McGregor Cemetery (Scottish Presbyterian Cemetery)

The college that received Galatia's proceeds was founded in 1849 at Huntsville by the Brazos Presbytery of the Old School Presbyterian Church. Daniel Baker, James Weston Miller and William Cochran Blair chose the site, Huntsville citizens put up $10,000 and five acres, and the charter was modeled on those of Harvard, Yale and Princeton. The school was named for Stephen F. Austin over other suggestions, and Sam Houston and Anson Jones sat on its first board. After hard years in the Civil War and Reconstruction it moved to Sherman, where fifty-three students enrolled in 1878.

What the plaque says

McGregor Cemetery (Scottish Presbyterian Cemetery) A group of settlers came to this area of western Austin County from North Carolina in the early 1850s. Many of the pioneers were originally from Lismore, Argyleshire County, Scotland, and had immigrated to the United States together. Included among the group were members of the McGregor, Carmichael, McLean, McDougald, and McLeod families. Galatia Presbyterian Church was founded nearby in October 1860, but was discontinued in 1883 after most of the members moved away from the area. The church property was sold and the proceeds donated to Austin College, a Presbyterian school founded in Huntsville, but relocated to Sherman in 1878. This cemetery, which contains fifteen marked graves, was established on August 22, 1868, with the burial of Mary McGregor (1793-1861), wife of Malcolm McGregor. Two days later another Scottish settler, Peter John McLean, died and was laid to rest in the graveyard. The cemetery continued to serve the small rural community until 1900, when six-year-old Billy Boy Carmighael was the last person interred here. Maintained by an association of descendants, the McGregor Cemetery is the last physical remnant of the area's pioneer Scottish settlement. (1997)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lake Somerville State Park and Trailway — 19 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.
• Independence and Old Baylor Park — 22 mi
  A crossroads north of Brenham that was the richest town in Texas when it won Baylor University in 1845, refused the railroad, and lost the college to Waco and Belton in 1886.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 27 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.
• Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site — 30 mi
  The townsite on the Brazos where delegates met in a cold, unfinished hall in March 1836 to declare Texas independent, with Independence Hall rebuilt and Anson Jones's Barrington farm worked as in 1850.

More markers nearby

• Welcome Lutheran Church — 3.5 mi
• Town of Shelby — 3.9 mi
• Haynie-Embrey House — 5.2 mi
• Friedrich Ernst — 5.3 mi