Salem Cemetery

Dr. Lewis arrived as Llano County was filling up. In 1870 the county had ninety-five farms and ranches, and its improved land had shrunk to about 1,600 acres after the war. Once the danger of raids was over, settlement sped up. By 1880 there were 619 farms and ranches with almost 34,000 improved acres, and the county counted 31,760 cattle and nearly 14,000 sheep. By 1890 the farms and ranches numbered 858 and covered about 342,000 acres, with almost 52,700 cattle and about 24,000 sheep. Ranching dominated.

What the plaque says

Salem Cemetery William Leggette Lewis, a physician and ordained Methodist minister who served in the Civil War, came to Texas with his family in 1878. Lewis land probably was used for a family and community burial ground before 1884, when Rebecca Ann Stevenson, the daughter of Joseph M. and Eliza T. Stephenson, was interred in the earliest marked grave on this site. Dr. Lewis' son, M. Dee Lewis, was interred here a month later. Dr. Lewis and his wife, Isabelle D. (Palmer) Lewis, deeded 100 square yards of land for the cemetery to the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1888. Of the more than 209 known graves in the Salem Cemetery, 61 are unmarked; a few have initials scratched on rocks. Twelve graves are those of Civil War veterans. Others served in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. (1999)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Llano County Courthouse Square — 8.0 mi
  The 1893 Romanesque courthouse on Llano's square, built after a fire at the height of a boom that was meant to make the granite town an iron city.
• Enchanted Rock State Natural Area — 20 mi
  A dome of pink granite north of Fredericksburg that rises some 385 feet above Sandy Creek, creaks as it cools at night, and has drawn people for thousands of years.
• Colorado Bend State Park — 25 mi
  Old ranch country on the Colorado above Lake Buchanan, where a spring-fed creek drops 70 feet over fern-covered travertine at Gorman Falls.
• Inks Dam National Fish Hatchery — 25 mi
  A free federal hatchery below Inks Dam on the Colorado, with thirty production ponds that draw birds and a look at how fish are raised from egg to harvest.

More markers nearby

• Valley Springs Primitive Baptist Church — 3.4 mi
• Community of Valley Spring — 4.3 mi
• Valley Spring Cemetery — 4.9 mi
• Lantex Theater — 8.0 mi