Sherman's Woodmen Circle Home Cemetery designated; project reports two marker approvals

Correction, Sept. 13, 2026: An earlier version of this article, drawing on the Texas Historical Commission's Historic Sites Atlas, gave the cemetery's name as the Supreme Forest Woodmen Circle Cemetery and put the number of graves at about 80. The cemetery is the Woodmen Circle Home Cemetery, and the project's ongoing burial research counts 74 confirmed burials. The correction comes from Melissa Carruth, the cemetery preservationist who leads the Woodmen Circle Home Cemetery marker project and sponsors the markers. The state record still carries the older name and count. Updated Sept. 18, 2026: Ms. Carruth has since shared the funeral-home records, obituaries and photographs behind her count, and a sources list is added below.

The Texas Historical Commission's public record lists a Sherman cemetery tied to a Depression-era home for widows and orphans as a Historic Texas Cemetery, with a designation date of Dec. 8, 2025. The volunteer project working on the site says the state has approved two markers for it.

That record places the Woodmen Circle Home Cemetery, which the state's Atlas entry carries as the Supreme Forest Woodmen Circle Cemetery, in Sherman, Grayson County. It is not a Cooke County burial ground, though the same program is open to cemeteries here.

The commission's Atlas entry counts about 80 graves at the site, with burials running from 1933 to 1985. The marker project's own research, which documents each person interred there, puts the figure at 74 confirmed burials, according to Melissa Carruth, the project's preservation lead. Find a Grave's page for the cemetery lists the same 74 memorials, every visible marker photographed. Its Jan. 30, 2026 quarterly agenda listed the cemetery among sites up for certification as Historic Texas Cemetery designations.

The project's own page reports two approvals: an official Cemetery Medallion and Name Marker for the burial ground, and a separate Texas Historical Marker for "The Woodmen Circle and its Home." Those approval claims are attributed to the project posts.

Ms. Carruth's records include the one former child of the Home she has confirmed is buried there. Jacqueline Naomi Ward came to the Home in January 1932, at five, and died June 1, 1944, at 17, days after a car carrying children to school for their report cards skidded on wet pavement and struck a tree, according to a 1944 Sherman newspaper account and the Home's own newsletter, both supplied by Ms. Carruth. She sang in the First Baptist Church choir; her high school friends were her pallbearers, and the paper recorded hers as the first death of a child since the Home opened. Her flat granite marker reads only "Jacqueline Ward, 1926–1944."

The cemetery is tied to the former Woodmen Circle Home. A project post says the home opened in 1930 for widows and orphans and was demolished in 2022. An archival postcard record catalogs the Sherman facility as the Supreme Forest Woodmen Circle Home for Aged Members and Orphan Children, which matches the account that it took in both adults and children. The Library of Congress dates the start of the Great Depression to 1929, so the fraternal order opened its doors as the hard years set in.

Designation and marker are two different things. The commission says a cemetery must hold the Historic Texas Cemetery designation before it can receive a cemetery marker, and that the designation produces no marker by itself. A separate application is required.

Those applications compete. The commission's 2026 work plan held that year's marker workload to no more than 185. At the July 31, 2026 quarterly meeting, staff said the cycle for 2027 markers drew more than 200 applications, of which 168 were approved. Sponsors pay for the plaque as well. The commission's 2025 price sheet sets an application fee, with the marker itself running from several hundred dollars for a cemetery name-and-date plaque with medallion to roughly $2,500 for a large marker set on a post.

The commission says the program in its present form dates to 1962 and has put up more than 16,000 markers, with some in every one of the state's 254 counties.

Cooke County groups with a cemetery or an old building in mind have missed this year's window, which the commission lists as closed. The next regular application period runs March 1 to May 15, 2027. The Undertold marker program takes applications Oct. 1 through Nov. 15, 2026.