Tow Cemetery

Tow is counted the oldest community in Llano County. John F. Morgan, who came in 1853, made hats from beaver and other furs trapped nearby. When the brothers William and Wilson Tow arrived with their families the same year, they named the area where they settled Tow Valley. A post office opened in 1886 under the name Tow, with Mathew B. Clendenen as postmaster. The community stayed small until Lake Buchanan brought retirees and recreation: from fifty people before 1950 it grew to 305 by 1974, and in 2000 it had thirty-one businesses.

What the plaque says

Tow Cemetery The 1850 death date of eight-year old Margaret R. Thorp, said to have died from a snakebite, documents the age of this burial ground in the community that formed around the Bluffton-Tow Saltworks. An obelisk with an 1846 date is a memorial for a Morgan family member buried elsewhere. John F. Morgan, a successful fur hatmaker, arrived here in 1853, the same year William Tow and family settled Tow Valley. A long tradition of caring for this site by area families is now overseen by an association formed in the 1950s. This cemetery remains as a chronicle of the pioneers and generations that are the Tow area's heritage. Historic Texas Cemetery 2001

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Colorado Bend State Park — 11 mi
  Old ranch country on the Colorado above Lake Buchanan, where a spring-fed creek drops 70 feet over fern-covered travertine at Gorman Falls.
• Inks Lake State Park — 12 mi
  A state park on a constant-level lake of the Colorado, between Buchanan and Inks dams, with pink granite and gneiss at the water and CCC work along Park Road 4.
• Inks Dam National Fish Hatchery — 12 mi
  A free federal hatchery below Inks Dam on the Colorado, with thirty production ponds that draw birds and a look at how fish are raised from egg to harvest.
• Llano County Courthouse Square — 15 mi
  The 1893 Romanesque courthouse on Llano's square, built after a fire at the height of a boom that was meant to make the granite town an iron city.

More markers nearby

• Isaac Byler Maxwell — 5.1 mi
• Board Branch Cemetery — 6.7 mi
• Lone Grove School — 7.1 mi
• C.S.A. Salt Works — 10 mi