Squaw Creek Cemetery

The community took its name from a creek also known as Spring Creek. It forms where Indian and Flores creeks meet a mile south of Farm Road 648 in northern Gillespie County and runs northwest for twelve miles, intermittent in its upper reaches, to join Threadgill Creek and form Beaver Creek five miles southwest of Loyal Valley in Mason County. The creek crosses part of the Central Basin, a country of flat to rolling terrain with deep loamy and clayey soils, where grasses grow among open stands of live oak, mesquite and Ashe juniper.

What the plaque says

Squaw Creek Cemetery On their way west from Arkansas to California about 1856, the family of Francis Marion Nixon and his wife, Catherine Elliot, was forced to detour south from the North Texas Plains to this area to obtain water and forage for their livestock. After first camping on a hill near the Mason/Gillespie County line, thereafter referred to as Nixon Point, they settled in this section of Gillespie County during the 1860s. The Nixon's son, Andrew Jackson Nixon, and his wife, Lurana Wooten, built their home in this vicinity and with their fourteen children formed the nucleus of the community of Squaw Creek. Marriages by their descendants added the names Baethge, Ratto, Strackbein, Mund, Faught, and Gibson to the extended Nixon family line. The Squaw Creek Cemetery grounds were a part of a 110-acre conveyance from A. J. Nixon to his brother-in-law, Henry Strackbeing, in 1872. The first recorded interment is that of Elizabeth Gibson in 1873. The first legal mention of the cemetery occurs in a deed executed by Adolph Strackbein in 1914. Of the approximately 60 interments here, most are members of the extended Nixon family. The burials include those of American Civil War and World War I veterans. (1992)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Enchanted Rock State Natural Area — 14 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.
• Vereins Kirche and Main Street — 15 mi
  The octagonal Society Church on Fredericksburg's market square, rebuilt in stone in the 1930s, beside a main street laid out like a Rhine village.
• National Museum of the Pacific War — 16 mi
  A museum of the war in the Pacific in Chester Nimitz's hometown, dedicated at his request to the two million who served with him, with a garden given by Japan.
• Fort Martin Scott — 18 mi
  An army post of 1848 on Barons Creek beside the German town, where soldiers kept the peace of a Comanche trade and paid the merchants in hard cash.

More markers nearby

• Squaw Creek Primitive Baptist Church — 4.3 mi
• The Marschall-Meusebach Cemetery — 4.6 mi
• Doss School — 4.9 mi
• Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church — 5.1 mi