Baby Head Cemetery

Baby Head had a post office from 1879, with Shelby Walling as its first postmaster, until 1918. The community was for a time the seat of an election and justice court precinct, and it supported several small businesses and a school. By 1968 it was a rural community of about twenty people marked only by this cemetery, and the count was the same in 1990. The mountain that gave the place its name rises to 1,627 feet, about 200 feet above State Highway 16, ten miles north of Llano, in open country of live oak and mesquite.

What the plaque says

Baby Head Cemetery According to local oral tradition, the name Babyhead was given to the mountain in this area in the 1850s, when a small child was killed by Indians and its remains left on the mountain. A local creek also carried the name, and a pioneer community founded in the 1870s became known as Baby Head. The oldest documented grave here is that of another child, Jodie May McKneely, who died on New Year's Day 1884. The cemetery is the last physical reminder of the Baby Head community, which once boasted numerous homes, farms, and businesses. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Llano County Courthouse Square — 9.6 mi
  The 1893 Romanesque courthouse on Llano's square, built after a fire at the height of a boom that was meant to make the granite town an iron city.
• Colorado Bend State Park — 15 mi
  Old ranch country on the Colorado above Lake Buchanan, where a spring-fed creek drops 70 feet over fern-covered travertine at Gorman Falls.
• Inks Dam National Fish Hatchery — 20 mi
  A free federal hatchery below Inks Dam on the Colorado, with thirty production ponds that draw birds and a look at how fish are raised from egg to harvest.
• Inks Lake State Park — 20 mi
  A state park on a constant-level lake of the Colorado, between Buchanan and Inks dams, with pink granite and gneiss at the water and CCC work along Park Road 4.

More markers nearby

• Board Branch Cemetery — 6.4 mi
• Llano County — 6.5 mi
• Lone Grove School — 7.0 mi
• Site of Old Behrns West Texas Normal and Business College — 7.0 mi