Austin Memorial Park Cemetery
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
As the population of the city of Austin grew larger during the early 20th century, a privately owned cemetery with plots available for purchase by the public became necessary. In 1927, Austin Memorial Park, a private corporation, purchased farm land located northwest of the city of Austin from Gladys and J.T. Bowman. The first recorded burial in Austin Memorial Park was that of M.A. Hanna, who was interred on April 26, 1928. In order to provide cemetery services for the citizens of Austin and the surrounding area, the city purchased Austin Memorial Park in 1941 for the price of $56,000, making it a public cemetery. There have been several reductions in size of the cemetery throughout the years. In 1933, one acre on the west edge of the site was sold for the establishment of the Jewish Agudas Achim Cemetery, and another portion of the original property was sold by the city during the 1960s. The construction of Loop 1 (Mopac Boulevard) during the 1970s took away a segment of property in the extreme southwest corner of the site. Construction of the Northwest Recreation Center by the city of Austin in 1979 furthur reduced the cemetery's size. In 2004 and 2005, a separate section was reserved for Temple Beth Shalom for the creation of a Jewish section within the existing boundary of Austin Memorial Park. Well-known citizens interred in the cemetery include Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist James A. Michener (1907-1997), Texas Ranger Frances Augustus "Frank" Hamer (1884-1955), actor Zachary Scott, Jr. (1914-1965), and noted University of Texas coaches Dana X. Bible (1891-1980), William John "Billy" Disch (1874-1953), Bibb A. Falk (1899-1989) and Harvey Penick (1904-1995). Historic Texas Cemetery-2008
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
As Austin outgrew its older graveyards in the early 20th century, a private corporation bought farmland northwest of town in 1927 and opened Austin Memorial Park, recording its first burial in 1928. The city bought the grounds in 1941 to serve the public, though highways, a recreation center, and new construction later trimmed its edges. Among those interred are Pulitzer-winning novelist James A. Michener, legendary Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, actor Zachary Scott, and famed University of Texas coaches Dana X. Bible and Harvey Penick.
Why it matters
The cemetery is a roll call of 20th-century Texas life — its writers, lawmen, athletes, and coaches — and a record of how a growing capital city provided for its dead.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early decades of the 20th century, Austin was shedding its frontier skin and growing into a real state capital. The population was climbing, the university on the hill was expanding, and the old churchyards and family plots that had served a small town were no longer enough. A growing city has to plan for its dead as deliberately as for its living, and by the 1920s Austin needed burial ground that any citizen could simply buy into.
That need was met in a very American way: not by the city at first, but by private enterprise. In 1927 a private corporation bought farmland northwest of town, and the first burial was recorded the next spring. It was only in 1941 that the city stepped in and purchased the grounds for public use — the moment a commercial venture became a civic institution.
This was the Progressive era's instinct made local: the belief that essential services — water, parks, schools, and yes, cemeteries — belonged in public hands. The dollar figure recorded for that 1941 purchase reads like a bargain today, a reminder of just how much the value of Austin land would climb in the century to come.
People & events
A cemetery's history is written in its edges as much as its graves, and this one kept getting redrawn. Over the decades pieces were carved away: an acre sold in the 1930s to establish a Jewish cemetery next door, another portion sold in the 1960s, a corner lost to the construction of a major highway loop in the 1970s, and still more given up when the city built a recreation center at the end of that decade. In the 2000s a section was set aside for a Jewish congregation within the existing bounds. The place tells a story of a city pressing in on all sides.
But it is the names on the ground that draw visitors. Here rests James A. Michener, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose sweeping books carried readers across oceans and centuries, and who made Austin his home. Not far off lies Frank Hamer, the legendary Texas Ranger whose name is bound up with the frontier lawman's mystique.
The city's cultural and athletic life is here too. Zachary Scott, an actor who found his way from Texas to Hollywood, is buried on these grounds. So are a remarkable cluster of University of Texas coaches — among them Dana X. Bible, who shaped the university's football program, and Harvey Penick, the beloved golf teacher whose gentle wisdom reached far beyond his home course. To walk these rows is to read a roster of the people who gave 20th-century Texas its writers, its lawmen, its athletes, and its teachers.
Its place in the American story
Every American city of any age has a cemetery like this one, and that ordinariness is exactly what makes it significant. The move from a private burial corporation to a city-owned public cemetery mirrors a national shift in how communities took responsibility for their members — the same municipal impulse that built public parks and waterworks across the country in those decades.
The steady nibbling away of the cemetery's acreage is a national story too. Highways, recreation centers, and new construction reshaped the ground beneath America's growing cities everywhere in the mid-20th century, and the dead were not exempt. A cemetery is one of the few pieces of land a city promises to keep forever, yet even here the pressures of growth left their mark.
And the people buried here connect a single Texas hillside to the whole American story — its literature, its frontier legend, its films, and its sports. A novelist read around the world, a lawman out of the old West, a Hollywood actor, and coaches who mentored generations: they are threads that run from this quiet ground out into the national fabric.
If you visit
Come for a slow walk rather than a quick look. A cemetery like this rewards the visitor who reads the stones, and the pleasure here is in stumbling on a familiar name where you least expect it — a famous novelist or a storied lawman resting under a modest marker like everyone else.
Notice the boundaries. If parts of the grounds feel oddly clipped or hemmed in by roads and buildings, that is the history the marker describes: a burial ground that gave up its edges piece by piece as the city grew around it. The neighboring cemetery sections tell their own story of how one place made room for different communities.
Bring a respectful quiet — this is an active cemetery, still in use, not a museum. It fits naturally into a day spent exploring Austin's older northwest neighborhoods, a green and shaded pause where the city's 20th-century story lies gathered in one place. Let the names you recognize send you home to read more about the lives behind them.
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
- · James A. Michener
- · Frank Hamer
- · Zachary Scott, Jr.
- · Harvey Penick
- · Dana X. Bible
Themes & tags
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