Old Red Rock Cemetery

Red Rock is said to take its name from a red stone in the chimney of first settler James Brewer's house in the early 1850s, and early on it was apparently also called Hannah Land. A post office opened in 1870. By the mid-1870s the Red Rock Male and Female Academy was running, and a community dramatic troupe entertained neighboring towns. After the move to the railroad, a 1909 newspaper put the population at 500 and called Red Rock "a splendid cotton market," with a bank and a gin baling 2,500 bales a year.

What the plaque says

Old Red Rock Cemetery The town of Red Rock grew at the crossing of the Austin - Port Lavaca Stagecoach Road (now FM 812) and the Bastrop - Gonzales Trail (now CR 229). In 1892 the town moved one mile east to the newly-laid railroad. This site, with more than 370 graves, is the burial place of pioneer settlers, including Texas trail drivers and veterans of the Texas Revolution, the Mexican War, and the Civil War. The first documented burial was in 1864. Earlier graves may have been lost when homemade sandstone markers were removed. The cemetery is maintained by descendants of area pioneers. (1996)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 13 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.
• Bastrop State Park — 15 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.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 21 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.
• Texas State Cemetery — 26 mi
  A hill east of the Capitol that began with one general's grave in 1851 and now holds Stephen F. Austin, governors, Barbara Jordan and more than 2,000 Confederate veterans and widows.

More markers nearby

• Thomas Osborn — steps away
• Rockne — 3.1 mi
• Bethel Primitive Baptist Church — 8.8 mi
• Delhi — 11 mi