Boggy Creek Masonic Cemetery

In one retelling of the 1859 story, the young man was John A. Davis and the man who fired was Dick King, who shouted that Indians had come into camp after a skunk sprayed Davis in the dark. King rode to Manchaca to tell Davis's father, Jenkins, who buried his son near a schoolhouse north of Boggy Creek rather than carry him to Austin. Jenkins later deeded two acres to the Onion Creek Masonic lodge, and twenty-two other Davis relatives lie in the cemetery that grew from the grave.

What the plaque says

Boggy Creek Masonic Cemetery According to local tradition, in the winter of 1859, 23-year-old John Davis joined a community wagon train headed for work in the pine forests of Bastrop County. Davis, sprayed by a skunk during the night, began running wildly through the camp. He was mistaken for a Comanche intruder and accidentally shot to death. His father, Jenkins Davis, buried his son here, on 2.3 acres he purchased near Boggy Creek and his Manchaca home. John's 1859 burial is the earliest recorded here. In 1876 Jenkins Davis, a member of the early area Onion Creek Masonic Lodge No. 220, donated the 2.3 acres to the lodge, and the site became a community graveyard. First called Boggy Creek and later Boggy Creek Masonic Cemetery, the graveyard had become known simply as Masonic Cemetery by the 1960s. Enlarged over the years, the cemetery contains about 6.6 acres and more than 1,200 burials. Among the people buried here are area pioneer settlers and their descendants; members of fraternal organizations such as the Masons and Woodmen of the World; and veterans of the Civil War, Spanish-American War, World Wars I & II, and the Korean Conflict. Onion Creek Lodge No. 220, A. F. & A. M., continues to maintain the cemetery. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845 - 1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• McKinney Falls State Park — 3.5 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 — 5.7 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 — 6.5 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.
• Texas State Cemetery — 6.7 mi
  A 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.

More markers nearby

• Doyle Farm — 3.3 mi
• Santiago Del Valle Grant — 3.3 mi
• Kincheonville — 3.4 mi
• Espinosa-Olivares-Aguirre Expedition — 3.7 mi