Tarrant County TXGenWeb - Hodgkins Cemetery

Tarrant County TXGenWeb

Hodgkins Cemetery

Contributed by Kenneth Klein
Staff Writer, NW Times-Record

There are three marked graves and three unmarked graves. The marked graves are:

The Judge
James Hodgkins
1866-1942

James Lawrence Hodgkins
Sept. 6, 1893
December 13, 1955

Richard Runyon, Sr.
April 4, 1916
September 4, 1991

It is cared for by Geoffrey White, Mayor Pro-Tem for the City of Lake Worth. The Whites had a bakery in Lake Worth in the 1930's and 40's and they apparently married into the Hodgkins family.

Brief history of James Hodgkins
(Published Sep. 19, 2002, NW Times-Record)

In 1906 a man named Jim ("James") Hodgkins purchased 240 acres to farm in northwest Tarrant County. After completion of Lake Worth, he decided that instead of farming, he would open Hodgkins’ Trading Post, which stayed on the same hill where the Coconut Grove Nightclub came to stand, the present site of the Coconut Grove Beer Barn.

The Hodgkins Trading Post was the first business establishment in the Lake Worth community and came to be the focal point for the handful of the community’s residents. Hodgkins Trading Post had the only telephone in town, and he would call people to the telephone with a bullhorn. As the small community began to grow, Hodgkins also assisted in educational matters. Public education for children was a lifetime interest of Mr. Hodgkins,and the question of education for the town came up. At that time, children attended classes at rural schools such as Wayside or Lone Star (near Azle) or in Fort Worth. Since there were no schools or bus service, he would drive the children to the Fort Worth schools in his truck every day. In 1923, with the help of Sam Rosen, he opened the area’s first school with 23 students, a one room store building in what was then known as the Rosen Heights Independent School District. The Coconut Grove Nightclub was opened by Earl Hodgkins, son of Jim Hodgkins in 1937, on the same ground where the old Hodgkin’s Trading Post was located, where the old Coconut Grove Beer Barn stood, at Jacksboro Hwy and Foster.

The D.A.R. inventoried Hodgkins Cemetery in the 1950s or 1960s in a county wide effort to copy all local cemeteries. They found the graves of:

J. Lee AUTREY - d. 1936

Charles Harold HODGKINS - d. 1955

James Lawerence HODGKINS - d. 1955

Jim HODGKINS - d. 1942

A copy of this inventory (with full dates) can be found at the Fort Worth Public Library, Genealogy/Local History Department. This will be found in Texas Cemetery Records: Tarrant County, volume 12, page 44.

This page was last modified 8 Mar 2004.