Historical Marker
Bethany Cemetery
Austin, Travis County · Texas
Erected 1997
Bethany began as a business run by Black Austinites. C. W. Jones, a plumber, paid $432.60 for the land in 1892, and the next year sold most of it to four partners: John M. Holland, a real estate agent, William M. Tears, Henderson Rollins, and Allen Bradley, a butcher. They divided it into plots and gave Tears the power to sell them. An infant, Hellen Moore, was buried here in 1879 and nine-month-old Alice Maud Miller in 1886. Oakwood's section for Black burials, set aside in 1856, had been a small northeast corner.
What the plaque says
Bethany Cemetery This cemetery was established in the late 1800s when burial space set aside for African Americans in Austin's historic Oakwood Cemetery was no longer available. The oldest recorded burial is that of infant Hellen Moore in 1879. C. W. Jones purchased this land in 1892. The Bethany Cemetery Company, formed in 1893 by William Holland, Henderson Rollins, Allen Bradley and William M. Tears, maintained the site until 1933. In 1976, members of the Bethany Cemetery Association became caretakers of the 6.18-acre graveyard and improved the site, which still serves the area. (1997)
Where it stands
30.28036, -97.68631 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- George Washington Carver Museum — 2.4 miEast Austin's museum of Black history and culture, grown from a segregated branch library moved across town in 1933, with a permanent exhibit on Juneteenth at its core.
- Texas State Cemetery — 2.5 miA hill east of the Capitol that began with one general's grave in 1851 and now holds Stephen F. Austin, governors, Barbara Jordan and more than 2,000 Confederate veterans and widows.
- LBJ Presidential Library — 2.6 miA ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.
- French Legation State Historic Site — 2.9 miA 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.