Spring Cemetery

Spring's years as a railroad town, which this cemetery recalls, lasted about half a century. The Houston and Great Northern built through in 1871, and a post office followed in 1873. After the International-Great Northern linked Spring with Fort Worth in 1901-03, a roundhouse went up and the town became a major switchyard, with fourteen trackyards and 200 rail workers; by 1910 it had 1,200 people. The roundhouse moved to Houston in 1923, and by 1931 only 300 remained. Revival came later, with suburbs in the 1970s and the Old Town Spring shops after 1980.

What the plaque says

Spring Cemetery After Spring's establishment on the International and Great Northern line in 1873, it became an important railroad center. The Sellers family, early area landowners, donated a portion of their property for a community church and cemetery. The oldest legible tombstone is that of a child, Franklin Leroy Lovins, who died in 1910. Military veterans, including George C. Baker, who served in the Civil War, are also interred here. Gravestones mark nearly 50 burial sites, but many other burials are unmarked. The cemetery stands as a reminder of Spring's heritage as a railroad town. (2001)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 22 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.
• Rothko Chapel — 24 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.
• The Menil Collection — 24 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.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 24 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

• Spring — 0.5 mi
• Immanuel United Church of Christ of Spring — 0.5 mi
• Trinity Lutheran Church Cemetery — 6.9 mi
• The Klein Community — 7.7 mi