranging from the large municipal Elmwood Cemetery (8,000+ documented memorials, active since 1880) to smaller community and family grounds like Lindale, Briar Creek, and Brush cemeteries — all of which hold THC markers and are documented in this site’s inventory.
The distinction between these smaller Bowie-area cemeteries and Elmwood is significant. Elmwood became the municipal cemetery as Bowie grew along the Fort Worth and Denver Railway (arriving 1882). The smaller cemeteries on the rural margins — Lindale, Briar Creek, Brush — were established by farming families who settled the Bowie hinterland before the railroad arrived and who maintained distinct community burial grounds independent of the town’s emerging institutions.
Lindale’s position along FM 1758 places it on one of the agricultural farm roads east of Bowie — roads that connected farming communities to the county seat and eventually to the railroad-town supply economy. Families buried at Lindale were farming the Cross Timbers-to-prairies transition zone east and south of Bowie, likely arriving in the 1850s through 1870s, during the county’s first generation of organized Anglo settlement.
Research Gaps
The current research record for Lindale Cemetery is thin. The following are not confirmed in available sources:
- Marker inscription verbatim text
- Establishment date or earliest confirmed burial
- Founding family or land donor
- Interment count
- Current maintenance status or governance organization
- GPS coordinates
- Find A Grave cemetery page ID
- Denomination (the name “Lindale” suggests a community rather than church cemetery, but this is not confirmed)
These gaps are characteristic of rural frontier-era cemeteries that received HTC designation without a full secondary research dossier. The HTC designation itself is confirmation of historical significance; the documentation gaps are a research priority, not a judgment about the cemetery’s importance.
Recommended next steps: field visit to photograph the 1998 THC marker and transcribe its inscription; MCCPC contact for any burial surveys or records; THC Atlas direct lookup for the HTC file associated with #7337000105.
Sources
- Elmwood / Bowie Cemetery — neighboring Bowie-area municipal cemetery
- Briar Creek Cemetery — neighboring THC-designated rural cemetery in the Bowie area
- Brush Cemetery — neighboring THC-designated rural cemetery in the Bowie area
- Historic Markers of Montague County — Lindale Cemetery (bowie-10)
- Montague County Cemeteries — County Hub
- Montague County Cemetery Preservation Committee
- THC Atlas — Cemetery Search