Vsetin Cemetery

Vsetin was a congregation before it was a village. The Handbook says the community grew around the Evangelical Unity of the Czech-Moravian Brethren, a Protestant church first built in 1894 and rebuilt in 1954, on land a Mexican grant gave to Elenor Living in 1831 and that stayed in a few big holdings until the 1880s. Two cemeteries lie here, the larger one dated by the Handbook to 1888. Cotton was the crop until the 1950s, when most fields went to pasture, corn and hay. Business is done in Hallettsville.

What the plaque says

Vsetin Cemetery About 1865, newly arrived Czechoslovakian immigrants settled in this vicinity, named Sublime by earlier Irish immigrants. The Czech settlers began calling the community "Vsetin" in remembrance of the area in Austria from which they came. After working as sharecroppers for several years, most earned enough money to purchase their own farms. The settlers soon established a Czech Moravian Bretheren Church congregation and constructed a school here. The favorable reports the settlers sent back to Austria inspired a group of their relatives to immigrate in 1880. The Vsetin Cemetery was founded ten years later. It originated as a private cemetery for the Mikush family, who had arrived with the second migration. The first burial, that of six-week-old Valentine, the infant son of Martin and Veronica (Stasny) Mikush, took place in 1890 when this property was part of a farm owned by Martin and Katerina Sralla. The graveyard later evolved into a community burial ground, and in 1927 the Vsetin Cemetery Association was established to maintain it. The Vsetin Cemetery continues to serve as a tangible reminder of the area's early permanent settlers. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lavaca County Courthouse — 6.7 mi
  A limestone Romanesque courthouse of 1897-99 on the square of a town founded by a widow trader, in a county seat that once printed the Socialist Party's state paper.
• Nativity of Mary, Blessed Virgin Catholic Church (High Hill) — 16 mi
  A red brick Gothic Revival church of 1906 in a German farm settlement, where two San Antonio painters spent 1912 faking marble columns and stone vaults on wood.
• Saints Cyril and Methodius Catholic Church (Dubina) — 16 mi
  The church of Texas's first Czech settlement, under a sky-blue painted ceiling that was whitewashed in the 1950s and brought back from faint traces by its own parishioners.
• St. Mary's Church of the Assumption (Praha) — 18 mi
  The mother parish of the Czech settlements around Flatonia, a stone-fronted church of 1895 whose ceiling Gottfried Flury turned into a turquoise garden, with an August 15 feast since 1855.

More markers nearby

• Rabb Switch — 2.5 mi
• Sublime Baptist Church — 3.2 mi
• Hackberry — 5.8 mi
• General John W. Whitfield — 6.5 mi