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Photographer's
Note:
"There is not much to Squeezepenney, just a couple of houses and ranches
and I don't know how many people live [here]. I thought it was interesting
because I had never heard of it." - Jordan
Gibson, April 2008
Stiff Chapel Cemetery
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“Squeezepenny,
sitting under the long hill to the east, is a locality, but a locality
with a name.” – Captain Roy F. Hall
Photographer Jordan
Gibson researched Squeezepenny until he unearthed an article
in the pages of the Collin County Genealogical site concerning the
naming of the community. Written by Captain Roy F. Hall and originally
published in the Collin County Daily Courier Gazette on April 25,
1952, it provides some facts on Squeezepenny, but unfortunately, there’s
still no clue to the origin of its name. – Editor
From Captain Hall’s 1952 Article:
“Nobody knows how Squeezepenny got its name. This writer was told
several different source facts for this, but none of them elite enough
to bear the scrutiny of an educated public - a sensitive public, that
is. Squeezepenny, sitting under the long hill to the east, is a locality,
but a locality with a name.
Anyway the place got its start in 1855 when William Hampton and family
came there from Bonham and established a mill. This mill ground corn
and carded wool for yarn. During the Civil War the mill actually made
cloth to supply the Confederate forces in the Indian Territory. It
became quite famous as the Hampton & Harris mill. Horse powered.
Mr. Hampton later moved to Weston, and the mill passed into the hands,
eventually, of Tom Craft, who had come to Squeezepenny from Alabama
(via) old Pilot Grove. Mr. Craft turned the mill into a grist mill
and cotton gin, and it remained as such till about 1900, when it was
abandoned, and the machinery sold. Not a vestige of the old mill remains
today.
Squeezepenny never had a school, church or other public building,
and only one little store, run by Joe Bassham for a few years. The
school children have always gone to the Melissa school nearly four
miles away. There has never been even a collection of houses there,
yet the place is known far and wide. The long hill mentioned had so
many settlers right after the Civil War from the North that it took
the name of Lincoln Ridge and was known by that name for a half century.
The only stagecoach robbery, or attack we have record of as occurring
in Collin County, happened on the old Neal homestead. This is the
supposedly haunted crossing, mentioned in these columns before. Here
it was during the Civil War that a traveler and his small son was
killed by the patrol from McKinney
one moonlight night 90-some-odd years ago. The old road ran over the
rock crossing till Mr. Neal had it moved westward to its present location
about 1910.” |
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The Historic
Stiff Chapel Cemetery
Squeezepenny, Texas
On private property |
Photographer's
Note:
Stiff Chapel Cemetery is located on CR 412. Less than a mile from
the sprawling metropolis of Squeezepenny. The last burial was in the
30's. When I first saw it last summer, it was completely overgrown
and looked like it hadn't seen any human activity in 10 years." -
Jordan
Gibson, April 2008 |
Historical Marker:
Near CR 412, cemetery is on private property
Stiff Chapel
Cemetery
Jesse Stiff (1796-1871)
came to Texas from Virginia in 1835 and settled on several thousand
acres of land in this area. His brother, Louis, arrived in 1849, and
a community known as Stiff Chapel developed around their homesteads.
In 1847, Jesse's son, James, died while serving as a Texas Ranger.
He was buried near his father's house on land that later was deeded
as the Stiff Chapel Cemetery. Most of the graves in the two-acre family
burial ground date from the 1800s. The last burial in the Stiff Chapel
Cemetery, that of Minnie Swaim, took place in 1935.
(1984) |
Stiff Chapel
Cemetery Tombstones
Photo
courtesy Jordan
Gibson, 2008 |
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