Columbus' Old City Cemetery

The plaque lists the cemetery's notable dead; for two decades the Nesbitt Memorial Library has given them voices. Its foundation's Live Oaks and Dead Folks tour, traditionally held on the first Saturday in November, leads groups by lantern light to chosen graves, where costumed guides tell true, newly researched stories of local people. In 2024 the foundation moved the event to the courthouse square, using a new book by Susan Chandler, Tracey Wegenhoft and Jim Kearney as the guide, then returned to the cemetery in 2025 for the tour's twenty-second year. Proceeds support the library's local history work.

What the plaque says

Columbus' Old City Cemetery Date of earliest burial is not known: oldest headstone, 1853. Site (7 A.) was deeded to the city in 1870 as an existent graveyard. Burials here included Benjamin Beason, one of Austin's "Old 300" colonists: W. B. DeWees, also in "Old 300," founder of Columbus; 1830s historian Dilue Rose and husband, Sheriff Ira Harris; Gen. Augustus Jones, War of 1812 and Texas War for Independence veteran; Dr. John G. Logue, known as founder of the first drugstore in Texas, 1845; The Rev. Jacob Scherer, founder, in 1857, of Colorado College; many Confederate soldiers; and victims of 1873 yellow fever epidemic. (1973)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Stafford Opera House — 0.7 mi
  A cattleman's bank and theater of 1886 on the Columbus square, in a river town Sam Houston burned in 1836 and a county marked by a long feud and a 1935 lynching.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 17 mi
  The church of Texas's first Czech settlement, under a sky-blue painted ceiling that was whitewashed in the 1950s and brought back from faint traces by its own parishioners.
• Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge — 17 mi
  Ten thousand acres of native coastal prairie northeast of Eagle Lake, kept for a critically endangered grouse, many of whose birds are hatched in captivity and released here.
• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 19 mi
  A wooden Carpenter Gothic church built in 1919 after storm and fire took two before it, its dusty-rose interior painted by an artist whose name was lost for decades.

More markers nearby

• Exum Philip Whitfield — steps away
• George Glenn — 0.4 mi
• The Rev. Jacob Scherer — 0.4 mi
• Homesite of Fannie Baker Darden — 0.5 mi