High Hill Cemetery

The six acres on the plaque were first meant for a school, not a graveyard. N. W. Faison conveyed two acres in 1858 and Henry Ebeling four more in 1859, intended for a school or college, and when those plans fell through local families took the ground for their dead. George Herder lies here with his wife, Minna Wolters Herder, near Louis and Johanna Schulenburg and the doctors Henry Overbay and E. Heinrich Fahnert. The stones carry curtain and flower motifs, lambs, angels and lodge emblems, some lettered in German, some showing joined hands over the words "Auf Wiedersehen."

What the plaque says

High Hill Cemetery High Hill Post Office, established about 1858, united three adjacent villages and gave this community cemetery its name. This six-acre tract was once the property of George Herder (1818-87), a German immigrant and a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto. The oldest stones here mark the graves of August Wolters, who died April 6, 1861, and Friedrich Eicholt, who died May 18, 1861. The cemetery contains about 241 graves, primarily those of German settlers in the area. Family members cared for the site until 1963, when the Old High Hill Cemetery Association, Inc., was organized. (1975)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill) — 1.1 mi
  A red brick Gothic Revival church of 1906 in a German farm settlement, where two San Antonio painters spent 1912 faking marble columns and stone vaults on wood.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 6.1 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.
• St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Ammannsville) — 7.3 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.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 8.5 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.

More markers nearby

• Creuzbaur's Battery, C.S.A. "The Big Guns of Fayette" — 1.1 mi
• Col. William F. Upton — 1.4 mi
• Lyons Family Cemetery — 1.4 mi
• Schulenburg — 2.1 mi