Hill Crest Cemetery

The ranch began in the early 1880s, when New York broker Francis Morris bought thirty-four sections in southwestern Gillespie and northeastern Kerr counties at twenty-five cents an acre; he died in 1886 without seeing it. His son John A. Morris made it one of the country's leading thoroughbred breeding centers, spending some $500,000 in 1893 on barns, houses, fences, a school, a gin, a store and a flour mill. After New York passed antiracing laws in 1897 the ranch declined, and it was later cut into some seventy tenant farms growing mainly cotton.

What the plaque says

Hill Crest Cemetery This graveyard is closely associated with the Morris Ranch, an early international race horse breeding and training facility in Gillespie county. Charles Morris, whose Uncle Francis owned the ranch, served as its first general manager and was assisted by his brothers and sisters. Their father, william, died in 1894, and his grave bears the earliest legible tombstone here, although there may be earlier unmarked burial sites. The cemetery contains the graves of many Morris family descendants and other settlers of the Morris Ranch community. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vereins Kirche and Main Street — 9.4 mi
  The octagonal Society Church on Fredericksburg's market square, rebuilt in stone in the 1930s, beside a main street laid out like a Rhine village.
• National Museum of the Pacific War — 9.6 mi
  A museum of the war in the Pacific in Chester Nimitz's hometown, dedicated at his request to the two million who served with him, with a garden given by Japan.
• Fort Martin Scott — 10 mi
  An army post of 1848 on Barons Creek beside the German town, where soldiers kept the peace of a Comanche trade and paid the merchants in hard cash.
• Schreiner Mansion — 14 mi
  The 1879 downtown home of Charles Schreiner, the Alsatian-born merchant, banker and rancher whose store and mohair trade built Kerrville.

More markers nearby

• Baethge-Behrend Homestead — 6.0 mi
• Philipp Hartmann Family Cemetery — 6.2 mi
• Guenther's Live Oak Mill — 6.3 mi
• Wunderlich Houses — 8.4 mi