Needville Methodist Church Cemetery

The church could buy this ground from the state because the prairie around Needville was school land. Texas built its school lands from alternate sections that an 1854 law required railroads to survey alongside their own, and from the half of the unappropriated public domain the Constitution of 1876 gave the schools. Fort Bend's share was four leagues of prairie between the Brazos and San Bernard, opened to sale in 1887. The first few settlers arrived here in the fall of 1890, many of them German families from other counties and states, and found no roads, churches or cemeteries.

What the plaque says

Needville Methodist Church Cemetery Located on land purchased by the Needville German Methodist Church from the State of Texas in 1896, this small cemetery began in 1903, when the infant son of the church's pastor, William Sievers, and his wife Alma was buried near the church building. By 1905 children of the Busch and Kielman families also were buried here, and the Zich family began burying relatives in the graveyard in 1907. Adjacent to the Needville Public Cemetery, this plot has historically been used by members of the Methodist church, which moved into the town of Needville in 1927. Funded by the Estate of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Bacica

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Brazos Bend State Park — 13 mi
  Oak and pecan bottomland, lakes and alligators on the Brazos River 45 miles from downtown Houston, with the museum's George Observatory in the woods.
• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 19 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.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 34 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• The Menil Collection — 34 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.

More markers nearby

• Town of Needville — 1.3 mi
• Needville Methodist Church — 1.7 mi
• Concord Cemetery — 4.3 mi
• Snake Creek Cemetery and Church — 7.0 mi