Pitts Cemetery

Before Texas, Pitts was a trained civil engineer in Stewart County, Georgia, authorized to build a bridge over the Chattahoochee, and one of the organizers of the town of Florence. In August 1842 he wrote his wife from Washington-on-the-Brazos asking her to tell relatives and friends to come to this "land of plenty." He was engrossing clerk of the Texas House in 1846 and 1848, deeded land to the new Methodist church, and in 1854 helped organize Cushney Lodge No. 128, the county's first Masonic lodge. At that time he owned fifteen slaves.

What the plaque says

Pitts Cemetery John Drayton Pitts was born at sea on August 26, 1798, during the voyage of his parents, John and Jane Pitts, from England to Charleston, South Carolina. They moved to Georgia during the War of 1812, and John D. married Eliza Permelia Daves in April 1819. John D. Pitts was elected to the Georgia Legislature in 1841, but later moved to Grimes County, Texas. He persuaded his extended family in Georgia to join him, and in 1843 eleven Pitts families moved to Texas. John D. Pitts served as adjutant general under Texas Governor George Wood from 1848 to 1849. Pitts bought land here from his friend General Edward Burleson in 1850, and eventually much of his extended family settled along the nearby San Antonio-San Marcos stage route in a community called Stringtown. Pitts Cemetery began in 1850 with the burial of John Malone, infant son of James L. and Eliza (Pitts) Malone and grandson of Eliza and John D. Pitts. Eliza Pitts was buried here in 1851. In 1861 John D. Pitts died on his way home from a secessionist convention in Austin, and was buried here. The cemetery was set aside by Pitts' sons-in-law, James Malone and Samuel Kone, Sr., in 1875. The cemetery continues to serve as a burial site for the descendants of John D. and Eliza Pitts. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845 - 1995

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 5.3 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• Gruene Historic District — 9.7 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.
• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 13 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 19 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.

More markers nearby

• Stringtown — 0.2 mi
• First Baptist Church of San Marcos — 0.8 mi
• King's Highway - Camino Real - Old San Antonio Road — 2.1 mi
• Riley's Tavern — 3.0 mi