Anchorage Cemetery

🏛️The era

Anchorage took shape in the 1880s and 1890s, during the decades historians call the Gilded Age — a time when the American frontier was filling in and rural communities across Texas were being built almost from scratch by newly arrived families. Atascosa County, south of San Antonio, was open country where a family with land, skill, and determination could plant a whole community around a store, a church, and a burial ground.

What makes this settlement unusual is where its founders came from. Most frontier Texans of this era arrived from the American South or from Germany and Central Europe; the Stiggins family came from Prince Edward Island, off Canada's Atlantic coast. Their journey is a reminder that the peopling of the American West drew on maritime and northern roots as well as the more familiar overland streams of migration.

This was also an era when professional medicine was scarce in the countryside. Formal doctors were few, hospitals were distant, and much of the work of birth, illness, and death fell to whoever in a community had training or a healer's reputation. Into that gap stepped a woman who had actually studied medicine — a rare and valuable thing on the rural frontier.

👥People & events

The story opens with William and Mary Allen Stiggins, who brought their family from Prince Edward Island to this part of Texas in 1882. Among them were their daughter Mary Jane, born in 1855, who had studied medicine, and her fiancé Thomas Whittet, born in 1838, a former sea captain whose old life on the water gave the place its name. Looking over this dry inland ground, the retired seaman declared it the spot where he would at last drop anchor — and so it became Anchorage.

Thomas and Mary Jane married in the early 1880s and put down roots in every sense. In 1896 they deeded land for a church and a cemetery to serve both Anchorage and the neighboring community of Rossville a couple of miles to the northeast. The two oldest marked graves date to that same year — one for Mary Allen Stiggins, the family matriarch, and one for Annie Theresa Farran — so the burial ground's history begins almost at the moment the land was given.

Mary Jane became the beating heart of the community's daily life. She practiced medicine across the surrounding area and delivered many of its babies, including all nine children of the J.M. Rogers family — a detail that says everything about how much a single skilled woman could mean to the families around her. The Whittets' general store doubled as the Anchorage Post Office from 1889 to 1935, making their household the community's commercial and civic center as well as its medical one.

The cemetery holds the community's memory, including George Bopp, Jr., who lived only from 1924 to 1945 — a young man lost as a casualty of the Second World War.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Anchorage speaks to two threads of the larger American story at once. The first is the sheer breadth of immigration that built the frontier. A community founded by Canadians from a maritime island — led by a man who had captained ships — complicates the tidy picture of westward settlement and reminds us that Americans came from every direction, including down from the north and in from the sea.

The second thread is the quiet, essential role of women in rural medicine. Long before the profession opened its doors widely to women, communities depended on female healers, midwives, and the occasional formally trained woman doctor to bring their children into the world and tend their sick. Mary Jane Whittet's career — delivering babies across a whole district — stands for countless women whose medical labor held frontier communities together and rarely made it into the history books.

Even the lone World War II grave connects this small cemetery to the nation's largest shared experience of the twentieth century, a war that reached into the most remote crossroads and brought its losses home to be buried in local ground.

🧭If you visit

Anchorage today is best understood as a cemetery and chapel rather than a bustling town, and that is exactly the appeal — it is a place for reflection. The Anchorage Cemetery Association still maintains the burial ground and its chapel, so you'll find a cared-for, dignified spot rather than a ruin.

Walk the older section and look for the 1896 stones, the oldest marked graves, which tie the ground back to the very year the Whittets deeded the land. Reading the family names across the rows is a way of meeting the community that once lived here. If you find the grave of the young man lost in World War II, it's a moment worth a pause — a single life connecting this quiet Texas field to a global war.

The present chapel is a cinder-block building raised in 1958 on the site of the earlier frame church that had stood since the community's early days. As you stand there, remember the name and the sailor who chose it: this flat inland country was where a sea captain decided to drop anchor for good. It's a short, contemplative stop that pairs well with a broader drive through the ranch country south of San Antonio.