Gulf Prairie Cemetery

Austin's grave here had two funerals. He died at Columbia on December 27, 1836, and Guy M. Bryan Jr.'s 1911 account has him buried on December 29, with four members of President Houston's cabinet, Henry Smith among them, as pallbearers. The procession went by the steamboat Yellow Stone toward Peach Point. When the state moved him in October 1910, the casket was to lie in the Senate Chamber before a funeral on the 20th. The Handbook of Texas calls this cemetery his first resting place, and Emily Perry lies here as well.

What the plaque says

Gulf Prairie Cemetery Pioneer cemetery. Originally part of Peach Point Plantation. Used by descendants of James Franklin Perry and wife, Emily Austin Bryan Perry, Stephen F. Austin's sister, and by the community since 1829. In 1836, Austin, the "Father of Texas," was buried here. His remains were reinterred in the state cemetery in the city of Austin in 1910. (1967)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 11 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.
• Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge — 12 mi
  Coastal prairie, salt marsh and bays between Freeport and Christmas Bay, where an auto tour along Big Slough passes wintering geese, ducks and wading birds in the tens of thousands.
• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 16 mi
  A Brazos sugar plantation built by enslaved people for the Patton family, later leased convict labor and Hogg family oil, now told through Rachel Patton and Sarah Ford.

More markers nearby

• William Joel Bryan — steps away
• Major James Peckham Caldwell — steps away
• Henry William Munson — steps away
• Emily Margaret Brown Austin Bryan Perry — steps away