China Spring Cemetery

The plaque says Isaac Brock lived in three centuries, and his gravestone gives his birth as 1787. The claim is contested. Wikipedia notes that he said he was born in Buncombe County, North Carolina, in 1787 or 1788, and that late in life he appeared in patent-medicine advertising for Peruna. Census records of 1860 and 1880 point to a birth around 1812 or 1805. His 1909 obituary in the Waco Semi-Weekly Tribune said no one knew his age with exactness. His grave is a marker of a famous claim, not a verified record.

What the plaque says

China Spring Cemetery The China Spring community was originally settled about 1870. It was named for a large grove of chinaberry trees and nearby spring. Burials were first held in family cemeteries. An association was formed by local citizens in 1902 to establish a community burial ground. They purchased the initial tract of five acres. At one time, sheep were used to keep grass trimmed but the experiment failed when they began to stray. An unsual grave is that of Isaac Brock (1787-1909) who lived in three centuries. Many of the area pioneers are buried here. (1980)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Waco Mammoth National Monument — 9.0 mi
  A bone bed on the Bosque River where a nursery herd of at least 19 Columbian mammoths was trapped and drowned by floodwater 65,000 to 72,000 years ago, left in place under a dig shelter.
• Waco Suspension Bridge — 13 mi
  A Brazos crossing opened in January 1870 as the longest single-span suspension bridge west of the Mississippi, tolled until 1889, closed to vehicles in 1971 and now walked.
• Dr Pepper Museum — 13 mi
  The 1906 bottling plant of the Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company, built where Dr Pepper outgrew a Waco drugstore soda fountain, now the Dr Pepper Museum.
• Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum — 13 mi
  The official state repository of Texas Ranger memorabilia, opened in 1968 in Fort Fisher Park on the Brazos, named for a Ranger post of 1837 whose site no one has located.

More markers nearby

• China Spring Tabernacle — 0.7 mi
• Bosque River Crossing of the 1841 Texan Santa Fe Expedition — 3.1 mi
• Rock Springs Cumberland Presbyterian Church — 6.3 mi
• Gholson Cemetery — 6.4 mi