Even during a long, hot summer that forced many North Texas residents indoors, one group in Bonham has found that hard work has many rewards.

The Fannin County Adult Probation Office is wrapping up their first year of maintaining historic Gates Hill Cemetery.  For over a century, Gates Hill Cemetery was the primary African American cemetery for Fannin County.

"This has been a real cooperative effort," stated probation officer Derrell Hall. "Our probationers deserve a big pat on the back."

"There was no one complaining," added Lisa Ayers, another probation officer that helped supervise the project. "They just got busy." 

"This is a feel good project," one probationer told Ayers after working on the cemetery.

Fannin County Adult Probation Officers Derrell Hall and Lisa Ayers

"They are really doing a great job taking care of the cemetery," said Palmer Rayford, a member of the Gates Hill Cemetery Committee.

Rayford was on hand to present a plaque as a memento of appreciation to Hall and Ayers at a Memorial Day service recognizing American veterans buried in Gates Hill Cemetery.

"You'd be surprised at how many veterans are in this cemetery," Hall noted.

One of our veterans...

"The Fannin County Historical Commission is grateful for the help provided by the county's probation crew," remarks Larry Standlee.  "All too many cemeteries in Fannin County go unprotected and untended.  The Commission would love to see someone in the community prepare an application for one of Texas Historical Commission's 'Texas Historic Cemetery' marker for Gates Hill."

The probation officers have noticed how meaningful this project has been as their crew worked diligently to restore this historic cemetery.  Ayers said she would eventually like to see some of the headstones that have been damaged by the ravages of time and vandalism repaired.

The history of Gates Hill is an important chapter in the history of Fannin County that dates back at least to the 1870s.  No one will ever know the entire story of this cemetery because wooden grave markers from the earliest gravesites were destroyed in a grassfire.

Legendary jazz guitarist Charlie Christian was buried here in 1942 in an unmarked grave.  A Texas State Historical Marker now designates the closest guess anyone has as to exactly where Bonham native Charles Henry Christian was actually laid to rest. 

Opera singer Roberta Dodd is another musician that became relatively famous, only to be buried in an unmarked grave that was forgotten years ago.  While it is unlikely anyone will ever know Dodd's final resting place, some of her life story has been documented in Forgotten Dignity: The Black Community of Bonham, Texas that was compiled and edited by Pat Stephens.

"I can remember Roberta Dodd, the famous black opera singer, singing in the old Steger Opera House -- anyone could go there who had money," recalled Willie Ross in Forgotten Dignity. "The blacks did have to sit in the balcony, though." 

Dodd was a gifted mezzo-soprano that attended Fisk College in Washington, D.C. and became a popular opera singer in France.  She even married an African prince. 

Dodd performed three concerts in Bonham to the delight of an audience comprised primarily of local women.  The gifted vocalist went on to become an instructor in a Paris, France music school and later spent years trapped by the German occupation during World War II.   

To understand how Gates Hill Cemetery came to be in the first place is to pay tribute to the remarkable vision of Henry Gates. 

Gates was the local tax collector and a prominent landowner that acquired much of the land on the hill south of Bonham that overlooks Powder Creek.  Everyone called his place Gate's Hill. 

Although many of the cemeteries around Fannin County circa 1870 had designated areas for African-Americans that could afford a burial site, it would seem Gates must have been troubled that African-Americans had no designated cemetery of their own.  So, Henry Gates donated a part of his land and that gift eventually became Gates Hill Cemetery.

Remember that it was in 1865 when federal troops first occupied Texas following the bloody Civil War. Texas was a state in turmoil as the abolition of slavery meant equality for all with the demise of the old plantation labor system.  Reconstruction was a bitter pill for many Texans and this was a troubled period in local history, yet Henry Gates seemed to be a man far ahead of his time. A century ahead of his time, perhaps.

It would seem to be a shame that while so much of our history lies silent in countless depressions that are the only signs remaining of unmarked graves, no official historical marker designates this site as one of the oldest cemeteries in Fannin County.

"Most people don't realize how many people come to Bonham for no other reason than to find the gravesite of Charlie Christian," states Press Cox, a landowner with a home just down the county road south of Gates Hill Cemetery.  "For those visitors, this is the image of Bonham they will take home with them."

Thanks to the hard work of the adult probation department, that image has greatly improved.