Pillot Cemetery

Tomball, the town that grew up a couple of miles north of this graveyard, was once known for having no cemetery of its own. Drillers struck oil west of town on J. F. W. Kob's land on May 27, 1933, and Tomball incorporated that July with 665 people, a number that soon tripled. A 1935 contract with Humble Oil and Refining gave residents free water and natural gas for ninety years in exchange for drilling rights inside the city. Ripley's Believe It or Not featured Tomball as the only city with free gas and water and no cemetery.

What the plaque says

Pillot Cemetery Pillot Cemetery The earliest known settler on Willow Creek was Frenchman Claude Nicholas Pillot (1793-1862), whose family immigrated to the United States in 1832 and to Texas in 1837. He and his wife, Jeanne, established a home and farm in the area, and soon other French settlers joined them. Church services and school classes were held in private homes until permanent structures could be built. This cemetery began as a family burial ground upon the death of August Pillot, 21-year-old son of Claude and Jeanne, in September 1844. The Pillots also provided burial spaces to their friends and neighbors, but the Pillot family plot remains the focal point of the graveyard. The large monument in the center of the plot was manufactured in France and shipped to Cypress for transportation to the cemetery. Although Claude Pillot died in New Orleans after a business trip, Jeanne died at home in 1866 and is buried in the family plot. Although there were a few burials over the next several decades, for the most part the graveyard was untended. In 1959, efforts began to re-establish the site as a community cemetery, and the last known burial took place in 1997. There are approximately 70 graves in the Pillot Cemetery, Including three veterans of the Civil War. Through its burials and tombstones, the cemetery is an important reflection of the area's history. (2002)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 25 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• The Menil Collection — 26 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.
• Rothko Chapel — 26 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 26 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• Texas Railroads, C.S.A. — 2.3 mi
• Wunderlich Farm — 4.1 mi
• Kohrville Community — 4.1 mi
• Catherine Wunderlich — 4.2 mi