Wellborn Cemetery

The plaque names the Royder brothers among Wellborn's leaders. A 2000 history of the cemetery says their firm, J. H. Royder and Brother, began in 1885 and ran the first store on the railroad line, a cotton gin and a lumberyard. Thomas Harvey was postmaster, school trustee and politician; John Horace was the undertaker and also a postmaster. They died in 1919 and 1929 and lie in the cemetery. Even the town's name is unsettled. The Handbook of Texas offers a construction-camp well, a foreman named Wellborn, or a landowner named Wilburn.

What the plaque says

Wellborn Cemetery The town of Wellborn was founded in 1867 along the Houston and Texas Central railroad line. By 1874, with the first documented burial -- that of two-year-old Newton Farquhar -- a cemetery was in existence to serve the community. A reflection of Wellborn's history, the burial ground contains the graves of community leaders, including brothers and business partners Thomas Harvey Royder and John Horace Royder; veterans from armed conflicts dating back to the Civil War; Brazos County pioneers; and members of fraternal organizations, identified by the distinctive symbols on their tombstones. (2001)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum — 5.4 mi
  The library of the forty-first president on the Texas A&M campus, opened in 1997, where George and Barbara Bush and their daughter Robin are buried in a family plot on the grounds.
• Independence and Old Baylor Park — 15 mi
  A crossroads north of Brenham that was the richest town in Texas when it won Baylor University in 1845, refused the railroad, and lost the college to Waco and Belton in 1886.
• Navasota — 16 mi
  A railroad and cotton town where the La Bahia Road crossed the Navasota River, scarred by an 1865 explosion and yellow fever, and the home ground of the songster Mance Lipscomb.
• Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site — 17 mi
  The townsite on the Brazos where delegates met in a cold, unfinished hall in March 1836 to declare Texas independent, with Independence Hall rebuilt and Anson Jones's Barrington farm worked as in 1850.

More markers nearby

• A&M College Consolidated Rural School — 4.2 mi
• African American Education in College Station — 4.9 mi
• Shiloh Community — 5.0 mi
• William Templeton Millican — 5.3 mi