Type Cemetery

The Handbook of Texas tells Type's story through its school and post office. A school dating from 1900 had thirty-eight pupils in 1903, and a post office opened in 1902 under Bastrop County with August Smith as postmaster, closing in 1904. The Handbook calls the congregation organized in 1908 a Swedish Evangelical Church, where the plaque says Swedish Free Mission Church. By 1940 Type counted twenty people and one business, and its school merged with Coupland's in 1945. In 1999 the community had a single business, the Type Store.

What the plaque says

Type Cemetery The earliest Anglo settlers of this area came to the vicinity in the 1840s. They called their community Post Oak Island for an isolated oak grove between Bastrop and Circleville. Many of these pioneers had moved on by the time Swedish and Danish immigrants arrived in the 1890s. Swedish-born August Smith owned a store which straddled the line between Bastrop and Williamson counties. Smith opened the Type Post Office in that store in 1902, probably naming the community for the printing machine owned by his friend Jonas Sunvision. The Type Cemetery was established on land conveyed by Peder and Christine Nygaard when the Swedish Free Mission Church was founded in May 1908. The tombstones of Anna Amalia Hansen (Hanson) (d. 1910) and Christina Fredrickson (d. 1915) are inscribed in Swedish, merely one indication of the strong cultural identification of the early settlers with their homelands. Burials before 1950 are primarily those of members of the Carlson, Hanson, Nygaard, Nyman, and Swenson families. The small number of Scandinavian burials in the cemetery after 1950 reflects the group's assimilation into American culture and the dispersal of local young people to cities. In 1954 the Swedish Free Mission Church merged with Kimbro's Free Church. Of the 36 graves counted in 1998, eleven were those of Swedish immigrants and fifteen were first or second generation Scandinavian Texans. Several Mexican graves were located on the eastern edge of the cemetery. The Yegua Creek Evangelical Free Church, which relocated to this site in 1987, maintains the Type Cemetery. (1998)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Round Rock — 22 mi
  A table-shaped stone in Brushy Creek gave Round Rock its name in 1854; the Chisholm Trail crossed the creek near it, and Old Town stayed behind when the railroad pulled the town east.
• Bastrop State Park — 23 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.
• Inner Space Cavern — 24 mi
  A Georgetown cave found in 1963 when highway engineers drilled test holes, holding Pleistocene fossils and 72-degree rooms that visitors reach by an artificial tunnel.
• Williamson County Courthouse — 25 mi
  The fifth Williamson County courthouse, a Beaux Arts building by C. H. Page, rises over a Georgetown square of more than 50 Victorian-era buildings.

More markers nearby

• Mager Cemetery — 3.7 mi
• Pleasant Grove Cemetery — 3.8 mi
• United States Senator Morgan C. Hamilton — 3.9 mi
• Pioneer Publisher and Printer David Ervin Lawhon — 4.3 mi