Alta Loma Cemetery
Santa Fe, Galveston County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Organized in 1897, this burial ground served the ranching and farming community of Alta Loma. In 1893 the Alta Loma Investment and Improvement Company located in Colorado established the town site, whose name means "High Land", in Spanish. IN 1894 William Skirvin, who is buried here, led the first party of settlers to the new town. When the investment company established Alta Loma it set aside land for cemetery use. However it was not until 1897 when the company presented the deed to the town for this property. The first burial here occured that year, when the infant son of the Stobart family died. others interred includ members of eary pioneering families who raised longhorn cattle in the area, as well as residents of other near by settlements. in addition, community and buisness leaders, immigrants, teachers, preachers, veterans of military conflicts dating to World War I, are also burried here The Alta Loma cemetery association, organized in 1904, continue to maintain the community burial ground. Cemetery features include curbed plots, verticle stones, false crypts, grave slabs and statuary. In 1978 Santa Fe incorporated Alta Loma into its city limits. As one of the few remaining vestiges of Alta Loma, this burial ground is a reminder of the non-existant settlement. It continues to serve as a testament to the pioneering men and women who resided here long ago and is a record of their once thriving community. Historic Texas Cemetery 2007
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Organized in 1897, this cemetery served the ranching and farming community of Alta Loma, a town whose Spanish name means high land, laid out by a Colorado investment company in the 1890s. The first settlers arrived in 1894, and the burial ground holds early pioneering families who raised longhorn cattle, along with teachers, preachers, immigrants, and veterans of conflicts dating to World War I. A cemetery association organized in 1904 has maintained the grounds ever since.
Why it matters
As one of the few remaining traces of Alta Loma, the cemetery is a lasting record of the pioneer families who built a thriving Gulf Coast farming and ranching community.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the last years of the nineteenth century, the Texas Gulf Coast prairie was still being turned from open range into farms and organized towns. This is the world Alta Loma was born into: grassland where longhorn cattle grazed, gradually parceled out by investment companies that saw money in selling land to settlers hungry for a fresh start. The name they chose — Spanish for 'high land' — was itself a small piece of salesmanship on famously flat coastal country.
It was the Reconstruction and Gilded Age era, a time when town-founding was often a business venture as much as a community act. Out-of-state capital, in this case a Colorado investment company, would lay out a townsite, name it, plot the streets, and set aside ground for the things a town needs — including, crucially, a place to bury its dead.
The families who answered that call were pioneers in the plainest sense. They arrived to build homes on unimproved land, raise cattle and crops, and knit together the institutions — churches, schools, a cemetery association — that turn a real-estate plat into a living community. A burial ground was among the first of those institutions, because a town only truly puts down roots when it has ground it will not sell.
People & events
The town site was established in 1893 by the Alta Loma Investment and Improvement Company, and the following year William Skirvin led the first party of settlers to the new community. Skirvin is buried in this cemetery — a fitting resting place for a man who guided others to the land he would spend his life on. When the company laid out Alta Loma it set aside ground for burials, though it did not formally deed the property to the town until 1897, the year the cemetery was organized.
The first grave tells you how tender and hard frontier life could be: the infant son of the Stobart family, who died that same year, 1897. Around that small grave gathered the community's history — members of the early pioneering families who had raised longhorn cattle on the surrounding prairie, along with residents drawn from nearby settlements. In time the ground received the full cast of a working town: community and business leaders, immigrants, teachers, preachers, and veterans of the nation's military conflicts reaching back to World War I.
In 1904 the residents organized the Alta Loma Cemetery Association to care for the grounds, and that association has maintained the burial ground ever since. The town itself did not endure the same way. In 1978 Santa Fe absorbed Alta Loma into its city limits, and the once-thriving community effectively disappeared from the map — leaving the cemetery as one of the few remaining vestiges of a place that no longer exists on its own.
Its place in the American story
Alta Loma's arc is one of the most common — and least told — stories in American history: the community that was founded, thrived, and then quietly vanished, absorbed or bypassed until only its cemetery remains. Across the country, thousands of such places live on chiefly through their burial grounds, which become the last archives of names, dates, and family lines that no other record preserves.
The cemetery also documents the machinery of westward expansion in miniature. An investment company from another state, a Spanish place-name marketed to newcomers, a first party of settlers, longhorns on the prairie, and the steady arrival of immigrants, teachers, and preachers — this is how much of the American landscape was settled and organized, one speculative townsite at a time.
And the roll of those buried here — pioneers beside veterans of conflicts dating to World War I — is a reminder that a small farming community is never separate from the larger nation. Its sons went to America's wars; its founders came from across the country and across the sea. To walk the rows is to read the twentieth-century American story written small, on a patch of Gulf Coast 'high land.'
If you visit
Approach Alta Loma Cemetery knowing you are visiting the surviving heart of a town that no longer exists. Everything around it may read as modern Santa Fe, but this ground is Alta Loma itself — the last address the community still keeps. That reframing turns a quiet cemetery into something closer to an open-air museum of a vanished place.
The marker points you toward what to notice underfoot and among the stones. Look for the cemetery's older features — curbed plots, upright stones, false crypts, grave slabs, and statuary — the vocabulary of memorial art that generations of families used to honor their dead. Seek out the earliest markers, and remember that among them lies William Skirvin, who led the first settlers here, and the Stobart infant whose 1897 death marked the ground's first burial.
For a road trip, this is the kind of stop that rewards slowing down. It won't take long, but it pairs well with exploring the broader Galveston County coast and prairie, where the shift from open longhorn range to organized towns played out again and again. Read the names, do the quiet arithmetic of the dates, and you'll leave with a real sense of the pioneer families who built a thriving community that the map eventually forgot.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · William Skirvin
Themes & tags
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