Category: Family

Oakwood Cemetery: Gleaning snippets of history from headstones

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At the urging of President Mirabeau B. Lamar*, the Congress of the Republic of Texas selected a site on the Colorado River to serve as the country’s capital. In October of 1839, the government was loaded into oxcarts and moved to a site bounded by Shoal Creek and Waller Creek and newly named in honor of Stephen F. Austin.

William H. Sandusky’s 1840 map of the new capital, Austin, indicates a square plot of land dedicated for use as a cemetery. Texas General Land Office collection.

By January 1840, the population swelled to 839, and the need for a cemetery was obvious. The original core of what would later become known as Oakwood Cemetery is marked on the right of the map above.

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Who was the ‘Barton’ of the springs?

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barton springs 1882

Above, “Barton Springs,” A.M. Ramsey, 1882 oil painting, Austin History Center, Portal to Texas History

…”waters are as transparent as glass. Small objects can be seen at the bottom, 15 or 20 feet below the surface. The flow never changes. Prolonged rains, over a wide extent of the country, do not increase their volume, nor do the severest drouths diminish it.”

Frank Brown writing in Annals of Travis County and the City of Austin, (From the Earliest Times to the Close of 1875), Collection of Travis County Historical Commission, Portal to Texas History

New zipcode for this blogger. Jumped from 78204 to 78704, which means a whole batch of historical tidbits to master in order to understand home in South Austin. With an address on Barton Springs Road, finding out about Barton seems a good place to start.

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Sisters like two peas in a pod: Perhaps they shared a wedding dress as well

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agnes and william marmon

Above, William C. Marmon wed Agnes Zacharriah Autry in a double wedding ceremony in the Coker Church in 1899. Photograph courtesy of Virginia Heimer Ohlenbusch from Haunting the Graveyard: Unearthing the Story of the Coker Settlement

In the late 1800s, itinerant photographers wandered the Texas countryside, making a living talking hardworking farming families into the need to document their lives on their homesteads. The result was that neighbors often had their farmstead portraits taken during the same time period.

In Haunting the Graveyard: Unearthing the Story of the Coker Settlement, published by the Coker Cemetery Association in 2019, I organized the book by a combination of themes and timelines. This meant that I used most of the itinerant farm photos in a chapter describing the efforts of those making a living in the area of San Antonio known as Buttermilk Hill. But this also meant my favorite details in two of these remained unlinked in the book.

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