Barton Cemetery

Mountain City grew up before the Civil War as a supply center and one of the first post offices and stage stops between Austin and San Marcos. Phillip Allen and perhaps three other families settled it in 1846. William Walton Haupt, said to have named it as postmaster, brought Angora goats and Brahman cattle to the county. Jesse Day, who led one of the earliest cattle drives from Central Texas to the Midwest in 1856, lived here. When the railroad passed several miles east in 1880, the Allens led an exodus to Buda and Kyle.

What the plaque says

Barton Cemetery This property was part of a Mexican land grant awarded to Ben Milam in 1826. James U. Barton (1814-1893) brought his family to Texas from alabama in the 1850s and established a farm at this site. The first burial in this cemetery is believed to be that of Barton's infant granddaughter, ella May Ligon, who died in 1873. Other relatives and neighbors in the Mountain City community also were buried here, and James barton officially deeded 3.25 acres of land for the graveyard in 1881. The Barton Cemetery continues to serve residents of this area. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 12 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 12 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Barton Springs Pool — 15 mi
  A three-acre pool in the bed of Barton Creek, fed by the fourth-largest spring in Texas at 68 to 70 degrees, and shared with an endangered salamander found almost nowhere else.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 17 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.

More markers nearby

• Antioch Colony — 2.2 mi
• Buda — 2.4 mi
• John Wheeler Bunton — 5.0 mi
• Kyle — 5.0 mi