Sweeny Cemetery

The graveyard is more than seventy years older than the town around it. Freedonia Sweeny was buried here in 1833; her father bought the league that included the townsite in 1835, the Handbook says. The St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway reached the area in 1905, and the stop was briefly Adamston. The post office took the name Sweeny in 1909, and around 1910 a land company gave each church denomination a plot. In 1911 Burton D. Hurd platted the townsite and sold ten-acre garden farms under the slogan "Soil Richer Than the Valley of the River Nile."

What the plaque says

Sweeny Cemetery Begun as family burial ground when John Sweeny, early landowner, member of Stephen F. Austin's colony, chose this site for burial of his young daughter, Freedonia, 1833. In use ever since by the neighborhood. Has graves of veterans of all wars since Texas Revolution. 1966

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 5.3 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.
• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 9.2 mi
  A Brazos sugar plantation built by enslaved people for the Patton family, later leased convict labor and Hogg family oil, now told through Rachel Patton and Sarah Ford.
• Brazos Bend State Park — 24 mi
  Oak and pecan bottomland, lakes and alligators on the Brazos River 45 miles from downtown Houston, with the museum's George Observatory in the woods.
• Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge — 25 mi
  Coastal prairie, salt marsh and bays between Freeport and Christmas Bay, where an auto tour along Big Slough passes wintering geese, ducks and wading birds in the tens of thousands.

More markers nearby

• Thomas Jefferson Sweeny — steps away
• Sweeny Plantation — 3.2 mi
• John Adriance — 7.5 mi
• John S. D. Byrom — 7.5 mi