Alley Cemetery

🏛️The era

In the early 1820s, Texas belonged to newly independent Mexico, and it was a thinly settled frontier. Mexico allowed Stephen F. Austin to bring American colonists into the fertile river bottoms between the Brazos and the Colorado. Those first families became known as the 'Old Three Hundred', and they laid the foundation of Anglo-American Texas.

Life on the lower Colorado River was hard. Settlers cleared land, built cabins and raised crops far from doctors or towns. Floods, fevers and epidemics could strike without warning. Family burial grounds like this one grew up wherever there was a homestead, because there was nowhere else to bury the dead.

Within little more than a decade, tensions between the colonists and the Mexican government led to the Texas Revolution of 1835–1836 and an independent Republic of Texas. The families who settled along this stretch of the Colorado lived through every stage of that change: Mexican colony, revolution, republic and then American state.

👥People & events

The cemetery takes its name from Rawson Alley (1793–1833), a surveyor on Stephen F. Austin's original expedition in 1821. He surveyed much of the land around the Colorado River, and it was partly his work that turned wilderness into claims settlers could own. His family followed in 1822 with the Old Three Hundred, including his brothers Abraham (also called Abram) and Thomas.

Rawson died of illness during a Colorado River flood in 1833 and was buried here. His brother Abraham (1803–1862) fought in the Texas Revolution and lived long enough to see Texas become a republic and then a state. He rests beside his wife, Nancy Millar Alley (1817–1893).

The first graves here were not Alleys' at all. Dr. John Millar (1787–1831) settled on the west bank of the Colorado in 1831, and that same year smallpox took him and his youngest children, William and Julia. Their burials began this cemetery, half a century before Nicola and Elizabeth Glaiser formally deeded the land on November 2, 1881.

The story goes on into the 20th century. Shelly Lee Alley (1894–1964) served in World War I and became a noted bandleader. He founded the 'Alley Cats', a country blues band, and was inducted into the Western Swing Hall of Fame in 1994. One small plot of ground ties a surveyor of Mexican Texas to the dance halls of the swing era.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Old Three Hundred were the start of a migration that reshaped the continent. Their settlement led to the Texas Revolution, the Republic of Texas, annexation by the United States and, soon after, the Mexican-American War. Each of those events changed the map of the nation, and people buried here lived through the first of them.

The cemetery also shows how frontier settlement really happened. Before farms could be claimed, surveyors like Rawson Alley had to measure and map the land. Then families like the Millars paid a heavy price in disease and hardship. The country's westward growth rested on countless small, fragile households like these.

Shelly Lee Alley's grave adds a later chapter. Western Swing blended country, blues and jazz into a sound that came out of Texas and helped shape American popular music. In one quiet cemetery you can follow a Texas family from colonial settlement to a distinctly Texan music.

🧭If you visit

Look for the oak trees. Generations of Texans lie in their shade, some buried before the Texas Revolution. This is a quiet, rural place, well suited to slowing down and reading the stones, where you can find names and dates that stretch back nearly two centuries.

See if you can spot the graves the marker names: Abraham and Nancy Alley side by side, and the family of Dr. John Millar, whose smallpox deaths in 1831 began the cemetery. Look for Shelly Lee Alley too, a reminder that frontier families went on to make music as well as history.

The cemetery is near the Colorado River in Colorado County, an area rich in early Texas history, so it pairs naturally with other Austin Colony sites nearby. As with any family burial ground, be respectful: stay on paths, leave everything as you found it, and remember that descendants may still visit these graves.