San Marcos Cemetery

Thomas Jefferson Chambers, whose grant holds this ground, came to Mexico from Kentucky and Alabama in 1826 and lived with a Mexican family in Mexico City to learn the language. Through Vice Governor Victor Blanco he became a certified surveyor and, in 1829, surveyor general of Texas. For that work he received eleven leagues, located in five counties including Hays, in 1834. He became a naturalized Mexican citizen and in 1834 the only foreigner licensed to practice law. During the Anahuac disturbances his enemies hanged him in effigy at Brazoria.

What the plaque says

San Marcos Cemetery This cemetery lies within the Mexican land grant acquired by Thomas J. Chambers in 1834. Chambers died in 1865 and in 1867 his widow, Abbey, sold 3,000 acres containing this site to H. N. Duble at an estate sale held in Galveston. A portion of the cemetery site was purchased by Freedman Peter Roberts in Galveston in 1868. Local tradition suggests that slaves of the area's earliest settlers were buried here prior to the first recorded burial, that of Major C. Rogers in 1876. The San Marcos Cemetery Association was organized in 1876 by Edward Burleson Jr., L. w. Mitchell, W. J. Joyce, E. P. Raynolds, Wallace Carnahan and W. O. Hutchison. That year the association bought 10 acres here from Judy Covington Dixon and her husband, Shadrach Dixon. By 1924 the cemetery acreage had increased to more than 20 acres due to land acquisitions from: H. S. and Laura Jane Harvey in 1890; W. O. Hutchison in 1892; Dock and Sarah Roberts in 1902; Beverly Hutchison in 1904; and Dock Roberts and John McGehee in 1908. San Marcos acquired the cemetery in 1924 and in 1964 a perpetual care trust fund was created by private citizens. Interred here are many pioneer settlers, War of 1812 veteran Louis Lawshe, and veterans of other conflicts ranging from the Texas Revolution (1835-36) to Vietnam. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 1.7 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 — 14 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 — 17 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 — 17 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

• Peter Cavanaugh Woods — steps away
• Site of Coronal Institute — 0.7 mi
• Wonder Cave — 0.8 mi
• Founding of the First Methodist Church — 1.0 mi