Chew Cemetery

The Chews' cotton gin worked a crop that rose and fell in Llano County. Farmers planted about 2,250 acres of cotton in 1880 and almost 9,800 by 1900. They produced 4,944 bales in 1906 but only 1,918 in 1916, one reason the county lost farms and people between 1900 and 1920. Cotton recovered to about 3,000 bales in 1926, then nearly vanished in the drought and depression of the 1930s: county farmers ginned 414 bales in 1936 and none at all in 1941. Cattle ranching carried the county instead.

What the plaque says

Chew Cemetery Born in West Virginia in 1832, George Oliver Chew came to Texas in 1839. He married Nancy Taylor prior to 1870, and they settled in western Llano County in 1883, purchasing 320 acres of land. This site probably was first used as a family cemetery about 1885 when their infant granddaughter was interred here. The second marked burial was that of a 2-year-old grandson, Osceola Chew, in 1887. George Oliver Chew was interred here in 1901. The Chew family continued to grow, operating a school and later a cotton gin. In 1927 they sold the land to another family, who donated back the one-acre cemetery twenty years later. There are more than 40 known graves in the Chew Cemetery. Both a Confederate and a Union soldier are interred here, as are veterans of other military conflicts. (1999)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Llano County Courthouse Square — 17 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.
• Fort Mason — 17 mi
  A reconstructed officers' quarters on Post Oak Hill above Mason, standing where the army's stone fort was taken apart by the town that grew up below it.
• Enchanted Rock State Natural Area — 22 mi
  A dome of pink granite north of Fredericksburg that rises some 385 feet above Sandy Creek, creaks as it cools at night, and has drawn people for thousands of years.
• Eckert James River Bat Cave Preserve — 28 mi
  A limestone cave on the James River where about four million Mexican free-tailed bats raise their young each summer, kept open to visitors by a family's gift.

More markers nearby

• First Known Religious Services in Mason County — 6.3 mi
• German Settlements — 6.4 mi
• Castell School — 6.8 mi
• Trinity United Methodist Church Cemetery — 6.8 mi