John Tarleton - Stephenville,TX - Out of Place Graves on Waymarking.com

After completing his will, Tarleton’s health began to decline. According to Edwards and King, Tarleton made a trip to Galveston in 1895 on the advice of his doctor to improve his deteriorating health. He was accompanied by his foreman, G.S. Williams. Once, when Williams left the hotel where the two men were staying, several robbers drugged and kidnapped Tarleton. After stealing approximately eight hundred dollars from him, they took him to a second-class hotel near the city limits and abandoned him there. Williams did not find him until the next day. Even though the old man still showed signs of his traumatic experience, Williams, for unfathomable reasons, convinced him to sit for a photograph later that same day. This tin-type portrait of a stunned John Tarleton is the only likeness we have of him today.

Tarleton appears to have never completely recovered from this episode. After returning to his ranch, he fell ill and died on September 10, 1895. He was buried in Patillo Cemetery in the southern part of Palo Pinto county. J.C. George began a campaign in 1896 to raise money to move Tarleton’s remains to Stephenville and erect a monument to him to the John Tarleton College Campus. This goal was met in 1898, when the lawyer hired Joe Lockhart, Ben Compton, and two African-American men (Frank Lewis and Tom Ross) to transfer Tarleton’s body into an iron-lined box and re-inter it on the campus of the fledgling college (the location was in an area now known as Heritage Park, between the E.J. Howell Building and McIlhaney Street). A fifteen foot tall granite obelisk, with the simple inscription “John Tarleton” marked the gravesite. It is not clear exactly when the obelisk was erected, but a 1908 photograph of the old Administration Building of John Tarleton College shows that it was in place by that date. In 1928, Tarleton’s body had to be moved again to make room for the construction of the old auditorium building. The removal was performed at night to avoid attracting a crowd and required the presence of a public health officer. This time, Tarleton and the granite monument were moved to a small triangle of land owned by the college at the southeastern quarter of the intersection of Washington and Lillian streets. He has remained there ever since. Due to the efforts of the Tarleton Planning Committee for the Texas Sesquicentennial, chaired by Dr. Patricia Zelman, this location received an official Texas historical landmark plaque in 1987.

Two interesting, but slightly divergent, accounts of the transfer of Tarleton’s body to it’s current resting place exist. According to Dr. Richard Thompson, whose father participated in the exhumation, the bottom of Tarleton’s coffin cracked open as it was raised from the earth, spilling his remains to the ground. Unable to obtain another coffin in the middle of the night, one of the men present went to his garage and brought back a small wooden container (only slightly larger than a shoebox). The workmen then scooped Tarleton’s scattered bones into the box and moved it to the Washington and Lillian site. A slightly different version of this story has been provided by Mr. Barkley Thompson, Dr. Thompson’s younger brother and an eight-year old witness to the event. According to him, Tarleton’s coffin did not fall apart as it was raised from the ground. Rather, once they had dug down to his casket, the workmen discovered that the top of the wooden structure had rotted away (exposing Tarleton’s remains) and realized that it could not be moved without completely falling apart. One of the men then retrieved the small wooden box from his garage and the participants shoveled what was left of Tarleton’s body into it so that it could be moved to its new location. In either case, a large portion of Tarleton’s original casket (and probably a little bit of John Tarleton himself) still lies beneath the ground of Heritage Park.