Fannin County TXGenWeb
Burnett Community Memories

From;

     "My name is Joe Richardson and I spent my childhood summers on my grandad's 160 acre farm which comprised most of the old Burnett Community. My great-great grandad Zachariah Bullock Tate came to Texas from Georgia  in 1869 after the War between the States. He was a teenager when he and his older brother joined the Confederate Army. Waddy, the older brother was killed at Gettysburg and Zach left him in a shallow grave before marching back south with the Army of Northern Virginia. Returning to his family farm in Georgia after the war he found his mother and father dead, the farm in the possesion of strangers. Alone except for his riding horse, a pack horse , a bird dog and barely 19 years old he headed to Texas, a place he had heard great stories about from Texas soldiers. He stopped at Burnett to renew his money by clearing brush for Abner Raney. He met Abner's daughter, Eliza Ruth. They fell in love and married and never left. A year later he bought 160 acres between Bullard creek and Burnett creek from the T&P Railway at 10 cents an acre and began what became 4 generations of cotton farming, bee keeping and bird dog breeding. "
     "As a child during the summers I played in and out of the gravestones of Burnett Cemetary where Zach and Eliza are buried. Theres the first well that Zach dug by hand out there and there is also an Indian burial mound just southwest of the cemetary that was very old at the time Zach arrived and every generation plowed around it as a show of respect and I suspect out of superstition. Ive found several arrow heads as a kid and my dad found several buckets full of them while growing up there........ The Baldwins, Selfs, Raneys and Henrys were the predominate familys back then before Windom or Dodd City were towns and I know where the first homesteads are located and the original garden flowers brought from the east still grow around them but have evolved into a wild variation over the past 100 years. Joe."