Coletoville Cemetery

The German settlement here began as Steiner's Settlement, for Carl Steiner, who arrived from Germany in 1850. In 1860 alone it made 2,000 gallons of wine from wild mustang grapes, and it had a shooting club and, from 1854, a singing society. The Old Goliad Road kept it alive until the road missed the town, and the store closed by 1884. When the Gulf, Western Texas and Pacific put a stop at Raisin in 1889, the business went there. The church paid four dollars for its two-acre site, and its cemetery had no burial restrictions regarding creed.

What the plaque says

Coletoville Cemetery When an epidemic of diphtheria hit the German settlement of Steinerville, established in 1849, two of August and Thekla Spitzer's children died. Ten-year-old Henry and six-year-old Robert were buried by their parents in 1872 on this site. In May of 1872, the Spitzer's deeded the land to the trustees of the new school and evangelic German church of the German community of Steinerville. The community was later renamed Coletoville for the nearby Coleto Creek. Both Thekla and August Spitzer are buried in the cemetery. The oldest birth dates are those of Eva Voigt and Joseph Weiser, both born in 1812. Several veterans of major American and international conflicts are interred here. In 1970, the church, now called Martin Luther Lutheran Church, deeded the cemetery land to the Coletoville Cemetery Association. The church and cemetery became two separate institutions for the first time, though community members of all faiths have traditionally been buried here. Burial sites are marked in rows and spaces rather than in plots, and graves are arranged in consecutive order by date. Many of the oldest markers were originally made of sandstone. A 1997 count revealed 623 marked and 78 unmarked graves. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• De León Plaza — 7.1 mi
  The central plaza of Guadalupe Victoria, the only predominantly Mexican colony in Texas, founded by Martín De León in 1824 and taken from his family after 1836.
• Museum of the Coastal Bend — 8.8 mi
  Victoria College's museum of thirteen thousand years on the middle Texas coast, from Clovis hunters and Karankawa potters to La Salle's lost Fort St. Louis and the first ranches.
• Fannin Battleground State Historic Site — 9.0 mi
  The open prairie east of Goliad where Fannin's retreating column formed a square short of the Coleto Creek timber on March 19, 1836, and surrendered the next day.
• Fannin Memorial Monument — 18 mi
  The 1938 pink granite memorial over the common grave of Fannin's men, shot on the roads out of Goliad on Palm Sunday 1836, the grave itself found again only in the 1930s.

More markers nearby

• Cologne Community — 5.8 mi
• Guadalupe River — 6.7 mi
• Home of Empresario Martin De Leon — 7.0 mi
• In Memory of Edward Conrad — 7.0 mi