Buried Gold in a Ft. Worth Cemetery

Greenwood Cemetery entrance

In the late 1840's, Charles Turner, a Mexican War veteran and former Texas Ranger, established a large farm on land that eventually became today's Fort Worth, Texas. After building a home for his family, he expanded into the retail business and opened one of the first general stores in the growing community. His store gained fame when hundreds of people from all around the area came by over a few days in December,1860 after Cynthia Ann Parker, who had been kidnapped almost 25 years earlier in the Fort Parker massacre, was recaptured from the Comanche Indians and brought there by Texas Rangers while returning her to her family. She still wore her Indian clothes and sat quietly holding her infant daughter, Prairie Flower,  as people lined up to stare at her.

Talk of secession filled the air in early 1861. At his store, which had become a community meeting place, the slave-owning Turner expressed his desire that Texas not leave the Union. He said he could see no good that would come of it and gave his opinion that if war came, the south, with no manufacturing base, would lose and economic disaster would inevitably follow.

The Turner Oak

Later that year, when the state voted to secede and join the Confederacy however, Turner confirmed his allegiance to Texas and even paid to raise a company of Confederate soldiers. When war was declared, the Confederate government ordered its citizens to exchange their gold for paper currency. Before exchanging his gold though, Turner, along with his most trusted slave, "Uncle Ben," took a large cooking pot filled with gold coins and buried it under a live oak tree on his farm.

As the war continued, people suffered. Men were killed in battle, people went hungry and nobody was immune from the suffering. Some of Turner's family passed away and were buried near the oak tree which hid the pot of gold. Soon, people from the area began being buried on the same piece of land and a cemetery began taking form. The population of Fort Worth dropped to only 175 residents by the time war mercifully came to an end.

Marker at the base of the Turner Oak

The hard Reconstruction years followed and the citizens of Fort worth felt the pain like everyone else in the south. The economy was devastated when their Confederate money became worthless. People were left with next to nothing. And that's when Charles Turner came to the rescue of Fort Worth. He retrieved that pot of gold coins hidden beneath the live oak and used the money to pay for food, construction of new buildings, and the needed infrastructure of a city. Today, Fort Worth is prosperous and the 16th largest city in the United States with a population of almost 900,000, but who knows what would have happened if it were not for Charles Turner and his hidden pot of gold.

Near the Turner Oak is the grave of Luse Wallenberg,
marked by a female figure atop a pot of gold coins which
commemorates the story

The live oak tree which once was the caretaker of Fort Worth's future, is still alive and well. Known as The Turner Oak, it has been officially named a Living Witness tree and is listed as a certified Historic Tree of Texas. It is located about 200 yards inside the main gate of what became today's Greenwood Cemetery on White Settlement Road in Fort Worth.

Close-up of the Luse Wallenberg
grave statue