Three Oaks (Goerlitz) Cemetery

Two miles east of this graveyard, McDade had a trade that used the local ground itself. Clay from Marshy Branch, four miles east of town, fed the McDade Pottery, successor to a jug shop of 1853 near today's Bastrop State Park. Robert L. Williams bought out his partners in 1890 and built a three-acre plant with two brick beehive kilns and a railroad siding. He patented an extrusion press for flowerpots in 1909 and a portable charcoal furnace in 1911, and the sculptor Elisabet Ney sometimes worked in McDade clay.

What the plaque says

Three Oaks (Goerlitz) Cemetery The earliest marked graves on this site were those of infant Peter Goerlitz and two-year-old Emma Goerlitz. The property was primarily a family cemetery until 1893, when Peter Kellermier deeded one acre for burial purposes. The cemetery was long associated with the Catholic church located on its north side, and was known as the Catholic Cemetery. The church declined in the early 1930s; the site became known as the Goerlitz Cemetery because of the number of family members interred there. In 1975 the name was changed to Three Oaks to better represent all those interred here. There are thought to be unmarked graves and lost headstones. Veterans of World War I and World War II also are interred here. Three Oaks Cemetery continues to serve the surrounding area. (1999)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bastrop State Park — 13 mi
  The westernmost loblolly pines in the United States, cut off from the East Texas forest by a hundred miles of post oak, burned almost entirely in 2011 and growing back.
• Texas Wendish Heritage Museum — 21 mi
  A museum at Serbin of the Wends, a Slavic people from Lusatia whose congregation of nearly 600 crossed on the Ben Nevis in 1854, losing seventy-three to cholera on the way.
• McKinney Falls State Park — 29 mi
  Limestone falls on Onion Creek inside Austin, where people camped under a rock overhang for thousands of years and a financier of the Texas Revolution built his stone ranch house.

More markers nearby

• McDade — 1.5 mi
• Rural Farms and Communities Before Camp Swift — 5.6 mi
• Pleasant Grove Cemetery — 6.4 mi
• Camp Swift — 6.5 mi