Lexington Memorial Cemetery

Gustav Urbantke, the lay minister on this plaque, had fled one army only to join another. Born in Beilitz, Austria, in 1841, he ran away to avoid military duty there and, unable to get a passport because of his age, followed his family to Texas alone a few weeks behind them. In Texas he volunteered for the Confederate army and came home from captivity in the North. In the fall of 1881 he traveled from Industry to Lexington with Franz Peterson and Gottfried Hornung, signed the church's 1889 deed as a trustee, and died in 1932.

What the plaque says

Lexington Memorial Cemetery A Methodist Episcopal church, locally known as the German Methodist Church, was organized in Lexington in 1882. The church purchased two acres of land for a cemetery in November 1898. The first recorded burials on this site were those of two-year-old Reinhold Retzlaff and four-year-old Gustav Hillegeist in the spring of 1899. Also interred here are Civil War veterans Bernhard Retzlaff (who fought for both the Union and the Confederacy), Jacob Seifert, and Gustav Urbantke, who served as a lay minister for forty years. Others buried here include members of the Bauer, Grusendorf, Hillegeist, Hornung, Letterman, Otto, Peterson, Raesener, and Raschke families. All were charter members of the church. (1999)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Somerville State Park and Trailway — 20 mi
  Two park units on an 11,000-acre lake between Austin and College Station, joined by a thirteen-mile trailway for hikers, cyclists and riders with primitive camps along the way.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 21 mi
  A museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.
• Bastrop State Park — 27 mi
  The westernmost loblolly pines in the United States, cut off from the East Texas forest by a hundred miles of post oak, burned almost entirely in 2011 and growing back.
• Round Top and Festival Hill — 31 mi
  A German village on the old La Bahía Road, named for a house tower, with an 1867 stone church, a Fourth of July kept since 1851 and a concert hall a pianist built without blueprints.

More markers nearby

• Lexington Schools — 0.5 mi
• The First Baptist Church of Lexington — 0.6 mi
• United Methodist Church of Lexington — 0.7 mi
• Town of Lexington — 0.7 mi