Bethel Cemetery

The Bethel community grew around a school that opened in 1869. It was closely tied to nearby Sage, which had the post office and store but sent its children to the Bethel school. In the mid-1890s the school had one teacher and twenty-five students, and it lasted until 1941, when the area joined the Burnet Independent School District. County highway maps of the late 1940s still showed houses, a gin, a store and this cemetery. By 2015, the Handbook of Texas notes, the old brush arbor had become a barn and the schoolhouse a home.

What the plaque says

Bethel Cemetery The Rev. Richard Howard (1817-1882) moved to this area of Burnet County in 1855. The frontier settlement he joined would later be known as the Bethel community. In 1874 he deeded two acres at this site for community use. The first recorded burial was that of Howard's granddaughter, Harriet Ruthie Howard, in 1875. Since then this site has been used as the Bethel community cemetery. Buried here are veterans of the Civil War to World War II and many of this area's early settlers and their descendants. The Bethel Cemetery Association was established in 1930. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Hancock Springs Park — 14 mi
  Lampasas's city park on Sulphur Creek, with a spring-fed swimming pool that holds about 69 degrees all year, the walls of the old bathhouse and a golf course.
• Inks Lake State Park — 15 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.
• Inks Dam National Fish Hatchery — 16 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.
• Longhorn Cavern State Park — 16 mi
  A cave carved by an underground river in the Hill Country, cleared of mud by hand in the 1930s and reached down 52 stone steps on a guided tour.

More markers nearby

• Lake Victor Lodge No. 1011, A. F. & A. M. — 3.9 mi
• Site of Town of Strickling — 4.0 mi
• Black's Fort — 5.1 mi
• Shady Grove Community — 5.5 mi